Pg. 69: Paul Harding's "Tinkers"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Tinkers by Paul Harding.

About the book, from the publisher:

An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure.

A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost 7 decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring.

Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

Read more about Tinkers at the publisher's website.

Paul Harding has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught writing at Harvard and the University of Iowa.

The Page 69 Test: Tinkers.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Megan Hart reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Megan Hart, the best-selling author who has published in almost every genre of romantic fiction, including historical, contemporary, romantic suspense, romantic comedy, futuristic, fantasy and perhaps most notably, erotic. She also writes non-erotic fantasy and science fiction, as well as continuing to occasionally dabble in horror.

Her new novel is Stranger, and she's a contributor to the soon-to-be-released Naughty Bits, the first collection of Harlequin's Spice Briefs.

One book mentioned in her entry:

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker -- I picked this as one of my choices when I joined the Doubleday Book Club, and I'm enjoying it. Truly is a giant -- I'm not sure if she's got a condition or is just gigantic, and the book so far is a series of scenes of her life that are entertaining and interesting, even if they don't seem to be moving the plot in the direction suggested by the book blurb. [read on]

Learn more about Megan Hart and her work at her website and blog.

If you are 18 or older, read excerpt 1 and excerpt 2 from Stranger.

Writers Read: Megan Hart.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Mary Jane Maffini's "The Cluttered Corpse"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Cluttered Corpse by Mary Jane Maffini.

About the book, from the publisher:

Organization can get very messy...

When Charlotte Adams agrees to help Emmy Lou Rheinbeck organize her stuffed animal collection, she never imagines she'll find herself fending off pranksters whose shenanigans lead to murder.

Learn more about the author and her work at Mary Jane Maffini's website.

Mary Jane Maffini is the author of three mystery series and nearly two dozen short stories. The Charlotte Adams mysteries launched in May 2007 with Organize Your Corpses, and was followed by The Cluttered Corpse in 2008. Death Loves a Messy Desk, the third novel in the series, is due out this spring.

The Page 99 Test: The Cluttered Corpse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10: books of South American journeys

Hugh Thomson’s first book, The White Rock, was the result of a twenty-year long quest to explore and understand the Peruvian Andes in the area beyond Machu Picchu. His most recent book, Nanda Devi: A Journey to the Last Sanctuary is about the celebrated Nanda Devi Sanctuary in the Himalaya, on the border between Tibet and India, long closed to all visitors by the Indian government, but briefly re-opened to the outside world for an international expedition of which he was a part.

He also has had a long career as a director and producer of documentaries.

For the Guardian, he named his top ten books of South American journeys.

Number One on his list:

The Motorcycle Diaries, A Journey Around South America by Ernesto Che Guevara

Che leaves his girlfriend, studies and Argentina behind to take off with a fellow medical student, Alberto Granado, on a freewheeling and delightfully irresponsible tour of the continent. With hardly any money, they beg meals off fellow doctors in the countries along their way, most of whom amiably comply. Che admits that the only difference between the clothes they wear at night and during the day is that they take their shoes off in bed. They fall off the bike a great deal, not least because bits kept falling off the bike. The inspiration for Walter Salles's thoughtful film, but with much that was of necessity left out.

Read about another book on Thomson's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Toni Jordan's "Addition"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Addition by Toni Jordan.

About the book, from the publisher:

Everything counts . . .

Grace Lisa Vandenburg orders her world with numbers: how many bananas she buys, how many steps she takes to the café, where she chooses to sit, how many poppy seeds are in her daily piece of orange cake. Every morning she uses 100 strokes to brush her hair, 160 strokes to brush her teeth. She remembers the day she started to count, how she used numbers to organize her adolescence, her career, even the men she dated. But something went wrong. Grace used to be a teacher, but now she's surviving on disability checks. According to the parents of one of her former students, "she's mad."

Most people don't understand that numbers rule, not just the world in a macro way but their world, their own world. Their lives. They don't really understand that everything and everybody are connected by a mathematical formula. Counting is what defines us . . . the only thing that gives our lives meaning is the knowledge that eventually we all will die. That's what makes each minute important. Without the ability to count our days, our hours, our loved ones . . . there's no meaning. Our lives would have no meaning. Without counting, our lives are unexamined. Not valued. Not precious. This consciousness, this ability to rejoice when we gain something and grieve when we lose something—this is what separates us from other animals. Counting, adding, measuring, timing. It's what makes us human.

Grace's father is dead and her mother is a mystery to her. Her sister wants to sympathize but she really doesn't understand. Only Hilary, her favorite niece, connects with her. And Grace can only connect with Nikola Tesla, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century inventor whose portrait sits on her bedside table and who rescues her in her dreams. Then one day all the tables at her regular café are full, and as she hesitates in the doorway a stranger—Seamus Joseph O'Reilly (19 letters in his name, just like Grace's)—invites her to sit with him. Grace is not the least bit sentimental. But she understands that no matter how organized you are, how many systems you put in place, you can't plan for people. They are unpredictable and full of possibilities—like life itself, a series of maybes and what-ifs.

And suddenly, Grace may be about to lose count of the number of ways she can fall in love.

Browse inside Addition.

Writers Read: Toni Jordan.

Visit Toni Jordan's website.

Read about Jordan's top ten flawed romantic heroines.

See the links to reviews, interviews, etc at "Matilda," the indispensable Australian litblog.

The Page 69 Test: Addition.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Beverly Gage's "The Day Wall Street Exploded"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror by Beverly Gage.

About the book, from the publisher:

Just after noon on September 16, 1920, as hundreds of workers poured onto Wall Street for their lunchtime break, a horse-drawn cart packed with dynamite exploded in a spray of metal and fire, turning the busiest corner of the financial center into a war zone. Thirty-nine people died and hundreds more lay wounded, making the Wall Street explosion the worst terrorist attack to that point in U.S. history.

In The Day Wall Street Exploded , Beverly Gage tells the story of that once infamous but now largely forgotten event. Based on thousands of pages of Bureau of Investigation reports, this historical detective saga traces the four-year hunt for the perpetrators, a worldwide effort that spread as far as Italy and the new Soviet nation. It also takes readers back into the decades-long but little-known history of homegrown terrorism that shaped American society a century ago. The book delves into the lives of victims, suspects, and investigators: world banking power J.P. Morgan, Jr.; labor radical "Big Bill" Haywood; anarchist firebrands Emma Goldman and Luigi Galleani; "America's Sherlock Holmes," William J. Burns; even a young J. Edgar Hoover. It grapples as well with some of the most controversial events of its day, including the rise of the Bureau of Investigation, the federal campaign against immigrant "terrorists," the grassroots effort to define and protect civil liberties, and the establishment of anti-communism as the sine qua non of American politics.

Many Americans saw the destruction of the World Trade Center as the first major terrorist attack on American soil, an act of evil without precedent. The Day Wall Street Exploded reminds us that terror, too, has a history.

Visit Beverly Gage's Yale faculty webpage, and learn more about The Day Wall Street Exploded at the Oxford University Press website.

Beverly Gage teaches at Yale University. Her historical commentary has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, The Nation, Slate.com, Salon.com, and the Washington Post. She has appeared as a guest commentator on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and in Time magazine.

The Page 99 Test: The Day Wall Street Exploded.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marie Arana: best books about love

Marie Arana, the former editor of the Washington Post’s Book World and author of the newly released novel Lima Nights, named her six favorite books about love for The Week.

One title on the list:

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (Vintage, $15).

Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza when she is still a child. She grows up to marry someone else, but his love never flags, even after 50 years. This is a novel of love in its infinite variety: spiritual, carnal, young, old, romantic, quotidian, and, finally, eternal.

Read about the book on Arana's list that she calls "the greatest novel of all time."

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Suzanne Kamata reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Suzanne Kamata, author of last year's debut novel, Losing Kei.

Kamata's short stories, essays, articles and book reviews have appeared in over 100 publications including New York Stories, Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Pleiades, Kyoto Journal, The Utne Reader, The Japan Times, Brain, Child, Skirt!, Ladybug, and Cicada. Her work also appears in the anthologies Yaponesia, The Beacon Best of 1999, It's a Boy, It's a Girl, Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined, Not What I Expected, and One Big Happy Family. She is the editor of the anthologies The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan (Stone Bridge Press, 1997) and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising Children with Special Needs (Beacon Press, 2008).

Part of her Writers Read entry:

I was excited to read T4 by Ann Clare LeZotte last week. The title refers to the Nazi's program to "euthanize" disabled individuals, and the novel-in-verse is told from the point of view of a deaf girl who is forced to hide out. The language is spare, but the story packs a powerful punch. Like my daughter, the author Ann Clare LeZotte is profoundly deaf, which makes this story even more of an accomplishment.

Last week I also read Mother in the Middle, by Sybil Lockhart, one of my colleagues at literarymama.com. Lockhart, a neurobiologist, writes of raising small children while caring for her mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s. She paints a vivid portrait of her family while illuminating the changes in her children's and mother's brains.[read on]

Visit Suzanne Kamata's website and blog.

Writers Read: Suzanne Kamata.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gabriel Cohen's "Red Hook," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Red Hook, The Graving Dock, and Neptune Avenue, Gabriel Cohen's three crime novels featuring Brooklyn South Homicide detective Jack Leightner.

The entry begins:

It’s funny—not ha-ha funny, but I just fell down a flight of stairs and got severely banged up but I’m still alive funny—but this was almost not a theoretical question for me. My first novel Red Hook came out in 2001. After it got nominated for the Edgar award the next year, I got a hotshot Hollywood agent. In very short order, she found an interested production company (Denis Leary’s) and an interested screenwriter (Will Rokos, who was very hot that year as he had just co-written Monster’s Ball). There was just one inconvenience: they needed some serious studio money to make the film happen.

I didn’t let that little detail faze me. I was too busy dreaming about the single phone call, the tap from a studio head’s magic wand, that would instantly transform my life for the better. No more struggling to pay the rent. No more part-time gigs doing work I had zero interest in. No more plugging away in total obscurity.

My agent asked me to come up with a list of possible actors for the lead role. I figured, hey, why not start at the top? I still have the list on my computer:...[read on]

Learn more about the author and his work at Gabriel Cohen's website.

Neptune Avenue is out on April 27, 2009, from St. Martin’s Minotaur.

The Page 69 Test: Gabriel Cohen's The Graving Dock.

My Book, The Movie: Red Hook.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Paul Malmont's "Jack London in Paradise"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Jack London in Paradise by Paul Malmont.

About the book, from the publisher:

Jack London.

The name stands for adventure.

Explorer. Social activist. Romantic. Self-educated genius. White Fang. Call of the Wild. Martin Eden. The Sea-Wolf. Generations worldwide have been thrilled by his tales, probably never realizing how true to life they really were. He did not imagine the hardships and brutality of life in the Yukon, on the high seas, or in the back alleys of Oakland. He lived them. Few men were his equal and only one woman ever fully captivated his heart. By the time he was forty, no American was more famous. And in the winter of 1915, the great writer set sail on one last adventure.

But in this story of that adventure, he is being hunted.

Hobart Bosworth -- an aging matinee idol and filmmaker -- is desperate for one more Jack London picture to save his career. Hollywood machinations have driven a wedge between him and his old friend. He has tracked Jack and his wife, Charmian, from the mysterious ruins of their once-magnifi cent Wolf House across the Pacific to the volcanic islands of Hawaii. The Jack London he finds here is a man half mad with visions, a man struggling with the ghosts of his past, the erotic temptations of the island paradise, and his own wolfl ike nature.

Now Hobart's original goal -- to save his studio -- has become a desperate struggle to save his friend and preserve the icon he has become. With or without Charmian London's help.

A romantic novel of sweeping passions and raw adventure set against an unforgettable, sultry backdrop, Jack London in Paradise vividly imagines the last year in the life of a legendary man nearly everyone knows about, but few actually know.

Read an excerpt from Jack London in Paradise, and learn more about the book and author at Paul Malmont's website and blog.

Paul Malmont is a Copy Director at an interactive advertising agency in New York.

The Page 69 Test: Jack London in Paradise.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Kathleen Rooney's "Live Nude Girl"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object by Kathleen Rooney.

About the book, from the publisher:

Live Nude Girl is a lively meditation on the profession of nude modeling—that “spine-tingling combination of power and vulnerability, submission and dominance”—as it has been practiced in history and as it is practiced today. Kathleen Rooney draws on her own experiences working as an artist’s model, as well as on the stories of famous, notorious, and mysterious artists and models through the ages. Combining personal perspective, historical anecdote, and witty prose, Rooney reveals that both the appeal of posing nude for artists and the appeal of drawing the naked figure lie in our deeply human responses to beauty, sex, love, and death.

Learn more about Live Nude Girl at the publisher's website.

Kathleen Rooney is the author of Reading with Oprah: The Book Club that Changed America, now in its second edition, as well as the poetry collections Oneiromance (An Epithalamion), Something Really Wonderful, and That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness, the latter two written collaboratively with Elisa Gabbert. Her essay “Live Nude Girl” was selected for Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers.

Visit Kathleen Rooney's website.

The Page 99 Test: Live Nude Girl.

--Marshal Zeringue

Most important books: Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman, Esquire columnist and author of the novel Downtown Owl, named his most important books for Newsweek.

And addressed a couple of related issues:

A classic book that, upon revisiting, disappointed:

I don't often read books twice. There are too many I haven't read once.

A book you would have parents read to their children:

"Gravity's Rainbow." I don't really understand children.

Read more about Chuck Klosterman's most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is John Hulsman reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: John C. Hulsman, the Alfred von Oppenheim Scholar in Residence at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin and coauthor of the books Ethical Realism (with Anatol Lieven) and The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable (with A. Wess Mitchell).

Read an excerpt from The Godfather Doctrine, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

Visit John C. Hulsman's website.

See what Hulsman has been reading at Writers Read: John C. Hulsman.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Donald S. Lopez Jr.'s "Buddhism and Science"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed by Donald S. Lopez Jr..

About the book, from the publisher:

Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing to the present day, both Buddhists and admirers of Buddhism have proclaimed the compatibility of Buddhism and science. Their assertions have ranged from modest claims about the efficacy of meditation for mental health to grander declarations that the Buddha himself anticipated the theories of relativity, quantum physics and the big bang more than two millennia ago.

In Buddhism and Science, Donald S. Lopez Jr. is less interested in evaluating the accuracy of such claims than in exploring how and why these two seemingly disparate modes of understanding the inner and outer universe have been so persistently linked. Lopez opens with an account of the rise and fall of Mount Meru, the great peak that stands at the center of the flat earth of Buddhist cosmography—and which was interpreted anew once it proved incompatible with modern geography. From there, he analyzes the way in which Buddhist concepts of spiritual nobility were enlisted to support the notorious science of race in the nineteenth century. Bringing the story to the present, Lopez explores the Dalai Lama’s interest in scientific discoveries, as well as the implications of research on meditation for neuroscience.

Lopez argues that by presenting an ancient Asian tradition as compatible with—and even anticipating—scientific discoveries, European enthusiasts and Asian elites have sidestepped the debates on the relevance of religion in the modern world that began in the nineteenth century and still flare today. As new discoveries continue to reshape our understanding of mind and matter, Buddhism and Science will be indispensable reading for those fascinated by religion, science, and their often vexed relation.

Read Lopez's brief online feature, "Six Episodes from Buddhism and Science."

Learn more about Donald Lopez's teaching, research, and publications at his faculty webpage.

Donald S. Lopez Jr. is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Prisoners of Shangri-La, The Madman’s Middle Way, and Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism.

The Page 99 Test: Buddhism and Science.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Bill Crider's "Murder in Four Parts"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Murder in Four Parts by Bill Crider.

About the book, from the publisher:

When Sheriff Dan Rhodes is asked to join the Clearview Barbershop Chorus, he suspects that there's an ulterior motive, mainly because he can't sing a note. He's momentarily distracted by a rogue alligator on the loose, but shortly afterward, Lloyd Berry, the director of the chorus, is murdered. Berry is suspected of embezzling money, and he's leaked the information that a member of the chorus ordered a singing valentine for a woman who isn't his wife. Later, Rhodes discovers that Berry has been gambling on eight-liners at Rollin' Sevens, a barely legal operation in a strip center on the outskirts of town.

Rhodes also must deal with the usual assortment of small-town crimes: a man dressed in his underpants and cowboy boots picketing a law office, dogfood theft, and attempts on the life of a man who likes to root through garbage. Rhodes sorts through clues that involve geocaching and barbershop singing with the help of a few oddball local characters before he solves the crime.

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

Also see Steve Hockensmith's Q & A with Bill Crider.

Visit Bill Crider's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Murder in Four Parts.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books on musical theater

Ethan Mordden, author of Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business, named a five best list of books on musical theater for the Wall Street Journal.

One title in his list:

Everything Was Possible
by Ted Chapin
Knopf, 2003

"Making of" books are a delectable genre, and, as too much "Follies" is never enough, I'll cite "Everything Was Possible," not least for the show's poster illustration of a cracked statue (of liberty?) staring out from the dust-jacket spine. Young Ted Chapin, a production "gofer," kept a diary of rehearsals, Boston tryout and New York premiere, in 1971. Following his sometimes dire chronicle, one realizes why one of the staff members solemnly warns him to stay out of show business. "There are divas in our midst," Chapin dryly intones, about backstage shenanigans, mainly verbal shoving matches among the many oldsters in small parts. There are giants as well, as the creative team, from director Hal Prince to set designer Boris Aronson, makes a masterpiece while wheedling, inspiring, reprimanding and even firing some of those divas. "Follies" itself is worried and inconclusive, but in the end, Chapin's book about the show is proud and affirmative.

Read about Number One on Mordden's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Matthew Hilton's "Prosperity for All"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization by Matthew Hilton.

About the book, from the publisher:

The history of consumerism is about much more than just shopping. Ever since the eighteenth century, citizen-consumers have protested against the abuses of the market by boycotting products and promoting fair instead of free trade. In recent decades, consumer activism has responded to the challenges of affluence by helping to guide consumers through an increasingly complex and alien marketplace. In doing so, it has challenged the very meaning of consumer society and tackled some of the key economic, social, and political issues associated with the era of globalization.

In Prosperity for All, the first international history of consumer activism, Matthew Hilton shows that modern consumer advocacy reached the peak of its influence in the decades after World War II. Growing out of the product-testing activities of Consumer Reports and its international counterparts (including Which? in the United Kingdom, Que Choisir in France, and Test in Germany), consumerism evolved into a truly global social movement. Consumer unions, NGOs, and individual activists like Ralph Nader emerged in countries around the world-including developing countries in Southeast Asia and Latin America-concerned with creating a more equitable marketplace and articulating a politics of consumption that addressed the needs of both individuals and society as a whole. Consumer activists achieved many victories, from making cars safer to highlighting the dangers of using baby formula instead of breast milk in countries with no access to clean water.

The 1980s saw a reversal in the consumer movement's fortunes, thanks in large part to the rise of an antiregulatory agenda both in the United States and internationally. In the process, the definition of consumerism changed, focusing more on choice than on access. As Hilton shows, this change reflects more broadly on the dilemmas we all face as consumers: Do we want more stuff and more prosperity for ourselves, or do we want others less fortunate to be able to enjoy the same opportunities and standard of living that we do? Prosperity for All makes clear that by abandoning a more idealistic vision for consumer society we reduce consumers to little more than shoppers, and we deny the vast majority of the world's population the fruits of affluence.

Learn more about Prosperity for All at the Cornell University Press website.

Matthew Hilton is Professor of Social History at the University of Birmingham. He is a past winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize and has been a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies , Harvard. He is currently Co-Director of the Centre for Contemporary Governance and Citizenship in the UK (CenConUK). He sits on the editorial boards Past and Present, Contemporary British History and History Compass.

Hilton is the author of Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement and Smoking in British Popular Culture, 1800–2000.

Visit Matthew Hilton's University of Birmingham faculty webpage.

The Page 99 Test: Prosperity for All.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Antonya Nelson reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Antonya Nelson, author of the newly published short story collection Nothing Right (Bloomsbury, 2009).

Nelson's books include the short story collections Some Fun and In The Land Of Men, and three novels: Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, and Living to Tell.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books of 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and she was named in 1999 by The New Yorker as one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.”

Read more about Antonya Nelson's new short story collection, Nothing Right.

See what she has been reading at Writers Read: Antonya Nelson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Novel-writing politicians: top 10

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the most curious novel-writing politicians.

One Prime Minister to make the list:

Benjamin Disraeli

"When I want to read a novel I write one," declared Disraeli, who has the reputation of being the only British politician who has ever written novels that were any good. Like most politician-novelists, he turned his hand to fiction out of a pressing need for money.

Read about the only American president to make Mullan's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Matt Beynon Rees' "The Samaritan's Secret"

This weekend's feature at the Page 69 Test: The Samaritan's Secret by Matt Beynon Rees.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Samaritan’s Secret, the third Omar Yussef mystery, from the winner of the CWA John Creasey Dagger.

When Omar Yussef travels to Nablus, the West Bank’s most violent town, to attend a wedding, he little expects the trouble that awaits him. An ancient Torah scroll belonging to the Samaritans, descendants of the biblical Joseph, has been stolen. But when the dead body of a young Samaritan is discovered, a seemingly straightforward theft inquiry takes an unexpected turn.

As Omar sets out to find the perpetrators of this murder, he is driven down into the murky alleys and tunnels of the old casbah in Nablus. Here, as he uncovers a deepening political rift, the secret deals of one of the region’s richest businessmen, and the shadowy world of the tiny Samaritan community, he begins to wonder whether he will be able to attend the wedding after all…

Visit Matt Beynon Rees' website and blog, and watch The Samaritan's Secret video.

The Page 69 Test: The Collaborator of Bethlehem.

My Book, The Movie: The Collaborator of Bethlehem.

The Page 69 Test: A Grave in Gaza.

The Page 69 Test: The Samaritan's Secret.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Blixt's "The Master of Verona," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: The Master of Verona by David Blixt.

In The Master of Verona, Shakespeare's Italian characters meet the historical figures of Dante's Inferno, setting the stage for the famous Capulet-Montague feud from Romeo & Juliet.

Blixt names an Australian director as well as a couple of heavyweight actors from that continent in the cast of an adaptation. Read on.

Read an excerpt from The Master of Verona and learn more about the book at the official website.

The Page 69 Test: The Master of Verona.

My Book, The Movie: The Master of Verona.

--Marshal Zeringue

Best books: David Hare

Playwright and director David Hare, whose screenplay for The Reader has just been nominated for an Academy Award, named a best books list for The Week.

One title on his list:

The Third Man by Graham Greene—the screenplay, not the subsequent novella (out of print).

Anyone who wants to write films or plays for a living is advised to commit this screenplay to memory, because the rhythm and drive of its glorious dialogue and structure are so compelling.

Read about another title on Hare's list.

The film The Third Man is deserving of its wide acclaim, but I think The Fallen Idol, also adapted for the screen in collaboration with Graham Greene, is even better.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Dora Costa & Matthew Kahn's "Heroes and Cowards"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War by Dora L. Costa & Matthew E. Kahn.

About the book, from the publisher:

When are people willing to sacrifice for the common good? What are the benefits of friendship? How do communities deal with betrayal? And what are the costs and benefits of being in a diverse community? Using the life histories of more than forty thousand Civil War soldiers, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn answer these questions and uncover the vivid stories, social influences, and crucial networks that influenced soldiers' lives both during and after the war.

Drawing information from government documents, soldiers' journals, and one of the most extensive research projects about Union Army soldiers ever undertaken, Heroes and Cowards demonstrates the role that social capital plays in people's decisions. The makeup of various companies--whether soldiers were of the same ethnicity, age, and occupation--influenced whether soldiers remained loyal or whether they deserted. Costa and Kahn discuss how the soldiers benefited from friendships, what social factors allowed some to survive the POW camps while others died, and how punishments meted out for breaking codes of conduct affected men after the war. The book also examines the experience of African-American soldiers and makes important observations about how their comrades shaped their lives.

Heroes and Cowards highlights the inherent tensions between the costs and benefits of community diversity, shedding light on how groups and societies behave and providing valuable lessons for the present day.

Read an excerpt from Heroes and Cowards, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

Dora L. Costa is the author of The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History, 1880-1990. She teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. Matthew E. Kahn is the author of Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment. He also teaches at UCLA. Costa and Kahn are research associates at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The Page 99 Test: Heroes and Cowards.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Chandra Prasad reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Chandra Prasad, author of On Borrowed Wings, a novel set in Depression-era Connecticut about a quarryman’s daughter who attends a prestigious university in 1936 in the guise of a boy, and other books.

Her entry begins:

I’m going to preface this entry by saying my son just turned two, and it’s a big, intense, rambunctious two. The taller this child gets, the shorter my attention span. Thus, I’ve been reading smaller works: magazine articles, short stories, the backs of cereal boxes, in-one-sitting things. My steady intake has included The Week Magazine, The Economist (which lately has been sweepingly critical of President Obama for no well-argued reason), The New York Times Magazine (the last few weeks of the “Lives Column” have been standouts), and Mental Floss Magazine, which is just plain fun. Two quality non-fiction collections on my bedside table are Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering edited by Suzanne Kamata and Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution. The latter book has a marvelous cover, like Lamb’s new book: The Hour I First Believed.

And speaking of beautiful images, I can’t stop staring at ...[read on]

Chandra Prasad's books include Death of a Circus, which Tom Perrotta says is “narrated with Dickensian verve, a keen eye for historical detail, and lots of heart.” She is the originator and editor of — as well as a contributor to — Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience, which was published to international acclaim by W.W. Norton.

Read an excerpt from On Borrowed Wings, and learn more about the book at the publisher’s website.

Visit Chandra Prasad's website.

The Page 69 Test: On Borrowed Wings.

Writers Read: Chandra Prasad.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Linda L. Richards' "Death Was in the Picture"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Death Was in the Picture by Linda L. Richards.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 1931, while most of Los Angeles is struggling to survive the Depression, the business of Hollywood is booming. And everyone wants a piece. The movies have always been cutthroat and, as girl Friday Kitty Pangborn is about to find out, that’s more than a metaphor.

Kitty’s boss, private detective Dexter Theroux, has been asked to help leading man Laird Wyndham prove his innocence. The actor was the last person to be seen with a young actress who died under very suspicious circumstances, and the star has fallen from the big screen to the big house. Wyndham’s a dreamboat, but that isn’t the only thing that has Kitty hot under the collar. Dex has already signed a client---one who’s hired him to prove Wyndham’s hands are not as clean as they look.

Mixing Hollywood glitz with hard-boiled grit, Death Was in the Picture captures the essence of life in Depression-era Los Angeles: a world where times are tough, talk is cheap, and murder is often just one scene away.

Learn more about the author and her work at Linda L. Richards' website.

View the Death Was in the Picture trailer.

Linda L. Richards is the editor and co-founder of January Magazine and a regular contributor to The Rap Sheet.

The Page 69 Test: Death Was the Other Woman, the first Kitty Pangborn novel.

The Page 69 Test: Death Was in the Picture.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six novels about doomed marriages

Valerie Martin is the author of eight novels, including the Orange Prize winner Property and 2007’s Trespass. In October 2008 she recommended "six novels about doomed marriages" for The Week.

One book on her list:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (Penguin, $7).

Rich, innocent Edgar Linton pays the price for putting himself in the line of fire between the famously passionate Catherine Earnshaw and her beloved Heathcliff, the revenge-driven prototype of the romantic hero. The big question: Did Cathy and Heathcliff actually have sex?

Read about another title on Martin's list.

The Page 99 Test: Wuthering Heights.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Linda Radzik's "Making Amends"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law, and Politics by Linda Radzik.

About the book, from the publisher:

Can wrongs be righted? Can we make up for our misdeeds, or does the impossibility of changing the past mean that we remain permanently guilty? While atonement is traditionally considered a theological topic, Making Amends uses the resources of secular moral philosophy to explore the possibility of correcting the wrongs we do to one another.

Philosophers generally approach the problem of past wrongdoing from the point of view of either a judge or a victim. They assume that wrongdoing can only be resolved through punishment or forgiveness. But this book explores the responses that wrongdoers can and should make to their own misdeeds, responses such as apology, repentance, reparations, and self-punishment. Making Amends explores the possibility of atonement in a broad spectrum of contexts--from cases of relatively minor wrongs in personal relationships, to crimes, to the historical injustices of our political and religious communities. It argues that wrongdoers often have the ability to earn redemption within the moral community.

Making Amends defends a theory of atonement that emphasizes the rebuilding of respect and trust among victims, communities and wrongdoers. The ideal of reconciliation enables us to explain the value of repentance without restricting our interest to the wrongdoer's character, to account for the power of reparations without placing a dollar value on dignity, to justify the suffering of guilt without falling into a simplistic endorsement of retribution, and to insist on the moral responsibility of wrongdoing groups without treating their members unfairly.

Learn more about Making Amends at the Oxford University Press website.

Linda Radzik is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University.

The Page 99 Test: Making Amends.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 potato books

John Reader is a writer and photojournalist who holds an honorary research fellowship in the Department of Anthropology at University College London.

His new book, from Yale University Press, is Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent.

For the Guardian, he named his top 10 potato books. One title on the list:

Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor

The potato famine that struck Ireland in the 1840s was the greatest social catastrophe of 19th-century Europe – a consequence of the potato's exceptional nutritional attributes, exacerbated by political and economic inequities that had left most of the Irish with nothing else to eat, and executed by a disease, Late Blight, that totally destroyed the country's potato crop. In Star of the Sea, O'Connor's writes eloquently, heart-wrenchingly, of a disaster and its aftermath that were God's way, some said, "of converting Connemara peasants into Boston politicians".

Read about Number One on Reader's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Daphne Uviller's "Super in the City"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Super in the City by Daphne Uviller.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this off-the-beaten-sidewalk debut, native New Yorker Daphne Uviller reveals the secrets of a sexy, story-filled Big Apple, where a mystery lurks behind every apartment door—and a savvy but slightly lost young woman unexpectedly finds herself holding the keys.

In a city brimming with opportunities for heroism, twenty-seven-year-old Zephyr Zuckerman has often fantasized about committing acts of bravery that would make front-page news. Now she may get her big break—though it may require plunging a few toilets. When the superintendent of her parents’ Greenwich Village brownstone is led away in handcuffs, unemployed Zephyr takes over his post and unleashes her inner sleuth: discovering titillating secrets about her tenants—from a smoky-voiced Frenchwoman who entertains throngs of unsavory visitors to a moody musician who just has to be hiding something—and realizing that her new reality is far more intriguing than her imagination.

Soon Zephyr has sussed out wrongs that stretch from losers on the Internet to art fraud and an international crime ring. The mob thinks she’s in the FBI, and the FBI thinks she’s in the mob—a predicament she needs to clear up fast. But perhaps not before the cute, surly exterminator helps her solve the mystery of what to do with the rest of her life….

Read an excerpt from Super in the City, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Daphne Uviller was superintendent of her family’s building in the West Village for ten long years. She is a former Books/Poetry editor for Time Out New York and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsday, New York, Allure, and Self.

Visit Daphne Uviller's website.

The Page 69 Test: Super in the City.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Jack McDevitt reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Jack McDevitt, author of the recent works The Devil's Eye, an Alex Benedict mystery, and Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt.

His first novel, The Hercules Text, was published in the celebrated Ace Specials series, and won the Philip K. Dick Special Award. In 1991, he won the first $10,000 UPC International Prize for his novella “Ships in the Night.” The Engines of God was a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and his novella “Time Travelers Never Die” was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula. Omega received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best SF novel, 2003.

His writings to reach the final list for a Nebula include Infinity Beach, Ancient Shores, “Time Travelers Never Die,” Moonfall, “Good Intentions” (cowritten with Stanley Schmidt), “Nothing Ever Happens in Rock City,” Chindi, Omega, and Polaris, "Henry James, This One's for You," and Seeker.

One book mentioned in his entry:

Blasphemy, by Douglas Preston. This is the one I've been reading on my stationary bike during workouts, the last part of my daily physical routine, a twenty-minute ride to nowhere. Blasphemy actually has me looking forward to pumping the pedals. Religious extremists and angry Navajos take exception to a supercollider in Arizona, which, with luck, may reveal what brought on the Big Bang. But the scientists are keeping something quiet. An investigator arrives to find out what's going on. I'm almost halfway through, and got my first real indication today. Almost fell off my bike.[read on]

Visit Jack McDevitt's website.

Writers Read: Jack McDevitt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best prime ministers in fiction

At the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best prime ministers in fiction.

One title on the list:

Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

Clarissa Dalloway is married to a Conservative MP, and when the PM arrives at her party, her triumph as a society hostess is confirmed. But some of her guests are underwhelmed. "He looked so ordinary. You might have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits - poor chap, all rigged up in gold lace."

Read about another PM to appear on Mullan's list.

Quite a few readers thought Mrs. Dalloway was a model for Ian McEwan's Saturday. Were they right?

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: R. Ned Lebow's "A Cultural Theory of International Relations"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: A Cultural Theory of International Relations by Richard Ned Lebow.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this exciting new volume, Richard Ned Lebow introduces his own constructivist theory of political order and international relations based on theories of motives and identity formation drawn from the ancient Greeks. His theory stresses the human need for self-esteem, and shows how it influences political behavior at every level of social aggregation. Lebow develops ideal-type worlds associated with four motives: appetite, spirit, reason and fear, and demonstrates how each generates a different logic concerning cooperation, conflict and risk-taking. Expanding and documenting the utility of his theory in a series of historical case studies, ranging from classical Greece to the war in Iraq, he presents a novel explanation for the rise of the state and the causes of war, and offers a reformulation of prospect theory. This is a novel theory of politics by one of the world's leading scholars of international relations.

Read an excerpt from A Cultural Theory of International Relations, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

Richard Ned Lebow is James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and Centennial Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Visit Richard Ned Lebow's faculty webpage.

The Page 99 Test: A Cultural Theory of International Relations.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Bernardine Evaristo's "Blonde Roots"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo.

About the book, from the publisher:

A provocative novel that upends the history of the transatlantic slave trade, reversing and reexamining notions of savagery and civilization, as it follows a young woman’s journey to freedom.

Award-winning writer Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Blonde Roots asks: What if the history of the transatlantic slave trade had been reversed and Africans had enslaved Europeans? How would that have changed the ways that people justified their inhuman behavior? And how would it inform our cultural attitudes and the insidious racism that still lingers—and sometimes festers—today?

We see this tragicomic world turned upside down through the eyes of Doris, an Englishwoman who is kidnapped one day while playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields near their home. She is subsequently enslaved and taken to the New World, as well as to the imperial center of Great Ambossa. She movingly recounts experiences of tremendous hardship and dreams of the people she’s left behind, all while journeying toward an escape into freedom.

A poignant and dramatic story grounded in provocative ideas, Blonde Roots is a genuinely original, profoundly imaginative novel.

Read an excerpt from Blonde Roots, and learn more about the book and author at Bernardine Evaristo's website and blog.

Bernardine Evaristo was born in London to a Nigerian father and an English mother. Her first novel, Lara, won the EMMA (Ethnic Multicultural Media Awards) Best Book Award in 1999. A former Poet in Residence at the Museum of London, she won an Arts Council of Britain Writers' Award in 2000.

The Page 69 Test: Blonde Roots.

--Marshal Zeringue