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Weekly Words about BooksJuly 27, 2014
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Be the First to Check Out
These New Arrivals
Back Channel by Stephen L. Carter. Yale law professor Carter is best known for his writings on politics, history, and law, but he's also a more-than-capable fiction writer, as he showed with The Emperor of Ocean Park a decade ago. In Back Channel, he mixes fact and fiction to reimagine the  unfolding of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He puts the fate of the world on a young female African-American college student. It's October 1962. Kennedy and Khrushchev are in the midst of a military face-off that could lead to nuclear war, and both leaders are surrounded by advisers clamoring for war. The only way for them to negotiate safely is to open a "back channel" - a surreptitious path of communication hidden from their own people. They need a clandestine emissary nobody would ever suspect. Enter Cornell student Margo Jenson, who is recruited to go to Eastern Europe and become the unlikely go-between. Margo is inexperienced but resourceful, as she navigates roiling, warmonger-filled waters while fulfilling her harrowing mission. Lucky Us by Amy Bloom. The author of the acclaimed and award-winning Away and the short story collection Come To Me, among others, is a bookseller favorite. With her latest novel, Bloom delivers up an entertaining coming-of-age story wrapped in a cross-country romp.  Disappointed by their families, teenage half-sisters Iris and Eva journey through 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris is a talented small-town performer with stardom on her mind, and her ambitions lead the pair across America in a stolen station wagon, from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, and to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island. As they meet vivid characters and make friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine though a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and the ever-present World War II.
A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre. Kim Philby is perhaps the best-known real-life spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain's counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War - while he was secretly working for the enemy. And Macintyre is no stranger to the world of espionage; his Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies is a fascinating look at the key individuals behind the Double Cross system, which  specialized in turning German spies into double agents and tricked the Nazis into believing that the Allied attacks would come in Calais and Norway rather than Normandy.
Double Cross was a masterpiece of trickery and deception, but it may have met its match in Philby, who fooled and betrayed two close and powerful friends for 20 years. Nicholas Elliott was a fellow M16 officer and James Jesus Angleton was the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence; both became unwitting conduits of sensitive information that helped Philby sink almost every important Anglo-American spy operation for two decades, leading countless operatives to their doom. The story of Philby's deceit and eventual downfall reads like the great spy thriller it actually is.
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Colbert's Anti-Amazon Campaign Makes Debut Novel a Bestseller
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You may have heard about a significant and ongoing publishing fight between Amazon and New York publisher Hachette. Basically, Amazon wants a better deal than anyone else gets, and what they're demanding would be devastating for publishers and, ultimately, for many authors. Hachette has balked, so Amazon - in retaliation - jiggered with its web site to make it harder for customers to order Hachette titles. Among the publisher's titles that were affected were books written by Stephen Colbert, and he did not take kindly to it, lambasting Amazon on his Colbert Report. He also solicited a book recommendation from author Sherman Alexie, who touted a dystopian debut novel called  California, written by little-known author Edan Lepucki and also published by Hachette. Colbert took the further step of encouraging his viewers to buy the book online from Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, instead of from Amazon and subsequently set a goal of making the book a bestseller and having folks purchase California from anywhere but Amazon. Well, it worked. California debuted last week on the national Indie Bound and The New York Times bestseller lists - an extraordinary accomplishment for a debut novel with an initially modest print run and publicity budget. And in a piece of related news, a national survey of over 5,000 readers found that close to 40% were aware of the Amazon-Hachette conflict, and that about half of those people had cut back on their Amazon book purchases as a result. |
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WHERE TO FIND
AN INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE
Many of you already have a favorite local bookstore, but for those of you without such a relationship, this link will take you to a list of Northern California indie bookstores by region.
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A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ME
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My name is Hut Landon. I'm a former bookstore owner who now runs the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) in San Francisco.
My goal with this newsletter is to keep readers up to date about new books hitting the shelves, share what booksellers are recommending in their stores, and pass on occasional news about the book world.
I'm not into long, wordy reviews or literary criticism; I'd like HUT'S PLACE to be a quick, fun read for book buyers. If you have any friends who you think might like receiving this column each week, simply click on "Forward this email" below and enter their email address. There is also a box in which to add a short message.
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