Book News
Madoff books.
Could you call it a celebrity book? Only of a very unusual kind. Recently former Nasdaq Stock Market chairman Bernard Madoff was arrested and charged with securities fraud, but already the book proposals are flying.
HarperCollins says that in 2010 it will release an investigative book by TV journalist Andrew Kirtzman. At the same time, Random House says it will publish a Madoff book by print journalist Richard Behar in 2010.
Behar is a particularly strong candidate to write such a book. He is an investigative reporter whose work has won the Daniel Pearl, Loeb, Polk and National Magazine awards, among others. In 2005 he launched Project Klebnikov, a media alliance focused on investigating the Moscow murder of Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov.
“This is a story that isn’t going away,” Claire Wachtel, an executive editor at the Harper imprint who acquired Kirtzman’s book told The Wall Street Journal. “It’s the human element that makes it so interesting.”
First Lines
Lost River, by David Fulmer
No one called him Buddy. No one called him Kid. No one called him King. They called him Charles, if they spoke to him at all. That was his given name: Charles Jr. When the attendants in their frocks and the doctors in their white coats spoke his name, that’s what they used.
Though more often than not, he didn’t hear, his mind resting in a blank and serene place. Except for thos rare moments when lightning would flash, the thunder rumbled, and a blue luminance glowed along the horizon of his memory. Then the pictures would come to life: a curve of brass glimmering off hot lights, the wild and hungry faces, then bodies of midnight black, fair brown, and light coffee writhing in electric animation, as others stretched all languid on divans draped with shawls embroidered with flowers and vines and exotic birds. He could the crazy dervish dance of the horns, the treble slap of the guitar, the hollow thump of a bass fiddle, percussion knocking and jangling along, and behind it all, the shouts of all the drunken dancers.
Go, Kid, go!
Best sellers from the independents
Fiction
1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Marry Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
2. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski
3. A Mercy, by Toni Morrison
4. The Private Patient, by P.D. James
5. The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb
Nonfiction
1. Dewey, The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, by Vicki Myron
2. Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
3. American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, by Jon Meacham
4. Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas L. Friedman
5. The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch
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