In one of the strangest author-tour stories, Jerome R. Corsi, co-author of the Swift Boat classic Unfit for Command, is being deported from Kenya, where he had gone to promote his new book, The Obama Nation, the New York Times reported.
The book, critical of Senator Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan, is of questionable veracity. For whatever reason, Kenyan authorities plucked Corsi from a Nairobi hotel, where he was to hold a press conference, and said that he had misled them by "working" while in the country on a tourist visa.
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Should booksellers stock Sherry Jones' controversial novel The Jewel of Medina, just published here by Beaufort Books? In his Guardian book blog, Nic Bottomley, co-proprietor of Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, Bath, England, considered the options:
"It's
not for a bookseller to judge what his or her customers should read. If
a book hasn't been labelled so provocative or insulting as to be
illegal then why should a bookseller (let's not overstate our role--we
are a mere conduit between the writer/publisher and reader) take on the
guise of a moral or religious arbiter?
"I wonder if I would feel
so sure of my position if my shop was in an area with a significant
Muslim population (rather than Bath with its notable absence of ethnic
diversity). If it became clear that a large portion of my clientele
were going to be personally offended by a book, then perhaps I wouldn't
stock it. I certainly wouldn't be making up a Jewel of Medina window display.
"But
again this would be a commercial decision. I wouldn't be saying to my
customers 'you shouldn't read this,' I would be saying, 'I'm not going
to commit business suicide by promoting a book that offends a large
number of you.' I'd still take orders for it. And I'm sure plenty of
Muslim customers would buy the book to discover whether or not the book
does indeed cross the line in its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad."
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The radical and the bookseller. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's
Duane Dudek recalled meeting Bill Ayers, the activist who's been a
focus of intense media coverage recently, in 2003 at the Sundance Film
Festival, where he and wife, Bernadine Dohrn, were appearing on behalf
of the documentary, The Weather Underground.
During the
interview, Ayers "talked about an appearance in Milwaukee at a Schwartz
bookstore on Milwaukee's East Side to read from his book Fugitive Days,
about the pair's radical past and experiences underground. He said
despite a flap over his appearance there caused by 'right wing talk
radio,' and the protective presence of police at the scene, 'it was the
best reading ever. I think the audience was mostly Unitarians.' He said
that he 'came to like' bookstore owner David Schwartz, who died in
2004, 'very much. He's a gutsy guy. His whole thing is free speech.'"
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Has Margaret Drabble been asked to 'dumb down' her work to appeal to a larger readership? The Independent
reported that the novelist and biographer said, "I do feel publishers
are under very strong pressure to sell books rather than encourage
long-term readers. They have not asked me to dumb down . . . but I have
a feeling there's a problem. I write literary novels but I can sense my
publishers have difficulty in selling me as a genre . . . whether in
literary fiction, or women's fiction or shopping fiction. They don't
quite know whether I'm highbrow or literary."
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Kalen Landow has joined Rowman & Littlefield, where she is handling marketing and publicity for the group's trade imprints and working in the company's Boulder, Colo., office. Landow was formerly communications director at Chelsea Green and was long-time executive director of the Publishers Association of the West.
Soon she may be reached at klandow@rowman.com.