"So many books, so little time" is definitely the lesson of autumn 2009. Lest anyone believe there is no point in coming to P&P to hear an author, let me quickly disabuse you of that. Let me review some the excellent talks last week that most of you missed: Tim Flannery, Denis MacShane and Max Cleland. Click here for more.

 

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Step right up for another round in the playoffs among Amazon, Wal-Mart, Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Politics & Prose.

I feel like a tortoise in this match - with all of the positive qualities that this conveys.  We know what we have to charge to pay for the books, the rent, salaries, etc. We offer five-year memberships for $100 with the commitment that we will be still here. 

More to the point, we know - and want you to know - that we are committed to bringing an ongoing conversation to our customers about what they are reading, whether this conversation is in book groups, classes, the weekly email, or the shopping-in-store experience itself; and we know that there are enough citizens of the book world out there that who count these qualities as more important than the quantity of the price.

Click here for more.

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If you can’t attend a talk, but would like to reserve a signed copy, or a recorded author talk,
click the title links to purchase online. Members save 20% off on these titles.

Thursday October 22

4:30 p.m. A DUAL AUTHOR EVENT FOR TEENS
In Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld, author of the Uglies series, spins a historical fantasy set during World War I. The Germans and Austro-Hungarians have technologically advanced machinery. The English, inspired by Darwin’s theories, have evolved animals into war machines. Leviathan is a whale-dirigible. Common soldiers from each side escape on a round-the-world odyssey.

In a world populated with both mechanical and organic people, Lia must find her place. Following Skinned, Crashed is the second book by Robin Wasserman in a futuristic series featuring an alternative society that sets new rules about the ethics of life and death. Ages 14-18.

7 p.m. Judith Jones, the great Knopf editor who played an instrumental role in bringing Julia Child’s recipes to American cooks, follows her memoir, The Tenth Muse, with a useful cookbook, The Pleasures Of Cooking For One, about taking care of and nurturing yourself. After her husband died, Jones taught herself how to cook and savor a good meal for one. "This book is for those of you who want to roll up your sleeves and enjoy, from day to day, one of the great satisfactions of life."  

Friday October 23

10:30 a.m.  Deborah Heiligman tells the story of Charles and Emma. Charles Darwin and Emma Wedgwood were a devoted married couple who had ten children. Emma was devoutly religious and worried that she and Charles would be separated in the afterlife. Her fundamentalism made Charles reluctant to publish his On the Origin of Species. It wasn't until an American wrote an essay with a similar theory to his that Charles realized he must publish his controversial ideas. Ages 12-16. 

1 p.m. Come meet Tina Wasserman, food columnist for Reform Judaism magazine, who will be in the store signing copies of her Entrée To Judaism Cookbook and discussing ways food informs the histories and traditions of the great Jewish Diaspora communities.  Tina will provide complimentary sweet treats to accompany coffee.

7 p.m. Steven V. Roberts explores the experience of immigration by tracking the fortunes of thirteen families who have recently come to the United States From Every End Of This Earth. He captures the voices of those living the promise of a new land—and the difficulties of starting over among strangers whose suspicions increasingly outweigh their open-armed acceptance. Roberts talks about his own Grandpa Abe, who arrived almost 100 years ago, and writes that today, "America is still renewed by fresh transfusions of foreign blood."

Saturday October 24

1 p.m. With his co-author, Senator Christopher Bond, Lewis M. Simons, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, argues in The Next Front that Southeast Asia, and especially Indonesia, will be the next hot spot in the war on terror. The authors propose that the U.S., having lost credibility with failed military efforts in the Middle East, deploy “smart power” - civilians, instead of soldiers - to defuse anger and create alternatives to violent movements.

6 p.m. Haleh Esfandiari’s 2006 visit to her mother in Tehran turned into a harrowing eight months of interrogations, phone taps, and solitary confinement in Evin Prison as Iranian authorities tried to prove she was part of an American conspiracy working for regime change. In My Prison, My Home, Esfandiari, Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, interweaves her experience as a political prisoner with the larger history of relations between America and Iran, and speculates on what may lie ahead for Iran.

Sunday October 25

1 p.m. Paul Dickson’s compendium The Dickson Baseball Dictionary is the authoritative guide to the language of our national pastime.  What’s the difference between a “cut fastball” and a “four-seam fastball”?  Where did “fungo” come from?  Dickson traces sources, first usages, and etymologies of familiar (and not so familiar) baseball terms, with many insights into the game’s history. Including more than 10,000 definitions and 250 photographs, this third edition has doubled in size from the original.

5 p.m. In The Dead Hand, David E. Hoffman, a Washington Post journalist, tells the gripping story of the secret negotiations and diplomatic maneuvers between Washington and Moscow to end the arms race. Together, the United States and the Soviet Union recognized it was in their common interest to keep nuclear and biological weapons out of the hands of rogue states.

Monday October 26

7 p.m. Taylor Branch, author of the definitive three-volume biography of Martin Luther King and his times, has been a friend of President Clinton’s since they met during Senator George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. Branch was invited to interview the President dozens of times between 1993 and 2001, for roughly two hours each time. The President's side of those conversations formed the basis of his own memoir. Branch recorded his take not only on the content of the conversations, but on Clinton's demeanor, moods, puzzling behavior, and the homely aspects of family life in the West Wing. The Clinton Tapes highlights major events from Clinton's two terms, including the war in Bosnia, the anti-deficit crusade, health-reform failure, anti-terrorist strikes, peace initiatives, the 1996 re-election campaign, and the Whitewater investigations that culminated in Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial.

Tuesday October 27

Politics And Prose Reads: The Known World
7 p.m. We are introducing a reading group of the whole bookstore.  Everyone is invited to participate in a discussion after reading the same book. If you enjoy it, we can continue twice a year or so to read or reread a book that we have loved. The Known World is a novel imagining the corrosive effects of slavery. Set in Virginia in the 1850s, the novel looks at the unusual, but not unheard-of, situation of a free black man who buys a slave to oversee his farm. Jones, who grew up in Washington, D.C., won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for this book. We are honored that he will join us to discuss his novel.

Wednesday October 28

Dave Barry And Ridley Pearson - Peter And The Sword Of Mercy
10:30 a.m. In 1901 London, Molly and George Darling have three children, Wendy, Michael, and John. One day, an inspector from Scotland Yard knocks on their door. It is James, who was once one of Peter's Lost Boys. He suspects that Prince Edward is under the influence of shadow creatures who are looking for starstuff that fell into London centuries ago. Ages 9-12.

7 p.m. In this marvelous history of the 1930s Depression, Dancing In The Dark, CCNY historian Morris Dickstein has married history and culture to produce a lively look at “the books, films of an era: the stories they told, the fears and hopes they expressed.” He shows that culture both reflects and influences “how people understand their own lives and how they cope with social and economic malaise.” Considering the outstanding entertainment that was produced in the 30s—movies, theatre, and books like The Grapes of Wrath and Native Son, photography, and music—makes us ask whether we have the spirit and talent to rise to that cultural level in our present economic malaise.

Thursday, October 29

6:30 p.m. @ Rock Creek Restaurant
Dinner with the Author offers an opportunity to meet an author and dine with other customers in an intimate setting. Tom Gjelten, National Public Radio correspondent to the Pentagon, will join us to discuss his balanced and thoughtful history, Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba. Focusing on one of Cuba's liberal and influential families, he weaves together the personal with the historical. He is now working on a series on national security and extractive resources that he will be glad to discuss. For $65
(or $115 per couple), you receive a three course dinner and a paperback copy of Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba. Contact Bonnie Kogod to attend.

7 p.m. War Dances, a heartbreaking, hilarious collection of stories explores the precarious balance between self-preservation and external responsibility in art, family, and the world at large. With dazzling insight into the minds of artists, laborers, fathers, husbands, and sons, Sherman Alexie populates his stories with ordinary men on the brink of exceptional change. In the title story, a famous writer must decide how to care for his distant father who is slowly dying a “natural Indian death” from alcohol and diabetes, just as he learns that he himself may have a brain tumor.

Friday October 30

Honorable Survivor: Mao's China, McCarthy's America and the Persecution of John S. Service
7 p.m. Lynne Joiner, a veteran broadcast journalist and documentary filmmaker, recounts the extraordinary story of John Service, who was sacked by the Foreign Service during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts. Joiner had special access to newly released Soviet and American documents which contain evidence that Service was innocent of McCarthy’s charges.

SaturdayOctober31

3 p.m. William Ferris, a folklorist, filmmaker, and author of Blues from the Delta, toured the American South during the 1960s and ‘70s collecting music and oral histories from the performers about black life and the blues. This field work is the basis for this new book, Give My Poor Heart Ease, and for several films and recordings (samples of which are included in this volume), which explore the roots of the blues and traditional instruments, such as the one-string guitar; examine the music’s role in community life; and look at distinct secular and sacred traditions of the blues.

Sunday, November 1

1 p.m. Washington Writers' Publishing House Prize Winners
Washington Writers' Publishing House is a non-profit organization that has published over 50 volumes of poetry since 1973 and so far nearly a dozen volumes of fiction. The press sponsors an annual competition for writers living in the Washington-Baltimore area. P&P is proud to host a reading by the latest winners.

2009 Poetry Winner
Jehanne Dubrow
From The Fever-World ($15)
Through the voice of Ida Lewin, an imaginary Yiddish poet who lives in the village of AlwaysWinter, Dubrow recreates the pre-War world of Eastern European Jewry. Steeped in Yiddish literature and oral history, this award-winning sequence was completed while Dubrow served as a Sosland Foundation Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington.

2009 Fiction Winner
William Littlejohn
Calvin ($15.95)
Littlejohn’s award-winning novel is a story of the 1940s Deep South. Billy Smithson is ten years old when his mother, in flight from her ex-husband, leaves him with his grandfather in rural South Carolina. Then his grandfather, unable to keep him, leaves the boy with Calvin, an African-American servant. What happens between the two, and how they bridge gaps of age, class, and race, is a moving coming-of-age story.

5 p.m. As she embarked on a journey to discover her family’s origins, Elisa New, a professor of English at Harvard University, remembered her great-grandfather’s ornately-carved cane. With Jacob's Cane as a symbol of all she didn’t know about her origins, New traveled from Baltimore to the Baltic to London in order to find and understand an immigrant world profoundly affected by modern German culture, from the Enlightenment through the Holocaust.

To see the complete schedule and to purchase any of the above books, click here.

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Politics & Prose supplies books to the following book signing events.
Reservations and tickets should be acquired from the hosting organization.
If you can’t attend a talk, but would like to purchase a signed book, call
202-364-1919 or 1-800-722-0790 or click the title links below.

October 18 - 28

Washington DCJCC
1529 16th Street, N.W.
THE HYMAN S. & FREDA BERNSTEIN JEWISH LITERARY FESTIVAL AT THE WASHINGTON DCJCC
The Jewish Literary Festival presents the year's best in Jewish writing by emerging and established authors from across the globe. A celebration of Jewish literature, the Festival features engaging author panels, readings, films and talks for lovers of fiction, poetry, history, humor, children’s stories and much more. Browse the books featured at the festival here. For more information, the full schedule, and to purchase tickets, go to http://washingtondcjcc.org/litfest or call (202) 777-3251.

Monday, October 26, 7 p.m.

Washington Post Conference Center
1150 15th Street, N.W.
STEVEN D. LEVITT and STEPHEN J. DUBNER
SUPERFREAKONOMICS (William Morrow, $29.99)
The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics was a worldwide sensation, selling over four million copies in thirty-five languages and changing the way we look at the world. Fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is bolder, funnier, and even more surprising than the first. $40 tickets and more information at www.hooksbookevents.com. 

Monday, October 26, 7:30 p.m.

Folger Shakespeare Library
201 East Capitol Street, S.E.
PEN/Faulkner Presents
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE & FAE MYENNE NG
Introduction by Patricia Griffith
Two award-winning writers explore the themes of love, politics, and cultural dislocation - themes integral to the experience of leaving one's home for a new country.  A 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of Half of a Yellow Sun and The Thing Around Your Neck.  Fae Myenne Ng's current novel is Steer Toward Rock, and her first novel Bone was a finalist for the 1994 PEN/Faulkner Award. To purchase tickets call the Folger Shakespeare Library at (202) 544-7077 or click here.

Wednesday, October 28, 7:30 p.m.

National Geographic Society
1600 M Street, N.W.
PAM SPAULDING
AN AMERICAN FAMILY: Three Decades with the McGarveys (Random House, $35)
More than 30 years ago, Spaulding, a photojournalist for the Louisville Courier-Journal, began documenting events in the life of the McGarveys, a family from Louisville, Kentucky. She has produced a unique album comprising a remarkable look at their life. Photographer Sam Abell will introduce the event, and moderate a discussion with Ms. Spaulding and the McGarveys after the presentation. This event is part of the 4-part Masters of Photography speaker series. To purchase tickets, click here.

Friday, October 30, 6 p.m.

Sixth & I Historic Synagogue
600 I Street, NW
Metro: Gallery Place/Chinatown
DR. CAROLIVIA HERRON
ALWAYS AN OLIVIA: A Remarkable Family History (Kar Ben, $17.95)
Chaverim L’Shalom: Shabbat Around the World Dinner
Dr. Herron is a noted Jewish African-American writer of children and adult literature and is a scholar of African-American Judaica. This dinner will blend the flavors and music of Africa into Shabbat. $6 tickets can be purchased through www.sixthandi.org or receive one free admission with purchase of the book. Children under 3 are free. Questions? Please call 202.408.3100.

Sunday, November 1, 2:30 p.m.

The Historical Society of Washington
801 K St, N.W.
ULYSSES GRANT DIETZ and SAM WATTERS
DREAM HOUSE: The White House as an American Home (Acanthus, $75)
The White House, that symbol of the American presidency, was not always an iconic monument with a history written to preserve an establishment vision of colonial life and curatorial taste. Dietz and Watters look at the history of the White House as a home. For information about this event, please email Karen Sallis.

Monday, November 2, 5 p.m.

Acadiana Restaurant
901 New York Avenue, N.W.
DAVID GUAS and RAQUEL PELZEL
DAMGOODSWEET: Desserts to Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth, New Orleans Style (Taunton, $25)
Part memoir, part travelogue and all cookbook, DamGoodSweet transports cooks from their home kitchens into the giant dessert gumbo that is New Orleans. The October issue of Food & Wine features this debut cookbook by New Orleans-bred pastry chef Guas and food writer Pelzel as one of the best dessert books of 2009.

Monday, November 2, 7 p.m.

Sixth & I Historic Synagogue
600 I Street, N.W.
Metro: Gallery Place/Chinatown
MITCH ALBOM
HAVE A LITTLE FAITH: A True Story (Hyperion, $23.99)
Albom's childhood rabbi asks him to deliver his eulogy. Meanwhile, Albom befriends a Detroit pastor serving the poor in a decaying church. Moving between their worlds, Christian and Jewish, African-American and white, impoverished and well-to-do, Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie) explores the beliefs that divide us and bind us together. $10 tickets can be purchased through www.sixthandi.org or receive one free ticket with purchase of the book. Questions? Please call 202.408.3100.

Monday, November 2, 7:30 p.m.

Folger Shakespeare Library
201 East Capitol Street, S.E.
PEN/Faulkner Presents
New New York Novels: STACEY D'ERASMO and JONATHAN LETHEM
Introduction by Mary Kay Zuravleff
Two of our most innovative literary stylists read from new novels set in post 9-11 New York City: Stacey D’Erasmo’s The Sky Below and Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City. Purchase tickets through the PEN/Faulkner Foundation or call 202-544-7077. 

Tuesday, November 3, 6:45 p.m.

Colombian Residence
1520, 20th Street, N.W.
Metro: Dupont Circle (Red Line)
Co-sponsored with the Embassy of Colombia.
PABLO NAVAS SANZ DE SANTAMARIA
THE JOURNEY OF FREDERIC CHURCH THROUGH COLOMBIA AND ECUADOR: April - October 1853 (Villegas, $69.95)
Celebrate the art of 19th-century American painter Frederic Church. Art historian Bonita Billman will discuss Church's role as Thomas Cole's heir in the Hudson River School and his dramatic landscapes and vistas. Author Pablo Navas Sanz de Santamaria will reveal new facets of Church's life, including diary entries that offer a fresh and fascinating look at the natural life of Colombia and Ecuador. More information and tickets through Smithsonian Resident Associates.

Thursday, November 5, 7:30 p.m.

Friendship Heights Village Center
4433 S. Park Avenue
Chevy Chase, MD
HAYNES JOHNSON AND DAN BALZ
THE BATTLE FOR AMERICA 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election (Viking, $29.95)
Pulitzer Prize winner Haynes Johnson and Washington Post lead political writer Dan Balz followed the campaign from the candidates' first forays into Iowa and New Hampshire to Obama's victory celebration. Please sign up in advance for this FREE event by calling the Village Center at 301-656-2797.

Saturday, November 7, 3:30 p.m. 

Washington Convention Center
801 Mount Vernon Place, Mezzanine
Curator's Talk with MADELEINE ALBRIGHT
READ MY PINS: Stories from a Diplomat's Jewel Box (HarperCollins, $40)
Diplomatic and personal history comes to life through the brooches prominently worn by Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. David Revere McFadden, chief curator of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, which hosted the first major exhibition of her brooches, will have a conversation with the Secretary about how her accessories signaled her moods and views on the diplomatic situation at hand. Download a coupon here for $12 admission to the Washington Craft Show.

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Our top twelve hardcover FICTION and NON-FICTION bestsellers are always 20% off for P&P members. For our complete lists, click on the titles below.

#1 FICTION:  WOLF HALL by Hilary Mantel
#1 NONFICTION: MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS by Michael Chabon

 

 

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NEW IN PAPERBACK

Click FICTION or NON-FICTION  to browse a complete list of recent paperback releases.

CHICAGO by Alaa Al-Aswany
I AM AMERICA (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert

 

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BOOK OF THE WEEK
(20% off through 10/28)

While fishing in a magic pond in the Bluebell Wood, two sisters find THE BOG BABY (Schwartz & Wade, $16.99), a little blue creature the size of a frog.  They fish him out, put him in a jam jar, and secretly keep him in the shed as a pampered pet.  And yet, despite all their  love, the wild creature does not thrive.   Like the bog babies, this magical slice of childhood by author Jeanne Willis, and these beautiful illustrations by Gwen Millward, are a rare find.   Ages 4-8 - Dara La Porte

Stop by the store to see our wide selection of Halloween books.

Sunday, October 25, 1:30 p.m.
Nothing Happened!  Journaling about My Totally Exciting Life

Come join the Capital Letters Writing Center to strut your imagination, write about your life, and create journal entries that go above and beyond a list of what happened yesterday. We'll find ways to make the page itself part of your  journal and imagine what journals would look like if they came from fictional characters and creatures. Come ready to doodle, draw, write and create: because everyone does things worth writing in a journal. This free workshop is designed for students 10-14. Class size is limited to 15. Please RSVP to kira@capitolletters.org .

Lisa Chapin-Hobbes hosts story time for young children every Monday morning at 10:30 a.m.

25 Years of Children's Favorites
Winnowing down this list was a very difficult process.  Each of us in the department could name at
least 25 more beloved books that are not on this list. You can visit our display in the store or click here to browse our list online!

For upcoming events and more from the Children and Teens' Department, click here.

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The late Susan Sontag made her mark in several areas of cultural criticism, among them photography with her early book, On Photography. She returned to this subject late in her career with REGARDING THE PAIN OF OTHERS, a short and profound consideration of pictures that depict suffering. The immediate impetus for this book was the imagery from Abu Ghraib, and Sontag eloquently lays out the multi-layered meaning of those photos and videos, and puts them within the larger context of visual representations from wars, lynchings, and other atrocities. She goes on to consider more general questions of the aestheticization of suffering, desensitization and alienation, and the limits of sympathy. Available in paperback, $4.98.

When life suddenly changes, it’s impossible not to look back for the first signs you missed as they were happening. THE PERFECT SUMMER: England 1911, Just before the Storm, takes readers to the final years before World War I abruptly altered the fixed hierarchies and expectations Europe had lived by. Juliet Nicolson (of the dynasty including Vita Sackville-West, Harold, and Nigel Nicolson) recreates a golden season that began with the coronation of George V and all the attendant pomp and spectacle, and that ended with paralyzing strikes, food shortages, and the threat of famine. Unrest was in the air. Available in hardcover, $4.98.

For more recently acquired remainders, click here.

- Laurie Greer

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New pop & jazz: Lyle Lovett, Miguel Zenón, Twilight soundtrack, Ben Allison
New classical: Marc-André Hamelin, Tabea Zimmermann, Alarm Will Sound,
Joyce DiDonato, Dawn Upshaw

Click here for András’s reviews and Music News and to buy these albums.

 

P&P ENVIRONMENTAL BOAT TOUR

Saturday, October 24, 10-11:30 a.m.
Anacostia Riverkeeper, a local not for profit, non-governmental organization, will lead a boat tour of the Anacostia River for Politics & Prose customers on Saturday, October 24th, from 10 - 11:30 a.m.  This short river is highly polluted by DC and Maryland, but its great potential is increasingly drawing attention, even as climate change places it under added strains.  The tour will embark at the Riverkeeper’s dock in southeast DC, and navigate by Kingman Island to Kenilworth, where one of the Riverkeeper’s principal research projects is centered.  You will increase your awareness of the environmental issues that affect the river and its watershed and their impact on our own health and economy.  The Anacostia Riverkeeper is one of several NGOs working through advocacy, research, youth and volunteer projects to restore the river to health, engaging DC and Maryland governments in this pursuit.  Click here for more information about this organization - www.anacostiariverkeeper.org 

Car pools will depart from Politics & Prose at 9:30 a.m.  Space is limited to 12 persons.  Teens and adults welcome!

Politics & Prose’s Climate Action Project is sponsoring this tour.  Please contact CAP member, Nina Dodge, ndodge53@gmail.com, with questions and RSVPs.