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Thursday, May 31, 2012

Hot summer author: Larry Tye

In his new book Superman, Larry Tye has written a cultural biography of the Man of Steel, covering the many movie and TV adaptations and the unresolved legal battles between heirs of the creator, Jerry Siegel, who died in 1996, and DC Comics.

Larry Tye writes about the history of Superman in his new book. Josh T. Reynolds, for USA TODAY

Larry Tye writes about the history of Superman in his new book.

Josh T. Reynolds, for USA TODAY

Larry Tye writes about the history of Superman in his new book.

The book:

Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero

By Larry Tye

Random House, $27

The book

What's it about: A cultural biography of the Man of Steel, the numerous adaptations, and the unresolved legal battles between heirs of the creator, Jerry Siegel, who died in 1996, and DC Comics.

Why it's hot: Superman, who burst into print in 1938, remains hot: The same day Tye's book is released, an animated film, Superman vs The Elite, hits theaters (a coincidence, he says). Coming in June 2013 from Warner Bros.: Man of Steel with British actor Henry Cavill as Superman, Russell Crowe as his Kryptonian father, and Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as as his earthbound parents.

A taste: "The most enduring American hero is an alien from outer space who, once he reached Earth, traded in his foreign-sounding name Kal-El for a singularly American handle: Superman."

On sale: June 12

The author

Quick bio: Tye, 57, a former reporter for The Boston Globe, The (Louisville) Courier-Journal and The Anniston (Ala.) Star, has written four other books, including bios of baseball legend Satchel Paige (Satchel) and public relations pioneer Edward Bernays (The Father of Spin) and was co-author with Kitty Dukakis of Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy. He lives in Lexington, Mass., with his wife, Lisa, and two children, 19, and 17, his "in-home experts on comics and kids."

Fun fact: Tye has his own red cape, emblazed with a L (for Larry), a gift on the 10th anniversary in 2011 of a fellowship program he runs to help reporters improve their coverage of health care.

On Superman's enduring appeal: "Part of it is the irresistible allure of taking flight. Part of it is the seduction of the love triangle and his secret identity. Part of it is just being 10 years old again. The more that flesh-and-blood role models let us down, the more we turn to fictional ones who stay true."

Biggest surprise: "How brilliant writers and screenwriters have been over the years in inventing and reinventing Superman. I expected to be cynical, but I was inspired."

Up next: A biography of Robert F. Kennedy, the New York senator assassinated during his 1968 presidential campaign.

His summer reading: "For pleasure and work," David Rowell's 2011 novel, TheTrain of Small Mercies, inspired by 1968 photographs of crowds who gathered from New York to Washington as the train carrying RFK's body passed by.

E-books or print? "Print, definitely. As an old newspaper guy, holding what I'm reading is part of the joy."

Contributing: By Bob Minzesheimer

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'Cronkite' biographer Brinkley anchors the man in his moment

NEW YORK – In a small studio at CBS News headquarters, historian Douglas Brinkley is watching a piece of history, a black-and-white tape of his latest subject, Walter Cronkite, who's about to tell the nation that President Kennedy has been killed.

And that's the way it is: Historian Douglas Brinkley in front of an image of Walter Cronkite at CBS studios in New York. His biography, 'Cronkite,' arrives Tuesday. By Todd Plitt, USA TODAY

And that's the way it is: Historian Douglas Brinkley in front of an image of Walter Cronkite at CBS studios in New York. His biography, 'Cronkite,' arrives Tuesday.

By Todd Plitt, USA TODAY

And that's the way it is: Historian Douglas Brinkley in front of an image of Walter Cronkite at CBS studios in New York. His biography, 'Cronkite,' arrives Tuesday.

As the author of the biography Cronkite (Harper, $34.99, on sale Tuesday), Brinkley has logged countless hours viewing such tapes. But he says he never tires of watching "the most trusted man in America," as Cronkite was crowned in a poll.

On the screen, it's Nov. 22, 1963. Cronkite is 46, in his second year as anchor. He's in shirtsleeves. His hair is slightly tousled. CBS Radio already has broadcast an unconfirmed report from Dallas that the president is dead.

Cronkite, however, holds off until he's handed a note. "We just have a report from our correspondent Dan Rather in Dallas," Cronkite tells viewers. "He has confirmed that President Kennedy is dead."

But in that distinctive and deliberate voice — "flue-cured Southern with the drawl trimmed off," as Tom Wolfe described it — Cronkite adds, "We still have no official confirmation of this."

Brinkley says Cronkite's "punctuated delivery was bracing," but he also was "covering his own back," using Rather "as his potential fall guy if the report proved false."

Moments later, Cronkite is handed another note. He slowly removes his black horn-rimmed glasses, "as though," Brinkley says, "to warn people to prepare themselves."

After putting his glasses back on, Cronkite sighs and says: "From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 o'clock p.m. Central Standard Time, 2 o'clock Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago."

He glances at the wall clock behind him. "It's as if he's recording the time for history," Brinkley observes.

There's a hint of a tear in the anchorman's eyes.

"There's a whole literature on whether Walter cried or not," Brinkley says. "But he was certainly misty-eyed, which was better than crying. He showed emotion, but not too much. The nation was beginning to process its emotions through Walter's emotions."

In addition to Cronkite, the biography by Douglas Brinkley, there are three other new books that deal with Cronkite and CBS News:

--Rather Outspoken: My Life in the News by Dan Rather with Digby Diehl (Grand Central, $27.99) offers Rather’s version of his rise and fall at CBS — he was forced out in 2006 after 44 years — but ignores his feud with Cronkite. Rather does write that Cronkite’s support mattered during the Watergate scandal when the Nixon White House tried to get Rather fired.

--Mike Wallace: A Life by Peter Rader (Thomas Dunne, $25.99) describes Wallace of 60 Minutes, who died last month at 93, as “both a journalist and entertainer” who walked “this tightrope with brilliance and finesse.”

--Assignment to Hell: The War Against Nazi Germany with Correspondents Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, A.J. Liebling, Homer Bigart, and Hal Boyle by Timothy M. Gay (New American Library, $26.95) borrows its title from Cronkite’s 1943 dispatch for United Press about a bombing raid over Germany as “an assignment from hell, a hell at 26,000 feet above the earth, a hell of burning tracer bullets and bursting gunfire.”

Raised on the radio

Brinkley's book traces Cronkite's roots as a radio sports announcer in Kansas City and World War II wire service reporter who went on bombing missions over Germany. He joined CBS in 1950. On The Morning Show, he discussed current events with a puppet, a lion named Charlemane, but preferred reporting on the fledgling space race. He was anchor from 1962 until 1981, when he was pushed into retirement at 65 to make way for Rather.

Brinkley devotes seven of his 819 pages to the bitter and well-documented feud that developed between Cronkite and Rather. (Basically, Cronkite thought Rather was grandstanding as anchor; Rather dismissed Cronkite's public criticism as jealousy.) That's attracted pre-publication headlines, which doesn't surprise Brinkley.

"People are interested in feuds," he says, adding that he tried to see both sides of the rivalry and spoke at length to Rather. "Both sides behaved badly," he adds.

Rather (who declined to comment on the book to USA TODAY) told Brinkley that Cronkite "was competitive down to his marrow. It was like he woke up in 1987 and saw me in his old job with successful ratings, making more money than he ever did. … He wanted to destroy me. … I didn't want to fight him.

"So I hunkered down in the fetal position and just took it."

But veteran CBS reporter Morley Safer told Brinkley: "Rather was determined to wipe out every vestige of Cronkite. … Rather was nasty toward Walter."

Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw told Brinkley that Cronkite "never grew bitter or unapproachable. Walter got up every morning knowing who he was. Dan Rather woke up every morning trying to decide who he'd be that day. As a result, Rather didn't have a clue."

Reams have been written about Cronkite, who died in 2009 at age 92. Brinkley, 51, a history professor at Rice University in Houston and on-air analyst for CBS, says the idea for a definitive biography was triggered about nine years ago by David Halberstam, the reporter turned historian.

Halberstam, who died in 2007, and Brinkley were driving from New Orleans to Baton Rouge to speak at the Louisiana Book Festival. "Somewhere around Gonzales," Brinkley recalls, Halberstam said "Cronkite was the most significant journalist of the second half of the 20th century," but no author had adequately tackled his life and times.

That inspired Brinkley, the son of two teachers whose family never had dinner without first watching The Evening News With Walter Cronkite. Cronkite appears in drawings Brinkley did at 7, illustrated news reports that his mother saved.

Long after the car ride with Halberstam, Brinkley has borrowed a CBS studio, down the hall from Cronkite's old newsroom (now used by CBS Radio) to discuss his book and Cronkite's "exquisite timing."

Had he been born a decade earlier (rather than in 1916), he "probably would have become a B-list radio voice," Brinkley says. Had had he been born a decade or two later, "he'd probably be just another broadcaster, one of many."

'American royalty'

For better or worse, no one in today's fractured media has Cronkite's power, influence or popularity.

Reading Cronkite is "like revisiting another world," says Brian Lamb, founder of C-SPAN, who says of Brinkley: "He's full of ideas, enthusiasm and stories. There's no one quite like him."

The same was said for Cronkite, despite his shortcomings. "He was NASA's great promoter, but it came from his heart," Brinkley says. "He had an intense curiosity about how machines worked.

"But in Vietnam in 1965, he was so taken by the weapons, he missed the political perspective. He didn't see that until 1968."

At heart, Cronkite was an "FDR liberal," Brinkley says, but he "obfuscated that on the nightly news." In retirement, Cronkite criticized the Gulf War, the war in Iraq and the religious right.

Brinkley, who has written books on Theodore Roosevelt (The Wilderness Warrior) and Hurricane Katrina (The Great Deluge) and edited Jack Kerouac's journals and Ronald Reagan's diary, met Cronkite several times but never formally interviewed him. Off-camera, he says, Cronkite was "a mensch," although notoriously tight-fisted. Like Brinkley, who's the literary executor for Hunter Thompson and friends with Sean Penn and Johnny Depp, Cronkite had unlikely friendships.

After Betsy, his wife of 65 years, died in 2005, Cronkite met two friends, singer/songwriter Jimmy Buffett and Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. As Brinkley describes it, Buffett told Cronkite: "Mickey and I know what hell you're going through right now having lost Betsy. I've never known a marriage that worked so well, that was so close. We — "

Cronkite interrupted. "Boys," he said, "Stop! Stop! Stop! There's something you should know. I've got a new girlfriend."

Just weeks after his wife died, Cronkite starting dating Joanna Simon, a widowed Manhattan real estate broker and sister of singer Carly Simon. She was 24 years his junior.

One night, after they moved in together, they were walking to a restaurant, and as Brinkley describes it, "People kept coming up to Cronkite to shake the great man's hand."

" 'You know, Walter,' Simon said, 'you really are American royalty.' He looked at her lovingly and said, 'As long as I'm your King of Hearts,' " to which Brinkley adds, "Simon swooned."

And what did Brinkley learn from all his research?

"Cronkite wasn't like ordinary TV narcissists and braggarts. He didn't broadcast what the folks wanted. Cronkite instead wanted what the people wanted to be considered serious news.

"The difference was subtle, but sharp."

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Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Hot summer author: Laura Moriarty

In 1922, Louise Brooks, the Kansas teenager who will be transformed into a star of the silent screen, travels to New York for dance lessons accompanied by Cora Carlisle, a middle-aged chaperone who has hidden motives for taking the trip. That's the story behind Laura Moriarty's new summer novel, The Chaperone.

She's not in Kansas anymore: Lawrence resident Laura Moriarty goes to 1920s New York with Louise Brooks in her fourth novel, The Chaperone. By Earl R. Richardson, for USA TODAY

She's not in Kansas anymore: Lawrence resident Laura Moriarty goes to 1920s New York with Louise Brooks in her fourth novel, The Chaperone.

By Earl R. Richardson, for USA TODAY

She's not in Kansas anymore: Lawrence resident Laura Moriarty goes to 1920s New York with Louise Brooks in her fourth novel, The Chaperone.

The book:

The Chaperone

by Laura Moriarty

Riverhead, $26.95

Why it's hot:Downton Abbey's Elizabeth McGovern narrates the audiobook and will star in the film version.

A taste: "The remarkable black hair, shiny and straight and cropped just below her ears, the ends tapering forward on both sides as if forming arrows to her full lips. A smooth curtain of thick bangs stopped abruptly above her brows … really, this girl looked like no one else."

On sale: June 5

The author

Quick bio: Moriarty, 41, who teaches creative writing at the University of Kansas, lives in Lawrence with her husband, Ben Eggleston, a professor of philosophy, and their daughter, Vivian, 8. The Chaperone is her fourth novel.

Fun fact: The chaperone in this novel is named Cora, just like the character McGovern plays on Downton Abbey. "I hadn't seen Downton Abbey when I was writing it, and I think I might have changed the name if I'd known. It's just a coincidence, and I wonder if they'll change it for the movie so people don't get mixed up."

On McGovern in the movie adaptation: "I've always really liked her, and like everyone else I'm a huge Downton Abbey fan. In a lot of ways it's similar to the character she plays because it's a similar time period, but this Cora is so different from that Cora. That Cora grew up in wealth and lives in England. This Cora is very much a Midwesterner with humble roots."

On how she came to write about Louise Brooks: "I knew her personality was very vibrant and that she was difficult, self-destructive in a lot ways and smart and interesting. But when I had read she had left Wichita at 15 with a chaperone I started thinking, 'I wonder if I could write a novel about that.' "

On Brooks' signature look: "She had the bangs, the real Buster Brown, and I think with her features and how she looked, it was just completely striking to the point where if she changed it she wouldn't really look like herself."

Up next: Moriarty is doing research for a new novel, this one set in the 1930s.

Her summer reading: "I'm going to reread Baby Jesus Pawn Shop by Lucia Orth. It's a little bit like The Chaperone in that it has a fictional character and a real historical backdrop. It takes place in the Philippines in the 1980s."

E-books or print? "I don't have an e-reader yet. I'm still reading books and don't know when I'll make the jump. I do listen to audiobooks. I love to listen to a book when I'm walking in the woods when they have a wonderful narrator."

Contributing: By Carol Memmott

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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John Cheever remembered at centennial

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

Sunday would have been the 100th birthday of John Cheever, the great short story writer and novelist (Falconer, The Wapshot Chronicle, Bullet Park) who died in 1982 but continues to be cited as an influence by contemporary writers including Dave Eggers and Rick Moody.

As part of the Cheever centennial, Random House, one of his publishers, notes that Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, the hit TV show set in the '60s, keeps copies of Cheever's books in his office for inspiration.

Mad Men viewers and Cheever readers also may have noticed that an episode in the third season (when Don Draper's wife, Betty, takes up a local political cause) was inspired by Cheever's story "An Educated American Woman."

Random House also is offering some "Cheever trivia:"

-- Cheever's story, "The Swimmer," made into a 1968 movie starring Burt Lancaster, featured a cameo by Cheever himself as one of the neighbors.

-- The early seasons of Mad Men were set in part in Cheever's adopted hometown, Ossining, N.Y., a suburb 30 miles north of Manhattan. In the first few seasons, Don Draper and his family lived on the fictional Bullet Park Road after the 1969 Cheever novel "Bullet Park." ( A 1964 Time cover story on Cheever proclaimed him "Ovid in Ossining.")

-- Before buying a house in Ossining, Cheever and his family rented the former home of Richard Yates, who wrote the novel Revolutionary Road, another influence on Mad Men and Weiner.

In his 2009 biography, Cheever: A Life, Blake Bailey writes that "Cheever took pleasure in being a familiar face in his adopted hometown, the virtues of which he extolled with impressive zeal. When Cheever was profiled by People in 1979, the magazine described Ossining as a 'gritty enclave, dominated by Sing Sing penitentiary.'"

Bailey adds that Cheever, "indignant, rushed to disavow the slur in the local Citizen Register: 'Paradise on earth,' he said, 'with its fine views of the Hudson, its unpretentious people, its good restaurants, its nearness to New York."

Sunday, the Ossining Public Library will host a birthday celebration in the John Cheever Reading Room.


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Monday, May 28, 2012

'50 Shades of Grey' to return to Florida library shelves

MELBOURNE, Fla. -- Less than a month after Fifty Shades of Grey was pulled from local library shelves, officials plan to put the erotic best-seller back in circulation as early as next week, according to the chairman of the Brevard County Commission.

Book covers from the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' series. Vintage Books, AP

Book covers from the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' series.

Vintage Books, AP

Book covers from the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' series.

Chuck Nelson said Friday that County Manager Howard Tipton and Assistant County Manager Stockton Whitten, who oversees library operations, told him during separate briefings Thursday and Friday that the novel once more will be available to library patrons. Details are being worked out.

"Given where we are today," making the book available to library patrons would be "a reasonable approach," said Nelson, adding that e-mails and phone calls to his office ran heavily in favor of the book's return.

"I never want to be in a position where we appear to be censoring or banning books."

County spokesman Don Walker said the county manager's office plans an announcement next week, but no final decision has been made.

The county's Fifty Shades saga started when Cathy Schweinsberg, Brevard's library services director, decided to pull the system's 19 copies after reading the book. At the time, she said that the library had "erred in our selection process and are correcting the error, and, thus, it is not censorship."

Officials said then they would review policies by which books are selected, purchased and reconsidered.

But after Florida Today's first story about the ban appeared May 4, a national conversation ensued, with anti-censorship advocates demanding a return of the book by British author E.L. James. The first installment in a trilogy, it tops nationwide best-seller lists and features explicit sexual scenes.

Linda Tyndall of Viera and her 16-year-old daughter, Becca, started an online petition asking for the book's return that drew almost 2,000 signatures.

Tyndall said that while she might have understood had the library simply not purchased Fifty Shades -- many libraries nationwide have chosen not to buy it -- she would have fought as hard for the return of any book that was purchased and pulled.

"I'm very happy to have played a role in it," she said. "I do think the petition got the word out. … Anybody who spoke up against censorship needs to pat themselves on the back."

The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida notified commissioners this week that it was considering legal action against the county.

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Five questions for author Justin Halpern

Justin Halpern, 31, author of the 2010 best seller Sh*t My Dad Says, talks to USA TODAY about his second book, I Suck at Girls (It, $16.99).

Does the title 'I Suck at Girls' describe author Justin Halpern? By Matt Hoyle

Does the title 'I Suck at Girls' describe author Justin Halpern? "When I was young. But now I'm married."

By Matt Hoyle

Does the title 'I Suck at Girls' describe author Justin Halpern? "When I was young. But now I'm married."

1. For those who prefer not to use the word suck, as you do, is there an euphuism you can suggest for your title?

How about "I Stink at Girls"?

2. Do you?

I did when I was young. But now I'm married. So hopefully, I don't. Maybe you should ask my wife.

3. What does she think of the new book?

She liked it, except she doesn't like stories from when I was dating other women.

4. And is your dad still your first reader?

Always. He has no problem at all telling me if he thinks something I wrote is terrible.

5. Sh*t My Dad Says flopped as a TV show. What are the prospects of I Suck at Girls as a TV series?

We'll see if the option (bought by Warner Bros.) gets picked up. And if it does, this time it won't be a sitcom with a live audience. I'd like it to be more like The Wonder Years. As a kid, I loved that show.

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Sunday, May 27, 2012

'Bring Up the Bodies' continues Tudor tale

In this follow-up to Wolf Hall, Mantel tackles the tempestuous relationship between King Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn .

The very best thing about Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies: It doesn't end with Thomas Cromwell's thick neck on the chopping block after he loses Henry VIII's favor. Instead, there will be a third novel. Titled The Mirror and the Light, it will complete the story Mantel began with the sensational Wolf Hall, which won the 2009 Man Booker Prize.

Trying to convey the magic and majesty of these two Tudor-era novels leaves a reviewer burbling with superlatives. Riveting! A page-turner!

The funny part: The ending is no mystery. Henry the multi-married had the once-invaluable Cromwell beheaded in 1540. Nor is the subject — Tudor court sexcapades — unexplored in popular culture. Thanks to the TV miniseries The Tudors, movies like The Other Boleyn Girl and best sellers by Philippa Gregory, Alison Weir and the superb C.J. Sansom, it practically feels like TMZ has set up a videocam in Henry's bed chamber.

Mantel's secret is her ability to make the reader identify heart and soul with Cromwell. You want the blacksmith's son to rise in the world the same way you want Mario Puzo's Godfather to triumph. You simply don't care that the skill set required for their career advancement requires murder and corruption.

Cromwell rose to power thanks to three things. One: His extraordinary knowledge of how the world worked, which he gained as a mercenary in Europe. Two: An Einstein-level IQ. Cromwell wooed aristocrats and mentored the young and ambitious.

Most of all, he was ruthless. Cromwell's job description was simple: Keep Henry happy. No room for scruples at this palace.

The plot revolves around Henry's disenchantment with the bold but aging Anne Boleyn. Having broken with the Catholic Church and much of Europe in order to put Wife No. 2 on the throne and in his bed, Henry finds himself drawn to the demure Jane Seymour.

Read Wolf Hall first — it's non-negotiable in terms of understanding Bring Up the Bodies. And if you're someone who devours business books about snaring that corner office, you'll discover that Mantel's novel brims with timeless career advice about the grabbing and keeping of power, even though codpieces are no longer de rigueur.


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Thursday, May 24, 2012

Sheen and Estevez reflect in 'Along the Way'

It's refreshing to find a dual memoir between a father and son from the same profession that's so honest and cathartic. Veteran actor Martin Sheen and his eldest son, Emilio Estevez, the accomplished actor/filmmaker, reveal eerie, often ironic parallel journeys, both personally and professionally.

They've struggled as artists and fathers, and we come away with a deeper understanding of the sacrifices and compromises they've made in balancing craft and family. In many ways, they've actually grown up together during their remarkable relationship.

PHOTOS: Martin and Emilio's father-son 'journey'

Why, Sheen, 71, even remarks that he's known his son all of his life — that's how close they are. Even so, they differ in temperament and approach: Sheen throws caution to the wind and lives in the moment while Estevez is more cautious and takes the longer view.

This is exemplified in the beginning of the memoir when Estevez directs his father in The Way in 2009: a Spanish pilgrimage along the famed Camino de Santiago path, where Sheen's father grew up and near where Estevez's son has settled. The experience represents a culmination; the memoir then backtracks to tell each of their stories, alternating chapters and points of view.

Sheen grew up in Ohio as Estevez (his father was Spanish and mother Irish), but later changed his name in order to find work as a struggling New York actor. His first great success on stage was co-starring with Jack Albertson in The Subject Was Roses: a powerful father-son drama that Sheen still believes remains the best performance of his life. In fact, one of the highlights of the memoir occurs when Sheen recalls playing the climax squarely for his father in the audience. "I love you, Pop. I love you," he uncontrollably weeps.

Another revelation is when Estevez (who turns 50 on May 12) describes his father's drinking: "He acted as though alcohol gave him license to misbehave, when instead it made him unreasonable. It didn't make him stronger in my eyes. It made him look weak." In the subsequent chapter, Sheen concurs: "When I drank, I was an angry, terrible bore."

What's so fascinating about Along the Way is this insightful back and forth. Sheen confesses what a horrible father he was during the making of Francis Ford Coppola's legendary Apocalypse Now. He was at his most self-destructive during this Vietnam opus, which eventually led to a near-fatal heart attack. And Estevez admits how much he needed his father's attention when they were on location together in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, Estevez relates his own vices on the way to becoming part of the '80s "Brat Pack" generation (a gross misnomer, it turns out). Yet he overcomes his share of obstacles, too, in attaining satisfaction and enlightenment. Both father and son found inspiration in the life of Robert Kennedy, with Estevez writing, directing and co-starring with Sheen in Bobby, an ode to the charismatic and compassionate political figure in the wake of his assassination.

We learn how it brings father and son full circle.

As for Charlie Sheen, the bad boy of the family, he's alluded to tangentially but with well-placed irony. Sheen finds his climactic father-son showdown with Charlie in Wall Street poetic justice for really messing up as a father, while Estevez mentions how supportive his younger brother was when he lost focus scripting Bobby: "You need to change your environment and stop throwing parties," he lectured.

This cries out for a follow-up.

--

Bill Desowitz is the author of the forthcoming James Bond Unmasked.


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Wednesday, May 23, 2012

E.L. James basks in 'Fifty Shades' of sudden success

WASHINGTON – Halfway through a two-week tour to promote Fifty Shades of Grey, British author E.L. James is 50 shades of shellshocked about the supercharged success of her erotic trilogy.

E.L. James signs books at a Barnes & Noble in Bethesda, Md., while on a two-week tour. By Forrest MacCormack, for USA TODAY

E.L. James signs books at a Barnes & Noble in Bethesda, Md., while on a two-week tour.

By Forrest MacCormack, for USA TODAY

E.L. James signs books at a Barnes & Noble in Bethesda, Md., while on a two-week tour.

"It's really exhausting, and I find all the hoopla around it extraordinary," the fortysomething married mother of two teenage boys says in an interview with USA TODAY at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in the nation's capital. "But it's great to meet people who really love the books, just to say thanks, if nothing else, and just exchange a few words. I really enjoy that."

Thousands of fans have lined up in Miami, Chicago and Philadelphia to have copies of Fifty Shades autographed since James' book tour began in late April.

And it's not just books she's signing. Fans are asking her to sign gray neckties, T-shirts, even iPads, Nooks and Kindles. Police officers, she says, laughing, have had her autograph handcuffs.

'I'd rather be writing'

Despite all the fan enthusiasm, James (whose real name is Erika Leonard) says the depth of her newfound fame and fortune hasn't sunk in. "It's very strange," she says, brushing her brunette bangs off her forehead. "It's just that everything has happened so quickly. It's like it's happening to someone else. They've just been shipping out books like nobody's business."

And that's no overstatement. The erotic novels, about a virginal college student named Anastasia who enters a submissive sexual relationship with Christian Grey, a handsome young billionaire, were first published by a small Australian publisher last May, largely as e-books.

They became such hot properties — dubbed "Mommy porn" by some wags — that Vintage, a division of Random House, bought the rights.

In April, Vintage's paperback editions began selling here. In less than a month, Vintage has sold 3 million copies (digital and print) of the trilogy.

Fifty Shades of Grey, first in the series, is No. 1 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, a spot it's held for two weeks. They are best sellers in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, and nearly three dozen other countries will be selling them in translation soon.

All the attention, James says, is sometimes overwhelming. "In New Haven (Conn.), I went into a room and there were about 1,000 women in there, and they all started applauding, and I started to cry. The response has been so extraordinary, so no, I'm not used to it yet. Part of me loves it, but I'd rather be at home writing."

James, a former BBC production executive, is beginning to understand what people like about the books.

"It's a combination of things. Fundamentally, people like a good love story. That's it," she says. "They like the sex as well. They love Christian Grey, a complicated, damaged, talented man. He's very capable and strong and domineering but broken. So he's a fixer-upper. I mean, it's a fantasy — the whole book — and so they bought into it and suspended their disbelief. Gone on a vacation really."

Stella Lee, 27, of Baltimore brought her husband, Nelson, with her to James' book signing at the Bethesda, Md., Barnes & Noble last week.

While waiting in line to meet James, she laughs and reveals she has read the series five times. "There's so much talk about the S & M, but it's just so romantic. The love between the characters is so endearing. I just love Christian Grey."

Robin Preston, 50, of Alexandria, Va., also waiting to have her books signed, says the series "consumed" her. "I fell in love with the characters. I'm not much of a fiction reader, but this kept my interest. I could not put them down."

And how James came to write her famous erotic trilogy is equally fantastic.

After reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, about a high school girl who falls in love with a handsome vampire, James began writing fan fiction about Edward and Bella, the Twilight protagonists.

But it was far less chaste than anything Meyer ever wrote. "It was very sexy," James says, and the story of Christian and Anastasia is basically that fan fiction. "I had to tone it down and alter certain bits of it for publication, but fundamentally, it's the same sort of story."

Fever-pitch excitement for the novels heated up more after Universal and Focus Features bought the movie rights. As for who she thinks would be the perfect on-screen Christian and Anastasia, James will say only, "I'm keeping very quiet about all of that."

Don't ask, don't tell

She's also deflecting questions about whether she and her husband have experience with domination — "I've a little bit of experience, but I think that's mostly between me and my husband" — and says most of her research for the books was done on the Internet, "but also just thinking things through in my head."

She also knows she's influencing the sex lives of her fans.

"Yes, oh, God, yes. They say: 'You've really spiced up my marriage. Thank you very much, and my husband thanks you, too.' Of the thousands of e-mails I get, that's the main tenet. I get so many lovely e-mails. I think it's great. I say go for it. I think that's wonderful."

But she's not, she says, "making any huge statements" about lifestyle. "It's about having fun. What people get up to in the bedroom is entirely their own thing, and as long as it's safe, sane and consensual — those are the watch words of the BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) community — who are we to judge?"

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'Wild Things' author Maurice Sendak dies

In the world of children's picture books, where cute and cuddly know few limits, Maurice Sendak was neither.

Maurice Sendak at home in Ridgefield, Conn., in 2005 with his dog, Herman. By Todd Plitt, USA TODAY

Maurice Sendak at home in Ridgefield, Conn., in 2005 with his dog, Herman.

By Todd Plitt, USA TODAY

Maurice Sendak at home in Ridgefield, Conn., in 2005 with his dog, Herman.

Sendak, the author and illustrator best known for his 1963 classic, Where the Wild Things Are, died Tuesday at 83 in Danbury, Conn., after complications from a stroke.

He leaves behind no survivors, just millions of readers from several generations who were amused, scared and inspired by his work.

"He was the pre-eminent children's book artist of the last half-century," says Leonard Marcus, author of Show Me a Story! Why Picture Books Matter. "He can be said to have been the first picture book artist to draw insight and inspiration from the work of Freud."

In his books, from In The Night Kitchen (1970), which shocked some by its youthful nudity, to Bumble-Ardy (2011), about an orphaned pig whose parents were eaten, "he showed, more candidly than any picture book artist had previously done that young children are a tangle of vulnerability and resilience," Marcus says. "And his books continue to show children that their resilient side can win out."

Lisa Von Drasek, director of the Center for Children's Literature at Bank Street College of Education in New York, says: "Sendak smashed the perception of childhood as a time of pleasantness, a time of unicorns and rainbows, sweetness and light. He appalled the 'gatekeepers' of the time who said he was too scary."

But, she says, "his joyful sketches reflect everyday childhood."

Sendak called Max, the mischievous boy who imagines a land of monsters in Wild Things, "a rotten kid."

Which is part of the appeal. Author Dave Eggers, who worked with Sendak on the 2009 film adaptation of Wild Things, recalls his mother reading the book to him when he was a toddler: "I was really scared by it. I was used to tidier narratives with a clear message of who's good and who's bad. But Sendak's monsters weren't simple or cute."

At 7, Eggers started "writing and illustrating my own stories, and they involved a boy who befriended monsters who were misunderstood. I was always into monsters, but nobody did them better than Sendak."

Parents and other readers reacted on Facebook and Twitter:

Uhura Russ: "R.I.P. Maurice Sendak!!! A joy to read your books during my childhood and a joy to see you on the Colbert Report in my adulthood!"

Diana Abu Jaber: "My toddler went as Wild Thing for Halloween. She perfected her roar. To our dismay."

Chuy Gonzalez: "I was a little boy 35 years ago. … I was scared and drawn to Where the Wild Things Are at the same time. It's probably the only book I remember fondly from my youth."

Tom Romano: "Where the Wild Things Are helped get me through an abusive childhood. I escaped repeatedly to Sendak's magical land where I could be King."

The son of Jewish immigrants, Sendak said his earliest influences were the Holocaust and the 1923 kipnapping of Charles Lindbergh's infant son. "Here was a rich, gentile child, and he couldn't make it," Sendak said. "How was I, a poor Jewish child, going to manage?"

His first job in 1948 was as a 20-year-old window dresser at FAO Schwarz, the famous Manhattan toy store, which also sold books. He said he spent a lot of time reading while hiding in the back room.

But the manager recognized Sendak's artistic talents and introduced him to an "angel," Ursula Nordstrom, a children's book editor who worked with author Ruth Krauss. That is how Krauss spotted Sendak's artwork on Nordstrom's desk and how, in 1952, Sendak came to illustrate Krauss' A Hole Is to Dig.

It was Sendak's big career break and the start of a lifelong friendship with Krauss and her husband, illustrator Crockett Johnson (Harold and the Purple Crayon).

"They knocked all the conventional stuff out of my head," Sendak said. "They were the divine parents I wanted to have."

They also helped him with Where the Wild Things Are. "It was like Max was our love child," he said.

In person, he was gruff. At a 2005 interview at his home in Ridgefield, Conn., he introduced his German shepherd, Herman.

Named for Melville, one of Sendak's literary influences?

"Of course," Sendak shot back. "What did you think, Goering?"

He publicly acknowledged being gay only after the death in 2007 of his longtime partner, psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn.

He said he never wanted to be a parent: "I never wanted the obligations. I don't think I'd be good at it. I'd be in the studio too much, or I'd want to be in the studio … and how could you live with that kind of failure?"

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Monday, May 21, 2012

New novel 'Home' brings Toni Morrison back to Ohio

OBERLIN, Ohio – At 81, Toni Morrison, who's won the Nobel Prize for her novels about the sorrows and joys of African-American life, has a new book and a new hip.

Toni Morrison, whose new novel is out Tuesday, is also one of 13 recipients of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor. By Thibault Camus, AP

Toni Morrison, whose new novel is out Tuesday, is also one of 13 recipients of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor.

By Thibault Camus, AP

Toni Morrison, whose new novel is out Tuesday, is also one of 13 recipients of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor.

Her 10th novel, Home (Knopf, $24), released Tuesday, features an angry and troubled black Korean War veteran in the 1950s. It's set mostly in Georgia, where Morrison has never lived. But it's brought her from her home in New York back to Ohio, where she was born and raised.

In an interview during a three-day visit to Oberlin College, she says that despite a hip replacement, her back is "problematic." Her diagnosis: "Two little discs seem to be engaged or something." She gets around by wheelchair or supported on the arms of others.

Her dreadlocked hair, tucked under a scarf, is gray, almost silver. But her voice remains strong. At Oberlin, where she previewed Home in March, Morrison has unconventional advice for the adoring and cheering students who fill all 1,200 seats in the college chapel:

"People say to write about what you know," she says. "I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, 'cause you don't know anything."

In 1989, Toni Morrison explained why she wrote Beloved, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel inspired by a 19th-century black mother who killed her daughter rather than see her grow up enslaved:

“There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it. There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or part of skyscraper lobby. There’s no 300-foot tower. There’s no small bench by the road...And because such a place doesn’t exist…the book had to.”

Those words inspired The Toni Morrison Society, a group of scholars and fans, to begin The Bench by the Road Project. It places 6-foot-long metal benches with plaques quoting Morrison at sites important in African-American history.

In 2008, the first bench was placed on Sullivan’s Island, S.C., a point of entry for slaves. In 2009, the second was installed in the town square in Oberlin, Ohio, a stop on the Underground Railroad and an abolitionist stronghold before the Civil War. There are now six benches, with more planned.

“It’s never too late to honor the dead,” says Morrison. She loves the fact that even in an age of new museums about civil rights and slavery, “they are real, unpretentious benches. You can sit on them. And at my age (81), I’m always looking for a place to sit down.”

The students laugh. Morrison smiles and adds, "So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever."

No contemporary novelist is more celebrated by both scholars and everyday readers. Her best-known work, Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, was inspired by a real-life escaped slave who killed her daughter rather than return her to slavery. (Oprah Winfrey starred in the 1998 movie.)

In 1993, Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. No American has won since, which she can't explain, although she asks, "Philip Roth is still alive, isn't he?" (He is; the Nobel is awarded only to the living.)

She was born and raised in Lorain, an industrial city filled with immigrants from Poland or Czechoslovakia or, like her grandparents, from the South. It's 9 miles and a world away from the inviting college town of Oberlin.

As an honors graduate of Lorain High School (class of 1949), she says she could have attended Oberlin, which boasts on road signs into town of being the first college "to welcome male and female students of all races," starting in 1835.

"But Oberlin would have been too close to home," Morrison says. "Someone would have been telling me what to do."

Finding answers

Instead, she attended Howard University, the historically black college in Washington, D.C., where for the first time, she saw signs downtown separating "colored" and "white." And at Howard, she learned of the divisions among blacks, between poor and rich, between dark- and light-skinned, which would become themes in her novels.

Her own family was "poor," she says, "but we were never degraded." Her dad, who assumed "all whites were unredeemable," worked as a welder, among other jobs. Her mother, "the most non-racist person I knew," worked as a restroom attendant "so she could send me $5 a week when I was at Howard. Back then, that made a difference."

Morrison, who worked as an editor at Random House from 1967 to 1983, says she has followed her own advice to write about what you don't know: "I write to find out something. I write with questions in mind. 'What would it feel like if …' Or, 'What would happen if…' "

The plots are simple to construct, she says. "The characters are complex." She says they talk to her, like ghosts: "On a good day, they shut up and let me work."

In Home, told from multiple viewpoints, she does something she's never done before.

Her main character, Frank "Smart" Money, who harbors a terrible secret from Korea, talks back to the author, challenging what she knows and doesn't.

Money is summoned home to Georgia, to a "no-count, not-even-a-town place," to save his naive sister, Cee, who's been abused by a white doctor. That part of her plot was inspired by Harriet Washington's 2007 book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present.

Morrison's novels, which often blend reality and myth, arise from her imagination and research. They are not autobiographical. One book she won't write is a memoir. She's canceled plans to do so after deciding, "A) I don't remember everything anymore, and B) as a subject to write about, I'm not that interesting to myself. I'm more interested in my imagination. Fiction is my place."

On Lorain, Obama, Oprah

That doesn't surprise Carolyn Denard, a dean at Emory University in Atlanta and president of the Toni Morrison Society, a group of 600 scholars and fans. "She has been so generous with her life story in appearances and in countless interviews," Denard says. "And she has now written 10 novels. She has always told me that everything we need to know about her is there — in the works."

Morrison doesn't discuss her 1964 divorce from Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect she met at Howard. (As a single mother, she raised two sons. Ford, 50, is an architect in Princeton, N.J., where his mother used to teach. Slade was an artist and illustrator, who collaborated with his mother on several children's books and died in 2010 at 45 from pancreatic cancer.)

But in an interview, on a variety of topics, she's funny and biting:

Growing up in Lorain: "All those immigrants. I thought it was typical. It helped me feel comfortable in the world at large. There wasn't a ghetto sensibility."

Her mother: "Whenever a new place or store would open in Lorain, she would go just to check it out and see how we were treated. When the Dreamland movie theater opened, all the black kids sat on the left side. My mother deliberately made us sit on the right side. I was furious because my friends were on the other side. But my mother wanted to make a point."

President Obama: "As good as it gets … I think what drives some of his critics is not that he's black, but that he's such a smart, articulate black … and that causes all this vulgarity about his birth certificate or the Muslim thing." She's "thrilled" that she's one of 13 recipients of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, and is eager to meet Obama for the first time at a White House ceremony to be scheduled soon.

E-books: She likes reading books on her iPad — to a degree. She recently found that Hilary Mantel's 2009 novel, Wolf Hall, set in Henry VIII's England, "was so good, I had to go buy the book book, or whatever it's called now. When I like a book, I want to add my notes. Exclamation points! And questions marks! I want to corrupt it with my responses."

•Her friendship with Winfrey: "I adore her. She sends me flowers every year on my birthday. She did what they said was impossible: She used TV to get people to read books." (Morrison says Winfrey's embrace of three of her novels, Song of Solomon, Paradise and Sula, did more for her sales than the Nobel Prize ever did.)

But no, Morrison hasn't urged Winfrey to revive her televised book club. "We stay friends because I don't ask her for anything. Everyone else does." (Winfrey likes to say that when she told Morrison she often has to reread parts of her novels to understand them, Morrison replied, "That, my dear, is reading.")

Home as a place: These days, it's mostly Morrison's riverfront house in Grand View-on-Hudson, N.Y., which lives up to its name, 20 miles north of Manhattan on the west bank of the Hudson. "I love the river. As a girl, I loved Lake Erie. There's something about water."

Home, her new novel, set in the '50s: "I wanted to rip the scab off that period. There's all this Leave It to Beaver nostalgia. That it was all comfortable and happy and everyone had a job. Oh, please. There was violent racism. There was (Joe) McCarthy. There was this horrible war we didn't call a war, where 58,000 people died."

The length of her new novel (just 147 pages): "Some reviewers say it's too short. They used to say my novels were too long. Someone called it a novella. What's the ella? It's a novel. The better I can do with less is more."

The reviews have been generally good: Entertainment Weekly (A-) and People (four stars) loved it, but The Los Angeles Times called it a "thin book with some beautiful writing."

The dedication page on Home reads simply "Slade," her son who died.

"Sometimes you just don't have any words," she says. "Sometimes, it's just clichés and tired old words, and there's nothing really to say."

After a long pause, Morrison adds two words about her son: "He knows."

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Sunday, May 20, 2012

Five questions: Andy Cohen of Bravo

Bravo TV personality Andy Cohen shares his tales of success and embarrassment in Most Talkative (Henry Holt, $25). Cohen, 43, chatted

Andy Cohen's new book is entitled 'Most Talkative.'

Andy Cohen's new book is entitled 'Most Talkative.'

Andy Cohen's new book is entitled 'Most Talkative.'

with USA TODAY.

1. In high school, you were voted "most talkative and biggest gossip." What superlative would friends give you today?

Most talkative and biggest gossip.

2. How would you describe the book?

There's some good dish on the Housewives, but mostly it's the story of how a gay closeted kid from St. Louis who grew up an inch away from TV wound up making and being on TV. It's a dream come true.

3. You reread old journals for research?

There were lots of stories about how my mouth has gotten me into trouble. There was a time when I was an intern at CBS News and someone pulled me aside to tell me to "tone it down." I was just like, well, this is hilarious.

4. Dream guest on Watch What Happens Live?

A great female politician like Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama or

Sarah Palin.

5. What advice do you want to give readers?

Follow your passion. Be yourself, but check yourself before you wreck

yourself.

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Saturday, May 19, 2012

'Midnight in Peking' is a riveting murder tale

Subtitle: "How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China".

On a cold Peking morning in 1937, a man named Chang Pao-chen was taking his caged songbird for a walk when he discovered the mutilated body of a 19-year old British girl. She was Pamela Werner. Her father, a distinguished diplomat and scholar of Chinese dialects, had been searching for her with increasing alarm since she failed to return from ice skating with a friend the evening before.

Bodies fall every day. What makes this one's tale worth telling, as Paul French does with a police procedural's efficiency in Midnight in Peking, is the songbird, that essential dose of cultural strangeness that can lift narratives of murder above the plainspoken fray of the true- crime genre.

French's setting is the Legation Quarter, a walled and gated scrap of Peking where between the wars a few thousand Westerners lived as they would have back home, surrounded by bars, department stores and cinemas — almost in a mirrored version of the Forbidden City.

Pamela's murder forced these adjacent but unmixed worlds together. Two detectives, Colonel Han and the Scotland Yard-trained Richard Dennis, paired to take the case, interrogating rickshaw drivers, her school friends, and, eventually, a bizarre cabal of men interested in the uncommon joint pursuits of nudism and hunting.

This makes for fairly interesting reading until the book's final 75 pages. Then it becomes riveting. That is when Pamela's father initiates his own, obsessive investigation, hiring Chinese detectives and bombarding the recalcitrant Foreign Office in London with memos.

Some books falter when they "solve" a cold case (the otherwise admirable The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, by Kate Summerscale, comes to mind) but this book's solution, when it arrives, is persuasive and disturbing, and several small clues, scattered early on to be gathered by astute readers, click agreeably into place.

Unfortunately French is a careless writer, prone to cliché and moralizing. More seriously, the historical context in which he attempts to locate Pamela's murder, the "last days" of old China, never seems particularly relevant to her death. As a result, Midnight in Peking doesn't rise to the level of the best work of Erik Larson or John Berendt, both writers who understood murder as the single event that most starkly reveals a subculture's demons, but who found, in the Chicago World's Fair and phantasmagoric Savannah, more resonant milieus.

Almost inadvertently, however, the book offers a subtler idea: that the years before Pearl Harbor were the last time China would ever seem so immeasurably remote from Western life. By 1945 television, airplanes, and war had made Asia familiar. And now, had she lived, Pamela Werner, who would be 94 years old, could probably find video of Chinese men walking their songbirds online.

--

Charles Finch is the author of A Burial at Sea.


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Friday, May 18, 2012

Prequel lays out life before 'The Godfather'

BLACKSBURG, Va. – The Falcos seem like such a nice family. Ed is a respected literary novelist, writer of short stories and director of the MFA program in creative writing at Virginia Tech. His niece, Edie Falco, is the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning actress.

Connected guy: Ed Falco's prequel to Mario Puzo's 'The Godfather,' 'The Family Corleone,' arrives Tuesday. By Joe Brier, for USA TODAY

Connected guy: Ed Falco's prequel to Mario Puzo's 'The Godfather,' 'The Family Corleone,' arrives Tuesday.

By Joe Brier, for USA TODAY

Connected guy: Ed Falco's prequel to Mario Puzo's 'The Godfather,' 'The Family Corleone,' arrives Tuesday.

So what are they doing hanging out with the Mafia?

"It's a joke between us, a constant source of amusement," says the elder Falco, whose new book, The Family Corleone, a prequel to Mario Puzo's wildly popular 1969 novel The Godfather, goes on sale Tuesday. "We're not sure how we both ended up in the Mob. We like to think it's coincidental."

Edie Falco, of course, is famous for her award-winning role as Carmela in The Sopranos, the hit HBO series revolving around a Mafia family.

Not that the two are complaining. The Mob connection seems to work quite nicely for the Family Falco.

"Yeah, it was funny that an actress from a suburban Italian-American family ended up being associated with a Mob family of some renown, years ago though it was," Edie Falco, who now plays a drug-addicted nurse in Showtime's Nurse Jackie, says by e-mail. "Then my uncle goes and writes this book about another Mob family of some great renown! Just when I thought I was out."

But the Falcos are not out. Ed Falco got in on the Mob action because his literary agent, Neil Olson of Donadio and Olson, represented Puzo and now the Puzo family. "He thought I'd be a good person to work with Mario Puzo's themes," Falco says. "And I was interested in getting into popular fiction."

The Family Corleone is based on unproduced portions of the screenplays of Godfather 3 and 4, both written by Puzo, who died in 1999. The prequel follows two sequels to The Godfather, both written by Mark Winegardner, who did not get the prequel nod — the best-selling The Godfather Returns (2004) and the less successful The Godfather's Revenge (2006).

In Falco's prequel, Mob boss Vito Corleone is most interested in the future of his family. His youngest children — Michael, Fredo and Connie — are in school and clueless about Daddy's "profession." Adopted son Tom is away at college. It's Sonny, his 17-year-old and most unruly son, who worries him most. Much of the book revolves around Sonny's desire to get into the "business."

Booklist, which reviews thousands of new books, already has given The Family Corleone its blessing, saying it "channels the original so well that readers will be vividly reminded of Puzo's strength," leaving them "dreaming of just one more movie."

Falco is well-known in academic circles for his award-winning short-story collections, three novels, nine plays and his poetry (written as Edward Falco). But it wasn't all that much a stretch for him to venture into Mob territory as "Ed" Falco. The themes of gangsters and betrayal have appeared in Falco's work before, in his novels Wolf Point and Saint John of the Five Boroughs among them.

"Gangsters have always interested me. Outlaws," he says.

But talking in his neat, book-lined office on the Virginia Tech campus, Falco says he is no mobster. He has no criminal record and only hints at once having had a gambling habit. Ponies. Poker. "But I was never particularly good at it," he says with a laugh. "That's why I'm a writer."

Having published through small academic presses with small press runs for much of his 25-year career at Virginia Tech, Falco was eager for a larger stage. The Family Corleone has a first print run of 130,000 copies.

"I jumped at the chance. I wanted to write something that had an audience. The literary world can be very small."

Falco, who writes in the morning now that he's 63 and goes to bed much earlier than he used to, says the book came to him quite quickly. "I wrote it in about eight months. It's usually a much slower process. Two years or so."

He calls writing both a "puzzle and a challenge" and confesses that dealing with Puzo's long shadow was intimidating.

"But I went into it with a certain bravado," says Falco, who is as soft-spoken as the original godfather, Marlon Brando, star of the classic 1972 blockbuster movie now celebrating its 40th anniversary as a pop culture icon. "I knew the milieu."

It comes through. The Family Corleone is filled with the smell of simmering tomato sauce, cheap cigarettes and the taste of ripe figs, picked from a tree in a Brooklyn backyard.

What intrigued him most was working with "monsters who lived under the mask of civility. I liked peeling away the outer layers."

He was also interested in the time— the Depression-era '30s in New York, a city inhabited by Italian and Irish immigrants who were battling for turf.

Falco's editor at Grand Central, Mitch Hoffman, said Falco rose to the challenge.

"Ed had to take the kernel of a story — a story involving truly beloved characters that everyone knows — and he had to honor the legacy of Mario Puzo," Hoffman says. "All the while expanding that into a contemporary story that feels fresh and new and his. And he pulled it off."

Falco is well aware that the legions of Godfather fans will have the final say.

"I like the book. Other people will have to decide," he says, realizing all too well that some Puzo fans have a "certain position" on The Godfather brand. "They don't want people fooling with it."

That would be Rachel Clements Case of Lynchburg, Va., a big fan of Puzo's original.

"I'm not a fan of prequels or sequels written by someone other than the original author," says Case, a stay-at-home mother of four. "I won't be reading. When something is as great as The Godfather, you should just leave it alone."

But Alan Simmons, a copywriter from Bella Vista, Ark., is willing to take a look. "I'm a huge fan of The Godfather and I'm fascinated by Italian-American culture, so I would definitely read it. I'm normally not a fan of prequels, but for this I would make an exception."

Falco does come to the job with certain advantages. He grew up in an Italian neighborhood of Brooklyn. His father was a house painter. His mother a seamstress. But the only time his parents spoke Italian was in anger. (Falco is divorced and in a relationship. He has a daughter and stepson.)

"Every word in there I grew up with," Falco says with a laugh. "My parents didn't speak Italian around us kids, but they cursed in Italian, so I knew all the exclamations."

He just didn't know how to spell them. Like v'a Napoli! which translates to "Go to Naples!" which turns into "Go to hell!"

Not that the project hasn't come with larger controversies.

In February, Paramount filed a lawsuit accusing Puzo's heirs of approving sequels to The Godfather without the studio's permission and in violation of previous agreements. Puzo's heirs came back with a $10 million countersuit in March over the studio's attempts to block The Family Corleone.

The Puzo family says it has informed Paramount several times of the publication of Falco's book and noted the studio did not object to the 2006 sequel.

In a statement, Paramount said: "The studio has tremendous respect and admiration for Mario Puzo, whose novel The Godfather was acquired in 1969 and helped spawn one of the most celebrated film trilogies of all time. We have an obligation to and will protect our copyright and trademark interests."

Grand Central, publisher of The Family Corleone, has distanced itself from the lawsuits, which are still pending, and is proceeding with publication.

Hoffman, Falco's editor, says he's "happy to be publishing this great book" despite the legal hassles. "I hope they all revolve their differences."

If there's a film to be made out of the newest Godfather book, Falco isn't saying. (Paramount also would not comment on possible film rights.)

"The book is out. Film rights are another deal," Falco says, refusing to even play the who-would-play-who game in a film version of his book. (Francis Ford Coppola made three Godfather movies; the first two were classics, the third, not so much.)

Falco did concede, however, that he wrote the book with various scenes in mind. "Yes, I tried to do some scene writing, because I loved the (first) movie. I hope it translates visually. That was part of my job."

Part of his job was also to bring his characters to life, like young and reckless Sonny (James Caan in the films). "He's an Italian guy you easily recognize. Like one of my uncles. Not terribly smart but full of opinions! A sweet guy who might smack you up side the head at any moment."

Wasn't he worried about reinforcing stereotypes? "I tried to make them individuals."

As for the 21 graduate students who are in his MFA program, he doesn't quite know what they think about all this — a Mafia novel from their most academic of professors.

"I'm known as a literary writer of short stories," he acknowledges. "But evolution is natural."

Or maybe it was an offer Falco couldn't refuse.

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Thursday, May 17, 2012

Mortimer vs. Frankel: Stiletto standoff

April showers bring May romans à clef— one from a Manhattan housewife turned camera-ready party queen (Tinsley Mortimer), the other from a Manhattan Housewife turned ready-made cocktail queen (Bethenny Frankel). Both reality-show swans have put their ladder-climbing lives into loosely fictionalized form. USA TODAY tackles the twin socialite tomes, sizing up theauthors' size 0 alter egos.

The authors

Tinsley Mortimer, 35, and Bethenney Frankel, 41

The books

Mortimer's Southern Charm(Simon & Schuster, 242 pp., $25) and Frankel's Skinnydipping (Touchstone, 350 pp., $25)

The premises

Southern Charm: Southern debutante moves to New York and becomes accidental It Girl, enduring pesky Page Six plants and a bad-boy blue-blood boyfriend while holding her honey-haired head high.

Skinnydipping: No-nonsense New Yorker flees NYU graduation for L.A. to pursue her Hollywood dreams, enduring a raft of audition rejections and unwanted attention from skeevy suits. When an acting career doesn't materialize, she heads back to her hometown and nurtures her troika of talent for vegan baking, cocktail shaking and sassy self-promotion, catching the eye of a reality-TV show in search of America's next domestic goddess.

The heroines

Southern Charm: inty Davenport, a Charleston native and cum laude Chapel Hill graduate whose penchant for pink pops out against New York's typically dour fashion flock, propelling her to style icon status.

Skinnydipping: Faith Brightstone, the estranged daughter of a legendary horse trainer. Faith has big ambition, a big mouth and a big trail of busted relationships. Her one constant companion? Her mutt, Muffin.

Name-dropping nuggets

Southern Charm: From places (the Standard Hotel's platinum-roped Boom Boom Room) to labels (Marc Jacobs, Oscar de la Renta) to families (Guggenheim, du Pont), Charm traffics in the trappings of luxury.

Skinnydipping: A little Vera Wang, a little Rolex, a little Upper East Side but little else.

Dirt scooped

Southern Charm: Minty's mate, Tripp du Pont — a doppelganger of Mortimer's ex, Standard Oil heir Topper Mortimer — is portrayed as a probably philandering prig who holds Minty back from her handbag-designing dreams.

Skinnydipping: A dump truck's worth. Frankel was a finalist on The Apprentice: Martha Stewart. Faith competes on something called Domestic Goddess, hosted by that Machiavellian maven of mealtime, Sybil Matthews. But Frankel's infamous TV frenemy, Jill, came from her other series, The Real Housewives of New York City. And who is Faith's bestie-turned-back-stabber on Goddess? A Noo Yawk-talking, family business-hawking housewife named Shari.

The X (-rated) factor

Southern Charm: Positively PG. Minty kisses and tells about exploits that would make only the most repressed belle blush.

Skinnydipping: Resolutely R. X, coke, back-seat gropes: There's a reason it's called Skinnydipping— aside from the fact that Frankel's brand is called Skinnygirl.

Guilt quotient

Southern Charm: * * 1/2 out of four. Better than an episode of High Society (Mortimer's ill-fated CW series). Worse than 10 minutes of the classic (1956) High Society.

Skinnydipping: * * Better than an episode of Bethenny Ever After (Frankel's latest reality TV foray). Worse than an episode of The Real Housewives of New York City.

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Bill Clinton reviews Robert Caro's LBJ bio

By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY

Add a new line to Bill Clinton's resume: book critic.

In Sunday's New York Times Book Review, the former president wrote a rave for The Passage of Power, the fourth installment in Robert Caro's LBJ biography. (It debuts on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list this week at No. 15.)

Clinton writes, "With this fascinating and meticulous account of how and why (Johnson) did it, Robert Caro has once again done America a great service."

The Los Angeles Times reviewer called it Caro's best while Entertainment Weekly graded it an A-. But Erik Nelson in Salon called the book "bloated," writing that it "cries out for the Ghost of William Shawn and a red pencil. How can a book take 10 years of obsessive work and still seem sloppy?"


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CITY OF SCOUNDRELS: The 12 Days of Disaster That Gave Birth to Modern Chicago

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Tuesday, May 15, 2012

BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK

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Monday, May 14, 2012

THESE GIRLS

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Sunday, May 13, 2012

A DIFFICULT WOMAN: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman

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