Shelf Awareness for Tuesday, November 8, 2005


Quarry Books: Yes, Boys Can!: Inspiring Stories of Men Who Changed the World - He Can H.E.A.L. by Richard V Reeves and Jonathan Juravich, illustrated by Chris King

Simon & Schuster: Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: Nightweaver by RM Gray

G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers: The Meadowbrook Murders by Jessica Goodman

Overlook Press: Hotel Lucky Seven (Assassins) by Kotaro Isaka, translated by Brian Bergstrom

Quotation of the Day

Manga Ever More Mainstream

"I know how popular manga and anime are among a young demographic. Go to any bookstore and there are kids swarming around the manga shelves. And by kids I mean everyone from high school into their 30s."--Martin Fischhoff, assistant managing editor at the Detroit News, one of several U.S. newspapers that will begin running manga comics in January, quoted in an AP story.

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News

Abebooks.com Finds and Buys BookFinder.com

Just when you thought there couldn't be another story about online retailing and book digitization:

Abebooks.com, the company with headquarters in Victoria, B.C., Canada, that matches buyers and sellers of new, used, collectible and antiquarian books and has sites serving North America, Germany, France, Spain and the U.K., has bought BookFinder.com.

BookFinder, Berkeley, Calif., a major book price comparison company, was founded by Anirvan Chatterjee and Charlie Hsu, longtime friends and University of California graduates. (The company began as a class project for Chatterjee at Berkeley.) The service allows searches of more than 100 million titles and receives a commission on purchases that result from a buyer being forwarded to a bookseller's Web site. BookFinder works with thousands of booksellers, including A1Books, Abebooks, Alibris, Amazon, B&N.com, Biblio.com, Buy.com, Chapters.indigo.ca, Overstock.com and Powells.com.

The purchase "strengthens our position in North America," Boris Wertz, COO of Abebooks.com, told Shelf Awareness. Still, the two companies will operate separately, and a certain friendly competitiveness will continue. "They compete with us for buyers to a certain extent, and they will continue to work with our competitors," Wertz explained. He stressed that the two companies have collaborated since 1996, when coincidentally they were both founded.

Abebooks sees major opportunities for BookFinder to grow, both in expanding its coverage in North America and going international, much in the way Abebooks expanded from its base in collectible books to used and then to new and textbooks. (BookFinder has a tiny staff.) By expanding its coverage of new books and textbooks, BookFinder can easily enter "new subsegments of the market," Wertz noted.

Wertz emphasized that Europe, which is two or three years behind North America in Internet development and the online book market, has very few online book comparison shopping services, and Abebooks.com has a platform for BookFinder to expand there. "We have the setup and technology in Europe," Wertz said.

In Germany and France, price comparison services for new books make little sense because of net book price agreements. But other than a "smaller service in Germany," there is almost no competition for price comparisons for used and collectible books. And in other countries that have no restrictions on new book prices, the field is wide open. "We think we can grow BookFinder quite significantly there," Wertz added.

GLOW: Berkley Books: The Seven O'Clock Club by Amelia Ireland


Notes: Authors' New IDs; Ariel Tribute

In a front-page feature, the Wall Street Journal examines one of many odd results of today's numbers-driven book world: authors with poor sales records who adopt pen names, sometimes of the opposite sex, to try to restart their careers. Pity the author who makes it under a pseudonym, like William P. Kennedy, who, as Diana Diamond, has become the "queen" of the relational thriller. Noting that his literary career under his own name appears dead, he told the paper, "If I was a sensitive person, I'd be suicidal."

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This coming Friday evening, authors, customers and others are staging a "Last Word" party to celebrate Dean and Susan Avery and mourn the closing of their bookstore, Ariel Booksellers, New Paltz, N.Y., at the end of the month. The Woodstock Times talks with party organizers and the Averys.

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John Fowles, the author of such intriguing postmodern novels as The Collector, The Magus, Daniel Martin, The French Lieutenant's Woman and A Maggot, died on Saturday in England. He was 79.

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The Allentown Morning Call profiles 58-year-old Hackman's Bible Book Store in Allentown, Pa., owned by Joe and Marcia Hackman (he's the son of the founders). The 20,000-sq.-ft. store aims to boost sales on its Web site and increase its support of community religious activity. It's also found a strong market among Latinos but is having some trouble spreading the word among 20-to-35-year-olds.

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In a case of a superstore being all things to at least one person, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune reports on a Salem, N.H., divorce lawyer who may be disbarred. Among her indiscretions, as it were: she claimed to have offices but in fact worked out of her home and met with clients at a Barnes & Noble and a Denny's.

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The New York Times investigates Hard Case Crime series, the collaboration between Winterfall and Dorchester Publishing, whose noir cover was happily blown by the publication of Stephen King's The Colorado Kid. Titles are available in a range of stores as well as via subscription.

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Joyce Carol Oates, "grande dame de la littérature américaine" as one account put it, has won the Prix Femina in the foreign category for The Falls.

Media and Movies

Movie Tie-ins: Bee Season, Zathura, Pride and Prejudice

Based on Myla Golberg's bestselling novel (Anchor, $13, 0385498802), Bee Season was adapted by Scott McGehee and Davide Siegal and stars Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche. In the tale, a nine-year-old girl's family begins to fall apart when she wins the school spelling bee and reveals a latent genius for words. The buzz about Bee Season begins November 11.

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Zathura's opening move takes place on November 11. Based on the Chris van Allsburg title (Houghton Mifflin, $18, 0618253963) and directed by Jon Favreau, the movie centers on two boys whose house is hurtled through space. The tie-in titles include Zathura: The Movie Deluxe Storybook by David Seidman (Houghton Mifflin, $9.99, 061860578) and Zathura: The Movie Junior Novel by Ellen Weiss (Houghton Mifflin, $4.99, 0618605797).

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Another film version of Pride and Prejudice opens on Friday.  Directed by Joe Wright and with a screenplay by Deborah Moggach, the movie based on one of the best novels ever written stars Keira Knightley (Pirates of the Caribbean, Domino and Bend It Like Beckham) as Elizabeth Bennet and Donald Sutherland as her father.

Media Heat: Jeff Foxworthy

This morning Imus in the Morning engages in witty repartee with Jeff Foxworthy, the comedian whose new book is Jeff Foxworthy's Redneck Dictionary: Words You Thought You Knew the Meaning Of (Villard, $16.95, 1400064651).

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Today Janis Karpinski, commanding general of the Abu Ghraib prison when Americans tortured some prisoners and author of One Woman's Army (Miramax, $24.95, 1401352472) reports for publicity duty on WAMU's Diane Rehm Show.

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Today on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show:

  • Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, creators of Man Eating Bugs and Material World, serve Hungry Planet: What the World Eats (Ten Speed, $40, 1580086810), a photographic chronicle of what 30 families around the world ate during one week.
  • Moises Naim, author of Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy (Doubleday, $26, 0385513925).
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Tonight the Tonight Show with Jay Leno is graced by the presence of Martha Stewart, whose latest books are The Martha Rules: 10 Essentials for Achieving Success as You Start, Grow, or Manage a Business (Rodale, $24.95, 1594864705) and Martha Stewart Baking Handbook (Clarkson Potter, $40, 0307236722).
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Tonight the Daily Show with Jon Stewart listens to Senator John McCain, whose new book is Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember (Random House, $23.95, 1400064120).


Books & Authors

Mandahla: A Left Hand Turn Reviewed

A Left-Hand Turn Around the World--and a Chat with the Author
 
Shelf Awareness caught up with author David Wolman near the beginning of his counter-clockwise book tour, while he still had promotional pens to hand out--not strictly left-hand pens but guaranteed not to smudge. As a leftie and a journalist with a penchant for travel and science, he is well-equipped to deal with the question he posed: "If left-handed were a religion, where would Mecca be?" His search for answers about how left-handers might differ mentally, physically and spiritually from the right-handed majority resulted in A Left-Hand Turn Around the World (Da Capo Press, $23.95, 0306814153, November). Accessible and amusing, it has a sufficient amount of science to interest the technically-inclined but is lucid enough for everyone to grasp the rudimentary concepts.
 
He pursues one theory and then another about the development of handedness, as does the reader, sleuthing beside the author. Along the way, he clears up misconceptions, particularly the popular left brain-right brain creativity cliché. "It's nice to bust some myths," he said before his bookstore reading. "Drawing with your non-dominant hand has its benefits, but as for unlocking your creative self--maybe not."
 
One researcher says that most of us are mixed-handed, that is, we perform nearly all functions bimanually, where the two hands work together in different ways. The idea is that neither hand is the weaker or lesser, but specialized for different functions and complementary things. More to the point for some of us, in baseball natural lefties have statistically more home runs but also more strike-outs and less control, because the dominant hand is in the power grip position, not the precision position.
 
But how is handedness determined? Capacity for speech plays an integral part in the discussion. It seems to boil down to a chicken and egg thing: did anatomical changes to hands spur the asymmetrical evolution of our brains or is right-handedness a by-product of the evolution of language-capable brains? As for the mechanics of the process, Wolman clearly explains the research of Nobutaka Hirokawa, at Tokyo University School of Medicine : "Handedness may stem from the string of developmental instructions that make us asymmetrical beings in the first place." In looking at protein's role in the transport of nutrient and information within nerve cells, he discovered monocilia, tiny, hair-like structures that spin from right to left. The theory is they cause the flow of contents to one side of the protein, causing lopsidedness.
 
Too much science for you?  Wolman said, "I wanted to take the material seriously, but not take myself too seriously." So he goes to what could be considered the other end of the continuum: palmistry and handwriting analysis. In Quebec, he takes a 30-hour course in Vedic Palmistry. After his first session, he begins calculating how long it would take to walk the eight miles back to the local town in order to leave or at least find a bar. Driven back by aggressive black flies when he attempts the walk, he hunkers down and tries to get with the program. Initially skeptical, he ends up more so at the end, feeling used by plugs for books, healing gemstones and tri-metal bracelets. In Virginia, he attends a weekend seminar put on by Handwriting University, whose owner analyzed the writing on the envelope used to deliver anthrax to Senators Daschle and Leahy in 2001. (Whatever happened to that investigation?) He was promised that with Handwriting U training, he'd be able to understand Michael Jackson's personality. Instead of insight into handedness on writing and personality, he unhappily finds a mindset "reminiscent of zealots the world over . . . both annoying and creepy."
 
For even more hands-on research, Wolman visits a Scottish castle with a counterclockwise left-handed staircase. The staircase enabled the left-handed owner to wield his sword in an open passage against an ascending assailant. And in the funniest chapter, "Naisu Boru," he enters a golf tournament in Karuizawa, Japan, put on by WALG, the World Association of Left Handed Golfers. Although he's played only four games of golf in his life, he's game, although he hasn't got game. After his first exhilarating and successful drive, things fall quickly apart, confirming the opinion of a Nike marketing whiz he called to ask about sponsorship: "In light of the impossibility of legitimate skill development, I was determined to mask my ineptitude by at least looking the part. Although the phone call . . . ended abruptly, the woman said something to the effect of: 'So let me get this straight. You've barely ever played golf, which means you're likely to play badly, maybe even come in last. Why would we want you wearing Nike?' " A missed opportunity for Nike, since David Wolman is funny, smart, gracious and photogenic.
 
A quote from one of the scientists mentioned, Chris McManus, sums up another aspect of A Left-Hand Turn Around the World--the cultural facets of left-handedness: "Wherever one looks, on any continent, in any historical period or in any culture, right and left have their symbolic associations and always it is right that is good and left that is bad." The author discusses the etymological roots of left, which are "just about as depressing as it gets. The Anglo-Saxon lyft means weak or broken . . . most definitions of left reduce to an image of doubtful sincerity and clumsiness", and let's not forget the worse sinister. But he is quick to say, with a smile, "I'm not here to push a thesis that we are a persecuted people." He would like to make a case for left-handers being sexier though, and said, with a laugh, "I'd love my wife a little more if she were left-handed."--Marilyn Dahl
 
For more information on both the book and David Wolman's book tour, visit, with a right click, his Web site.

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