A small bench by the road

In a 1989 interview the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, speaking of the lack of any commemoration of the lives of slaves, said, "There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300-foot tower, there's no small bench by the road."

There is now.

This past weekend, on Sullivan's Island off the coast of South Carolina, Ms Morrison, along with a number of other people, celebrated the dedication of a simple bench looking out on the intracoastal waterway, placed there with a plaque commemorating those enslaved Africans -- about 40% of the total -- who entered this country through Sullivan's Island, as well as those who died during the Middle Passage. The bench was placed there through a joint effort of the Toni Morrison Society and the National Park Service. It's the first in a projected total of ten benches the society hopes to locate in various parts of the country that are significant either because of their place in African-American history or because of their importance in Toni Morrison's books.

As Toni Morrison commented last Saturday, "...the bench is welcoming, open, you can be illiterate and sit on the bench. You can be wandering, or on a search."

More on this story can be found here.

The Man Booker Longlist

This year, the "Booker Dozen" is actually a baker's dozen. The "longlist" -- or semifinalists -- for the 2008 Man Booker prize was announced yesterday and it is comprised of thirteen books. The Man Booker is awarded every year in England to a book judged to be the best original full-length novel written in English by a citizen of either the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. In recent years, this prize has become increasingly important in the US, with the winner and finalists drawing increasing prominence -- and sales -- because of that status.

This year's longlist is as follows:

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
Girl in a Blue Dress, by Gaynor Arnold
The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry
From A to X, by John Berger
The Lost Dog, by Michelle de Kretser
Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs, by Linda Grant
A Case of Exploding Mangoes, by Mohammed Hanif
The Northern Clemency, by Philip Hensher
Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill
The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie
Child 44, by Tim Rob Smith
A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz

Of these books, eight are currently available in this country. Four more -- Girl in a Blue Dress, From A to X, Sea of Poppies, and The Northern Clemency -- are due to be published over the next several months. The Clothes on Their Backs does not appear to be available in the US at this time.

The Man Booker shortlist -- about five finalists -- will be announced in September, and the winner in October. More information can be found at the award's website.

The Man Who "Saved" Baseball

I first became familiar with Jerome Holtzman as a kid reading "The Sporting News" (actually, I'm still a kid reading "The Sporting News" -- just a slightly older one). Back then, it was a golden age for baseball writers with Koppett in New York, Murray in Los Angeles, Bisher in Atlanta (he's still active), and Holtzman in Chicago. In addition to their hometown papers, they all wrote for "The Sporting News" -- Holtzman's column appeared in more than 1000 consecutive issues.

Holtzman, however, had a couple of claims to fame the others couldn't match. First, he wrote the entry on baseball for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Second, he invented a statistic which was eventually accepted as official by Major League Baseball. He called it the "save," and it's used to measure the effectiveness of relief pitchers who manage to hold onto their team's lead when they enter late in the game. (Don't ask me to explain it -- if you really want the details you can find them here.) He also wrote, No Cheering in the Press Box, considered one of the best ever books about being a baseball writer (unfortunately, it's presently out of print).

Holtzman died last week at the age of 82. The "New York Times" obituary is here, and it includes a wonderful photograph of a cigar-chomping Holtzman sitting in the Chicago Cubs dugout with Don Zimmer, one of baseball's ultimate "lifers."

To the Prime Minister, with best wishes, Yann

Last week, a customer in the store bought a copy of The Life of Pi, the hugely popular novel by the Canadian writer Yann Martel, and, in the process told me a delightful story which led to a neat website that I have permanently added to the "Links" section of this blog.

In March of last year, Yann Martel was one of fifty outstanding figures in the arts who attended a session of the Canadian Parliament which was to include a ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Canadian Council of the Arts. Since this ceremony was to take place immediately following "Question Time," the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, was present.

As it turned out, the "ceremony" was perfunctory to the point of being almost non-existent: a few remarks by a cabinet official, a smattering of applause, and that was it. But what Martel particularly noticed was that the Prime Minister paid no attention whatsoever to the proceedings, and spent the entire time with his head down, shuffling papers.

This led Martel to the conclusion that the Prime Minister needed more quiet time, more stillness in his life. And to help out in this regard, Martel resolved to mail the Prime Minister a book once every two weeks for as long as he was in office, along with a letter explaining the choice of the book.

And that's what he's done. If you go to the website, What Is Stephen Harper Reading, you will find a copy of each letter that Martel has sent the Prime Minister -- 37 so far -- a picture of the book that was sent and a note as to whether Martel has received any response. Actually, he has to date received just one -- a note from one of Harper's assistants acknowledging the very first book.

Martel's letters are amazing, and I will end with a quote from one of them:

"Cats are said to have nine lives. What is that compared to the girl, boy, man, woman who reads books. A book read is a life added to one's own. So it only takes nine books to make cats look at you with envy."

"We can't change the cards we're dealt, just how we play the hand."

The above quote is from The Last Lecture, a bestselling book by computer scientist Randy Pausch, who died Friday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 47 years old.

Pausch's book was based on a lecture he gave last September at Carnegie Mellon University -- where he was a professor -- shortly after he learned of his incurable illness. The video of his inspirational and defiantly humorous speech became an internet sensation, and he was featured in a "Wall Street Journal" article, and in "Time" magazine, which named him one of its 100 most influential people. In The Last Lecture, Pausch wrote about the events leading up to the speech and the influences behind it. Almost overnight, the book became a number-one national bestseller.

An obituary of Randy Pausch, along with links to audio and video of his speech, can be found here.

What they're reading in Iran

Straight from the "Tehran Times" comes an interesting (if occasionally ungrammatical) article about what books are selling in Iran. And no, they don't mention Uranium Enrichment for Dummies. Some things are evidently constants everywhere -- Harry Potter, for example. ("The youth are more interested in imaginative books," according to one bookseller.) Not surprisingly, Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns) is popular. Of course the majority of books are of specific Iranian interest, especially history and literature. But a few classic titles familiar to Western readers are mentioned, such as Gulliver's Travels, and A Hundred Years of Solitude. And the Islamic Republic isn't immune to self-help mania: popular writers in that area include Rhonda Byrne (The Secret), and, oddly enough, Anthony Robbins (does Iranian TV show American infomercials?).

As for those of us in the business, perhaps we can take comfort that some complaints are universal: according to the article, one bookstore owner "concluded that bookselling is a cultural activity that has its own problems and also that it doesn't provide sufficient income."

More can be found here.

Anthony Robbins???

Friday, 7/25 at Accent on Books: William J Everett

William Johnson Everett has lived and taught on four different continents over the past thirty years. He thus has developed an appreciation for the connections between cultures, and how those connections play out in history. His new novel, Red Clay, Blood River, deals with two simultaneous but seemingly disparate nineteenth-century events: the Cherokee "Trail of Tears," and the South African "Great Trek"; events that yet raise similar issues regarding exploitation and exile.

William Everett will be at Accent on Books this coming Friday starting at 6:00 PM. Join us as he talks about his life, his writing, and his sense of history.

More on the author and his work can be found here. Our store's event page is here.