School starts in the next few weeks, and many newspapers are featuring stories about the high cost of textbooks. The Washington Post has a long roundup of the issues today.
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Bob Woodward's new book is called The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 and will be published by Simon & Schuster on Monday, September 8, following excerpts in the Washington Post Sunday edition the day before. The book will have a first printing of 900,000 and is Woodward's fourth on President Bush, following Bush at War, Plan of Attack and State of Denial.
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North Carolina Public Radio listeners were able to "Meet Nancy Olson" when Frank Stasio, host of WUNC's The State of Things, interviewed the owner of Quail Ridge Books & Music, Raleigh, N.C.
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"I was so excited because it was like no other bookstore, and it was in the middle of this neighborhood," 16-year-old Brittney Graham told the New Haven Register as she recalled her first visit last year to A Walk in Truth Christian Books and blackPRINT, New Haven, Conn. Now working as an intern at the bookshop, Graham added, "You can come in and learn things about yourself."
The Register also noted that owner Bea Dozier-Taylor "doesn't press her many visitors to buy, but she does encourage them to read. One patron sat quietly in a corner reading for hours. These quiet readers may not bring in the bucks, but they represent quiet social change that comes from the cultivation of the mind."
"Books are life sustaining, they take you past your limitations," said Dozier-Taylor, who is currently celebrating the bookshop's 20th anniversary.
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Calling it "a treasure of a bookstore" and "a testament to the steadfastness of the little guy in business," the Morning News profiled the Dickson Street Book Shop, Fayetteville, Ark., which Mayor Dan Coody called "unique in the world. Whenever I bring people here from around the country or around the world, I always bring them through the doors of the book shop to show them a slice of our community."
Although their retail space is small, co-owner Don Choffel said there are no plans to relocate: "Oh, we think of it but we can't bring ourselves to do it." His business partner, Charles O'Donnell, said, "We're glad to be where we are."
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"Customer Service Don'ts" could have been the subhead for a Seacoastonline.com article on the arrest of Walter Wakefield, owner of Antiquarian Bookstore, Portsmouth, N.H. The bookseller's rap sheet reads like a customer service nightmare, going well beyond a recent charge of check fraud to include earlier complaints of assaulting and insulting customers, as well as charging "a $5 fee to browse."
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Novelist Eli Gottlieb's list of "top 10 scenes from the battle of the sexes" for the Guardian included:
- The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber by Ernest Hemingway
- Herzog by Saul Bellow
- Sylvia by Leonard Michaels
- A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
- Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
- On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
- The Collector by John Fowles
- Miss Julie by August Strindberg
- Tickets, Please by D.H. Lawrence