PowellsBooks.Blog

Composed: A Memoir by Rosanne Cash

Reviewed by Jeff Baker
The Oregonian

When Johnny Cash was in ill health a few years before his death, his daughter wrote a remarkable song called "September When It Comes." Rosanne Cash's husband, John Leventhal, suggested she ask her father to sing it with her as a duet. She put him off twice until Leventhal, who wrote the melody, insisted that now was the time and this was the song. Rosanne Cash flew to Nashville and showed her father the lyrics and he agreed to sing them. They went to a cabin on his property where he had a recording studio and got to work. Johnny Cash was not feeling well but rose to the challenge like the...

You say you've written a novel called The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia, and people ask you: Why Georgia? Why Baghdad? (Many of these people know that you were born in the Midwest and have lived there all of your life.)

The Georgia part is easy to explain. My mother was born in Gordon, Georgia. She grew up in the area around Milledgeville. When I was a kid, I didn't know there was any such thing as a "vacation" that wasn't a trip to Georgia. I'm old enough to remember going with my sister to the lunch counter in the dime store in downtown Macon, the two of us holding hands, feeling nervous about where we were supposed to sit. On the other hand, de facto segregation was so complete in Milwaukee in the 1960s that I never met a single African American until I went to high school.

I've been writing about Southern things for a long time. In high school, I wrote haikus about sweet tea and fried okra and baking powder biscuits with homemade peach preserves. One of ...

Michele Norris, the host of National Public Radio's All Things Considered and author of the new memoir The Grace of Silence, is reading at the Bagdad Theater in Portland on October 5th. Tickets are $24.95, which includes admission and a copy of her book.

But don't worry — we've got a pair of tickets to give away!

In the wake of talk of a "post-racial America" upon the ascendance of Barack Obama as president of the United States, Michele Norris...set out, through original reporting, to write a book about "the hidden conversation on race" that is going on in this country. But along the way she unearthed painful family secrets — from her father’s shooting by the Birmingham police within weeks of his discharge from service in World War II to her grandmother’s peddling pancake mix as an itinerant Aunt Jemima.

Publishers Weekly calls The Grace of Silence "eloquent and affecting." The book goes on sale September 21st.

To win tickets, all you have to do is leave a comment with your favorite NPR "driveway moment." ...

• Read Watch Pray: Does a bestselling book necessarily translate into a hit movie? The Los Angeles Times expresses a bit of skepticism on this matter.
  

  The film version of "Eat, Pray, Love" took in $24 million its opening weekend — a tally AdAge calls "satisfactory" — but it was bested by "The Expendables," the over-the-hill tough-guy action movie. In the weeks since, the [movie] "Eat, Pray, Love" has stayed in the top three — respectable but not stunning. Meanwhile, the paperback of "Eat, Pray, Love" is back at the top of our nonfiction bestseller list.

  Could it be that the essence of "Eat Pray Love" was not the eating, the praying and the loving — things easy to see on screen — but Gilbert's quest for them and her discoveries along the way? Was Gilbert's writing style — witty and self-deprecating and brutally honest — essential to the pleasure of the story? Are some books too internal to translate well to film? Is "Eat, Pray, Love" one of them?

  Note also that the same numbers that make a book successful don't necessarily translate into a successful film. If every single person who bought Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour also went to see the movie version — and there's anecdotal evidence to suggest this is the case — then the film still would have flopped. Unless each person saw it 150 times.

• By My Side: The Guardian wants to know which is your favorite position in bed. For reading.

  Are you sitting up? Lying down? Hanging by your feet from the ceiling? (Helps the blood flow.) For some reason, on the side seems popular:

  My technique is also lying on my side, but I prop myself up on a few pillows and hold the book in both hands. If it's a particularly large book I'll balance one edge of it on the bed. This can quite annoying, as the pages get caught on the bedsheet and my thumbs gets sore, but in general it's comfortable enough for me to stay in one position for ages — often until I fall asleep, glasses pressed into my face.

  For the record, my own answer is: all of the above. Whether sleeping or reading, I'm an inveterate tosser, turner, and shifter. At some point, I'm sure I cover every position. (I'm talking about reading, people — reading.)

• Baby, It's Him: Scott Simon, the host of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday and author of the new book Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other: In Praise of Adoption, will be appearing in Portland at the Newmark Theater on Monday, October 4th.

  The reading is a benefit for Journeys of the Heart Adoption Services based in Hillsboro.

  Click here for ticket information. (Yeah, sorry — it's Ticketmaster. What can ya do?)

• Our Kind of Baby: Legendary spymaster John le Carré (a.k.a. David Cornwell) says writing a book is "like having a baby."
  

  'There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.'

  Le Carré's newest little bundle of joy is Our Kind of Traitor, which starts walking in bookstores on October 12th.

  With his latest book, his 22nd, Our Kind of Traitor, about to be published, his place in posterity is assured. Set amid the backdrop of the credit crunch, it is a masterly yarn of a young London couple who, on holiday in Antigua, meet a rich, charismatic Russian millionaire called Dima who owns a peninsula, wears a diamond encrusted watch, has a tattoo on the knuckle of his right hand and wants a game of tennis. And he wants a lot more besides.

  The novel is a tale of greed and corruption pacing back and forth from the Arctic hells of the Gulag archipelago to a Swiss alpine house nestling in the shadow of the north face of the Eiger.

  After 22 "children," I would think the 79-year-old le Carré would be an old hand at giving birth and then shuffling them off to college in no time at all.

Book News Bits:

• Entertainment Weekly has launched its Shelf Life Book Club with Suzanne Collins's Mockingjay. If you've finished the book and want to join in, click here. If not, keep in mind that they're discussing the book after reading it, so there are spoilers galore.
• Publishers Weekly takes a gander at Sony's newest line of "redesigned and upgraded" e-readers.
• This morning, Apple held a press conference announcing new stuff. Fighting in war-torn parts of the world and relief efforts in catastrophe-hit areas all came to a stop as the entire world listened to Steve Jobs unveil new Apple stuff.

  Turns out the new stuff isn't as reader-centric as, say, the iPad. There's a new iPod that's super-small and a new Apple TV box that has WiFi and streams the internet and Netflix movies right to your TV. Once Jobs' presentation ended, the Earth resumed its rotation and the tides began turning once again. We now return you to life, already in progress.

One of the most important teachers I had regarding tiger behavor was an amazing video clip of an attack by a Bengal tigress in northeast India's Kaziranga National Park. In this clip, wardens on elephants can be seen trying to shoot the tigress with a tranquilizer gun until, finally, she gets fed up. What is significant about the tigress's response to this harassment is her mode of attack: when a cat is hunting for food, it typically attacks from behind, using the element of surprise. But when a tiger is attacking an adversary — driving off a competitor or fighting an enemy — it usually approaches head-on, as this tigress does (and as The Tiger did). One of many things that really impressed me about this video was how the tigress emerges from the long grass like a shark swimming up out of the depths — and then erupts — flying over the top of the elephant — jumping "as high as it needs to."

You can watch it here.

By stopping the motion of the ...

Minefields of the Heart: A Mother's Stories of a Son at War by Sue Diaz

Reviewed by Chuck Leddy
The Christian Science Monitor

Several visceral, difficult-to-forget books, like David Finkel's The Good Soldiers and Dexter Filkins' The Forever War, have chronicled the daily bravery, fear, and pain of American troops in Iraq as they struggle with the enemy, the meaning of their mission, and the loneliness of being away from home. Few books, however, have examined the pain of those loved ones on the home front, the people who stay up late worrying about a soldier's well-being. Sue Diaz's absorbing and intimate memoir Minefields of the Heart (which grew from a series of essays that appeared in The Christian Science Monitor) looks at a mother's relationship with her soldier son (Roman) as he spends two deployments fighting in Iraq. Award-winning journalist Diaz, at home in San Diego, reads and watches the news about Iraq every day, ...

Well, Children Are the Future: In what appears to be a last ditch effort to bring in the sales, Borders brings on the bears... er, parts of them, anyway. Some assembly required.

Borders Group Inc., the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain, will start selling items from Build-A-Bear Workshop Inc., relying less on books for sales as more people use electronic reading devices.

Most of Borders’ more than 500 stores will create sections next month dedicated to Build-a-Bear, the maker of kits kids can use to craft stuffed animals, Chief Executive Officer Michael Edwards said in an interview. The new areas also will feature books and DVDs tied to the brand.

Despite anticipated, parent-dragging throngs of salivating children lured by cuddly franken-bears, the Borders in South Beach, San Francisco, is calling it quits and will open its doors for the last time next month, leaving a gaping 23,000 square foot maw of economically downtrodden emptiness.

The last day of business for the Borders on King Street between Third and Fourth streets is Oct. 16, according to Borders spokeswoman Mary Davis. Three other Borders stores remain in San Francisco — in

...

One of the things that drew me to the story that became The Tiger was the way in which a solitary wild animal was able to make a modern community, equipped with cars, TVs, telephones, and firearms, revert to a Stone Age mindset almost overnight. If we're familiar with tiger attacks at all it's likely because we've read stories about man-eaters in India — serial attacks on seemingly helpless villagers living in very primitive circumstances. The Russian village of Sobolonye, profiled in The Tiger, is much more familiar to the western reader; the inhabitants (and the victims) are Caucasians with both feet firmly planted in the industrialized world. Furthermore, the vast majority of the men and many of the women who live there are experienced hunters. And yet, in the space of one week at the turn of the millennium, this tiger was able to strip away the fragile veneer of civilization and human superiority and replace it with a kind of ancient, elemental terror. This was possible because, as one Chinese saying puts it, "The tiger's progress is as silent as the moon's." When I was in the Far East, I was told repeatedly that if a tiger has targeted you, you will never see it coming. Should you have the misfortune to witness an attack like those experienced around Sobolonye, it has a way of undoing your confidence in the known world. Things you've taken for granted become unsteady, menacing, and magical — in a bad way. Children know this feeling well, but most adults have worked hard to forget it.

I wanted to understand more fully what this experience is like and, in order to do so, I had to learn a lot about how tigers operate. In the zoo, you can get a feel for a tiger's mass and "heavy grace," but zoo tigers tend to move very slowly, if at all. It's hard in that context to get a sense of how invisible — and how fast — tigers can be when they're sufficiently motivated. After the Siberian tiger attacks at the San Francisco Zoo on Christmas day, 2007, a noted tiger expert was asked how high a tiger can jump. His answer, "As high as it needs to," touches on an essential truth about tigers.

Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America by Ira Rutkow

Reviewed by Charles Barber
The Wilson Quarterly

All surgeons must devise a "way in" to their operation -- choosing the entry point and the methodology for each complex procedure. In Seeking the Cure, Ira Rutkow, a surgeon himself, hits upon an elegant approach to the contentious story of American medicine. Throughout his remarkably entertaining account, Rutkow selects telling medical episodes -- the tormenting of colonial surgeon Zabdiel Boylston by a violent mob, who believed that his smallpox inoculations spread disease; President James Garfield's death in 1881 at the hands of his own surgeons, who neglected basic antiseptic techniques in treating his gunshot wound; or doctors' extraordinary measures in 1926 to save Harry Houdini from appendicitis, which were unsuccessful but underscored clinical advances -- to capture the essence of medical knowledge of the day, and place it in a social context. Several powerful themes emerge in Rutkow's account. One is the persecution and general calamities endured by many of the great innovators ...

My Fine, Feathered Franzen: There's a new nursery rhyme being sung by mid-list authors to their children, who aren't yet old enough to realize what the words mean:

Jonathan Franzen and the NYT
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
First come reviews, a helpful assist,
Then comes the novel on the bestseller list!

With the New York Times itself featuring the Franzenfrenzy that it's been fingered for feeding, has this whole foolish Freedom fracas come full circle? (Can you say that five times fast?)

Meanwhile, Newsweek hates Franzen and his stupid ass face. But they might like the book.

I "Like" to Shut Up: What kind of book attracts almost 700,000 fans on Facebook? (Probably more by the time you read this.) Why, a memoir about life lessons picked up by career in the Israeli government, of course!

Or, perhaps, the kind with exactly the right title:

Mr. Levey, 32, quickly realized that his book, now two years old, had not catapulted to the best-seller list or landed on Oprah's Book Club. Rather,

...