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Book Review Podcast: The State of the Nuclear World

By JOHN WILLIAMS
Amy Toensing/National Geographic Stock (Papua New Guinea, 2009)
Podcast Archive

Listen to previous podcasts from the Book Review.

This week in The New York Times Book Review, Bill Keller reviews three new books that address the current thinking about nuclear weapons. Mr. Keller writes:

Fear of nuclear weapons spiked for a time after 9/11, when we confronted the possibility of fissile material in the hands of stateless enemies, and you can find a reservoir of existential fear today in Israel, as it contemplates a nuclear Iran. The nuclear weapons of fragile Pakistan and inscrutable North Korea preoccupy large sectors of our intelligence community. But for most of us anxiety has given way to a kind of complacency. The longer we have gone without seeing nuclear weapons used, the more we assume they will not be used. Three new books challenge that complacency, from three different directions.

This week, Mr. Keller discusses those books; Leslie Kaufman has notes from the field; Susan Chira talks about Susanna Sonnenberg’s “She Matters”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host.

Richard Ben Cramer On and Off the Field

By JOHN WILLIAMS

Notices of the journalist Richard Ben Cramer’s death at 62 of lung cancer have rightly focused on “What It Takes,” his mammoth account of the 1988 presidential campaign season. Jill Abramson once called it “by all odds the last truly great campaign book.” Matt Bai wrote that “no one else has come close to equaling it.”

In a profile of Mr. Cramer around the time of the book’s publication, Martha Sherrill wrote that the author’s method was to get inside the candidates’ heads. “Brave man. Their heads, their wives’ heads, their cousins’ heads, their Aunt Minnies’ heads. Their mothers’ heads.” He didn’t stop with their heads. “He got inside their limousines, their refrigerators, their hotel rooms, their campaign planes, their houses too — even Joe Biden’s money pit of a mansion.”

Mr. Cramer brought that same obsessiveness to baseball, and to two of the sport’s grandest rivals: Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. His 1986 profile of Williams for “Esquire” is considered one of the genre’s highest peaks. In it, he burrowed into the slugger’s brain the way he would later analyze Bob Dole and Gary Hart:

He does not go to restaurants, and the reasons are several: They make a fuss, and the owner or cook’s on his neck like gnat. Or worse, it’s a stream of sportsfans (still Ted’s worst epithet) with napkins to sign. At restaurants you wait, wait, wait. Restaurants have little chairs and tables, no place for elbows, arms, knees, feet. At restaurants there’s never enough food. Lastly, restaurants charge a lot, and Ted doesn’t toss money around.

His controversial biography “Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life” (2000) subverted much of Joltin’ Joe’s image. Some readers and reviewers bristled at the relish with which the book deconstructed celebrity mythology. Here Mr. Cramer writes about DiMaggio’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe: Read more…

Historians Look Back, and Inward, at Annual Meeting

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

NEW ORLEANS — Some 4,000 historians descended on New Orleans on Thursday for the American Historical Association’s four-day annual meeting, replacing the chants of departing Sugar Bowl revelers with more sober talk of job interviews, departmental politics, and — at least in the official panels — the past itself.

As usual, the meeting’s 300-plus sessions touched on contemporary issues like climate change, the 2012 presidential election, and the Arab Spring, along with more purely scholarly topics big (“Horstory: Equines and Humans in Africa, Asia and North America”) and small (“Trash and Treasure: The Significance of Used Goods in America, 1880-1950″). But for many in attendance, the most urgent question was the state of the historical profession itself in an era of budget cuts and declining humanities enrollments.

At a panel called “The Skyscraper Index, the Hemline Index, Champagne, Nail Polish and the Dow Jones,” scholars analyzed the colorful — and usually suspect — metrics that journalists and other commentators sometimes use to track the state of the economy. Read more…

Thomas Pynchon to Publish New Book

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

He is suspicious of e-books, does not like to have his picture taken, and is often rumored to be on the short-list of American novelists who might win the Nobel prize for literature.

The secretive novelist Thomas Pynchon is back. He will publish a new book, titled “The Bleeding Edge,” his long-time publisher, Penguin Press, said on Friday. No publication date has been set.

Mr. Pynchon has won loyal fans for his intricate narratives that use the 1960s and ’70s as touchstones and frequently combine popular cultural references with obscure history. He is the author of “V.,” “The Crying of Lot 49,” “Mason & Dixon” and the critically acclaimed “Gravity’s Rainbow,” which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1974. However, his last title, “Inherent Vice” in 2009, got mixed reviews.

Graphic Books Best Sellers: A Curious Vampire

By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES

It’s a sleepy start to the new year, with only one newcomer among graphic books best-sellers this week. That honor goes to Volume 1 of “Blood Lad,” by Yuuki Kodama (Yen Press), which is at No. 2 on the manga list. The series is about Staz, a vampire whose tough exterior hides a love for and curiosity about human culture, especially all things Japanese. When he meets a Japanese girl, he thinks he’s finally found someone he can ask questions, but her life is tragically cut short. His new mission becomes restoring her ghostly form to human life. The first volume was released in December. Volume 2 follows in March and Volume 3 in May.

Over at The Beat, the news blog of comics culture, Torsten Adair published an impressive year-end analysis of the 2012 books that appeared on our hardcover, paperback and manga lists. DC Comics was the pacesetter in the hardcover category, Image was the leader in paperbacks and VIZ was at the front of the pack in manga.

As always, the complete best-seller lists can be found here, along with an explanation of how they were assembled.

Book Review Podcast: Inside the Canine Brain

By JOHN WILLIAMS
Olaf Hajek
Podcast Archive

Listen to previous podcasts from the Book Review.

This week in The New York Times Book Review, Walter Vatter reviews “What’s a Dog For?” by John Homans, an “engaging and informative book that is both a survey of the latest research on canine cognition and a memoir of his years with his Lab mix, Stella.” Mr. Vatter writes:

Curious about how Stella’s brain works and how she adapted to her new family, Homans seeks out experts who can explain “the strangeness of having this predator in my home, lying on her back, waiting to get her stomach scratched.” He meets with scientists, trainers and breeders to understand why so many of us bond with dogs, and why dog ownership is on the rise. There were 77 million dogs in America in 2010, up from 53 million in 1996. “We’ve seen a linear explosion in pet populations in Western countries over the past 40 years,” one researcher says. “People are living more isolated lives, are having fewer children, their marriages aren’t lasting. All these things sort of break down a social network and happen to exactly coincide with the growth in pet populations. What’s happening is simply that we’re allowing animals to fill the gap in our lives.”

This week, Mr. Homans talks about “What’s a Dog For?”; Leslie Kaufman has notes from the field; Allan Kozinn discusses Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host.

Lehane Continues Search for Missing Dog

By DAVE ITZKOFF
Dennis Lehane with a poster of his missing dog, Tessa.Steven Senne/Associated Press Dennis Lehane with a poster of his missing dog, Tessa.

More than a week after appealing to the public for help in finding his lost dog, Tessa — and offering a role in his next novel as a reward to the person who finds her — the author Dennis Lehane has not yet located his missing pet, but he has not given up hope.

“No dog since Lassie ever got this attention,” Mr. Lehane told The Associated Press. Noting that efforts to find Tessa have spawned an online campaign and even attracted the volunteered participation of a dog psychic in San Francisco, he added, “The flip side of the comedy is, who wouldn’t do this for their dog?”

Tessa, a beagle, went missing on Dec. 24 after she escaped from the yard of Mr. Lehane’s home in Brookline, Mass. The author, whose novels include “Gone Baby Gone,” “Mystic River” and “Shutter Island,” quickly took to his Facebook page, where he asked for the help of his followers in finding the dog, who was not wearing identification tags but does have a microchip. As an added incentive, Mr. Lehane wrote on Facebook: “Naming of character in the next book for anyone who gets her back to us! (No, really!)”

Since then Mr. Lehane has received many online tips on Tessa’s whereabouts. (The search comes as he is finishing up a screenplay adaptation of his short story “Animal Rescue,” which he observed was a “sadistic irony.”)

But Mr. Lehane sounded an optimistic note when he spoke to The A.P. on Thursday. “Every dog expert we talk to is strongly suggesting that she’s in somebody’s house,” he said. “That’s why we keep saturating the area with pictures. Because somebody could have her and just not know.”

He added that finding Tessa was “a no-questions-asked issue.”

“Bring the dog to a shelter or call me and I will pick up the dog,” Mr. Lehane said.

No Wrath, but Some Discontent, When Nobel Prize Was Awarded to Steinbeck

By DAVE ITZKOFF
John Steinbecknobelprize.org John Steinbeck

When their best-laid schemes of mice and men, and authors and writing, went awry, the members of the Swedish Academy made the best of what they thought was a bad situation in 1962: they awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to John Steinbeck. The decision came amid their general dissatisfaction with the candidates for the prize that year, according to documents recently released by the academy.

As has become its custom, after a 50-year waiting period the Swedish Academy released documents on the internal deliberation of its committee members as well as a privately kept shortlist for the literary prize, The Guardian said, citing a report in the Svenska Dagbladet of Stockholm.

According to The Guardian, 66 authors were put forward for the literature Nobel in 1962, and the list was narrowed down to Steinbeck, Robert Graves, Lawrence Durrell, Karen Blixen and Jean Anouilh. But after looking at the field of contenders a committee member, Henry Olsson, wrote, “There aren’t any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation.”

Blixen, the Danish author who wrote “Out of Africa” under the pen name Isak Dinesen, became ineligible when she died in September 1962. Graves, whose novels included “I, Claudius,” was nonetheless regarded primarily as a poet and Olsson, The Guardian said, was reluctant to give the prize to an Anglo-Saxon poet until Ezra Pound, whose work he greatly admired, died. (Although Olsson objected to Pound’s politics.) Durrell’s series of novels “The Alexandria Quartet” was not yet considered a significantly substantial body of work (the author had also been passed over in 1961), while Anouilh, the French dramatist, had the bad fortune to come between the 1960 Nobel victory of his countryman Saint-John Perse and the ascent of Jean-Paul Sartre, who would win in 1964.

So the prize was given to Steinbeck, whose body of work consisted merely of such enduring novels as “Of Mice and Men,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Cannery Row” and “East of Eden.” In awarding the Nobel to Steinbeck, the Swedish Academy offered no public hint of its internal weariness, citing him for being among “the masters of modern American literature” and “for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and a keen social perception.”

Stay Tuned: A Self-Published Book About TV Gets a Major Publishing Pick-Up

By DAVE ITZKOFF
Jake Guevara/The New York Times “The Revolution Was Televised,” a book by the television critic Alan Sepinwall.

In the course of chronicling the modern-day history of television, the author Alan Sepinwall has made a bit of history himself, becoming the rare self-published author to be picked up by a major press. On Wednesday, it was announced that the Touchstone imprint of Simon & Schuster had acquired his well-regarded book “The Revolution Was Televised,” which Mr. Sepinwall put out late last year.

In this book (which is subtitled “The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever”) Mr. Sepinwall, a television critic for the Web site hitfix.com, looks at the impact that shows like “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men” and show runners like David Chase and Matthew Weiner have had in reinvigorating the hour-long dramatic format. Reviewing “The Revolution Was Televised” for The New York Times in December, Michiko Kakutani wrote that Mr. Sepinwall combined “smart, fair-minded assessments meant to provoke discussion” and interviews with creative talent, producers and executives to provide “a terrific book”; she also named it one of her 10 favorite books of 2012.

As with many of the TV success stories he writes about, Mr. Sepinwall encountered several “no”s before he finally heard “yes.”

Mr. Sepinwall said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that Touchstone had been one of the publishers he met with when he was shopping his proposal for “The Revolution Was Televised” about a year ago, though the project was turned down then.

“The proposal wound up being a little bit different from the book I wrote, and so I don’t necessarily blame them for passing at the time,” said Mr. Sepinwall, who planned to draw mostly from reporting he had already done on his site.

“When I got mostly rejections and one sort-of offer that I wasn’t crazy about it, I decided I’m going to go this route,” he said, referring to his strategy to self-publish the book. “The next thing I knew, I was doing fresh interviews with everybody – I’m not exactly sure how I had time to do that.”

After his book was reviewed in The Times and elsewhere, Mr. Sepinwall said he was contacted again by Touchstone, which was now interested in acquiring it.

“I like the idea that the book could exist in brick-and-mortar stores, could be on college syllabi,” he said. “I was pleased with the idea of being able to go back to the very beginning of the project.” He declined to provide exact sales figures for the book’s self-published release but said they were “well beyond my wildest expectations.”

Lauren Spiegel, an editor at Touchstone who acquired “The Revolution Was Televised” for the imprint, said of Mr. Sepinwall, “I was already in the bag for him, and have been such a fan for a long time.”

Touchstone is planning its release of “The Revolution Was Televised” “as soon as we can,” she said, with a paperback edition planned for the early spring and an e-book edition possibly coming earlier.

A Mountain Goat for Top Poet Perch?

By JOHN WILLIAMS
John Darnielle performing at Webster Hall in 2008.Rahav Segev for The New York Times John Darnielle performing at Webster Hall in 2008.

If one were establishing the odds of a songwriter being named the United States Poet Laureate, the logical favorite might be Bob Dylan. Or Paul Simon. But what about John Darnielle?

Far less well known than Mr. Dylan or Mr. Simon, Mr. Darnielle, who is the leader of the band Mountain Goats, has rabid fans who view him as a writer as much as a musician. Now, many of them are petitioning the government to name him Poet Laureate. The petition, created on Wednesday, seeks to compile 25,000 signatures. As of this writing, it has 634.

The Times’s Jon Pareles has called Mr. Darnielle a “literary thinker” whose songs “have revolved around their lyrics: autobiography, travelogues, couple chronicles and character studies.” Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker once called Mr. Darnielle “America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist,” and wrote of the people in one song: “Cyrus and Jeff are familiar Mountain Goats characters, long on bad luck and short on problem-solving skills, and Darnielle, through his poetry, grants them the dignity that eludes them in their lives.” Read more…