Fenwick vs. Felicity
Students earn scholarships
Minster vs. Southeastern
Book Nook provides readers with insights into the world of books. Vick Mickunas takes you into the center of the publishing world with the latest book buzz, book reviews, and exclusive chats with authors..Home > Blogs > Book Nook > Archives > 2008 > April
April 2008
Strange Bedfellows: Hillary Clinton and Bill O’Reilly
We have seen everything now - Hillary Clinton and Bill O’Reilly ganging up on Barack Obama?! What is wrong with this picture?
Here’s the story from the Boston Globe’s blog POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE:
“Hillary Clinton apparently doesn’t hold grudges, at least not with her presidential hopes in the balance.
She plans to make her first-ever appearance tonight with Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, who has been none too friendly to the Clintons over the years and has harshly criticized political liberals.
On Clinton’s official campaign website, there’s still an online petition that says, “Tell Bill O’Reilly: Stop Smearing Grassroots Progressives.”
He plans to interview her while she campaigns in South Bend, Ind., and the interview will air at 8 tonight on “The O’Reilly Factor” and a second part Thursday at 8.
O’Reilly is not the first arch-conservative to whom Clinton has reached out lately. In the run-up to last week’s Pennsylvania primary, Clinton met with Richard Mellon Scaife and the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. During the 1990s, Scaife had savaged the Clintons, including conspiracy theories about the suicide of White House lawyer Vince Foster.
But Scaife said he changed his mind about Clinton after a 90-minute interview and his paper endorsed her.”
And yet another irony:
According to CBS News, The Republicans are acting like Hillary Clinton is gone from the race and that it will be McCain versus Obama. The story is titled:GOP Gives Clinton The Silent Treatment.
Let’s see, Hillary Clinton is teaming up with some neo-cons to go after Obama while the GOP is acting like Hillary is gone from the race? What is wrong with this picture?
Vick Mickunas
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an interview with NPR’s Scott Simon
Scott Simon,the host of WEEKEND EDITION with SCOTT SIMON on National Public Radio recently published another novel. It is called WINDY CITY - a Novel of Politics (Random House).
Scott Simon is a Chicago native and his new book takes a humorous look at that beast known as Chicago politics. I spoke to Scott recently about the book on WYSO Public Radio in Yellow Springs.
If you missed our conversation you can listen by clicking here.
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How to Raise Your Parents
Sarah O’Leary Burningham visits Books&Co. at the Greene this Wednesday, April 30 at 7pm to introduce her new book How to Raise Your Parents - A Teen Girl’s Survival Guide (Chronicle Books).
Sarah decided to write this book when she was 16 and her parents busted her for a curfew violation. It became obvious at the time neither Sarah or her parents had a clue how to proceed with punishment or whatever. The seed for this book was planted that night.
Sometimes it takes a while for a book to grow. Sarah is a few years older now and she decided it was time to write it. It is a fun (and helpful) book!
Disclaimer: I know Sarah. She works in publishing. I have known her since she worked for Miramax Books, an imprint that no longer even bears that name. In fact, I remember when Sarah worked for a really famous publisher. I won’t mention the name but they no longer exist. My point? I think Sarah is one of the really fine people in publishing. She does a great job and she did a wonderful thing putting together this book.
Go out and see her this Wednesday at the Greene.
Vick Mickunas
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Red Sox Notion
Two new books celebrate the careers of two star players on America’s favorite team, the Boston Red Sox.
BoSox third basemen Mike Lowell has to be one of the classiest players in the sport of baseball. He has penned an autobiography, DEEP DRIVE (Celebra) with Rob Bradford that tells his story. The book’s subtitle, A Long Journey to Finding the Champion Within alludes to the obstacles Lowell has had to overcome along the way.
Lowell was a throw-in in the Red Sox trade with the Florida Marlins that brought the Sox their flame throwing ace pitcher, Josh Beckett. Lowell’s last season with the Marlins was sub-par. The Red Sox essentially got him for nothing. He has become the glue that holds those Sox together. Slick fielding, clutch hitting, and a team leader, Lowell speaks Spanish and can communicate fluently with all the non-Japanese players on the team. Most amazing of all, Mike Lowell beat cancer.
This year Lowell is on the disabled list. The Red Sox made a smart pickup last winter who has proved to be a valuable addition to the team, the former Red, Sean Casey. With Lowell on the DL, the BoSox Gold Glove first basemen (and Cincinnati native) Kevin Youkilis has spelled Lowell at third while Casey has played a sparkling first base.Two of the classiest guys in the game, Sean Casey and Mike Lowell, hope to lead the Sox to another World Series title.
One of the keys to Boston’s championship last year was their acquisition of the star Japanese pitcher Daisuke (Dice K) Matsuzaka, the 100 Million Man. Dice K is a special athlete who never seems to lose his cool.
DICE K - The First Season of the Red Sox $100 Million Man (The Lyons Press) by Ian Browne, just out in paperback looks back at the amazing year that Dice K had for the Red Sox as they surged to the American League pennant and the world championship in 2007.
The Sox just got swept in Tampa Bay this weekend but Manny Ramirez is hitting and the Bosox rookies are coming on strong. Go Sox!
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eat whatever you want
“The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted — and Other Small Acts of Liberation,” by Elizabeth Berg (Random House, 242 pages, $23).
Elizabeth Berg understands women. Over the course of 20 books she has staked out an emotional terrain populated by women who feel the myriad aspects of joy and sorrow.
Her new collection, “The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted — and Other Small Acts of Liberation,” is a baker’s dozen stories expressing perspectives from a variety of women.
The title piece whets our appetites for what follows. The narrator is feeling rebellious as she sets out on a food binge of massive proportions.
Her all-consuming food lust is charged with eroticism. “So dinner. You can imagine it, can’t you? The mushrooms sautéed in butter lying seductively over the steak. The potato, buried under butter, bacon, green onion and sour cream. The two desserts sitting side by side, can you see them?” This reviewer saw them all too well as he ravaged our pantry.
Berg slathers her theme across the next story, “Returns and Exchanges.” This narrator accepts herself. “She’d get a martini — Bombay Sapphire gin, extra dry, three blue-cheese-stuffed olives. She’d get a huge steak, French fries, sautéed mushrooms and creamed spinach. A nice Cabernet. She’d get a rich chocolate dessert, complete with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. She weighed 176 pounds and her socks didn’t match, and she was going out with the man who really loved her.”
In “The Party” a group of women are having a frank discussion about men. The party breaks up. Berg has a gently nuanced way of describing it. “Our group fell apart in a sad, slow-motion sort of way, as when petals leave a blossom past its prime.”
This narrator feels sadness and then anger when she spots her husband holding forth in conversation across the room. “I thought, here is how I feel about men: I am angry at them for the way they sling their advantage about — interrupting, taking over, forcing endings, pretending to not understand what equality between the sexes necessitates, thus ensuring that they are always and forever the ones who say when.”
One story in particular stands out. “Rain” is narrated by a middle-aged woman who has reconnected with a man she’s always desired from afar. “I thought about how handsome he used to be, and I thought about how I used to look in those days, too, my black hair nearly to my waist, my clothes as Janis Joplin-ish as I could get them: feathers and pearls, bell-bottoms so wide they looked like ball gowns, patchouli-scented velvet-and-lace tops … Michael and I had flirted with each other, and I think at various times had contemplated having a relationship …”
The desire for food that links many of these stories serves as a metaphor for women’s desires for beauty, self-esteem and love. As these women face the toll that time has exacted some of them find a hard-won clarity — that while physical beauty becomes a fleeting memory, only true love lasts.
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books for wine lovers
Books are such random things that I am always amazed when a batch of books on related subjects comes out at the same time. It happens quite often.
Three lovely new wine books just appeared like a cluster of succulent grapes. Yum! THE BATTLE FOR WINE AND LOVE or HOW I SAVED THE WORLD FROM PARKERIZATION (Harcourt) by Alice Feiring could not be more timely. Fans of Mark Fisher’s splendid wine blog UNCORKED here at the DDN know how important and how disputed the Parker wine rating system can be. This book is quite the eye opener.
If you could have your dream job, what would you be? I would love to be a wine importer. What a wonderful occupation that must be? I’m living the wine merchant life vicariously these days by reading REFLECTIONS OF A WINE MERCHANT - On a Lifetime in the Vineyards and Cellars of France and Italy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Neal I. Rosenthal. The title says everything.
And that’s not all. Another exquisite wine book takes yet another approach. PASSION ON THE VINE - A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Family in the Heart of Italy (Broadway Books) by Sergio Esposito describes a nostalgic journey through this wonderful land where food, wine and laughter merge, Viva Italia!
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Where’s the meat?
Do you begin to drool when you pick up the scent of barbecue? Do you pull over for roadkill? Crave a ballpark frank? Love a steak drizzled with onions?
Do I have the book for you. THE SHAMELESS CARNIVORE- a Manifesto for Meat Lovers (Broadway Books) by Scott Gold is a flaming debauchery of meaty predilections.
While I don’t agree with a lot of it I must admit that I do find some of it bloody amusing. And I’m not even British.
Here’s a quiz:
According to fossil record, about how long ago did our evolutionary ancestors begin the practice of butchery? (I know, it sounds like a trick question, right?)
a. 10, 000 years
b. 250, 000 years
c. 1.3 million years
d. 2.5 million years
If you know the correct answer you should go out and have yourself a Vickburger….with everything.
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Miley Cyrus - the Memoir
The breathless announcement has been made - Miley Cyrus plans to publish her memoir! Here is the report from the New York Times:
A Bookish Miley Cyrus
By MOTOKO RICH
Having dominated cable television and the concert circuit, and coming soon to the cineplex, Miley Cyrus, the 15-year-old star of the Disney Channel series “Hannah Montana,” has agreed to write a book about her early life in Tennessee, her move to Los Angeles and the influence of her parents — especially her mother — on her success. In a seven-figure deal, Disney Book Group acquired the rights to Ms. Cyrus’s book, to be published by the Disney-Hyperion Books imprint in spring 2009, when the Hannah Montana movie is also scheduled for release. Jeanne Mosure, global publisher of Disney Book Group, said the company had already sold 15 million copies of some 60 Hannah Montana-branded titles worldwide, including novelizations and gift books about the show. She said the new book would have an initial print run of one million copies. “It’s rare that you hear from someone her age that they want to talk about their family,” Ms. Mosure said. “How she sees her family in light of everything that she’s exposed to on a daily basis is pretty incredible.”
Wow. Imagine that? She is only 15 and she is ready to write her memoir. I’m sure it will be huge.
I shall wait for her second memoir - 30 years in the future - when she actually has something to write about! Imagine the possibilities? I do…the typical downward spiral from a once fabulous career…ah.. the drugs? the drinking? the divorces? the scandals? and burning through all that money?! Yes! Now that would be a memoir!
That is the one that I shall have my nurse read to me while I vegetate at the rest home….30 years in the future…I can’t wait~!
Vick Mickunas
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Reading Earth Day
Every time it rains I think of that blues tune THE SKY IS CRYING. Mother Earth is under siege. We have runaway carbon emissions. Aspiring consumers in places like India and China desire the American Dream: a car and all the pollution that entails.
For seven long years our government has danced around this crucial issue of global climate change as the glaciers melted, the seas rose, and fossil fuel futures soared. What is wrong with this picture?
Today is Earth Day. It behooves us to think about the impact that we are having on this planet every single day. An excellent new book offers lots of grist for your environmental mills. AMERICAN EARTH - Environmental Writing Since Thoreau published by the Library of America contains 1000+ pages of essential thought about our environment.
These words were penned by some of our greatest thinkers, people like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, “Ding” Darling, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder, Philip K. Dick, Wendell Berry, R. Crumb, Julia Butterfly Hill, and Michael Pollan.
A number of years ago I conducted one of the most unusual interviews I ever did on my radio show on WYSO. I called Julia Butterfly on her cell phone. She was perched in a redwood tree named Luna in northern California. She had been living in the tree for months to prevent loggers from chopping it down.
I’ll never forget that conversation. Remember, it is your planet. Save her.
Vick Mickunas
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some lovely baseball books
Baseball season is just a few weeks old and I have been listening to games on my radio. I love April because no matter how well your team is playing - or how poorly - there is a long season ahead and anybody can win it all*.
A couple of wonderful baseball books are giving me hours of nostalgic delight. THE CROWD SOUNDS HAPPY - A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball (Pantheon) by Nicholas Dawidoff is a superb memoir about the author’s childhood rooting for the Boston Red Sox. Every night he would listen to games on his radio. I interviewed him a number of years ago when he edited the Library of America’s splendid volume of collected baseball writings, BASEBALL. He is passionate about America’s pastime and probably best known for his book THE CATCHER WAS A SPY, the true story of Moe Berg who was actually a secret agent spying for the US while he was playing baseball in countries like Japan before WWII.
THE END OF BASEBALL (Ivan R. Dee) by Peter Schilling Jr. is a novel that is set in 1944 and features that wacky real-life baseball fanatic Bill Veeck. This wild baseball story is imagined but it is peopled by many of the truly legendary figures of this amazing sport.
*Except the Chicago Cubs.
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the #1 book in America
What would you do if you were told that you had only a few months to live? How would you get your affairs in order?
Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, found out that he had pancreatic cancer in September 2006. In August 2007, Pausch received terrible news: his cancer had spread.
Pausch decided to give his last lecture. He wanted his young children to have this speech so they might know him when they could understand. He delivered his lecture at Carnegie Mellon last September. He called it “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” Millions of viewers have seen it on YouTube.
Six months later Pausch, 47 years old, is still very much alive. He has published a book, “The Last Lecture,” to serve as a companion piece to his speech. In the book, Pausch looks back at his life. He dispenses nuggets of wisdom. There is no bitterness here, no feeling sorry for himself. His children are so young that they still don’t know that their dad is dying. The tenderness that he feels for his family glows with the fire of a celestial beacon.
He had wonderful parents who nurtured his dreams of becoming a scientist. A total nerd, he was a confirmed bachelor when he met Jai, the woman who was destined to become his wife and the mother of their children. He was crazy in love.
And he describes the moment when they learned that he was dying. On Aug. 15, 2007, they went to see his oncologist for his quarterly check-in. Randy and Jai were waiting for the doctor. “The examining room had a computer in it, and I noticed that the nurse hadn’t logged out; my medical records were still up on the screen.”
He clicked through a few screens and quickly comprehended his blood-work report. “It’s over,” I said to Jai. “My goose is cooked.” Perhaps his scientific perspective allowed him to observe somewhat dispassionately the circumstances that would cause his premature death.
The final section of “The Last Lecture” is a rapid-fire culmination and distillation of advice, humor and wisdom. He calls it “It’s About How You Live Your Life.” It is a series of pithy essays with some titles that hint at the jewels of knowledge contained in Pausch’s treasure box: “Dream Big.” “Don’t Complain, Just Work Harder.” “Don’t Obsess Over What People Think,” “Look for the Best in Everybody” and “Show Gratitude.”
He knows how to get his audience to pay attention. “When I taught a ‘user interface’ class at the University of Virginia, I’d bring in a working VCR on the first day. I would put it on a desk in the front of the room. I would pull out a sledgehammer. I would destroy the VCR.”
Pausch gently smashes our resistance to living deeper, richer lives. “The Last Lecture” contains a simple but powerful message: live today.
You can watch Pauch’s last lecture at the lastlecture.com
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for fans of crime fiction
Crime fiction was a mystery to me for many years. Then I realized what I had been missing. There is so much of it, and a lot of it is really good.
Two of my favorite writers in the genre have new books coming out this summer. Robert Crais has a wonderful series featuring the LA private eye Elvis Cole. CHASING DARKNESS (Simon&Schuster) will be out in August.
I feel like I grew up in crime fiction with Crais. Over the years his books have gotten darker and grittier. Back in the mid 1990’s this series was almost light hearted. Not any more.
George Pelecanos is another crime fiction luminary. His stories unfold on the mean streets of Washington, D.C. His latest, THE TURNAROUND (Little,Brown) is another classic noir thriller. A hot summer day in 1972 is the backdrop for drama that alters lives and then flashes forward 35 years with sizzling effect.
Pelecanos also writes for the hit TV series THE WIRE. He writes intense, powerful novels that steam off the pages. His new one will be out in August.
Watch out for these books!
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why can’t we all just get along?
Have you ever been in another country? Did you notice that the residents of foreign lands have different ways of doing things? Mark McCrum noticed.
McCrum is a Brit and he has been to many places,with trips to six out of seven continents. Guess which one he missed? He has written a handy guide to navigating the varying manners of other places. GOING DUTCH IN BEIJING - How to Behave Properly When Far Away from Home (Henry Holt) is a charming little book.
This is complicated stuff! The next time you are in Mongolia you must remember that “if you step on someone’s foot, you’re expected to shake their hand and offer to let them step on your foot in return.”
Be aware that “Argentinians may be surprisingly derogatory about your weight or choice of clothes, but don’t take offense: it just means they are relaxing with you.”
Going to the Olympics? Remember this: “Socks worn with sandals may be thought tacky these days at home, but in China they’re de rigeur. Bare feet, even if encased in the hippest designer ware, are not acceptable.”
Drinking in Latin America? “Latin Americans have a series of bizarre taboos about wine pouring, so it’s probably best to wait for your glass to be filled. Pouring with the left hand, for example, is considered rude, as is tipping a bottle backhandedly.”
When in Germany, “if you are invited to dinner at 7:00p.m. that means 7:00p.m.; anything after 7:15 and you’ll be thought impolite.”
There is so much to learn! Did you know that “Estonians and Italians regard cutting bread with a knife as bad manners? It should be torn with the hands.”
That “pouring soy sauce onto rice-much done in the west-is a total no-no in Japan?” And “never open a taxi door in Japan!”
And “in Mexico, if someone gives you a time and adds a la gringa (like the foreigner), you can expect them to be roughly on time. If they say a la mexicana, it’s anybody’s guess.
This is a valuable book. Bon voyage!
Can you guess which continent McCrum has avoided ? Do you have any tips for getting along in other countries??
Vick Mickunas
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are you feeling squeezed?
Has the economy got you down? How are things going? Are you worried about paying your mortgage? Is the recession being felt at your house? Are you worried about your job?
Things are getting a bit worrisome for many Americans. The financial markets are spinning. Are you an investor? Do you feel secure? How is your retirement nest egg doing? Do you still have one?
A new book takes a hard look at how things stand here in the USA circa 2008. THE BIG SQUEEZE-Tough Times For The American Worker (Knopf) by Steven Greenhouse is a real eye opener.
Are you a fan of globalization? If you read this book you might change your viewpoint. Greenhouse spotted the rocky times coming and he places the blame where he feels it belongs, at the feet of employers who have been taking advantage of American workers.
Is your workplace a version of hell these days? Read this book. Understand why.
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from Imus to Amis
Don Imus is a jerk. Fortunately he has a better half, his wife Deirdre. She has written a new book, GROWING UP GREEN-Baby and Child Care (Simon&Schuster).
Are you concerned about raising children in an increasingly toxic environment? This book offers a number of tips on ways to find “green” alternatives for some of the challenges parents encounter when seeking products that will be healthier for their kids, from toys to food containers to the foods that come inside them.
Martin Amis has a challenging new book, THE SECOND PLANE- September 11, Terror and Boredom (Knopf). These essays dissect the terror we felt after 9/11 and the repercussions of our responses to the attacks.
Amis is a Brit who seems intent upon ticking lots of people off.
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I remember John Kasich
Former Ohio Congressman John Kasich was the first speaker tonight at an event for Karl Rove in Kettering. Kasich spoke to the DDN’s Lynn Hulsey:
“In remarks to a reporter prior to Rove’s comments, former U.S. Rep. John Kasich, an Ohio Republican, said the cure for Ohio’s ills is a mixture of tax cuts, deregulation and improving the work force.
“We can begin to see the state turn. But we are in a ditch,” he said.
Kasich called for dramatic changes but would not place blame on Republicans for the state’s problems, even though the party controls the Legislature and dominated top statewide offices through 2006.
“I don’t want to spend my time based on what happened,” said Kasich, who is considering a run for governor.
He said he won’t decide until mid- to late 2009. He did say he’s uninterested in being McCain’s running mate.”
I have never met Karl Rove but I have had the pleasure of meeting John Kasich. He was still in Congress and he was doing some publicity for a book called Courage Is Contagious.
I was doing my radio show over at WYSO in Yellow Springs and Kasich had been signing books at a grocery store in the area when he dropped by the studio.
It was a mild shock. He was a powerful congressman and he just dropped in. Nice guy. I liked him. He was unassuming, articulate, intelligent. He seemed like one of us.
So when I heard that he was chumming around with Karl Rove, the Prince of Darkness, I had to pause and wonder? Kasich is still on the political radar. His name is on the long list of potential VP candidates to run with John McCain.
He is hanging his shingle up alongside that of the exiled Karl Rove? He is either a lot smarter or way dumber than I thought.
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J.K. Rowling Lashes Out!
J.K. Rowling had her day in court today. Here is a report from the New York Times:
J.K. Rowling, in Court, Assails Potter Lexicon
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR and ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
J.K. Rowling, the creator of the wildly popular Harry Potter series who rose from poverty to become the world’s most famous children’s author, took the stand in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday to sharply criticize a fan accused of stealing her work to publish a reference guide.
Accompanied by a security detail, Ms. Rowling arrived at a federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan on Monday morning to argue her case against RDR Books, a small Michigan publisher that hopes to publish a print version of a popular Web site called “The Harry Potter Lexicon.” Created by Steven Vander Ark, a school librarian and fan of the series, the lexicon Web site has attracted millions of readers and even won praise from Ms. Rowling herself — though Ms. Rowling said she drew the line when RDR and Mr. Vander Ark attempted to sell a print version for a profit.
Legal analysts say the outcome of the case could set a crucial precedent in the literary world, one that determines the extent to which fans can use and build upon the works of their favorite authors.
Dressed in a black dress and pinstriped suit, Ms. Rowling harshly criticized Mr. Vander Ark and his Lexicon manuscript, calling it a compilation of phrases and facts that were taken from her book and rewritten “without quotation marks around it,” and saying the manuscript was “sloppy” and “lazy.” Besides stepping on her plans to publish her own encyclopedia, she said, the Lexicon manuscript was also “derivative” and “riddled with errors.”
“What does it add?” she asked while on the stand. “The idea of my readership parting with their or their parents’ hard earned cash for this — I think it’s a travesty.
“My prime concern, if not my only concern,” she added later, “is these characters who have meant so much to me and continue to mean so much to me over a very long period of time. It’s very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand.”
Ms. Rowling’s books have sold more than 400 million copies worldwide and given rise to a franchise of Warner Brothers movies, turning the Harry Potter series into an exceptionally valuable global brand. Along the way it also turned a struggling, impoverished divorcée living on state benefits in a cramped Edinburgh apartment — “what you in America call welfare,” she said Monday — into a world-famous billionaire.
As the popularity of the Harry Potter series has mushroomed, fans of the boy wizard have spawned a cottage industry of Web sites, chat rooms and companion books that examine and celebrate every detail and quirk of the series and its characters.
Ms. Rowling has generally encouraged the work of her fans, even handing out awards to fan Web sites and acknowledging that on occasion she herself has used Mr. Vander Ark’s Web site to jog her memory while writing. She has no qualms about reviews and criticism of her work, she has said.
But when RDR Books announced last fall that it had paid Mr. Vander Ark a small advance to create a print version of his site, Ms. Rowling and Warner Brothers objected. Ms. Rowling and her lawyers argued that RDR Books was crossing a line by seeking to profit from “The Harry Potter Lexicon,” which they say is little more than a repackaging of Ms. Rowling’s original material. And rather than writing an eighth installment of the Harry Potter series, Ms. Rowling has said, she planned on publishing a Harry Potter encyclopedia of her own and donating the proceeds to charity — an effort that would be severely impeded if Mr. Vander Ark published his Lexicon.
In an interview last year with one of her fan sites, The Leaky Cauldron, Ms. Rowling said that writing her encyclopedia would require “an awful lot of work” and that she may take as long as 10 years to complete it. Despite the tedium and effort involved in writing an encyclopedia, Ms. Rowling said in court on Monday that this would be her next project because she felt she owed it to her fans.
But Mr. Vander Ark and his publisher, who have not yet taken the stand, say their lexicon would not violate any copyright infringement laws or hurt Ms. Rowling’s project because the content of his book would be original.
In court filings, RDR has argued that Mr. Vander Ark’s book “provides a significant amount of original analysis and commentary concerning everything from insights into the personality of key characters, relationships among them, the meaning of various historical and literary allusions, as well as internal inconsistencies and mistakes in the novels.”
The publisher also argues that Lexicon follows a long tradition of literary commentary. “For hundreds of years, everybody has agreed that folks are free to write companion guides,” Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School and one of RDR’s lawyers, said in an interview. “This is the first time that anybody has argued seriously that folks don’t have the right to do that.”
Despite the immense renown garnered by her franchise, Ms. Rowling has not had to wage many copyright battles in the past. She has only filed similar lawsuits against other publishers on two occasions, one in Germany and a second against a Dutch publisher that claimed plagiarism. On the witness stand on Monday, Ms. Rowling displayed a hint of anxiety at the start of her testimony.
“Have you ever testified in a court proceeding of any kind?” her lawyer asked.
“No,” she replied.
“Are you nervous?” the lawyer followed.
“Yes,” Ms. Rowling answered.
What do you think? Is JK Rowling doing the right thing?
And what is happening with the defendants in this case? Apparently, one of them broke down in tears. For the latest on this courtroom melodrama…click here
Vick Mickunas
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Blood Kin
Ceridwen Dovey was born in South Africa. At the age of 15 she moved to Sydney, Australia for a better education than she could get in South Africa. Her parents stayed behind. She has been on her own since the age of 15.
Dovey went on to attend college in America. She made films. She worked for Bill Moyers on his PBS program. Now at the age of 27 Dovey has just published her first novel. It is a real page turner. Here is my review:
“Blood Kin,” by Ceridwen Dovey (Viking, 183 pages, $24).
Ceridwen Dovey’s first novel, “Blood Kin,” is receiving high praise. J. M. Coetzee calls it “a fable of the arrogance of power, beneath whose dreamlike surface swirl currents of complex sensuality.”
“Blood Kin” starts while a coup is taking place. The “President” has become a prisoner of the “Commander.” Three men working for the President are captured. “His Portraitist” was painting another portrait of the President when the government fell. “His Barber” and “His Chef” are also being held prisoner in a room with “His Portraitist.”
The first section of “Blood Kin” is narrated alternately by these three men. The disorienting chaos of the coup is accentuated by Dovey’s erasure of all identifiable markings. The country is nameless. So are the people. They don’t even have facial characteristics.
These details don’t matter. This is a story about power - what will people do to get it, or just to get close to it? What happens to them after they obtain it and, when they lose it again?
The President was a cruel man. These men were close to him. They have seen a lot. As prisoners of the Commander they find themselves performing their former duties. The Chef prepares his meals. The Barber grooms him so that he can pose for his portrait.
As our narrators ponder their changed circumstances we learn about the women in their lives. The Chef’s daughter’s lover is the President’s son. The Barber’s brother’s former fiance’e is now the Commander’s wife. These twisted chains of contact form the outer edge of a tangle of deceit that threatens to suffocate all of these participants.
Dovey writes with a maturity that is impressive. The second section of “Blood Kin” introduces some secondary narrators; the Barber’s brother’s fiance’e, the Chef’s daughter, and the Portraitist’s wife. Dovey’s narrators reflect upon their past experiences and the uncertainties of their present lives.
The Chef’s wife was once a high government official. Now she has lost her mind. The Chef’s daughter doesn’t know if her father survived the coup. She waits and observes “I have been sitting in the dark, drinking, not for the oblivion most people seek but because it’s the only way I can be emotionally honest. It scares me that I feel so little sometimes, that in the face of sadness I can be so collected. The wine is a relief because it makes me feel human again, if to be human is to be sad.”
Dovey rips apart the drapes. We find her characters revealed for what they are; lustful, thirsty for power, vicious, sadistic. The quest for dominance by the President, the Commander, and others becomes a pretext for unspeakable acts.
One female narrator makes this scaldingly astute observation: ” I look at the women and they look at me and we rank ourselves constantly according to what we see. In fact, it’s a wonder to me that men ever get our attention when we’re all so busy looking at one another.”
“Blood Kin” bubbles out to a disturbing conclusion.
Vick Mickunas
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Hillary does it HER WAY
Politics. Should Hillary drop out? Is Obama a preppie snob? Is McCain a pawn of big money interests? Do I care? Do you?
Don’t even get me started on the possible First Lad, William Jefferson. I’m feeling so bitter that I might even consider guns, or religion. A guy needs distractions, right?
I’m burned out. I no longer care who wins the Democratic nomination. I don’t even care who wins the White House. The poison being spewed in these campaigns is radioactive. I suppose that is the point. They don’t want us to care.
OK, they all win. And we lose.
Do you care?
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from books to butterflies
I get mail. I’m glad that I do. This arrived the other day:
Hi Vick! I hope you’re doing well. I’m the guy who listened to you on WYSO while I was delivering mail during the day and attending college at night. Well, since then, I’ve graduated college and earned a position as curator of the Krohn Conservatory in Cincinnati, Ohio. I love my job, and, I really feel that you and your Book Nook program helped me get to where I am today. Those authors you interviewed, especially the ones who focused on botanical subjects, inspired me. As a result, I would like to invite you and your family to the 2008 Butterfly Show my staff and I are creating. We will open on April 19th and run through June 15th. This includes free admission and a personal tour through the show and the rest of the conservatory. The theme of our show is Butterflies of the Silk Road. We’ll have 10,000 amazing butterflies from the Far East that most Americans have never seen before. Additionally, there will be a lot of art and artifacts on display through a cultural exchange with Cincinnati’s sister city; Liuzhou, China. I hope you can make it.
Sincerely, Mark House.
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Swan Peak by James Lee Burke
James Lee Burke is one of my favorite writers. Every summer I look forward to talking to him about his latest book. We have had a number on conversations, I think I have interviewed him 8 times so far?
For the last 4 summers we have connected on the telephone. He spends the summers up at his place in Montana. He doesn’t go out on book tours any more. Calling him up during July is one of my greatest pleasures. What conversations we have.
He has the most wonderful laugh. He is so real. And he is at the top of his game. Every new book is even better that the one that came before.
In July Jim will publish the newest Dave Robicheaux novel, SWAN PEAK (Simon&Schuster).
I’m reading it now.
Vick Mickunas
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The Last Lecture
The hottest book on the planet was published today. THE LAST LECTURE (Hyperion) by Randy F. Pausch is one of those inspirational real-life stories that resonates with millions of people.
Here’s the story behind this story from the New York Times:
Keeping Priorities Straight, Even at the End
By TARA PARKER-POPE
“As a professor of computer sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Randy F. Pausch expected students to pay attention to his lectures. He never expected that the rest of the world would listen, too.
But today, more than 10 million people have tuned into Dr. Pausch’s last lecture, a whimsical and poignant talk about Captain Kirk, zero gravity and achieving childhood dreams. The 70-minute talk, at www.cmu.edu/randyslecture, has been translated into seven languages, and this week Hyperion is publishing “The Last Lecture,” a book by Dr. Pausch and a collaborator, Jeff Zaslow, that tells the story behind the story of the lecture.
“The whole thing is very strange,” Dr. Pausch said over lunch at a diner near Norfolk, Va. “I just gave a talk. I gave talks my whole life.”
But of course, this wasn’t just any talk. “Let’s not ignore the obvious,” he said. “If I’d given that lecture but I weren’t dying, it wouldn’t have had the gravitas. Context is everything.”
Dr. Pausch, 47, is dying of pancreatic cancer, a disease that kills 95 percent of its victims, usually within months of diagnosis. Except for a pill bottle on the table in front of him, there were no outward signs of the deadly tumors growing inside him. Though he had just recently recovered from heart and kidney failure, he looked boyish, with a red knit shirt and a head of thick dark-brown hair.
Last fall, after doctors told him that he would probably have no more than six months of good health, Dr. Pausch stepped down from his academic duties and relocated to be closer to his family. But he decided to give one last lecture to a roomful of students and faculty members at Carnegie Mellon.
The lecture was not about cancer. Instead, he says, it was simply a father’s effort to digest a lifetime of advice for his children into one talk — a talk that Dr. Pausch knew he would not be around long enough to deliver in person. The children are Dylan, 6; Logan, 4; and Chloe, almost 2.
Although he could have set it up on a home video, he liked the idea that one day they would watch his last lecture and see their dad at work, in his element.
“I’m speaking only to them,” he said. “I didn’t set out to tell the world about how to live life.”
After Mr. Zaslow, a Carnegie Mellon alumnus who is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, wrote about the talk, it quickly became an Internet sensation.
With the clarity of thought that perhaps only a person facing death can muster, Dr. Pausch, in his lecture and his book, outlines his recipe for a happy life and achieving dreams.
He talks of reaching his childhood goals of experiencing zero gravity, writing an article in the World Book Encyclopedia, winning giant stuffed animals at amusement parks and being a Disney “imagineer.” Much of his talk is about tenacity and how he managed to scale the “brick walls” that stood in the way of achieving some of his dreams. Other lessons are those that all parents hope to teach their children — show gratitude, tell the truth, no job is beneath you.
And he urges parents to let their children draw on the bedroom walls — where the young Randy Pausch painted a quadratic equation, a rocket, an elevator and, from one of his favorite stories, Pandora’s box. At the bottom of the box, he added the word “Hope” that a friend later preceded with “Bob.”
Dr. Pausch says he is trying to use his unexpected celebrity to draw attention to the lack of financing for pancreatic cancer research. Testifying before Congress on behalf of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (www.pancan.org), he showed a picture of his family. “This is my widow,” he said pointing to his wife, Jai. “That’s not a grammatical construction you get to use every day, but there aren’t many diseases where you know it will be fatal.”
Because Dr. Pausch has outlived his initial prognosis, a few bloggers have begun to speculate that he is not really dying. Doctors at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and the University of Pittsburgh have confirmed Dr. Pausch’s diagnosis and treatment.
“There’s nothing to be cynical about in how he’s choosing to approach these last months of his life,” said Robbee Kosak, vice president for university advancement at Carnegie Mellon. “He’s always been very passionate. He’s always very pragmatic. He knows exactly what his priorities are. People like Randy are so rare. We should all be really happy that so many of us have had a chance now to see that it’s possible to live your life with passion and energy and candor.”
Although Dr. Pausch let Diane Sawyer prepare a one-hour special for ABC-TV about his talk and cancer battle that will be broadcast on Wednesday evening, he has turned down movie offers and even declined an approach from a documentary filmmaker. “It was time I didn’t have,” he said.
Dr. Pausch said that his wife persuaded him to write the book, but that he was worried it would take too much time away from the children. Because he rode his bike every day to keep up his strength, he spoke with his co-writer, Mr. Zaslow, by phone on 53 one-hour bike rides.
The real wisdom of Dr. Pausch is that he tries to enjoy every day he has left with his family, while at the same time trying to prepare them for life without him. To that end, he is videotaping himself spending time with Dylan, Logan and Chloe so they can look back and see how he felt about them.
“I’ve always said I only care about the first three copies of the book,” Dr. Pausch said. “The lessons learned are the lessons I’ve learned and what worked for me. But so many people wrote to me and said, ‘This was a jumping-off point to have conversations with my kids we haven’t had.’ ”
The Last Lecture was an instant #1 bestseller today on Amazon.com. Do you plan to read it?
Vick Mickunas
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Junot Diaz wins Pulitzer Prize
One of my favorite books from 2007 has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Here is my capsule review from December 30, 2007:
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz. This story bounces across the pages. Oscar is intelligent, overweight and obsessed. He’s a Dominican kid living in New Jersey with his comic books and a fantasy of one day finding the woman of his dreams. The action shifts to the Dominican Republic, where Oscar becomes enamored with a dangerous female. This inspirational tragedy unfolds with diabolical precision among astonishing footnotes.
Here’s a report from The Guardian UK:
Junot Diaz has won the Pulitzer fiction prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, an ambitious novel that took him 11 years to complete. “It’s extraordinary how many people read a book that’s new and weird and befriended it,” a stunned Diaz said, shortly after learning that his tale about a nerdy Dominican immigrant and his family had won the £10,000 award for “distinguished fiction by an American author”.
The novel is an unconventional tale, hailed by the Guardian as “funny, unapologetic and intensely readable”. Diaz’s only other book, a story collection called Drown, created a stir when it was published in 1996, and Diaz, disoriented by all the attention, struggled to follow up its success. This, of course, only adds to his happiness now: the long-awaited Oscar Wao has also won the National Book Critics Circle award this year.
“I’m just this Dominican kid from New Jersey,” Diaz said, bashfully suggesting that if anybody deserved the award it was his fiancée and his agent, who coaxed and cajoled him through the book’s difficult birth. The real importance of his prize, he said, lies in its potential effect on others: “For any young person who’s attempting to make art against all the odds, I hope this can be inspiration and motivation.”
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David Sedaris is a wild and crazy guy
The first time the humorist David Sedaris came to Dayton was 10 years ago. He appeared at an event with Sarah Vowell and I had the pleasure of introducing them that night to the audience. When I met him backstage he was charming. Puffing on his cigarette. It was a brief pleasure.
I got to spend a little more time with him a few years ago in Chicago. A friend of mine had to pick David up from a book signing at a gay bookstore. We waited a long time for him to finish his signing. He wasn’t in any hurry, spending lots of time with each person in line. He’s like that. He may be famous but he still loves his audience.
We gave David a ride to the house where he was staying in Chicago. I sat in the back seat as David regaled us with stories. I tried not to laugh.
When we got to the place where he was staying we were invited in for a late night snack. His friend loaded the table with cold cuts, bread, pickles, and beer. It was heavenly!
David claims that he needs a script when he does his readings, that he doesn’t like to ad lib. He certainly did some splendid ad libbing that evening. One story in particular still makes me chuckle. David told us about a medical condition that had been bothering him, especially on airline flights. Every time he went to a book signing he would solicit medical advice from the crowd to try to treat his delicate condition. I guess you had to be there.
Right now I’m enjoying a sneak peek at his new book. WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES (Little, Brown) will be published on June 3rd.
Sedaris is very funny.
Vick Mickunas
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Remembering Charlton Heston
Charlton Heston has died. About a dozen years ago I interviewed Heston on my radio program on WYSO in Yellow Springs. Heston was on book tour to promote his memoir, IN THE ARENA.
We spoke on the telephone for about 30 minutes. It seems like only yesterday - it is so fresh in my mind. He told me that the chariot race scene in BEN HUR was the “greatest moment in the history of cinematography.”
He spoke about liberals with utter disdain. He asked me to call him “Chuck.” He hated being called Charlton. It was like having a conversation with God, if you can believe that God is an ultra-conservative, gun-bearing gadfly with a magnificent voice.
I remember seeing Ben Hur in a movie theater in Des Moines shortly after the film was released. I was a small boy and I came away impressed. I’ll always remember Heston in that role.
Here is Heston’s obituary from the New York Times:
Charlton Heston, Epic Film Star and Voice of N.R.A., Dies at 83
By ROBERT BERKVIST
“Charlton Heston, who appeared in some 100 films in his 60-year acting career but who is remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo, died Saturday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 83.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who declined to discuss the cause. In August 2002, Mr. Heston announced that he had been diagnosed with neurological symptoms “consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.”
“I’m neither giving up nor giving in,” he said.
Every actor dreams of a breakthrough role, the part that stamps him in the public memory, and Mr. Heston’s life changed forever when he caught the eye of the director Cecil B. De Mille. De Mille, who was planning his next biblical spectacular, “The Ten Commandments,” looked at the young, physically imposing Mr. Heston and saw his Moses.
When the film was released in 1956, more than three and a half hours long and the most expensive that De Mille had ever made, Mr. Heston became a marquee name. Whether leading the Israelites through the wilderness, parting the Red Sea or coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets from God in hand, he was a Moses to remember.
Writing in The New York Times nearly 30 years afterward, when the film was re-released for a brief run, Vincent Canby called it “a gaudy, grandiloquent Hollywood classic” and suggested there was more than a touch of “the rugged American frontiersman of myth” in Mr. Heston’s Moses.
The same quality made Mr. Heston an effective spokesman, off-screen, for the causes he believed in. Late in life he became a staunch opponent of gun control. Elected president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, he proved to be a powerful campaigner against what he saw as the government’s attempt to infringe on a Constitutional guarantee — the right to bear arms.
In Mr. Heston, the N.R.A. found its embodiment of pioneer values — pride, independence and valor. In a speech at the N.R.A.’s annual convention in 2000, he brought the audience to its feet with a ringing attack on gun-control advocates. Paraphrasing an N.R.A. bumper sticker (“I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands”) he waved a replica of a colonial musket above his head and shouted defiantly, “From my cold, dead hands!”
Mr. Heston’s screen presence was so commanding that he was never dominated by mammoth sets, spectacular effects or throngs of spear-waving extras. In his films, whether playing Buffalo Bill, an airline pilot, a naval captain or the commander of a spaceship, he essentially projected the same image — muscular, steely-eyed, courageous. If critics regularly used terms like “marble-monumental” or “granitic” to describe his acting style, they just as often praised his forthright, no-nonsense characterizations.
After his success in “The Ten Commandments,” Mr. Heston tried a change of pace. Another legendary Hollywood director, Orson Welles, cast him as a Mexican narcotics investigator in the thriller “Touch of Evil,” in which Welles himself played a murderous sheriff in a border town. Also starring Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, the film, a modest success when it opened in 1958, came to be accepted as a noir classic.
But the following year Mr. Heston stepped back into the world of the biblical epic, this time under the director William Wyler. The movie was “Ben-Hur.” Cast as a prince of ancient Judea who rebels against the rule of Rome, Mr. Heston again dominated the screen. In the film’s most spectacular sequence, he and his co-star, Stephen Boyd, as his Roman rival, fight a thrilling duel with whips as their horse-drawn chariots careen wheel-to-wheel around an arena filled with roaring spectators.
“Ben-Hur” won 11 Academy Awards — a record at the time — including those for best picture, best director and, for Mr. Heston, best actor.
He went on to star opposite Sophia Loren in the 1961 release “El Cid,” battling the Moors in 11th-century Spain. As a Marine officer stationed in the Forbidden City in 1900, he helped put down the Boxer Rebellion in Nicholas Ray’s 1963 epic “55 Days at Peking.” In “Khartoum” (1966), he played Gen. Charles (Chinese) Gordon, who was killed in a desert uprising led in the film by Laurence Olivier’s Mahdi. When George Stevens produced and directed “The Greatest Story Ever Told” in 1965, there was Mr. Heston, back in ancient Judea, playing John the Baptist to Max von Sydow’s Jesus.
He portrayed Andrew Jackson twice, in “The President’s Lady” (1954) and “The Buccaneer” (1958). There were westerns (“Major Dundee,” “Will Penny,” “The Mountain Men”), costume dramas (“The Three Musketeers” and its sequel, “The Four Musketeers,” with Mr. Heston cast as the crafty Cardinal Richelieu in both) and action films aplenty. Whether playing a hard-bitten landowner in an adaptation of James Michener’s novel “The Hawaiians” (1970), or a daring pilot in “Airport 1975,” he could be relied on to give moviegoers their money’s worth.
In 1965 he was cast as Michelangelo in the film version of Irving Stone’s novel “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” Directed by Carol Reed, the film pitted Mr. Heston’s temperamental artist against Rex Harrison’s testy Pope Julius II, who commissioned Michelangelo to create frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Mr. Heston’s performance took a critical drubbing, but to audiences, the larger-than-life role seemed to be another perfect fit. Mr. Heston once joked: “I have played three presidents, three saints and two geniuses. If that doesn’t create an ego problem, nothing does.”
Mr. Heston was catapulted into the distant future in the 1968 science-fiction film “Planet of the Apes,” in which he played an astronaut marooned on a desolate planet and then enslaved by its rulers, a race of anthropomorphic apes. The film was a hit. He reprised the role two years later in the sequel, “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”
Son of the Midwest
It was all a long way from Evanston, Ill., where Charlton Carter was born on Oct. 4, 1924, and from the small town of St. Helen, Mich., where his family moved when he was a small boy and where his father ran a lumber mill. He attended a one-room school and learned to fish and hunt and to savor the feeling of being self-reliant in the wild, where his shyness was no handicap.
When his parents divorced in the 1930s and his mother remarried — his stepfather’s surname was Heston — the family moved to the Chicago suburb of Winnetka. He joined the theater program at his new high school and went on to enroll at Northwestern University on a scholarship. By that time, he was convinced he had found his life’s work.
Mr. Heston also found a fellow drama student, Lydia Clarke, whom he married in 1944, just before enlisting in the Army Air Force. He became a radio-gunner and spent three years stationed in the Aleutian Islands. After his discharge, the Hestons moved to New York, failed to find work in the theater and, somewhat disenchanted but still determined, moved to North Carolina, where they spent several seasons working at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Theater in Asheville.
When they returned to New York in 1947, Mr. Heston got his first big break, landing the role of Caesar’s lieutenant in a Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” staged by Guthrie McClintick and starring Katharine Cornell. The production ran for seven months and proved to be the high point of Mr. Heston’s New York stage career. He appeared in a handful of other plays, most of them dismal failures, although his performance in the title role of a 1956 revival of “Mr. Roberts” won him praise.
If Broadway had little to offer him, television was another matter. He made frequent appearances in dramatic series like “Robert Montgomery Presents” and “Philco Playhouse.” The door to Hollywood opened when the film producer Hal B. Wallis saw Mr. Heston’s performance as Rochester in a “Studio One” production of “Jane Eyre.” Wallis offered him a contract.
Mr. Heston made his film debut in 1950 in Wallis’s “Dark City,” a low-grade thriller in which he played a small-time gambler. Two years later, he did his first work for De Mille as a hard-driving circus boss in “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
Throughout his career he studied long and hard for his roles. He prepared for the part of Moses by memorizing passages from the Old Testament. When filming began on the sun-baked slopes of Mount Sinai, he suggested to De Mille that he play the role barefoot — a decision that he felt lent an edge of truth to his performance.
Preparing for “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” he read hundreds of Michelangelo’s letters and practiced how to sculpt and paint convincingly. When filming “The Wreck of the Mary Deare” (1959), in which he played the pilot of a salvage boat, he learned deep-water diving. And he mostly rejected stunt doubles. In “Ben-Hur,” he said, he drove his own chariot for “about 80 percent of the race.”
“I worked six weeks learning how to manage the four white horses,” he said. “Nearly pulled my arms right out of their sockets.”
As the years wore on, the leading roles began to go to younger men, and by the 1980s, Mr. Heston’s appearances on screen were less frequent. He turned to stage work again, not on Broadway but in Los Angeles, at the Ahmanson Theater, where he played roles ranging from Macbeth to James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey into Night.” He also returned to television, appearing in 1983 as a paternalistic banker in the miniseries “Chiefs” and as an oil baron in the series “The Colbys.”
Rifles and a ‘Cultural War’
Mr. Heston was always able to channel some energies into the public arena. He was an active supporter of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., calling him “a 20th-century Moses for his people,” and participated in the historic march on Washington in 1963.
He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1966 to 1971, following in the footsteps of his friend and role model Ronald Reagan. A registered Democrat for many years, he was nevertheless selective in the candidates he chose to support and often campaigned for conservatives.
In 1981, President Reagan appointed him co-chairman of the President’s Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, a group formed to devise ways to obtain financing for arts organizations. Although he had reservations about some projects supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Heston wound up defending the agency against charges of elitism.
Again and again, he proved himself a cogent and effective speaker, but he rejected suggestions that he run for office, perhaps for a seat in the Senate. “I’d rather play a senator than be one,” he said.
He became a Republican after Democrats in the Senate blocked the confirmation of Judge Robert Bork, a conservative, to the Supreme Court in 1987. Mr. Heston had supported the nomination and was critical of the Reagan White House for misreading the depth of the liberal opposition.
Mr. Heston frequently spoke out against what he saw as evidence of the decline and debasement of American culture. In 1992, appalled by the lyrics on “Cop Killer,” a recording by the rap artist Ice T, he blasted the album at a Time Warner stockholders meeting and was a force in having it withdrawn from the marketplace.
In the 1996 elections, he campaigned on behalf of some 50 Republican candidates and began to speak out against gun control. In 1997, he was elected vice president of the N.R.A.
In December of that year, as the keynote speaker at the 20th anniversary gala of the Free Congress Foundation, Mr. Heston described “a cultural war” raging across America, “storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self-confidence in who we are and what we believe.”
A Relentless Drive
The next year, at 73, he was elected president of the N.R.A. In his speech at the association’s convention before his election, he trained his oratorical artillery on President Bill Clinton’s White House: “Mr. Clinton, sir, America didn’t trust you with our health care system. America didn’t trust you with gays in the military. America doesn’t trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our guns.”
He was in the news again after the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in April 1999, when he said that the N.R.A.’s annual membership meeting, scheduled to be held the following week in Denver, would be scaled back in light of the killings but not canceled.
In a memorable scene from “Bowling for Columbine,” his 2002 documentary about violence in America, the director, Michael Moore, visited Mr. Heston at his home and asked him how he could defend his pro-gun stance. Mr. Heston ended the interview without comment.
In May 2001, he was unanimously re-elected to an unprecedented fourth term by the association’s board of directors. The association had amended its bylaws in 2000 to allow Mr. Heston to serve a third one-year term as president. Two months after his celebrated speech at the 2000 convention, it was disclosed that Mr. Heston had checked himself into an alcohol rehabilitation program after the convention had ended.
Mr. Heston was proud of his collection of some 30 guns at his longtime home in the Coldwater Canyon area of Beverly Hills, where he and his wife raised their son, Fraser, and daughter, Holly Ann. They all survive him, along with three grandchildren.
Never much for socializing , he spent his days either working, exercising, reading (he was fond of biographies) or sketching. An active diarist, he published several accounts of his career, including “The Actor’s Life: Journals 1956-1976.”
In 2003, Mr. Heston was among the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by President Bush. In 1997, he was also a recipient of the annual Kennedy Center honors.
Mr. Heston continued working through the 1990s, acting more frequently on television but also in occasional films. His most recent film appearance found him playing a cameo role, in simian makeup, in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of “Planet of the Apes.”
He had announced in 1999 that he was receiving radiation treatments for prostate cancer.
He had always hated the thought of retirement and once explained his relentless drive as an actor. “You never get it right,” he said in a 1986 interview. “Never once was it the way I imagined it lying awake at 4 o’clock in the morning thinking about it the next day.” His goal remained, he said, “To get it right one time.”
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what did Bill Clinton do for all that money?
This story was posted by Bloomberg.com:
Bill Clinton Earned $15.4 Million From Burkle Firm
By Ryan J. Donmoyer
April 5 (Bloomberg) — “Former President Bill Clinton has earned $15.4 million from billionaire Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Cos. investment firm since 2003, according to tax documents released by his wife, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The earnings represent 20 percent of the approximately $75 million Bill Clinton earned during the same period, according to the documents. That may raise new questions about what services he performed for Los Angeles-based Yucaipa, whose investors include the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al- Maktoum.
Tax lawyers said the Yucaipa partnership income for Bill Clinton looks to be a form of salary because it was in round numbers for most years.
Most people who make that much money work for it,'' said Yale University tax law professor Michael Graetz, a former Treasury Department official in President George H.W. Bush's administration.What are they being paid for, and if it’s the Sheikh of Dubai paying the husband of somebody who might be the next president of the United States, what do they think they’re paying for?”
Jay Carson, a spokesman for New York Senator Clinton, said in an e-mailed statement that former President Clinton is a partner in a Yucaipa fund and “provides his best advice on potential investments, advocates generally on behalf of the funds, and seeks to create opportunities for investors to consider investing in the fund.”
Carson didn’t respond to a question about whether Bill Clinton did any work for Dubai. In 2006 Senator Clinton opposed efforts by a Dubai-based company to acquire control over six U.S. ports.
Tax Returns
The payments from Yucaipa to Bill Clinton were detailed in seven years of tax returns released by Hillary Clinton, 60, following pressure to disclose them from rival Barack Obama, the Illinois senator who made public his own returns in March.
The returns covered tax years 2000 through 2006. Hillary Clinton’s campaign also released information about the couple’s 2007 income, although they haven’t yet filed a return for that year. Obama has yet to release information on his 2007 income.
The former president, 61, received $1 million from Yucaipa in 2003, $4 million in 2004 and $5 million in 2005. In 2006, he received a guaranteed payment of $2.5 million plus a $156,611 share of the profits. The campaign said he earned $2.75 million from partnership income in 2007.
Amounts `Odd’
The flat amounts received from Yucaipa are odd,'' said Tom Ochsenschlager, vice president of taxation at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, who agreed that it signaled Bill Clinton was performing a service.That’s quite unusual.”
Previously, Hillary Clinton reported only that the former president earned “more than $1,000” a year from Yucaipa on financial disclosure forms she is required to file in the Senate.
In all, the Clintons earned $109 million from 2000 through 2007 and paid $33.8 million in federal taxes, the returns and campaign documents show. They donated $10.3 million of their income over that time to charities.
The bulk of those charitable donations went to the family foundation. From 2002 through 2006, $5.9 million of the $6.4 million, or 93 percent, of the Clinton’s charitable giving went directly to the Clinton Family Foundation, according to the tax returns and foundation records.
Cayman Islands Funds
The tax returns indicate the couple paid all the U.S. federal taxes owed on the income from Yucaipa, which controls three funds located in the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands doesn’t charge any individual or corporate income tax and has strict bank secrecy laws.
Bill Clinton’s ties to Yucaipa have sparked controversy over the past year, including a September report in the Wall Street Journal that detailed how one of the former president’s aides had helped arrange a partnership with Burkle that dissolved amid litigation over allegations of misused funds.
Yucaipa spokesman Frank Quintero didn’t return calls seeking comment about what services Bill Clinton performed for the company. Forbes Magazine listed Burkle, 55, as the 91st richest American last year, with a net worth of $3.5 billion.
Bill Clinton also earned $800,000 in 2006 and 2007 as an adviser to infoUSA Inc., a data-mining company owned by Vinod Gupta, a longtime supporter.
Carson said in December that the former president is taking steps to ensure'' thatthere will be an appropriate transition from those relationships” if his wife receives the Democratic presidential nomination.
Rising Income
The 210 pages of documents released yesterday chronicle the Clintons’ rising income since 1999, the last year for which they had previously released a tax return. The couple earned $20.4 million last year, compared with less than $420,000 in 1999, the year before they left the White House.
The bulk of their income, $51.9 million, came from Bill Clinton’s speeches, the campaign said in a summary. The former president also earned $1.2 million from his presidential pension and $29.6 million from royalties and an advance for his autobiography.
Hillary Clinton earned $10.5 million in book royalties and advances and a total of $1.1 million from her Senate salaries since 2001. In 1999, the Clintons earned $417,467, had $334,681 in taxable income after deductions including $39,200 to charity, and paid $92,104 in federal taxes.
Among other details the couple listed $250,000 in cleaning and maintenance expenses on their home for 2003 and 2004 for which they took a partial deduction for their separate home offices.
At a Democratic Party convention in Grand Forks, North Dakota, last night, Hillary Clinton said that her husband “has made a lot of money since he left the White House doing what he loves most, talking to people.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan J. Donmoyer in Washington at rdonmoyer@bloomberg.net;
What special service is Bill Clinton performing??
Do we really want this guy back in power from the White House? Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Just ask Monica Lewinsky….
Vick Mickunas
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just out in paperback
Two of my favorite books from last year have just been issued in paperback.
SAVAGE PEACE - HOPE AND FEAR IN AMERICA 1919 (Simon&Schuster) by Ann Hagedorn is a book that will give you an entirely different perspective of history. In 1919 the First World War had just ended. America was in turmoil. Black veterans returning from the battlefields of France were being lynched. The young future FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was wiretapping American telephones. In northern Russia the US Army was bogged down in a forgotten war. Sound familiar? I didn’t think so. Hagedorn, a Dayton native who now resides in Ripley, Ohio has written a powerful history of a year that should not be forgotten.
THE MINISTRY OF SPECIAL CASES(Vintage) by Nathan Englander. Set during Argentina’s dirty war, this searing novel depicts the heartbreak experienced by a family after their son is abducted and absorbed into the Argentine security state. His crime? Possessing forbidden books. Chilling.
Vick Mickunas
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REDS or INDIANS??
Do you have a favorite Ohio baseball team? Cincinnati Reds? Or, Cleveland Indians? I tend to be an American League guy so Cleveland would be my choice. Which team do you favor?
Reds and Indians fans have a pair of new books to check out:
THE GOOD, THE BAD, and THE UGLY- Heart-Pounding, Jaw-Dropping, and Gut-Wrenching Moments from Cincinnati Reds History by Mike Shannon (with a forward by Dusty Baker)
and
THE GOOD, THE BAD, and THE UGLY- Heart-Pounding, Jaw-Dropping, and Gut-Wrenching Moments from Cleveland Indians History by Mary Schmitt Boyer (with a forward by Terry Pluto) (Triumph Books) contain lots of good stuff relating to each Ohio team.
The Indians were great last year. The Red Sox were the only thing that stopped them from going to the World Series. And the Reds were….not so good.
Who will do well this year? Who are you rooting for?
Vick Mickunas
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sure signs of springtime
It was raining Monday night when I noticed something moving on the sidewalk. A toad! A sure sign of spring.
Today I saw a butterfly. Definitely springlike this afternoon.
Pedro Martinez the oft injured New York Mets pitcher started his first game of the season the other day and quickly left the game with an injury. Spring is here!
David Ortiz the Boston Red Sox slugger crushed his first home run of the season this afternoon in Oakland. Ah, spring.
The Big Read is underway! The featured book is FUNNY IN FARSI by Firoozeh Dumas. I’m reading the sequel, LAUGHING WITHOUT AN ACCENT. It must be spring….
How can you tell it is spring? The first dandelion? The robins? Bock beer?
What are the signs that you watch for to know that spring has sprung?
Vick Mickunas
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Do you remember Osama?
I’m reading the hot new book about Osama Bin Laden’s family. Here’s a review from the New York Times:
The Bricklayer’s Sons: The Family That Spawned 9/11
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
THE BIN LADENS
An Arabian Family in the American Century
By Steve Coll
Illustrated. 671 pages. The Penguin Press. $35.
“Steve Coll’s riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of Osama bin Laden’s extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics.
“The Bin Ladens” uses the prism of one family to examine the mind-boggling, culture-rocking effects that sudden oil wealth had on Saudi Arabia, while shedding new light on the “troubled, compulsive, greed-inflected, secret-burdened” relationship that developed between that desert nation and the United States, and the conflicts many Saudis felt, pulled between the traditional pieties of their ancestors and the glittering temptations of the West.
It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.”
That earlier work focused on the rise of Islamic extremism during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s in Afghanistan, where Mr. bin Laden first emerged as a leader, while this volume looks at the familial, cultural and political forces that shaped him as he came of age in Saudi Arabia.
Parts of Mr. Coll’s narrative are heavily indebted to other reporters’ pioneering work on this subject — most notably, Peter Bergen’s two books on Mr. bin Laden, and “The Looming Tower,” Lawrence Wright’s searing book about Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11. But by focusing on Mr. bin Laden’s conflicted relationship with his family and that family’s complicated relationship with the West, Mr. Coll, a staff writer for The New Yorker who also worked for many years at The Washington Post, has added fascinating new details to our understanding of how Mr. bin Laden evolved from a loyal family adjutant into an angry black sheep, intent on lashing out at the very people — the Saudi royal family and the United States of America — that his father and brothers had cultivated in their business dealings for years.
Just as recent books like Jacob Weisberg’s “Bush Tragedy” have underscored the role Oedipal rivalries may have played in George W. Bush’s presidency and his decision to go to war against Iraq, so this volume underscores the role that Freudian family dynamics may have played in Mr. bin Laden’s radicalization and his declaration of war against America.
Mr. Coll traces how Osama — who was still a boy when his father, Muhammad, was killed in an airplane accident in 1967 — found a succession of father figures in a series of radical mentors, including a high school gym teacher who involved him in an after-school Islamic study group and Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic scholar who introduced the young Osama to “the concept of transnational jihad.”
Mr. Coll’s book also traces a host of bizarre connections among its dramatis personae, suggesting that there are often less than six degrees of separation when it comes to the new globalized world of international finance. We learn, for instance, that Muhammad bin Laden began his rise by working as a bricklayer and mason for Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, which had been formed to manage the oil rights of the Standard Oil Company of California, and that the huge international company that the bin Ladens built would come to do business with well-known American firms like General Electric, and draw on advice from the law firm Baker Botts, headed by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and Bush family adviser.
We also learn that Jim Bath, a former reserve pilot with the Texas Air National Guard who used to carouse with George W. Bush, later became a business partner in Houston with Salem bin Laden, Osama’s half-brother.
The ultimate self-made man, the family patriarch Muhammad bin Laden left an impoverished and deeply religious canyon village to seek his fortune (during an early interlude in the pilgrim city of Jeddah, he was so poor that he reportedly slept in a ditch he dug in the sand) and through a combination of skill, acumen and the assiduous cultivation of the royal family, became the king’s principal builder, overseeing renovations of sacred sites in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. He would bequeath to his children not just a fortune, but also what Mr. Coll calls a “transforming vision of ambition and religious faith in a borderless world.” His British-educated son, Salem, who took over the company after his death, would expand its international reach, and he would also embrace a Westernized, jet-set existence that allowed him to indulge his eccentricities to the fullest.
In fact, Salem emerges from this volume as a compelling, larger-than-life figure, a picaresque playboy, at once guileless, brilliant and self-indulgent, who held together the increasingly fractious bin Laden clan through sheer force of will and charisma. Salem, who dressed in jeans, loved airplanes and liked to play the harmonica, reportedly “paid a bandleader at an Academy Awards party in Los Angeles hundreds of dollars to let him sing ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in seven languages.”
Mr. Coll reports that Salem organized family expeditions to Las Vegas, shipped thousands of cases of Tabasco sauce back to Saudi Arabia and dreamed of marrying four women from four Western nations: his estate, he imagined, would resemble the United Nations, with four houses, one flying an American flag, one a German flag, one a French flag and one the Union Jack. Salem died in 1988 in a plane accident in Texas.
As for Osama bin Laden, Mr. Coll, like Mr. Wright in “The Looming Tower,” suggests that the Qaeda founder’s turn to international war against the United States was not inevitable. Mr. Coll writes that when the Saudi royal family agreed in the summer of 1990 to the arrival of American troops in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Mr. bin Laden “offered no public dissent” at the time, but “moved quickly with the rest of his family to protect his personal fortune against the possibility that the Al-Saud regime might collapse.” Although he had come to see himself as an “international Islamic guerrilla leader,” his views at the time, Mr. Coll writes, were still “nuanced, changeable and laced with contradictions.”
Increasingly at odds with the Saudi royal family, Mr. bin Laden left the kingdom in 1991 for the Sudan, where he bought a farm and raised horses and sunflowers while training jihadis (whom he sent to places like Bosnia). “Osama seemed to believe during this period,” Mr. Coll writes, “that he could have it all in Sudan — wives, children, business, horticulture, horse breeding, leisure, pious devotion and jihad — all of it buoyed by the deference and public reputation due a proper sheikh. He did not yet seem to grasp that his enterprise, particularly in its support for violence against governments friendly to or dependent upon the Al-Saud, might prove difficult to reconcile with the interests of his family in Jeddah.”
In June 1993, Mr. Coll reports, the family, most likely under pressure from the Saudi government, moved to expel Osama as a shareholder of the Muhammad bin Laden Company and the Saudi bin Laden Group. The following year the family publicly repudiated him, the Ministry of Interior announced that he had been formally stripped of his Saudi citizenship, and Mr. bin Laden began writing lengthy essays denouncing the royal family, which he circulated by fax.
By 1995, Mr. Coll writes, there was “a hint of King Lear in the wilderness” to his exile: he was out of money, one of his wives had divorced him, and his eldest son had left him to return to Saudi Arabia. Isolation fueled Mr. bin Laden’s self-righteousness, however, and his wrath increasingly focused on the United States, particularly after Washington put pressure on Sudan’s government to expel him from Khartoum, leading to his exile in 1996 back to the harsh lands of Afghanistan.
While he careered toward violence, other members of his family moved to strengthen their ties with the West. There were family investments in enterprises ranging from Iridium, a satellite communications network, to the Hard Rock Cafe franchise in the Middle East.
In the days after 9/11 Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington — who met with President Bush on the evening of September 13 — helped arrange (with F.B.I. permission) a special chartered plane flight to carry more than a dozen bin Ladens, some of whom had been living in the United States for years, back home to Saudi Arabia. Subsequent F.B.I. investigations “turned up no evidence of complicity by the bin Laden family in terrorist violence,” Mr. Coll writes, and a decision seems to have been made at the White House sometime early in 2002 that, barring the emergence of new evidence, “the U.S. government would not sanction the bin Laden family in any way because of its history with Osama.”
One F.B.I. analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment this way: there were “millions” of bin Ladens “running around” and “99.999999 percent of them are of the non-evil variety.”
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