J.K. Rowling announces Harry Potter e-books

Fans lamenting the end of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and the subsequent movies can rejoice.

By Akira Suemori, AP

British author J.K. Rowling announced her new website project, Pottermore, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on Thursday. For the Pottermore project, Rowling has written new material about the characters, places and objects in the Harry Potter stories.

By Akira Suemori, AP

British author J.K. Rowling announced her new website project, Pottermore, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on Thursday. For the Pottermore project, Rowling has written new material about the characters, places and objects in the Harry Potter stories.

The boy wizard's creator, at a news conference in London this morning, announced that she will share extensive new material on the Potter saga on a new website, Pottermore, that will go live in October. The site will launch in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, with more languages to follow.

"No author could have asked for a more wonderful, diverse and loyal readership," Rowling told fans in a YouTube video also released this morning.

"I'm thrilled to say that I'm now in a position to give you something unique, an online reading experience unlike any other. It's called Pottermore. It's the same story with a few crucial additions. The most important one is you. Just as the experience of reading requires that the imaginations of the author and reader work together to create the story, so Pottermore will be built in part by you, the reader."

One of the biggest announcements related to the website is that the Potter books will for the first time be available in e-book form.

"Digital generations will be able to enjoy a safe, unique online reading experience built around the Harry Potter books," Rowling said. "Pottermore will be the place where fans of any age can share, participate in and rediscover the stories. It will also be the exclusive place to purchase digital audio books and for the first time e-books in the Harry Potter series. I'll be joining in too because I will be sharing additional information I've been hoarding for years about the world of Harry Potter."

The new material will include more details on the characters, objects and places in her beloved series.

"Fans are really excited," says Andrews Sims, editor of the MuggleNet.com fan site. "It's a pretty big day for Potter fans to hear so much from J.K. Rowling and see this project that's going to be coming out later this year."

Pottermore, Sims says, "is a step toward a Potter encyclopedia that fans have wanted for a long time. The exclusive content is definitely going to get a lot of people using this. It's a cool way to reveal all this new information that she's been quote unquote hoarding."

On Rowling's equally big news that her books will now be available in digital form, Sims says: "Fans have wanted Harry Potter e-books for a long time. I'm glad they're finally doing it because this is obviously one of the greatest book series of all time, and now it's available for a lot of people who want to experience it through an e-reader."

Edward Drogos, senior site editor for LeakyNews.com, another fan site, says he'll be first in line to buy the e-books and read them on his iPad. "This is an amazing addition to what Jo (Rowling) has already created for us."

Of Pottermore, Drogos says, "Jo has come up with something fans are simply going to love. We all want more information about Harry Potter. Seeing all this extra information and material that she's had in her head for the past 13 years -- that's what I'm most excited to read and experience."

Pottermore, it was also announced, is being developed in a partnership with Sony and will be an outlet for Sony products designed for Potter fans.

A news release distributed after the news conference explained that on the Pottermore website "the storyline will be brought to life with sumptuous newly-commissioned illustrations and interactive 'Moments' through which you can navigate, starting with the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's (Sorcerer's) Stone. On entering, you choose a magic username and begin your experience. As you move through the chapters, you can read and share exclusive writing from J.K. Rowling, and, just as Harry joins Hogwarts, so can you. You visit Diagon Alley, get sorted into a house, cast spells and mix potions to help your house compete for the House Cup."

Key features of the website, according to the news release, will bring to life both the Sorting Hat and Ollivanders experiences from her books "by revealing the questions asked by the Sorting Hat — which places newcomers into their Hogwarts houses according to their characteristics — and the magic behind the Wand Chooser — which finds the right wand for each user from over 33,000 possible combinations."

Beginning today, fans can submit their e-mail addresses on Pottermore.com in order to be contacted by the site following the opening of registration on July 31, Harry's birthday. On that date, an online challenge will be launched in which the first million people to complete their registration will gain early entry into the website.

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New Tom Clancy novel ripped from the headlines

By Craig Wilson, USA TODAY

You might as well be reading today's paper. Terrorism. Pakistan. Navy SEALS. They're all here in Tom Clancy and Peter Telep's Against All Enemies, which enters USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list at No. 2. Clancy returns with a tale of a terrorist bombing in Pakistan which sends a former Navy SEAL into the mountains to uncover the culprits. But what he finds sends him halfway around the world to America's border. "Tom's novels have always been prescient, whether they were about technology or military tactics or geo-political maneuvering," says his editor, Tom Colgan. "(Here) he examines the unacknowledged war on America's doorstep, the bloody slaughter perpetrated by the Mexican drug cartels. Tom brings his unique Clancy twist to the story and warns us about the potential disaster a destabilized neighbor poses to the U.S."

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Harry Potter e-books plan worries bookstore owners

NEW YORK — Author J.K. Rowling has joined the 21st century on her own special terms.

Akira Suemori, AP

British author J.K. Rowling poses for photographers as she announces her new website project Pottermore at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on June 23.

Akira Suemori, AP

British author J.K. Rowling poses for photographers as she announces her new website project Pottermore at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on June 23.

One of the world's most famous digital holdouts, Rowling announced Thursday that a new interactive website, www.pottermore.com, will be the exclusive seller of the e-book editions of her iconic Harry Potter series. The news is a landmark for the growing electronic market, especially for the relatively small number of young adult e-book fans, and an unwelcome surprise for the traditional stores which helped sell hundreds of millions of Potter novels.

"Bricks and mortar stores are taking a lot of bullets and there's a limit to how many bullets we can take," says Roxanne Coady, owner of R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn, one of more than 200 independent sellers of e-books through Google. "If the sellers of the Rowling e-books are saying they don't need bricks and mortar stores, then that's the result you'll get."

Jon Howells, spokesman for Britain's Waterstone's chain, said the Harry Potter book launches, which for years drew thousands of fans in wizard garb to midnight store openings, "have become the stuff of legend at Waterstone's and other booksellers."

"We're therefore disappointed that, having been a key factor in the growth of the Harry Potter phenomenon since the first book was published, the book trade is effectively banned from selling the long-awaited e-book editions," he said.

Tom Turcan, chief operating officer of Pottermore, said Rowling wanted "to make the books available to everybody, not to make them available only to people who own a particular set of devices, or tethered to a particular set of platforms."

During a press conference in London on Thursday, Rowling cited the special bond she has had with fans online and said she was "phenomenally lucky in that I have the resources to do it myself and therefore I got to do it, I think, right."

"I think this is a fantastic and unique experience that I can afford in every sense," she said.

E-books have jumped from less than 1 percent of total sales four years ago to more than 20 percent. Children's books are catching up as the Kindle, Nook and other devices become cheaper and touchscreen readers such as the Nook and the iPad enable illustrated stories to be available in digital form. Potter books remain steady sellers four years after the series ended, especially as the final movie approaches, and publishers believe the e-books will be as revolutionary for the digital market as the paper ones were for the traditional market.

"The Potter books took children's books in general to another level and we've never gone back," said Susan Katz, president and publisher of HarperCollins Children's Books. "And I think the news today could be the tipping point for 8-to-12-year-old market."

Pottermore is far more than a retail outlet. The site lets fans delve into Harry Potter's beloved Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. They can shop for wands in Diagon Alley, travel to Hogwarts from the imaginary Platform 9 3/4 at London's King's Cross train station and be sorted into Hogwarts school houses by the perceptive Sorting Hat.

Along the way are wand fights, games and new information about characters beloved around the world, including Harry's boorish relatives, the Dursleys. The website also features 18,000 words of new Potter material from Rowling, who said it will have "information I have been hoarding for years" about the books' characters and settings. The level of detail gives Potter fans new reasons to obsess over the wizard and his friends. The final Potter movie, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2," opens in July.

"I go into ridiculous detail about wand woods," Rowling said.

A beta version of the site launches July 31, Harry Potter's birthday, and the e-books become available in October under an unusual arrangement. They will be sold directly from Pottermore, with Rowling's longtime publishers, Bloomsbury Publishing in the United Kingdom and Scholastic Inc. in the United States, sharing revenues. Scholastic and other publishers have long sold books directly to customers, but through their own websites. And they traditionally have made those releases available to retailers, too.

Children's booksellers have extra reasons to worry. Potter books remain a rite of passage among young readers, one that often includes a visit to the local store. That initiation may now happen online.

"It's one thing if an individual sells book on her own, I can understand that," says Ann Seaton, manager of Hicklebee's Children's Book Store in San Jose, Calif. "But it did sort of surprise me that the publisher would cut us out of the loop. That makes it hard for us.

"We have sold a huge amount of Potter books," she said. "And we were one of those stores that had the midnight parties when a new Potter book came out. I don't think we'll be having a party for the e-books."

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It's a James Patterson double scoop at bookstores

James Patterson, who has broken most bookselling records, is about to try something his publisher believes has never been done before: release two new books on the same day.

Deborah Feingold

Patterson: One for adults, one for kids.

Deborah Feingold

Patterson: One for adults, one for kids.

Patterson's murder thriller, Now You See Her, written with Michael Ledwidge, goes on sale Monday encased in a narrow wrapper that urges: "While you're here, don't forget the kids."

It shows the cover of Patterson's other Monday release: Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life, written with Chris Tebbetts and illustrated by Laura Park, aimed at readers 8-12.

Patterson, who has had 19 titles hit No. 1 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list in the past decade, says he can't remember who suggested the dual release.

"But it's a good way to remind parents that it's part of their job to find books their kids will enjoy," he says. "Books that they'll finish and say, 'Give me another one.' Reading is a kind of muscle you need to use."

Patterson says his son Jack, 13, who has turned into a voracious reader after a slow start, inspired him to write for kids, including sci-fi series Maximum Ride and Daniel X, and to create a website, ReadKiddoRead.com, which Publishers Weekly praised as "clearly not a cynical ploy to sell more of his own books."

Middle School is designed as if it's written and drawn by an artistic/mischievous student out to break every school rule.

Patterson says there's a "connection" to Jeff Kinney's best-selling series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, but his inspiration was Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, an award-winning 532-page kids' mystery set in Paris, told with 300 pages of drawings, photos and old movie stills. (The Martin Scorsese film releases Nov. 23.)

"That took the ceiling off for how the visual stuff can enhance the text," he says. "That got me going."

Not that there are signs that Patterson, 64, is slowing down.

He has five more novels out this year, three for adults and two for teens, but may end his Maximum Ride series.

More kids' books are coming, he says, including a Middle School sequel and a new series with a girl detective, written with Maxine Paetro.

His growing list of collaborators raises questions about his role. Last month at a sold-out reading in New York's Lincoln Center with Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson and the Olympians), a young girl asked Patterson why he didn't write more books by himself.

He said he has too many ideas to keep up with if he worked alone, adding, "There is nothing that I put my name on that I don't put through several drafts."

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Find the great outdoors inside these kids' books

The outdoors, from baby blue jays to baseball, figure in four new books for young readers, from preschool to high school. USA TODAY takes a look.

Like a tamer 'Wild Things'

The Woods, written and illustrated by Paul Hoppe (Chronicle, 36 pp., $16.99, for ages 4-8, * * * out of four): In a gentle variation on Maurice Sendak's classic adventure/nightmare Where the Wild Things Are, the young unnamed narrator of The Woods can't find his favorite stuffed bunny at bedtime. That leads him into the woods, which seem to sprout right in his bedroom. The brave narrator encounters bears, dragons and monsters, although none, it turns out, should scare even the youngest readers. Paul Hoppe's text and watercolors make for comforting bedtime reading.

Finding nature in the city

My Baby Blue Jays, by John Berendt (Viking, 32 pp., $16.99, ages 5-8, * * *): Wildlife adventures can be found anywhere, even in Manhattan. Best-selling author John Berendt (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) spent a spring photographing one of nature's miracles on his 86th Street balcony, where two blue jays were building a nest. It was soon home to three baby blue jays, which learn to fly the hard way and seem to be unperturbed by their personal photographer. Nature (and Disney movies) can be cruel, but Berendt's blue jays find nothing but blue skies in the big city.

Covering historical bases

First Pitch: How Baseball Began, by John Thorn (Beach Ball Books, 40 pp., $19.99 hardcover, 14.99 paperback, ages 9 and up, * * *): Young baseball fans ready for revisionist history can learn much from John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, who writes, "Saying Abner Doubleday invented baseball is as ridiculous as saying the moon is made of green cheese." In an illustrated, kid-friendly episodic history, Thorn traces the evolution (rather than creation) of baseball and celebrates unsung pioneers such as Doc Adams, who, in about 1850, invented the idea of shortstops, and Octavius V. Catto, a 19th-century combination of Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr.

Rough seas for this teen

Sharks & Boys, by Kristen Tracy (Hyperion, 264 pp., $16.99, ages 12-18, * * 1/2): At 16, Enid thinks she has problems: Her mom and philandering dad are in couples therapy, and her boyfriend wants a "break," which, she hopes, doesn't mean a "breakup." Driven by suspicion and jealousy, Enid ends up as a stowaway on what was supposed to be an all-boy sailing adventure. A storm turns it into a high school version of Survivor, without the cameras but with a lot more reality. The sitcom-like dialogue becomes deadly serious as Enid learns, "Life is not fair. This world will swallow anyone. Even if you know how to swim."

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Glenn Beck is back on best-seller list

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

Glenn Beck, the darling of the Tea Party, is losing his show on Fox News (he says he jumped; New York magazine reports he was pushed), but he continues to build his media empire online, on radio and in books. Beck's The Original Argument: The Federalists' Case for the Constitution, Adapted for the 21st Century, a paperback original, lands on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list at No. 5. It's his seventh book in the top 10 since 2007. Beck's Christmas novel, The Snow Angel, is out Oct. 25. And in partnership with Simon & Schuster, Beck's production firm is starting its own imprint, Mercury Ink. Its first title, out Aug. 9, is a young adult thriller, Michael Vey: The Prisoner of Cell 25 by Richard Paul Evans, who self-published The Christmas Box in 1993. A year later, it hit No. 1 on the list.

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More books for fans of Louisa May Alcott

By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY

Fans of Louisa May Alcott can rejoice. Last year's The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott by Kelly O'Connor McNees is new in paperback from Berkley. It's a perfect summer read. And Susan Cheever's Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography is out Nov. 8 in paperback from Simon & Schuster. Here's my review. In other news: two more books inspired by Alcott are new to stores. Louisa and the Missing Heriress by Anna Maclean, a paperback re-issue from Obsidian of a 2004 hardcover novel that is the first in a series of mysteries starring the clever Alcott as a daring sleuth. The plot: Alcott takes on the role of amateur detective after the body of her friend Dorothy Wortham is found floating in the Boston harbor. A second novel in the series, Louisa and the Crystal Gazer, will be published next February. Also new to stores: The Little Women Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly from Touchstone. The author re-imagines the lives of Jo March's descendants. If these books don't satisfy ultimate fans, re-reading Alcott's books is recommended.

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Review-a-Day for Fri, Jun 24: The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families After World War II

by Tara Zahra A review by Mark Mazower

No sooner had I finished this fascinating book than I remembered the shattering scene in Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise when the teenage orphans whom a fatherly priest has been shepherding to the safety of a secluded chateau suddenly turn on him like a pack of wolves and stone him to death. It is an unforgettable moment that seems to sum up all the madness of France's panic in the summer of 1940. But in its almost Jacobin ghoulishness, the event is also mysteriously implausible.

Now, after reading The Lost Children, it seems more decipherable. Throughout the war and after it, Europeans were completely obsessed with the fate of children. Everything -- the health of society, the prospects for democracy, the future of the nation itself -- was believed to depend on their well-being. And so much threatened their tiny souls: the war destroyed hearth and home, forced families apart, and flung people together in temporary alliances that could not last. In her portrayal of the precise moment when civilization collapsed, revealing its most treasured possessions to be no more than a bunch of feral psychopaths, Nemirovsky captured the deepest anxieties of her generation.

Tara Zahra, a historian who made her name writing about the ambiguities of nationality in Czechoslovakia, has now added an important contribution to the growing literature on Europe's reconstruction after World War II. Children -- what was happening to them as a result of the war, and what to do with them after it -- turn out to have been at the epicenter of what she terms a "psychological Marshall Plan." Through the arguments about children we come to learn much about postwar Europe's state of mind.In fact, the intense debate about how to care for children and bring them whole out of the war's devastation was already underway before the end of hostilities.

The wartime anxiety articulated by Suite Francaise also permeated the Czech fortress ghetto Terezín, where Jewish educators debated the appropriate pedagogy for the children in their care. And this was just the beginning. After the war, the arguments intensified. Should children be brought up as self-reliant individuals, or were they to see themselves as part of a collective? If the latter, was their natural unit the family or the nation? This dilemma posed itself with special force for Jewish children, because so many families had been destroyed, so many children were left parentless, and the chances for any resumption of Jewish communal life in Europe seemed remote.

But it was not only Zionists who sought to claim children for their national cause. With the credibility and the prestige of Europe's nation-state model challenged by the experience of Nazi rule, most political activists keen to guarantee the rebirth of their nation at liberation regarded children as a precious resource. Several decades of demographic scaremongering had not helped. Orphans in particular found themselves fought over in a fashion not so different from the way Nazis had tried to claim blue-eyed and blond-haired Polish children during the war. But now the children in question were born to German women and French soldiers, and it was the French authorities who sought to bolster their war-torn country and weaken the boches by grabbing children for themselves.

To Germany's east, Czech officials acted similarly, and one of the many virtues of Zahra's pan-European optic is to reveal the persistence of nationalism across the continent at the war's end and the relative insignificance of the ideological divide of the Cold War in this moment of reconstruction. Czechs and Poles were as anxious to claim children as the French were, and for similar reasons. In every case, of course, it was a matter of the right kind of children: Jewish babies or black babies were not wanted, and a government might at one and the same time be trying to keep half-German babies in and push Jewish children out.

Another theme that runs through Zahra's book is the mistrust that officials, psychologists, and activists shared for parents. This was not just a matter of pursuing orphans: most of the children in displaced persons camps, for instance, had one or both parents and other close relatives alive. But could parents themselves be trusted to live up to their ethical and psychological responsibilities (this was where many of the professionals had their doubts), or to bear their responsibilities to the nation? Thus the postwar years saw two contradictory trends: on the one hand, the revival of a discourse of familialism that made the nuclear unit the core of social stability and ultimately turned the 1950s into the most conservative decade of the century; and on the other, the emergence of a new state activism that supervised parents and children alike, and intervened in unprecedented ways in their personal affairs.

The most extreme form that this intervention took was kidnapping, something we associate with the Nazis' Germanization campaign in occupied Poland in particular. The shadow of Roald Dahl's Child Catcher -- immortalized in the film version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang -- hangs over these pages, especially as the organized seizure of children continued after the Nazi defeat. Zahra tells several extraordinary stories. In 1946, a few Polish Jewish survivors criticized Zionist representatives who had spirited off their children from communal children's homes in order to smuggle them into Palestine against the wishes of their parents; but despite their protests, they failed to secure their return.

Another episode comes from France a few years later, in the so-called Finaly case, where a tug-of-war over two Jewish boys between their surviving relatives and the Catholic creche headmistress who had sheltered them degenerated into outright abduction by the Church, which smuggled the boys into Spain. The case made national headlines and led some observers to fear another Dreyfus affair until the boys were returned to their relatives in 1953, a decade after their parents, who died in Auschwitz, had parted with them. One thinks, too, of the accusations of child abduction leveled by both sides in the Greek civil war; the so-called "child-gathering" of the leftist rebels, who spirited thousands across the Albanian frontier and into a life behind the Iron Curtain, remains contentious to this day.

Zahra is especially good at tracing the connections between pedagogic theories and nationalist politics, and her rich source basis allows her to demonstrate the ubiquity of the problem. Was there anyone in the 1940s who did not worry about Europe's future in terms of its children? And yet the children themselves are only an intermittent presence in these pages, entering as a source of strife and disappearing once the conflict over them is resolved. Compared with some recent popular histories, their voices are infrequently heard here, and as a result one cannot help but wonder whether all this anxiety about their psychic resilience was really warranted.

There is not much worth reading on the long-term impact of wartime on children, but what there is suggests that kids are on the whole a tough lot, able to thrive in the most extraordinary circumstances and with a remarkable capacity to develop their own sense of what is happening to them. Perhaps, from the child's viewpoint, Nemirovsky's kindly priest-guide and Dahl's sinister Child Catcher were two sides of the same coin. On the basis of this book, there would be much to support such a view: when World War II ended, it was the adults who were lost.

Mark Mazower teaches history at Columbia University.

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Review-a-Day for Sat, Jun 25: Haunted Houses

by Lynne Tillman A review by Jill Owens

Even working at Powell's, surrounded by books, every once in a while I'll be blown away by an incredible author that I've somehow just missed, despite years of glowing reviews and critical praise. If I'm lucky, that author will have multiple books, giving me a new vein of backlist to mine. Such was the case this week with Lynne Tillman and her 1987 novel Haunted Houses, which I would have continued to overlook if Richard Nash's new publishing company, Red Lemonade, hadn't recently republished it. (I'd argue that you should take a good look at any book Red Lemonade puts out; their other title I've read, Vanessa Veselka's Zazen, wowed several of our staff and is currently one of our New Favorites.)

Told in alternating chapters in the voices of three girls whose lives never intersect but who nevertheless struggle with the same problems -- sexuality, art, money, culture, self-invention -- Haunted Houses is three variations on a coming-of-age story. Friendships, particularly intense and overwhelming ones, feature prominently in the novel. So do family ties and the kinds of early, fierce bonds a person makes when they're very young. Tillman's subject is essentially the ways we form our identities, and she is most interested in those spaces where the self blurs into or onto someone else.

Tillman's writing is astonishing. There's no other word for it. You could classify her along with writers like Joy Williams and Lorrie Moore, or perhaps even some of Joyce Carol Oates's early, best short fiction. But, her voice is singular and remarkable and honest, precise and metaphorical without being in the least showy or clever. I couldn't put the book down and was carried along as much by the language as the characters. One example that perfectly encapsulates awkward boredom:

"Let's go see a movie at the museum." Felix was looking at his foot and muttering to himself. "This is boring," Jane protested. "It's raining, you're looking at your foot, I have to read some stuff I don't want to... " "And... ?" Felix asked. "And nothing."

There were a few, maybe twenty more minutes of this kind of nothing that occurs between people who spend a great deal of time together and probably shouldn't.

Here's another wonderful sample of Tillman's not-quite stream-of-consciousness prose:

She hated the way people's faces looked as they cried. Faces contort, crumple. They compress as if protecting themselves, pulling themselves in. The eyes shut tight. What we take as the person's personality seems to recede. People look as if they're being hit even when they're not being touched.

The epigraph Tillman chose goes some way towards explaining the title and encapsulating her subject: "We are all haunted houses," which the poet H. D. wrote in Tribute to Freud. Character, not plot -- or rather, character as plot -- is the backbone of Haunted Houses (even though at one point, Grace ironically complains, "why...do people write stories about people who don't do anything?"). Tillman's created a remarkable piece of art. I am thrilled that I get to read more of her work, now that I've found her.

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Review-a-Day for Thu, Jun 23: The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century

by Scott Miller A review by Elinor Langer

Even without the intrinsic draw of the 1901 presidential assassination that shapes its pages, Scott Miller's The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century would be absorbing reading. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal with a flair for presenting complicated issues and personalities as an intelligible whole, Miller examines the social, economic and political forces that underlay the transformation of the U.S. after the Civil War from a feeble newcomer in world affairs to the global power we know today in a way that keeps you learning and turning pages at the same time. Rewarding as it is to be able to grasp at last such late 19th-century mysteries as the monetary debates that have befuddled college students ever since, what makes the book compelling is neither the narrative nor the explanations but the sense of familiarity that pervades it all. Indeed, so many of the circumstances and events of the earlier time have parallels in our own that the experience of reading it is practically eerie.

The key to the similarities between then and now lies in the "historic shift in the role of business in American politics" in the 1896 election. Rich Democrats supported Republican William McKinley, corporations made direct contributions for the first time and millionaires marched in the streets of New York. That was all to defeat populist orator William Jennings Bryan, who proposed to take the U.S. off the gold standard to provide the farmers and workers who were his followers with more money. And money they badly needed.

"For every tycoon smoking cigars wrapped in hundred-dollar bills ... there were tens of thousands of ... workers for whom life was simply a battle for existence," Miller writes. In this period of huge industrial expansion, it was not unemployment, but wages too low to provide even a fully-employed laborer with enough income to feed a family that was to blame. "'I don't live. I am literally starving,'" a Cincinnati cigar maker told an interviewer who asked how he supported his wife and three children on $5 per week. The same interests that benefited from the unequal distribution of wealth at home also benefited from the acquisition of territory abroad, as the U.S. took over from defeated Spain its former colonies, including Cuba and the Philippines, along with the bitter insurgents who had launched the anti-imperial struggles in the first place.

But it is in the details as much as in the larger framework that some of the most striking echoes seem to lie.

It is impossible to read about the strong-arming corporate-guarding Pinkertons of the past without the strong-arming corporate-guarding Blackwaters of the present springing spontaneously to mind. Anarchist theorist Johann Most's handbook on explosives, The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, is right at home on the Internet. Emma Goldman's lover Alexander Berkman was a Russian anarchist and not a Muslim terrorist, but his doubly-failed plan to blow himself up with nitroglycerine after assassinating Pennsylvania steel magnate Henry Clay Frick reads like today's suicide bomber headlines. The hunt for Philippine guerilla leader Emilio Aguinaldo who "would time and again slip through [the] fingers" of the Americans pursuing him was led by the very general who had led the hunt for Apache Chief Geronimo, the recent code name for Osama bin Laden. That water torture was first used by American soldiers to coerce information from Aguinaldo's followers makes it all the more chilling.

Historical analogies are both irresistible and inexact, and Miller has wisely chosen to let them speak for themselves, but he has made his point. The fatal encounter of McKinley and friendless anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Buffalo, N.Y., fairgrounds was a singular occurrence, but it was embedded in the life of its times. What readers take away from this lucid and disturbing book will inevitably vary with what they bring to it in the first place, but one possibility is, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer -- and sometimes the poor even get mad."

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ONE SUMMER

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Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

David Baldacci
Grand Central
ISBN 978-0446583145
333 pages
$25.99

Reviewed by Sarah Pekkanen

This isn't the typical fare from the writer of blockbuster thrillers, but David Baldacci's "One Summer" is a story the Virginia native felt compelled to tell. Its scenes unfolded in his mind while he sat in church, awaiting his son's confirmation. The book should come with a complimentary handkerchief tucked inside. Jack Armstrong, a happily married father of three, is given a diagnosis of an unnamed disease that a doctor warns is always fatal. And on Christmas Eve, Jack's wife, Lizzie, goes out to pick up his medicine and dies when her van is struck by a snowplow.

Jack miraculously recovers and, after rebuilding his strength, moves with his kids to an old family beach house in South Carolina, where Lizzie spent summers as a child. Here Jack's true healing takes place as he mourns his wife and tries to bridge the distance between himself and his children. "I missed a lot of things I shouldn't have," he confesses to his teenage daughter, Mikki.

Although the writing is flat in a few places and one or two plot twists strain credulity -- including a teenage prank that seems straight out of a horror movie -- Baldacci more than makes up for these lapses with his sympathetic characterization of Jack. Like most parents, Jack makes resolutions and promptly breaks them, struggles with his choices and navigates a treacherous relationship with his daughter, who, in the time-honored tradition of teens everywhere, doesn't hesitate to point out her dad's flaws. "You don't have a clue what to do with us," Mikki tells him. "Admit it. You're not Mom."

The last few chapters are packed with enough action to rival Baldacci's thrillers: fistfights! courtroom drama! a dramatic rescue! Fans of Nicholas Sparks in search of summer diversion will find in these pages a good message and a big heart.

Sarah Pekkanen is the author of "Skipping a Beat" and "The Opposite of Me."

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE DEAL FROM HELL: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers

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Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

James O'Shea
PublicAffairs
ISBN 978-1586487911
395 pages
$28.99

Reviewed by Jack Shafer

Eyewitnesses can't be expected to produce the best dispatches from a calamity. They're usually too bound in bandages and cross-stitched with sutures to understand anybody's pain but their own. That's what sort of witness James O'Shea was to the disastrous purchase of the Los Angeles Times media empire in 2000 by the larger media empire that owned the Chicago Tribune.

From vantage points first in the Tribune newsroom, where he supervised coverage of the deal, then later in the Times newsroom, where Tribune Co. executives installed him as the paper's top editor, O'Shea files a comprehensive report about the genesis of the deal, its rapid unwinding into a novel buyout by real estate wizard Sam Zell, and the final descent into bankruptcy where the combined company languishes today. But his book "The Deal From Hell" appears to make the reportorial mistake of coming to conclusions first and not letting the evidence, no matter how strong, shake him loose from them.

In O'Shea's view, the cause of the undoing of the newspapers owned by the Tribune Co. and Times Mirror, as well as other newspapers in the country, has not been the Internet, or declining circulation, or long stories and "skimpy attention spans, or arrogant journalists." It's been the reaction of newspaper executives to those forces. He writes: "The lack of investment, the greed, the incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy, and downright arrogance of people who put their interests ahead of the public's are responsible for the state of the newspaper industry today."

The problem with O'Shea's analysis is that important newspapers whose executives and owners weren't stingy, greedy, incompetent, corrupt, hypocritical or arrogant have also been forced to reduce news pages, cut whole sections, close bureaus and decimate newsrooms. Both The Washington Post and the New York Times, long controlled by families that have taken immense pride in providing the public service of great journalism, have bent before recent market forces and made the cuts that O'Shea deplores. (Candor demands that I disclose that I work for Slate.com, which is owned by The Washington Post Company.)

When the Hearst Corp. paid $660 million for the San Francisco Chronicle and paid another publisher $66 million to take its San Francisco Examiner off its hands in 2000, it had no idea that its losses would be so great by the end of the decade that it would threaten to close the newspaper if employees didn't make big concessions. Likewise, when McClatchy Newspapers, one of the best-run quality chains in the country, bought the larger Knight Ridder chain in 2006 for $4.5 billion (spinning off four newspapers it didn't want for $1 billion), the owners were guided not by greed and corruption when they later dramatically cut staff and features at all of its titles. They were guided by an instinct to survive.

You don't have to like the Tribune Co. number crunchers who put the deal together with Times Mirror -- or their demand that profits come before Pulitzer prizes -- to see that they thought their deal was going to make the combined company a lot of money. One of the lead Tribune dealmakers, John Madigan, predicted an additional $225 million in cash flow for the new enterprise.

O'Shea is not so blind that he doesn't correctly identify a few greedheads undermining quality journalism. There would have been no deal if the estimated 170 descendants of the Chandler family, which controlled Times Mirror, hadn't been so eager to sluice profits and capital out of the company. O'Shea reports that Times Mirror paid out $2.1 billion in dividends and distributions to investors and the Chandler heirs between 1995 and 1997, compared to $417 million the three previous years. The cash cravings of the Chandler heirs, practically none of them Times Mirror employees, made the deal happen. Readers of the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and the other newspapers that suffered after the deal can hate the Chandlers all they want, but it was their cow to milk, bleed or slaughter.

As late as 2007, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. moved in with a $5.6-billion offer for Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal, when heirs to that company showed a similar desire to cash out. Despite Murdoch's substantial investment in all aspects of the Journal, changes in newspaper economics forced News Corp. to take a $3 billion write-off in his newspaper division 14 months after the purchase.

Not to get overly counterfactual about this "deal from hell," but let's say the Chandlers had stood up for journalism -- as have the Grahams, who control The Post, the Sulzbergers, who control the New York Times (and the very much diminished Boston Globe), and even Murdoch, who has spent deeply to improve the Journal. Let's say the deal never happened just before the 40-year financial heyday of newspapers came to a close. Wouldn't the Tribune and Times Mirror newspapers still have had to cut employee perks, staff, bureaus, circulation and quality to prevail? The answer is obvious.

O'Shea's pocket histories of both Times Mirror and Tribune are succinct, and his reporting on the circulation scandals at Newsday and other newspapers in the last decade is superb. But, alas, he is not much of a writer. When he pokes former Los Angeles Times publisher Mark Willes for expressing himself with cliches like "think outside the box," O'Shea invites readers to catalog his own literary laziness. He writes of "gritty neighborhoods," "finishing touches," a "seasoned veteran," "a bear of a man," a "sympathetic ear," "a taste of their own medicine," a "crown jewel" and more. When he writes that somebody's eyes "twinkle," I found myself wanting to poke mine out.

O'Shea, an experienced reporter and editor, misses the story and writes poorly. If only we could send his terrific assignment back to the rewrite desk for fixing.

Jack Shafer writes about the media for Slate.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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MARTIAN SUMMER: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission

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Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Andrew Kessler
Pegasus
ISBN 978-1605981765
341 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Mike Brown

By coincidence, a day on Mars and a day on Earth last almost the same amount of time. Almost, but not exactly: Mars spins just a little more slowly, so the time from one sunrise on Mars to the next is 40 minutes longer than the same interval on Earth. This small difference usually causes no problems, but if you're remotely operating a robot near the north pole of Mars and you need to wake that robot at sunrise every (Mars) morning and get it busy scooping up ice, those extra 40 minutes per day can be maddening. One day you're heading to sleep just as the terrestrial world is awakening, two weeks later you've slowly gotten in sync with the rest of ground-based humanity, and two weeks after that you're back to daytime and sleeping with your blackout curtains closed. If you're sleeping at all. Because a robot at the pole of Mars has a lot to do and learn in the five months before Martian winter comes and it freezes to death, if indeed it makes it that long before a short-circuit disables it or NASA discontinues your funding or you succumb to exhaustion.

Though earthbound, Andrew Kessler spent 90 Martian days and nights watching the Phoenix Mars mission's robot perform experiments. He chronicles what he saw in "Martian Summer." This exceedingly informal account gives a picture not so much of the science of what was discovered as of the sociology of how it all happened. NASA does not come across well here. It appears to be a heavy-handed bureaucracy, forcing everyone to waste a frighteningly large amount of their extremely limited time before the robot dies for the sake of a single press release regardless of its scientific import. But there are heroes, and they are the engineers and scientists who stick to these crazy schedules in hopes of learning everything they can from a tiny dirt sample dumped into an oven, a probe stuck into the frozen ground or a perfectly calibrated picture of a lander's leg.

Enough interesting things happen that one wishes for a narrator who had spent more time learning and explaining rather than fretting that he was incapable of learning. But if you can control your exasperation, you will find an informative and even charming semi-insider account of how such a mission operates, how humans fare on Mars time, and how scientists and administrators behave under extreme stress. You might even find yourself, as I did, unexpectedly choking up when the mission's robot goes to sleep for the very last time.

Mike Brown is the author of "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming."

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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HAVANA REAL: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth About Cuba Today

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Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Yoani Sanchez
Translated from the Spanish by M
ISBN 978-1935554257
240 pages
$16.95

Reviewed by Mary Speck

No revolution has cultivated the image of manly, youthful rebellion longer and more successfully than Cuba's. The iconic image of Cuban communism remains the famous photo of a young Che Guevara, beret stuck atop a head of unruly hair, gaze fixed unflinchingly on the horizon. Even as Cuban leaders slip into senescence, they market their 50-year-old regime as a heroic David-vs.-Goliath story of resistance to U.S. power.

So it is fitting that the Cuban Revolution's best-known dissident is the anti-Che in almost every respect: a slender, bookish woman who writes "Generation Y," an intensely personal blog that eschews exhortations and absolute truths. Yoani Sanchez has gained an international following by chronicling the lives of those taught as school children to chant "we will be like Che" only to see their existence reduced to working at dead-end jobs, standing in line at half-empty state stores or hustling for enough cash to shop at convertible-currency-only supermarkets.

The contrast between the exalted rhetoric of Cuban communism and the realities of life in Havana has created "new men" (and women), but not in the way envisioned by the bearded guerrillas who came to power in 1959. "Our autocracy produced unexpected results, far from fanaticism or veneration," Sanchez writes in a new collection of her work, "Havana Real." "Instead of stern-faced soldiers, it bred apathy, indifference, people who concealed their true selves, rafters, infidels, and young people fascinated by material goods." The Cubans who populate these blog posts, written from 2007 to 2010, hold out little hope for top-down economic change, having learned the hard way that reform will be followed by the "dreaded rectification." Instead they plot escape plans, leaving those who stay behind, like Sanchez, in the "sad position of having to remake my group of friends."

Only when Sanchez writes of the blogosphere does her tone shift from melancholy to guarded optimism. "The Internet will not be a crumb that falls from above, a privilege earned by good conduct," she says. "It is slow but it will reach nearly all Cubans."

How many Cubans on the island are able to read Sanchez's blog? It is hard to say, though even those without access to the Web may receive this virtual samizdat in email messages, phone calls or surreptitiously distributed printed copies. What is read in Miami or Mexico City or Madrid eventually finds its way back to the island, along with the hundreds of millions of dollars sent there each month by relatives and friends abroad.

"I avoid using words such as 'eternal,' 'always' and 'never,'" Sanchez writes. "The definitive scares me and the everlasting stinks." Instead she celebrates the evanescent truths of daily existence. With her vivid portraits of family and friends, including Cuba's determined dissidents, Yoani Sanchez dissolves the abstractions used to fuse individuals into generic masses. Little wonder that state media have labeled her and her friends "cyber commandos."

Mary Speck is writing a book on pre-revolutionary Cuba.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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MANANA FOREVER?: Mexico and the Mexicans

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Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Jorge G
Castaneda
ISBN 978-0375404245
293 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Manuel Roig-Franzia

Not long ago, I dined with three visiting Mexican businessmen at a restaurant a few blocks from the White House. "Obama doesn't really live there," one of them said as the others nodded. "The first lady, and the girls? No way."

According to the musings of Jorge Castaneda -- author of the provocative, though almost clinically detached "Manana Forever?" -- my guests were exhibiting a fundamental aspect of the Mexican character. They not only don't trust government, they trust no one.

Others -- notably the superb Mexican stylists Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes -- have sought to explicate "Mexican-ness" and have done so much more eloquently than Castaneda, a former Mexican foreign minister and respected scholar who lectures at universities in Mexico and the United States. Still, there's a provocative and intriguing insight in Castaneda's often plodding analysis - which he self-diagnoses at one point as a "tedious technical discussion." Mexico's national character, he writes, "dramatically hinders its search for a future and modernity," and "its soul" is a "burden." The "main traits of its national character," Castaneda determines, "are radically dysfunctional."

Citing reams of polling data and drawing from historical analyses, Castaneda draws a dispiriting picture of his countrymen. They don't respect the law and are disinclined to pay taxes. They are so mistrustful, so prone to "acute individualism" and "stubborn rejection of any type of collective action" that they "prefer to be alone than to share anything with the 'other.'" This inability to play well with others, Castaneda writes in a chapter called "Why Mexicans Are Lousy at Soccer and Don't Like Skyscrapers," explains why the country has performed better at individual events in the Olympics than at team sports.

Mexicans, he says, also suffer from a "congenital defect of conflict aversion as a way of life," a trait he attributes to the fact that most of Mexico's great national heroes died as a result of their heroism. As Mexicans say, "Mas vale un mal arreglo que un buen pleito" -- "It is better to reach a bad deal than to have a good fight."

"Everything that is binary repels them: elections, the law, the market, competition, choosing sides in practically any area of national or human endeavor," Castaneda writes. "To choose is to take sides; to pick sides is to make someone happy and someone else angry; and anger is to be avoided whenever possible."

That last trait might be tough for American readers to reconcile with the persistent headlines about Mexico's savage drug war, responsible for more than 35,000 deaths in the past four years. President Felipe Calderon's decision to confront drug cartels has resulted in an "unwinnable war of choice" and is the nation's "greatest self-inflicted dilemma in recent years," Castaneda writes. He argues convincingly that "Mexican attitudes toward impunity and the rule of law stand in the way of the policy changes needed" to more effectively counter drug violence. But he fails to explain satisfactorily why supposedly conflict-averse. Mexicans so frequently resort to the ultimate kind of conflict: chopping off a head or putting a bullet in it.

When he's discussing current affairs, Castaneda has a tendency to stray into something approaching a stump-speech vibe. His own ambitions to run for president in 2006 were quashed -- with very little popular upset -- by Mexican courts because he did not have the backing of an organized political party. Castaneda extols the virtues of promoting Mexico as a haven for snowbirds and retirees, and wants U.S. and Mexican leaders to begin "at least imagining" a "North American Economic Union or Common Market" with a "single currency."

Castaneda -- a founder of the San Angel Group of Mexican intellectuals -- deserves credit for helping to end seven decades of authoritarian rule by Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which was toppled in the 2000 presidential election. So it's interesting -- and refreshingly admirable -- to read that he believes the PRI's "corrupt and lawless political system" was more a consequence of Mexico's innate character traits than a cause. "The PRI," he writes, "was a mirror of Mexican society and its members, not a molder or creator."

After the highly suspect 1988 presidential election, Castaneda traveled to the breathtakingly beautiful mountain town of Tepoztlan to help oversee a local election. He detected "obvious tampering" with tally sheets by the PRI, but his local allies resisted his entreaties to make a fuss. "'If we protest,'" he recalls the locals telling him, "'the PRI guys will get upset.' Which was undeniably true, and entirely the point: to stop the old ruling party gangsters from stealing another election, even if they were ultimately unhappy about it."

Unfortunately, this is one of only a few real-life anecdotes that buttress the author's arguments. His book about the character of Mexicans shows he knows a lot of facts and figures about Mexico; the only thing that's missing is Mexicans themselves.

Manuel Roig-Franzia writes for The Washington Post's Style section and was formerly the paper's Mexico City bureau chief.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE STORY OF CHARLOTTE'S WEB: E.B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic

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Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Michael Sims
Walker
ISBN 978-0802777546
307 pages
$25

Reviewed by Valerie Sayers

It is hard to imagine a literate American who has not encountered E. B. White, and harder to imagine one who has not been charmed. Parents swipe their children's copies of the classics "Stuart Little," "Charlotte's Web" and "The Trumpet of the Swan" to reread after lights-out. College freshmen still find William Strunk and White's delightful 1959 "The Elements of Style" on required reading lists. Generations have read his stylish essays in the New Yorker, and 26 years after his death, the White bibliography continues to grow: The subject of several biographies and memoirs, he is fascinating in part because his literary wit and fame are complicated by his legendary shyness and hypochondria.

His instinct for privacy did not, however, prevent White from cooperating with Scott Elledge's comprehensive 1984 biography, published a year before White's death. A reader might be forgiven for asking whether this new book is necessary, even as White and James Thurber once asked, in a 1929 collaboration titled "Is Sex Necessary?" The answer, of course, is yes: While "The Story of Charlotte's Web" does not add earth-shattering revelations, its account of White's death and his work's continuing life are a fitting echo to the resolution of "Charlotte's Web." The new study is unabashed homage from a writer interested in connecting White's lifelong need to situate himself in the natural world to his determination to write with painstaking precision. In exploring those two habits of being, Michael Sims seeks to explain why we feel the complicated way we do when we read White, and why his vision of a now-receding America, one that paid close heed to nature, still feels crucial.

"The Story of Charlotte's Web" devotes nearly its entire second half to the most popular of White's children's books. The first half, a broader investigation of his work and life, wisely intersperses choice lines from White himself. It is delicious to read the adult White describe his childhood self as a "writing fool" who has "been tapering off ever since." The young writing fool, Elwyn White, was a paradox: He biked, swam and roamed in the dark of night yet was fearful of moonlight streaming in his window. Often more comfortable with animals than with people, Elwyn rambled through the suburban stables of Mount Vernon, N.Y., and the woods of Belgrade, Maine, where his family vacationed, his animal encounters as central to his early poetry and essays as they would be to "Charlotte's Web." Though Sims says that White was "not a particularly bookish child," by the age of 11 he had published in St. Nicholas, the famed magazine that also ran juvenilia by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner (Sims is especially good at putting White's work in context).

In a 1940 New Yorker piece, White invoked a child's "mystical inner life" and "nature publishing herself through the 'I.'" It is this mystical sense of life that he communicates with seeming effortlessness in his essays and stories, but Sims reminds us what a struggle that "effortlessness" entailed. White became a staff writer at the New Yorker in 1926, when he was still in his 20s, and the glimpses here of the young magazine meeting the young writer, by then known as Andy, are delightful. But during his happy 48-year marriage to New Yorker editor and writer Katharine Angell, White found writing to be as much of a torment as a consolation. Though he had to write early in his life to understand his place in the world, he eventually wrote only when he felt like it.

The other requirement was living close to nature. In 1933, the Whites bought 40 acres on the coast of Maine, and as he and Katharine juggled their city and country lives (Sims is also good on the subjects of class and money), "Charlotte's Web" began to take shape in its barn. Though much of its fame rests on the forthright and unsentimental way the story faces death in the natural world -- not to mention the farmyard world -- Sims makes it clear that White contemplated the story for years and did scrupulous research before he committed a word to paper. Upon finishing a draft, he set it aside for almost a year and, when he took it up again, revised extensively (the opening chapters, in which young Fern saves the pig Wilbur from her father's slaughtering ax, were not added until then).

Though Sims begins this account with an attempt to inhabit Elwyn's consciousness ("Why were those leaves rustling? Was that a twig snapping?"), he soon abandons such you-were-there techniques for a more enjoyable voice that separates the biographer from his subject. If some of the passages about White's narrative methods remind us why it's more fun to read fiction than a study of how it's done, younger writers in particular may find this description of process bracing. Sims' research is thorough, his own prose clear, direct and concise: the ultimate homage. His book is a lovely and empathetic testament to E.B. White's vision of "nature publishing herself."

Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, has a new novel coming out this year.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THREE SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

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Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

ISBN NA

Reviewed by Michael Lindgren

1. J.M.G. Le Clezio was not widely read on these shores before winning the Nobel Prize in 2008, an honor that has caused renewed interest in translating his works for Americans. "Mondo and Other Stories" (Univ. of Nebraska Press; paperback, $19.95, translated from the French by Alison Anderson) makes it is easy to see why Le Clezio's work would have difficulty reaching a wide audience in this country. These strange, hypnotic, overtly poetic pieces are unhampered by such shallow commercial contrivances as dialogue and plot. It takes time to adjust one's mental clock to the slow rhythm of his surreal fables, which feature rolling, lush descriptions of the sun-drenched landscape of southern France. Most of the stories in "Mondo" are told from the point of view of young children, who exist here in a preverbal state of perfect synchronicity with nature. At times, this Rousseauian vision takes on a very nearly misanthropic tone. The wisest character of all is a goat named Hatrous, who "knew so many things, not the things you find in books that men like to talk about but silent, strong things, things full of beauty and mystery." In Le Clezio's fictional universe, the world exists in a prelapsarian state of timeless grace, at least until the inevitably corrupt and destructive world of adults comes crashing in.

2. Roddy Doyle's world, typically, is pretty much all destructive adults, all the time. Doyle, who took the Booker Prize in 1993 for "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha," has been a gifted chronicler of working-class Irish life, with all of its attendant ugliness, conflict and moments of unexpected beauty. The stories in "Bullfighting" (Viking, $25.95), however, represent a step sideways at best. Doyle has always had an eye for heartbreaking detail and an ear for blunt, colloquial, often profane rhythms of everyday speech and thought. The problem with these most recent stories is that the scope of his imagination has narrowed to a claustrophobic slice of the human experience. All of the stories in "Bullfighting" are narrated by men who have found themselves stranded in the wasteland of late middle age -- "his memories were wearing out," says one, "and there was nothing new replacing them." Although Doyle replicates their voices, full of regret and rage and wistfulness, with effortless accuracy, their stunted emotional range does not yield a richly varied experience for the reader. Even the weightier stories, such as "Funerals," with its hint of buried scandal, and the title story, which depicts a rare moment of unforced male camaraderie, occupy an oddly muted register.

3. Doyle's protagonists, however taciturn, are gushing fonts of sentimentality compared with the buttoned-up Englishmen who inhabit Julian Barnes' "Pulse" (Knopf, $25). The narrator of the title story, for example, facing the death of a parent, observes that "the bigger the matter, the less there is to say," a dictum that receives its corollary expression in the quartet of stories titled "At Phil & Joanna's." The cosmopolitan couples whose after-dinner conversation makes up these all-dialogue sketches are so outrageously witty and suave that one's jaw drops in anthropological wonder; rarely outside of Oscar Wilde does one encounter such a torrent of perfectly phrased epigrams. Elsewhere, Barnes gives us a pair of historical fiction set pieces, one of which -- "The Limner" -- is very nearly perfect. "Pulse" is rounded out with a handful of character studies whose narrators, feckless in love and hamstrung by diffidence, contend as best they can with the small humiliations, missed connections and clumsy attempts at intimacy that characterize modern life. One of these men speaks of the fleeting moment when "life was poised to lurch irretrievably in one direction or another," providing a rare "chance to see clearly before being flung into the full business of being yourself among others." That "chance to see" -- that pause, full of momentary grace -- is exactly what these wry, urbane stories offer.

Michael Lindgren is a writer and musician who lives in New York City.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THREE BOOKS ON GARDENING

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Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

ISBN NA

Reviewed by Christopher Schoppa

The spring season for flower and garden shows has ended, but with the help of these books, avid green thumbs can find inspiration as they start to plan for next year.

1. "Envisioning the Garden: Line, Scale, Distance, Form, Color, and Meaning," by Robert Mallet, translated by Bryan Woy (Norton, $39.95). This classy paperback takes a cerebral approach to garden design, offering insightful essays on some of its essential facets -- i.e., the lineup described in the book's subtitle. The author is the former director of Le Bois de Moutiers, a house in upper Normandy with striking grounds which was created by architect Sir Edwin Lutyens at the behest of Mallet's grandfather at the turn of the century. The garden also boasts planting plans provided by the renowned landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll. The author's goal was to balance the text with a bounty of visual elements, which here include his own lush photographs and drawings by architect Yves Poinsot.

2. "Chanticleer: A Pleasure Garden," by Adrian Higgins (Univ. of Pennsylvania, $29.95). The Main Line, that bastion of old-money townships in suburban Philadelphia, is the setting of this vibrant, multi-dimensional garden. Situated on 47 acres in the village of Wayne, the nucleus of Chanticleer is the 10 acres of the original, historic Rosengarten estate, which its last owner, Adolph Rosengarten Jr., chose to incorporate into a public garden that he began to lay out in 1970. He added acreage, a blue-chip staff of horticulturists and a well-endowed foundation to boot. Our guide is Adrian Higgins, The Post's garden editor, who made numerous forays to Chanticleer and chatted with its savvy horticultural staff, which is under constant pressure to exceed expectations. As the gorgeous photographs by Rob Cardillo attest, they often succeed.

3. "American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards: What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are," by Wade Graham (Harper, $35). This is a sweeping history of the garden in America, from pre-Revolutionary times (think Williamsburg) to the present day (New York City's High Line Park). Gardening, the author notes, is just as much a reflection of personal values, desires and notions of happiness as the clothes on one's back. Thanks to history's egalitarian influences, not to mention Martha Stewart, gardening has ceased to be the purview of the well-to-do only, but it still can impart power and wealth. A beautifully illustrated volume, perfect for dipping into over and over again, "American Eden" will educate you about all manner of gardening history and perhaps just a bit about yourself.

Christopher Schoppa can be reached at schoppac(at symbol)washpost.com.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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MRS. MATTINGLY'S MIRACLE: The Prince, the Widow, and the Cure That Shocked Washington City

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Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Nancy Lusignan Schultz
Yale Univ
ISBN 978-0300118469
274 pages
$30

Reviewed by Daniel Stashower

In the spring of 1824, an apparent medical miracle unfolded at the Foggy Bottom home of Capt. Thomas Carbery, the mayor of Washington, D.C. Carbery's sister, a 39-year-old widow named Ann Mattingly, had been close to death for several days, ravaged by a seemingly incurable form of breast cancer. The conventional treatments of the day, which included hemlock paste and mercury ointment, had done nothing to slow her decline. Mattingly entered the final stages of her illness wracked by a debilitating cough and vomiting "vast quantities of feculent blood." Nevertheless, as she recalled, she felt entirely at peace as she awaited "the final close of my earthly misery."

Matters took an extraordinary turn in the early hours of March 10th, as a small circle of friends gathered for prayers at the ailing woman's bedside. After weeks of planning, their devotions were painstakingly timed to coincide with a special Catholic mass in Europe, under the auspices of a magnetic German cleric known as Prince Alexander Hohenlohe. At the appointed hour -- 4 a.m. in Washington -- a local priest arrived to give Mattingly communion, though she had grown so frail that even the simple act of swallowing was a painful labor. Exhausted, she fell back and prayed to be released from her misery if a cure was not forthcoming.

At a stroke, as recorded by her brother, every trace of illness appeared to vanish: "All this complicate(d) machinery of the human system, so much deranged and out of order, beyond the reach of medicine and medical skill, was, in the twinkling of an eye, restored to the most regular and healthful action." Within moments, Mattingly rose from her sickbed, and the bells of Georgetown College tolled the news of her astounding recovery. "Miracle Ann," as she came to be known, lived another 31 years without feeling a moment of doubt as to the source of her deliverance: "See what God has done for me?"

Nancy Lusignan Schultz, a professor of English at Salem State University, brings an impressive depth of scholarship to this odd, forgotten chapter of America's early social history. She presents a gripping account of the controversy that erupted over Mattingly's sudden and inexplicable return to health and explores the lasting debate it provoked "between reason and emotion, between science and religion, and between sectarianism and ecumenism."

All of these tensions, she explains, were distilled in the person of Prince Hohenlohe, the mysterious "thaumaturgus," or miracle worker, whose apparent ability to cure blindness and other infirmities had already made him a sensation in Europe. The 18th son of an Austrian crown prince, Hohenlohe drew crowds wherever he went, combining the "benign accessibility of a parish priest with the awe-striking cachet of a thousand-year-old name." He also attracted powerful enemies. One official denounced him as a "deeply dissipated man, who seduces girls," and even his staunchest defenders were forced to admit that he made "an unlikely candidate for Catholic sainthood." As Hohenlohe's fame spread, Pope Pius VII himself urged moderation, "so that the holiness will not become a subject of curiosity and mockery."

The Vatican's fears were amply borne out in America, where the news of Mattingly's "distance healing" created an immediate stir. The young nation was moved, wrote one cleric, "as Jerusalem formerly was at the arrival of the three wise men." Perhaps wisely, Schultz does not attempt to answer the divisive question of whether Mattingly's return to health was a genuine miracle or not. "I believe that something extraordinary did happen in Washington City nearly two centuries ago," she explains. "How this happened, though, and whether the explanation is natural or supernatural, pushes deep into the realm of faith. This book does not try to guide you there."

Instead, Schultz focuses on the cultural impact of the drama. As the initial enthusiasm gave way to skepticism and concern, she demonstrates, the Mattingly episode exposed tensions within the American church and raised fears that foreign religious figures wished to tamper with the new republic's hard-won freedoms. The result was a climate of "spectral paranoia" that fueled a wave of anti-Catholic violence, including the burning of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Mass., in 1834 -- which, perhaps not surprisingly, forms the subject of one of Schultz's previous books.

The result is a gripping slice of history with fresh, often unsettling resonances for the modern reader. "This miracle has caused a great deal of trouble," as one beleaguered priest remarked at the time, "happy thing they do not occur often."

Daniel Stashower's most recent book is "The Beautiful Cigar Girl."

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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SISTERHOOD EVERLASTING

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Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 22, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Ann Brashares
Random House
ISBN 978-0385521222
349 pages
$25

Reviewed by Monica Hesse, a writer for The Washington Post Style section

The sisterhood is back.

There are no pants.

Is that statement a metaphor? A riddle? A poor Spanglish retranslation of "the emperor has no clothes?"

No.

The four Bethesda (Md.) teens who comprised Ann Brashares' four-book "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" series -- a modern fairy tale about a magical pair of jeans that made everyone's butt look good -- have returned for a fifth installment. But "Sisterhood Everlasting" is entirely pants-free.

Longtime readers will remember why: The pants were lost in Greece near the end of the fourth book, and the girls, who originally shared legwear custody, realized that they didn't need mystical denim to bind them together. That book was released in 2007, but in Pantsland, these events happened 10 years ago. "Everlasting" is sisterhood meant for adult readers. It revisits Bee, Tibby, Carmen and Lena as they are about to turn 30.

There's been a lot of revisiting in teen culture recently. "The Baby-sitters Club" got a reboot. "Teen Wolf" got a reboot. Earlier this spring the twins of "Sweet Valley High" reappeared, suddenly 27, with jobs and fiances and quarter-life crises. It's exactly what any devoted reader always thought she wanted: a chance to see what became of the character she identified with most. Did Elizabeth Wakefield win a Pulitzer? Is Tibby a filmmaker? Exactly how hot did Brian eventually get?

Reboots provide all of that information, but it comes at a price. Knowing what happens means saying good-bye to what could have happened, to all of the possibilities you had concocted for all of the girls you once loved. In this place of Not Knowing, the characters remain bright with potential, teenagers whose teenage problems are cozy retreats for adult readers. In the place of Knowing, they are just 20-somethings with grown-up problems and cruddy temp jobs.

In "Sisterhood Everlasting," the girls (women!) are physically far-flung but still emotionally tight. Lena's an art teacher in Rhode Island; Carmen is a New York actress; Bee ethereally floats through San Francisco. Tibby long ago moved to Australia and lost touch with everyone, until the opening of the book when she suggests they all meet on the Greek island of Santorini. Planning and packing discussions ensue. Then they all arrive, toting Pop-Tarts and other supplies necessary for any "Sisterhood" reunion.

And then, a tragedy.

As series about girl gangs go -- the Baby-sitters, the Ya-Yas -- the Pantshood has always been touching. The girls feel things deeply and are devoted to one another in a way that is aspirational if not always realistic. They are all imperfect, but all unique. Much of "Sisterhood Everlasting" is dedicated to exploring how each character responds to the sad event.

Bee predictably goes wandering. Lena predictably thinks of Kostos, who is not the only secondary character to drop in from the earlier books. Storylines involving Eric, Brian and Effie all resolve themselves to varying degrees of completion. For an old reader, it's like stumbling on the Facebook pages for a bunch of people you once sort of knew. Life histories are doled out in out-of-context info-bits. So that's where so-and-so went to college!

"Sisterhood Everlasting" is being marketed as a book for adults, but one wonders which ones. Women who never read the original series will be easily lulled into the comfy, familiar bonds that are resonant with female friendship. But will they stay through the middle parts, which are essentially a deep and repetitive morass of grief reflected through four different perspectives -- not to mention a few plot points that stretch even modern fairy tales beyond their limit? Women who are acquainted with the Sisterhood will love the character development, but how will they feel about what those developments mean? Loving the new book means saying good-bye to the old ones. But after all, that's life.

I read "Sisterhood Everlasting" in one afternoon. Then I bought the first four novels on my Kindle and re-read those too. Emerging two days later, I felt nostalgia, both for the girls in the novels and for the girls who once read them.

Midway through this final volume, one character confronts another in an abject emotional breakdown. "You stole our pants!" she tearfully accuses.

On the one hand, it's comical that this sentence signifies the emotional high point of the novel.

On the other hand, it sums up the relentless passage of time. It's time to grow up. The pants are gone.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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WALKING TO HOLLYWOOD: Memories of Before the Fall

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Jun 22, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Will Self
Grove
ISBN 978-0802119728
432 pages
$24

Reviewed by Adam Langer, who is working on a sequel to his most recent novel, "The Thieves of Manhattan"

Halfway through "Walking to Hollywood," Will Self's trippy triptych of quasi-autobiographical narratives detailing his obsessions and neuroses, is a novel-length story, also called "Walking to Hollywood," in which the author travels to L.A. to see what happened to the movies.

"I want to find out who killed film," Self writes. "For film is definitely dead, toppled from its reign as the pre-eminent narrative medium of the age. I don't know if film was murdered -- but I suspect there's a killer out there."

Perhaps the more pressing question at the heart of this book turns out to be not whether anyone murdered the movies, but whether the movies and Western pop culture are murdering literature. For, while reading Self, we find ourselves in the company of an uncommonly gifted wordsmith. The man can write with the savage wit of Martin Amis, the erudition of Christopher Hitchens, the incisive self-analysis of Spalding Gray, and with an enviable vocabulary that, at its best, can make you think of James Joyce. Self is an expert in spoofing both high and low culture; he drops knowing, funny references to Mike Myers' "The Love Guru," comic songwriting duo Flanders and Swann and Marxist literary theorist Fredric Jameson. He's also an inspired coiner of neologisms and a splendid creator of metaphors. A jet trundles along a runway "with all the grace of a stolen shopping trolley"; two hands "Sistine" together; a dead ringer for French author Michel Houellebecq is a "Houellebecqalike"; souped-up elevator music is "Rachmaninschmaltz."

And yet the author utilizes all this talent and skill in the service of conceits so flimsy that they can be overwhelmed by his Self-consciousness and his Tourette's-like tic for inserting pop-culture references everywhere. These are so numerous and often so distracting that they can make the reader forget that Self is telling any particular story at all.

"What did narrative have going for it anyway?" Self asks himself at one point. Well, judging from what's missing from large portions of this book, quite a lot actually.

"Walking to Hollywood" starts out promisingly enough with "Very Little," a novella that concerns the author's long-standing friendship and rivalry with Sherman Oaks, a 39-inch-tall artist who has achieved international stardom with his work, in which he recreates his own body on an increasingly gigantic scale, even attempting to make a 26-mile-long outline of himself in the Great Salt Lake Desert. Much of this material is entertaining and engaging because Sherman Oaks is a memorably idiosyncratic character. Although the story may be diminutive, it is also compact enough to effectively accommodate the narrator's ruminations about, say, his own obsessive-compulsive disorder and his occasional, amusing digressions, which include the lurid, Self-abusive fantasies he harbors regarding the "dreadful things" he might do with the LongPen, an invention that Margaret Atwood helped to create for signing autographs at a great distance.

But then comes the novel within the novel, "Walking to Hollywood," a metaphysical detective story that is so completely dwarfed by the author's asides that even its cleverest observations can become maddening. As Self ambles through Hollywood in search of cinema's killer, he loses his grip on reality. Everyone he sees is not only someone in and of himself but also his cinematic representation. So Will Self appears not only as Will Self, but also as Pete Postlethwaite and David Thewlis, actors who somewhat resemble him and might have conceivably played him in a movie. Self dines with the novelist Bret Easton Ellis, whom he imagines being played by a 40-something Orson Welles, apparently because both men never quite equaled their first successes and became exceedingly self-referential and also rather puffy in their middle years. The computer HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey" makes an appearance. So do the "quadrumanous cartoon dog" Scooby-Doo and Griffin Mill from "The Player." As for what Self imagines Judy Garland doing with the Tin Woodman, let's skip it. A little of this goes a very long way, and there are more than 200pages of it. To borrow from a Monty Python routine about Australian table wines, "eight bottles of this and you're really finished."

The effect of all these winking references can be so wearying that one suspects that Self must be trying to annoy us on purpose, to make us experience how our own obsessions with banal minutiae destroy our ability to read or tell an engaging story. I found myself reminded of the director Jean-Luc Godard, who in the film "Week End" forced his viewers to experience the frustration of being stuck in a traffic jam by depicting one on screen for nearly 10 minutes. Perhaps Self is intentionally bludgeoning us with pop-culture riffs to desensitize us to them so that we might eventually kill them off. Perhaps he's urging us to kill the movies and rid ourselves of our largely useless references to, say, Monty Python routines or Godard films, after which we can once again focus on stories that are more personal, truthful, poetic and universal.

That interpretation would go a long way toward explaining why some passages in "Spurn Head," Self's elegiac meditation on the loss of personal and cultural memory that completes his triptych, seem so refreshing and sublime. As Self's narrator experiences the eroding effects of early onset Alzheimer's while traveling along the coastline of East Yorkshire, the knowing references do not entirely disappear, but they seem to fade away. What emerges in their place is the Self that exists apart from all the distractions that bedevil his thoughts and his prose: a phenomenally talented artist, one capable of work far greater than what he describes in his "Afterword" as this "contorted, wayward and melancholic" book.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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