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Books Update: Vandals in the Stacks!
Date:
Fri, 13 Apr 2001 23:06:21 -0400
From:
The New York Times Direct
To:
medei@UOL.COM.BR
Books Update from NYTimes.com Friday, April 13, 2001
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Vandals in the Stacks!
1. In Sunday's Book Review: Nicholson Baker's "Double Fold"
2. Also Reviewed This Week: Stephen King's "Dreamcatcher"
3. Audio: William Styron
4. New in Stores: Terry Ryan's "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio"
5. In the News: Borders Turns Over Its Online Book Sales to Amazon
6. New on the Best-Seller List: Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck's "American Terrorist"
7. In the Forums: "Anil's Ghost," by Michael Ondaatje
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1. In Sunday's Book Review: Nicholson Baker's "Double Fold"
=======================================================
Paper Chase
Nicholson Baker makes a case for saving old books and newspapers.
------
DOUBLE FOLD
Libraries and the Assault on Paper.
By Nicholson Baker.
Illustrated. 370 pp. New York:
Random House. $25.95.
------
Novelist David Gates reviews "Double Fold: Libraries and the
Assault on Paper," the new book by Nicholson Baker, author
of "Vox" and "The Mezzanine," among other books. "[A] whole
book about libraries' 'assault on paper' in favor of
microfilm and digital scanning?" Gates asks. "Was it worth
agonizing over the 'disbinding' -- i.e., guillotining along
their spines -- and discarding of books nobody's checked out
in decades? The pulping of old newspapers that if you lived
1,000 years you might leaf through on a slow afternoon when
you were 910? Barbaric, sure. Nuts, for reasons we'll get
to. But it's not global warming, world hunger or a
Republican coup d'etat."
Related Links:
Michiko Kakutani Reviews 'Double Fold' (April 10, 2001)
Preserving Books? It's Easy on Paper (April 7, 2001)
The Collector: An Interview With Nicholson Baker
Excerpt: 'Double Fold'
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/reviews/010415.15gatest.html?0413bk
-----
"The Collector: An Interview With Nicholson Baker," by Dwight Garner.
------
"Preserving Books? It's Easy on Paper," by James H. Billington, The Times, April 7, 2001.
2. Also Reviewed This Week: Stephen King's "Dreamcatcher"
========================================================
Weasel From Another Planet
The aliens in Stephen King's novel specialize in telepathy and murder.
------
DREAMCATCHER
By Stephen King.
620 pp. New York:
Scribner. $28.
------
King's new novel -- and his first full-length work of
fiction since being struck by a van in June 1999 -- debuted
at number one on The New York Times best-seller list.
Reviewer Colin Harrison, author of "Afterburn," says that in
this novel, written during its author's convalescence, "King
offers his gigantic readership the opportunity to see
whether he's still got the stuff. They needn't worry."
Set in King's "familiar shotguns-and-pickups milieu of
small-town Maine," the new book is "a frenzied,
multilayered, ever-accelerating nightmare. The tale begins
as four middle-aged buddies take their annual hunting trip
in a remote cabin . . . Although the subsequent action
scenes are very well done -- King truly delights in the
gruesome -- it is the novel's cross-wired psychic structure
that is most fascinating. King manages to communicate to us
directly -- and perhaps to himself as well -- that he is
still very much here, still smiling that scary half-smile of
his as we quickly flip the pages."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/reviews/010415.15harrist.html?0413bk
-----
Featured Author: Stephen King
Collected reviews of King's earlier books, book excerpts and
an audio interview with King by Terry Gross, host of NPR's
"Fresh Air."
Related Links:
Featured Author: Stephen King
Janet Maslin Reviews 'Dreamcatcher' (March 15, 2001)
Stephen King Alert After Surgery (June 21, 1999)
-----
"Surviving Galeras," by Stanley Williams and Fen Montaigne
"No Apparent Danger: The True Story of Volcanic Disaster at Galeras and Nevado del Ruiz," by Victoria BruceBR>
Two books -- one by a survivor -- recount a devastating
volcanic eruption in Colombia. On Jan. 14, 1993, Stanley
Williams, a professor of geology at Arizona State
University, led 12 researchers to the top of Galeras as part
of a United Nations program aimed at improving the
monitoring of active volcanoes. Galeras seemed quiet. But as
the party stood watching -- some people inside the crater,
some at or near the rim -- it blew. Six scientists and three
tourists were killed. Williams survived, barely, suffering
severe burns, a destroyed leg and a life-threatening brain
injury.
As reviewer Tim Weiner, a correspondent in the Mexico City
bureau of The New York Times writes, "What we have here are
two vivid and violently opposed versions of what happened
and why. Williams (and his co-author, Fen Montaigne, a
superb freelance journalist) and Victoria Bruce, a highly
talented science writer with a master's degree in geology,
offer readers of both books riveting explanations of what
makes volcanoes tick."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/reviews/010415.15weinert.html?0413bk
Related article: "When a Volcano Turns Deadly for Those Studying Its Moods"
-----
"Afterimage" By Helen Humphreys
Humphreys, author of "Leaving Earth" and four collections of
poetry, has chosen "an interesting strategy," for her new
novel, writes Andrea Barrett, author most recently of "The
Voyage of the Narwahl." She has set her novel during 1865
and 1866, when the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron was
at the height of her powers, and she borrows "crucial
strands of Cameron's biography while creating a very
different fictional character."
Humphreys's creation is Isabelle Dashell, childless (Cameron
raised 11 children), in her mid-30's and without close
family or friends. (Cameron, who had six sisters, led a
wildly social life.) "In a house near Tunbridge Wells,
Isabelle avoids the attic filled with baby furniture,
tormenting reminders of her three stillborn infants. Instead
she retreats to her glass henhouse and the consolations of
photography, using for models her cook, her gardener and the
infants she rents for a crown a day from women in the nearby
village. The newly hired housemaid, Annie Phelan, becomes
the novel's living heart the instant she enters this frigid
household. In the growing tradition of
servants-behind-the-scenes (think of 'Mary Reilly,' 'The
Remains of the Day' or 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'), Annie
proves to be markedly superior to her employers, the moving
force behind accomplishments for which she receives no
credit."
3. Audio: William Styron
=========================
On April 5, William Styron made a rare public appearance, at
The Cooper Union in New York. In this exclusive audio
recording of the event, Styron reads from "The Confessions
of Nat Turner," defends the novel against its critics and
describes a recent bout with depression, which he suffered
after he had written his book on the subject, "Darkness
Visible."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/15/specials/styron.html?0413bk
4. New in Stores: Terry Ryan's "The Prize Winner of
Defiance, Ohio"
=================================================
"The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less," by Terry Ryan -- April
`
"The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio" is Terry Ryan's tribute
to her mother, who saved her family from poverty by entering
contests, winning everything from toasters to cars to
thousands of dollars in cash. In an interview with The Times
this week, Ryan described one such incident: "When we were
evicted from our first house, she won the money for a down
payment on the house she lived in for 45 years. She won the
Beech-Nut 'Name That Sandwich' contest just as we were
running out of food."
5. In the News: Borders Turns Over Its Online Book Sales to Amazon
==================================================
The Borders Group, the nation's second-largest bookseller,
is closing its struggling online store and will have
Amazon.com serve its customers instead, executives of the
two companies announced.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/11/technology/11CND-BOOK.html?0413bk
For a digest of this week's book news, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/daily/index.html?0413bk
6. New on the Best-Seller List
==============================
Hardcover Nonfiction
#2) "American Terrorist," by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck
Two reporters examine the Oklahoma City bombing and the life of Timothy McVeigh.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/bsp/index.html?0413bk
A note on our best-seller policy: The Times on the Web
publishes the New York Times best-seller lists a week in
advance of the printed Sunday Book Review. The best-seller
lists published this week on the Web will appear in the
print edition dated April 22 and are based on sales through
last weekend.
7. In the Forums: "Anil's Ghost," by Michael Ondaatje
========================================================
One of the participants in the Reading Group forum has
suggested that "Anil's Ghost," Michael Ondaatje's novel
about the Sri Lankan civil war, is a Buddhist allegory,
arguing that the character Sarath "is an arhat, one who has
attained Nirvana and encourages others to tread the path."
One reader complained that he sensed a Victorian "nature/man
separation" in Ondaatje's attempt to capture Sri Lankan
culture and history from the perspective of a Westerner, and
asked if Ondaatje is "a voyeur of the Buddhist reflections
on the surface of the river?"
For next month's book, readers have chosen "The Death and
Life of Great American Cities," the 1961 urban planning
classic by Jane Jacobs.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/forums/index.html?0413bk
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