Shelf Awareness for Monday, July 25, 2005


Del Rey Books: The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Dial Press: Whoever You Are, Honey by Olivia Gatwood

Pantheon Books: The Volcano Daughters by Gina María Balibrera

Peachtree Publishers: Leo and the Pink Marker by Mariyka Foster

Wednesday Books: Castle of the Cursed by Romina Garber

Overlook Press: How It Works Out by Myriam LaCroix

Charlesbridge Publishing: If Lin Can: How Jeremy Lin Inspired Asian Americans to Shoot for the Stars by Richard Ho, illustrated by Huynh Kim Liên and Phùng Nguyên Quang

Shadow Mountain: The Orchids of Ashthorne Hall (Proper Romance Victorian) by Rebecca Anderson

Quotation of the Day

A Young Bookseller's Dream--and Perspective

"I figured, I'm still 25. I still have plenty of years to work off the debt. I'd rather [do this now] than when I'm retired and have [to use] my life savings. . . . If it bombs, O.K., at least I tried it."--Rob Pondelli, who fulfilled a longtime dream and opened a bookstore, Stoneweaver Books, last week in Hampton, N.H., speaking with the Portsmouth Herald News.

HarperOne: Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World by Craig Foster


News

Bookworld Formalizes Ties to Spanish World

Bookworld Companies, the Sarasota, Fla., distributor with a warehouse in LaVergne, Tenn., has formed a Spanish sales division that will call on Spanish-language accounts. Many of Bookworld's more than 100 publishers have Spanish titles; the company also will represent to some of its Spanish-language accounts some of the lists of such major houses as HarperCollins, Holtzbrinck, Houghton Mifflin and Wiley. (As chairman Ron Smith put it to Shelf Awareness: "Essentially we can sell to anyone they are not reaching with their own--generally quite good--sales forces.") The new division is headed by Francisco Longoria, promoted from the company's direct sales operations; division headquarters is in Brownsville, Tex.

In a release, Bookworld called the Spanish market "a profoundly fast-growing segment of the book industry."

Park Street Press: An Autobiography of Trauma: A Healing Journey by Peter A Levine


Scan This: ISBN-13 Webinar Set for Thursday

Learn all about ISBN-13--and a new word at the same time.

This Thursday, July 28, from 2-3 p.m., the Book Industry Study Group holds its next Webinar--or Web seminar--on ISBN-13, called "Are you ready for ISBN-13?" During the live event, held via a conference call and simultaneous Web presentation, several experts on ISBN-13 explain what ISBN-13 is, why it's coming and how to prepare for it. A Q&A period is included. Participation costs $35 to cover costs. Several previous ISBN-13 Webinars reached more than 200 people around the world. For more information, go to BISG's Web site.

G.P. Putnam's Sons: Take Me Home by Melanie Sweeney


Books-a-Million Buyback Shrug Off

Books-a-Million's month-long modified Dutch auction tender offer, under which the company might have bought back as many as four million shares of its stock--about a quarter of shares outstanding--for as much as $10 each, ended last Thursday with only 57,223 shares on the block.

Some have speculated that this and other share repurchase programs, which usually boost a company's stock price, might be part of an effort for BAM to go private again.


Media and Movies

Media Heat: Sen. Santorum, Bill Maher

This morning the Early Show does a pas de deux with Robert James Waller, author of High Plains Tango (Crown, $24.95, 0307209946), which has some characters from his bestselling Bridges of Madison County.

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Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has begun a tour for his new book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good (ISI Books, $25, 1932236295), and appears today on the Today Show and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The book, which aims to show that government policy has undermined the family, suggests, among other things, that well-off and middle class families with children should reconsider whether both parents ought to work.

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Leonard Lopate talks today with Richard Ellis, author of Tiger Bone and Rhino Horn: The Destruction of Wildlife for Traditional Chinese Medicine (Island Press, $26.95, 1559635320).

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Ann Blackman, author of Wild Rose: Civil War Spy (Random House, $25.95, 1400061180), a biography of Confederate spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow, comes out of the cold today on the Diane Rehm Show.

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Tonight NPR airs the last of the three segments of National Geographic's production of Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (Norton, $24.95, 0393061310).

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On tomorrow's Today Show, Dr. Walter C. Willet cheerfully discusses his new book, Eat, Drink and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating (Free Press, $15, 0743266420). In the book, the good doctor argues that the USDA nutritional guidelines are all wrong--even dangerous.

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On tomorrow's Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Bill Maher kicks off publicity for his new book published tomorrow, New Rules: Polite Musings from a Timid Observer (Rodale, $24.95, 1594862958), a book-long riff on one of the most popular segments of his Real Time show on HBO. One example: "I don't need my cell phone to take pictures or access the Internet. I just need it to make a phone call. From everywhere! Not just the places it likes!" Maher reads the audio CD (Phoenix Audio, $27.95, 1597770299).

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Tomorrow Diane Rehm polls Ronald Walters, author of Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates, and American Presidential Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, $27.95, 0742538370), which traces the black vote in the U.S. since the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

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All this week, actors and actresses from Must Love Dogs, including John Cusak, Diane Lane and Dermot Mulroney, bark for attention on the morning and late night talk shows. The movie, based on Claire Cook's novel (Penguin, $13.95, 0451217217), opens on Friday.


Books & Authors

Tears for Willkie

Today's New York Times profiles Charles Peters, the Washington Monthly founder whose new book, Five Days in Philadelphia: The Amazing 'We Want Willkie!' Convention of the 1940 and How it Freed F.D.R. to Save the Western World (PublicAffairs, $26, 1586481126), posits that Wendell Willkie's "moderate candidacy [gave] Roosevelt the cover he [needed] to pass a draft, swap American destroyers for bases from a beleagured Britain and win re-election by five million votes."

Peters, who attended the convention as a boy, confesses a deep emotional connection to the story and says he cried twice at a recent reading at Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C. The passage that brought him to tears involved Willkie's discussion of an epitaph. "If I could choose between 'Here lies an unimportant president,' and 'Here lies one who contributed to saving freedom at a moment of great peril,' I would prefer the latter."

More...

BookPeople Top Shelf Contest: Vintage of Merit

Tonight BookPeople, Austin, Tex., which has events almost every day, will host one that is unusual even for it: Wine Tasting 101, which aims to help participants develop a vocabulary and ability to describe wine. It's not the delicious subject of the workshop that's unusual. Instead it's the fertile idea behind it--suitable for grafting to other books--that's exceptional.

Workshop leader Jane A. Nickles, a wine expert from the Texas Culinary Institute, proposed Wine Tasting 101 in response to the store's call for customers to come up with an event idea that would meet the challenge of the store's June Top Shelf pick, You Can Do It!: The Merit Badge Handbook for Grownup Girls, an April title by the late Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas (Chronicle, $24.95, 0811846350).

Grandcolas had started You Can Do It! in 2000, and after her death in the September 11 attacks, her sisters finished the book, intended to help women of all ages realize their dreams. The 60 "merit badge" possibilities include public speaking, travel--and learning to taste wine rather than just drink it.

Normally BookPeople has one Top Shelf pick a month--a book that is promoted throughout the store and on its Web site, in all departments, with displays and other promotions, with one staff member coordinating the effort. This time the store went a step farther and skipped a July pick to make an extra push for the You Can Do It workshop idea.

The store focused on proposals that would create some "buzz in the community," events coordinator Adam Rice told Shelf Awareness. "We wanted the person to be able to promote it to friends and family and to have a solid idea of what they wanted to present." In the case of Wine Tasting 101, the event may be a piece of cake, so to speak. As Rice put it: "Anytime wine's involved, a surprising amount of people show up."

The contest also inspired one BookPeople staffer so much that he, too, has put on a You Can Do It event: the Art of Media, basics of dealing with the media intended for activists (although all were welcome).

August Top Shelf Pick

BookPeople is now gearing up for its August Top Shelf Pick: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan (Miramax, $17.95, 0786856297), published a month ago, the first of a five-part series for young teens called Percy Jackson and the Olympians that retells tales from Greek mythology. Besides the usual Top Shelf promotions, the children's staff will wear Lightning Thief T-shirts, story times have been scheduled and several book groups may center on the book.

Riordan has written some mysteries (most recently Mission Road, Bantam, $24, 0553801856), lives in San Antonio, Tex., and "loves coming here," Rice said. "This is a completely different perspective and is quality stuff rivaling Harry Potter."

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