Scholastic has deleted material from its Web site that was intended to help teachers discuss the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11 and will have a new discussion guide "complete with background information" posted this morning, today's Wall Street Journal reported.
The miniseries, set to air on Sunday and Monday, has come under sharp
attack from Clinton Administration figures who say it falsely depicts
key events. In one example, the miniseries shows Samuel Berger, the
former national security advisor, hanging up on a CIA officer at a
critical time, something he says never happened. Former Secretary of
State Madeline Albright wrote a public letter criticizing her
portrayal, and former President Clinton's lawyers have written to ABC,
too.
The New York Times reported today that ABC plans to run the
series but is currently "reevaluating and in some cases re-editing
crucial scenes." ABC has defended the approach by saying The Path to 9/11 is a dramatization, not a documentary.
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Bookselling This Week
has a heartening story about the opening tomorrow of Bay Books in Bay St.
Louis, Miss., where many stores, including Bookends, were destroyed by
Hurricane Katrina. After Bookends owner Susan Daigre decided not to
rebuild (she has joined her husband's modular home business, which is in great demand at the moment), Kay Gough
decided to fill the void left by the lack of a bookstore.
Besides the usual stresses of opening a store, Gough is contending with
the reality that "everything takes longer than you would think it
should here. Nothing is simple because the infrastructure was so
destroyed."
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The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression has issued a
poster for Banned Books Week, Sept. 23-30, that incorporates
the FREADOM logo and depicts the Statue of Liberty reading a book.
Created by Roger Roth for The American Story: 100 True Tales from
American History, the poster can be downloaded free from the ABFFE Web site and printed as an 11" x 17" poster.
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The
Midwest Booksellers Association has launched Midwest Connections, a
marketing initiative for publishers and member stores to promote titles
and author in the Midwest. The association aims, as it put it, not "to
re-invent the wheel of marketing/promotion/publicity campaigns," but
instead "to build on its knowledge of member bookstores and its
relationships with publishers to help customize" marketing programs for
the region.
Booksellers will be able to participate per promotion at any of three
levels of intensity, depending on what works best for them depending on
the book and author involved. For example, to be classified as a "top
tier" store, which would allow for an author appearance, a store would
have to meet certain criteria, including doing a certain amount of
promotional effort for the book and author, submitting a proposal for
the author event, ordering books directly from the publisher and being
a Book Sense store that reports to the Heartland bestseller list.
Publishers will have three models to choose from: adult
fiction/nonfiction; cookbooks/how-to; and children's/middle grade/YA.
Publishers will be asked, among other things, to suggest titles and
authors for the program, provide the author for the top tier stores,
help with coop, provide promotional materials to bookstores, and more.
The association has committed itself to administer and organize the programs and work with all participants, among other things.
The first two books and authors to be featured under the program:
- The Driftless Area: A Novel by Tom Drury (Atlantic Monthly Press), which was published in August. Events include a regional tour by the author, a Spoken Word radio taping, speaking at the MBA trade show book & author dinner, ads and listings on MBA Web sites, rebates and prizes for MBA stores that promote the book, etc.
- Truck: A Love Story by Michael Perry (HarperCollins), an October title that will be promoted in many similar ways.
For details, see MBA's Web site and its Midwest Connections brochure or contact Susan Walker, MBA executive director, at susan@midwestbooksellers.org or UMBAoffice@aol.com or phone 612-926- 5868.