Alvah's Books

Roosevelt and the Jews: A Debate Rekindled

By Patricia Cohen
Published: April 30, 2009

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s legacy has been slid back under the microscope recently as his efforts to pull the country out of the Great Depression are scrutinized. Now a piece of his foreign policy is also being re-evaluated in a soon-to-be published book that upends a widely held view that he was indifferent to the fate of Europe’s Jews, and asserts that new evidence shows that the president pushed for an ambitious secret rescue plan before the war began.

To read the rest of the article, click on the headline

For some time now I’ve been obsessed to getting down to my svelte 125 pounds, and I figured that maybe I was missing something in the calories in/calories out equation. Reading positive reviews about Skinny Bitch  by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, I went ahead and downloaded it from Audible.com to my iPod and listened to it when I took my dogs out for their walk.

Did I find that secret to slimming down? No. In fact, I think I got about halfway through the book and gave up out of boredom. There’s not much I can recall except that the tone is snarky and the authors enjoy cussin’ like sailors.

Did I miss the point? No. I know it was a gimmick. But from someone who used to be very thin (and battled for most of her life to gain weight) and who wanted to lose the extra pounds, I really didn’t want to have these very unfunny women beat me up about my eating or exercise habits. I already do that to myself. I know I eat crap, I know that I sit in front of the computer too much and don’t move my ass as much as I should. I wanted some fun motivation to get me back on track and laugh my way back to slimming down.

Now the Skinny Bitch authors have written a book geared for men, Skinny Bastard. According to the New York Times the same “tough-love message of the original book will translate to men who want to lose weight and “get ripped.” and, “follows roughly the same outline as “Skinny Bitch,” with the language retooled to appeal to male psychology. Whereas the introduction to “Skinny Bitch” reads, “If you can’t take one more day of self-loathing, you’re ready to get skinny,” the men’s version does not assume low self-esteem: “Chances are, you haven’t done so badly, despite the few extra lbs you’re carting around. … But don’t kid yourself, pal: A hot-bodied man is a head-turner.”

I can’t predict how well this book will sit with men (or sell) but I went ahead and asked my husband for his opinion and he said, “If your choice is a lot of skinny bitches and bastards or pleasant fat people, I’ll take the latter.”

The first time I expressed interest in writing, my father presented me with his copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I still have that original 1959 first edition and it’s in remarkably good shape considering it has traveled from Europe to New York, California, and back to New York.

This little book has been invaluable and I always keep it near me. When I don’t want a long-drawn out explantion about style or grammar, I refer to it often.

For a little history about the book, Sam Roberts wrote a nice article in the New York Times.  Below are the first three paragraphs:

Photo from the New York Times

The New York Times
‘The Elements of Style’ Turns 50
By Sam Roberts

How does a professional writer discuss “The Elements of Style” without nervously looking over his shoulder and seeing Will Strunk and E. B. White (or thousands of readers of their book) second-guessing him? (Is “second-guessing” hyphenated or not? Is posing a question the same as using the passive voice?)

William Strunk Jr. wrote and self-published the famous “Little Book” as a professor of English. White, his student at Cornell in 1919 and later an author and essayist, first revised the text four decades later after returning it to prominence with an essay in The New Yorker.

In 1959 a New York Times book reviewer pronounced it “a splendid trophy for all who are interested in reading and writing.”

To read the rest of the article click on headline.

Public Provides Giggles; Bloggers Get the Book Deal

By Jenna Wortham

After Duncan Birmingham, a comedy screenwriter in Los Angeles, got one too many holiday cards featuring miserable-looking pets wearing fake reindeer antlers, he realized the photos were great material for a blog.

Mr. Birmingham started Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves in early January, uploaded the first entry and asked readers to contribute. Within days, visitors were supplying him with snapshots of bulldogs in bunny costumes and cats wearing wigs. The blogosphere noticed – and so did the publishing world. Within a week, he was contacted by editors and literary agents. By the second month, he said, he had sold a book based on the photos to Three Rivers Press, an imprint at Crown Publishing Group, for “enough money to buy a Lincoln Town Car” – with change left over.

To read the rest of the article, click the headline.

Last night I followed all the tweets on Twitter concerning this sales ranking controversy at Amazon.com. All I can say was that feathers were very ruffled. To learn more about what happened, below is the article from Publishers Weekly:

 Amazon Says Glitch to Blame for “New” Adult Policy

By Rachel Deahl & Jim Milliot — Publishers Weekly, 4/12/2009 5:49:00 PM

A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove “adult” titles from its sales rankings. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a “glitch” had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new policy regarding “adult” titles. As of Monday morning, a number of titles affected by the glitch were still without sales rankings. No one at Amazon was available this morning to discuss when the problem might be fixed or what caused the glitch. 

 To read more about the Amazon ranking debacle go to Publishers Weekly.

In the next few days I have to read and review a biography on Gabriel Garcia Marquez. While reading all my assorted news items, I came upon this piece of news from The Independent  concerning Marquez:

The Independent

Furious Garcia Marquez denies he will never write again

By Elizabeth Nash in Madrid

The venerable Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez has set pages fluttering in publishing circles by furiously denying reports that he’ll never write again.

“Not only is that not true, but what is true is that I do nothing else but write,” Garcia Marquez said at the weekend. The 82-year-old Colombian father of magical realism, who is probably the best known living author in the Spanish-speaking world, was pressed by the Bogota newspaper El Tiempo on whether it was true that he was to publish no more books. To read more of the article go to The Independent.

For a Brooklyn Tale, and Its Author, a Second Chance at a First Impression

By Eric Konigsberg

So woefully forgotten are L. J. Davis’s novels of Brooklyn that not even he has copies on hand in his apartment. Boxes of the unsold books, along with the rest of his collection 5,000 or so volumes by other authors, were relegated to storage two years ago, when Mr. Davis sold the Boerum Hill town house that had been his home since 1965 and moved into a postwar condominium around the corner.

To read the rest of the article go to The New York Times Book section.

Why am I so calm and stress-free? Because I read a lot. According to new research as reported in the UK’s The Telegraph, reading is the best way to relax and reduce stress, even better than killing myself on the treadmill. Below are the first two paragraphs of the piece: 

The Telegraph

Reading ‘can help reduce stress’

Reading is the best way to relax and even six minutes can be enough to reduce the stress levels by more than two thirds, according to new research. 

And it works better and faster than other methods to calm frazzled nerves such as listening to music, going for a walk or settling down with a cup of tea, research found.

To read the entire article, please go to The Telegraph.