Omnivoracious: Media Monday - Here's to a New Year

Happy New Year! 2011 in books was really special. We can only hope to see the same kind of breadth and quality this year. With a whole new year of books ahead of us, let's get started....

New York Times

In honor of the political season, the Sunday Book Review has a section called "Bipolar America," which juxtaposes books about leftward leaning politics with those from the right. One of the books reviewed is Thomas Frank's Pity the Billionaire. The Times says, "This book is Frank’s interpretation of developments since What’s the Matter With Kansas? was published eight years ago. Frank’s thesis here is basically that the thesis of the old book has been confirmed." Sounds like, if you liked the first book, you'll like this one, too.

Balancing out the Frank book are two books about the Tea Party (both published by the Oxford University Press). The books are Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party by Geoffrey Kabaservice and The Tea Party and the Remaking of the Republican Conservative by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson. The books tie the Tea Party back to 1964's Goldwater moment: "Today, nearly all political centrists are Democrats. And with the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans are experiencing another 1964 moment..." the book states. "But there are important differences between the two movements. For one, the Tea Party, unlike the Goldwater insurgency, has managed to win elections and thereby obtain some power at the national and state level. For another, the Tea Partiers’ anti-government ideology is tempered by quiet support for Social Security and Medicare. That’s because the activists themselves tend to be middle-aged or older."

Los Angeles Times

There's a new book about Queen Elizabeth, titled Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch by Sally Bedell Smith, which as titles go, doesn't break a lot of new ground. But does the book? According to the LA Times, the key to this book's success is the access-- "Here is where Smith breaks new ground, in the nature of the cooperation she got. She interviewed by her reckoning more than 200 people, 40 of whom wished to be anonymous. That's usually a red flag, but in Smith's case, the other 160 include the queen's relatives and friends. That suggests that some of the nameless 40 may be even closer to the action. Taken in sum, along with the assistance the author got from what she calls the "staff at Buckingham Palace" (Smith must mean high-ranking figures in the royal household; in palace speak, the staff are the servants, a word the queen dislikes), it suggests that the "ring of silence" around the queen, as one chapter describes it, is thinking "legacy" on behalf of a queen who is symbolically regal but personally modest, a woman concerned about the image of her thousand-year-old inheritance but who refuses to so much as pluck her eyebrows.

There's also a story on a very expensive book.

Washington Post

The Washington Post has a review of Amazon's spotlight pick for January. The book is The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, and reviewer David Ignatius calls it "A great novel can take implausible fact and turn it into entirely believable fiction. That’s the genius of The Orphan Master’s Son. Adam Johnson has taken the papier-mache creation that is North Korea and turned it into a real and riveting place that readers will find unforgettable." He continues, and we agree, that "This is a novel worth getting excited about, one which more than delivers on its pre-publication buzz."

Reviewer Reeve Lindbergh writes, "Roger Rosenblatt has written two books about grief since the sudden death of his 38-year-old daughter, Amy Solomon, due to an undetected heart condition." She continues, "Kayak Morning is a very different book. It was written more than two years after the catastrophic emergency of Amy’s death, which required the Rosenblatts’ constant shared attention to her young family. This account describes the author in solitude, in his kayak in the mornings. He is heavily burdened by the continuing pain of his daughter’s death, and the restless wandering of his thoughts as he paddles makes him seem at times distracted, at times anguished, at times enraged. The words are set down with a spare clarity that has no sentimentality to it but is nonetheless heartbreaking."

National Public Radio

NPR has a nice story about ebook author to publishing phenom Amanda Hocking that says in part, "She wrote and rewrote, edited and re-edited, but still no one was interested in publishing her work. On a whim, she decided to self-publish a few of her books online for anyone to download. She waited. Some of her books began selling. She'd sell one or two books a day, and that went on for a while. Then, in June, it exploded. Bloggers began asking for interviews. Reviews began to appear on Amazon.com. 'I think I sold, like, 6,000 books that month or something,' she says. 'It was a pretty dramatic jump.' By August, she was making about $9,000 a month. The year before, she'd made less than $18,000 for the entire year. 'It's still totally unreal when I think about it,' she says. 'It feels so weird to be able to just kind of buy things when I want them or need them.' Like a life-size replica of Han Solo encased in carbonite. It cost $7,000 and sits in her "movie room" — otherwise known as the basement."