Notes: Friedman BEA Keynote Speaker; Karibu Update
Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist and author of The World Is Flat, From Beirut to Jerusalem and other titles, will be the conference keynote speaker at BookExpo America on Friday, May 30, in Los Angeles, Calif. When he begins speaking at 11 a.m., all other convention programming except for the exhibit hall will close.
Friedman will focus on the topic of his next book, Green Is the New Red, White and Blue, which FSG is publishing on August 19, in which he proposes a national strategy he calls Geo-Greenism to address global warming and make the U.S. "healthier, more innovative, more productive and more secure."
In a statement, Lance Fensterman, v-p and event director for BEA, said that Friedman's "message not only dovetails nicely with our own programming, but it promises to be a definitive 'call to arms' for how we manage our environment in the future. His appearance certainly provides depth and substance for discussion at BEA."
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More on the imminent closing of Karibu Books, noted here yesterday:
Yesterday afternoon on the Kojo Nnamdi Show on WAMU, the NPR station in Washington, D.C., Brother Simba Sana, co-owner of Karibu, said that the company's stores were doing well and that the cause of their closing is a "destructive" dissolution of its partnership.
Incidentally Shelf Awareness's very own John Mutter was also on the show.
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Agence France-Presse (via today's New York Times) reported that J. K. Rowling "blocked the Finnish publication of her latest Harry Potter novel on paper from Finland because it lacked the ecologically friendly certification she favors."
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Yesterday we missed several Oscar nominations of movies based on books, including strangely one of our favorites:
Persepolis, based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, was nominated for best animated film.
Also Beaufort, based on the book by Ron Leshem, translated by Evan Fallenberg (Delacorte, $24, 9780553806823/0553806823), was nominated for best foreign language film.
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In an article on the "shop local" focus for businesses in the Vashon, Wash., area, Jenny Wilke, the new owner of Books by the Way, told the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber that "she met all the sales benchmarks the business’ previous owner had set out for November and December."
"It was my first time, and I thought sales went really well," she said. "We’re very thankful for all the people that bought locally."
Karen Barringer, co-owner of Vashon Bookshop, said her bookstore "had a phenomenal year; it was the best year we’ve ever had. It was exhausting and it was wonderful. This community is so supportive of its book store."
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Salander-O'Reilly Galleries plans to sell its collection of 35,000 art books and catalogs. The New York art dealer filed for bankruptcy protection last November, according to Bloomberg.com, which added that "Joseph Sarachek, the gallery's court-approved chief restructuring officer, said proprietor Lawrence Salander spent more than $4 million amassing the collection."
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With more women in the comics industry, "kick-ass heroines are taking over," according to the Guardian, and comics conventions are one of the venues where the change is apparent.
"It used to be that there might be girls tagging along with their boyfriends or fathers, pretty miserable," said comics writer Gail Simone. Now "they are actively there with their girlfriends, or they've dragged their boyfriend along. They really want to know how to get into the industry, how to be a writer, or an artist. Or you find out that they're already writing books about women and comics, or writing about the subject online. It's amazing!"
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Passionate handselling and insightful blogging are now a popular combination for indie booksellers, and newly published titles aren't the only ones being showcased online. Pamela Grath of Dog Ears Books, Northport, Mich., has just written a two-part post at her Books in Northport blog about Ulrich Straus's The Anguish of Surrender: Japanese POWs of World War II (University of Washington Press, $24.95, 9780295985084/0295985089), first published in 2004.
"Straus is a friend and neighbor here in northern Michigan," Grath explained. "With torture of prisoners now being debated (rather than rejected) by people in our government, Straus's book is taking on new life, as more and more diplomatic and military personnel find in it a case to be made against torture. This makes it an important and relevant book for our times, deserving of the highest visibility."
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Before her recent reading at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Wash., Joanne Harris, touring for her first YA novel, Runemarks, chatted with Random House rep Deanna Meyerhoff, Park Place Books' Mary Harris and area school librarians.
Fans of two-time Newbery Medalist Lowry (Number the Stars; The Giver) will easily detect the fun she's having with this novel about "an old-fashioned type of family." With tongue planted firmly in cheek, her omniscient narrator sends up classic orphan tales such as Heidi and The Secret Garden, and makes a couple of references to one of Dickens' only non-orphan novels, A Christmas Carol (yet points out, "A boy named Tim is not an orphan but behaves like one"). Intermediaries beware: this may be a tricky one to booktalk or handsell. In the first two chapters, the four Willoughby children devise ways to get rid of the parents, even as the "impatient and irascible" father and "indolent and ill-tempered" mother ("Once she read a book but found it distasteful because it contained adjectives") dream up plans to dispense with their progeny. For their part, the quartet of Willoughby offspring also starts off rather unsympathetically; after someone leaves a baby on their doorstep (à la The Bobbsey Twins and Baby May), the children abandon it on the porch of the local millionaire, whose own small son was presumed dead in a train wreck in the Alps six years before. The plot purposefully follows a predictable trajectory, beginning with a kind nanny who redeems the children ("Not one bit like that fly-by-night [Mary Poppins] . . . It almost gives me diabetes just to think of her: all those disgusting spoonfuls of sugar!" says Nanny), and concluding with the parents meeting a tragic end (though not at the hands of their children). Laugh-out-loud scenes feature the 10-year-old twins, both named Barnaby, who must share a sweater because their mother will knit only one, and the children posing as a coat rack or sporting a lampshade (bearing this note, "The electricity in this house is defective and may electrocute you if you turn on a lamp") in order to scare off prospective homebuyers. The bonus: a closing glossary as witty as the text (e.g., "Tycoon means somebody who has amassed great wealth and power in business. Usually a tycoon is a man, for some reason. Maybe Oprah Winfrey is a tycooness"). Avid booklovers will most appreciate Lowry's handiwork, but reluctant readers may well be drawn in by this deliciously irreverent narrator.--