Omnivoracious

A Life on the Edge: An Interview with Jim Whittaker

Nobody has a better business card than Jim Whittaker.

The business side is low-key: A simple, stylized mountain logo, his name, and the words “Adventurer, Author, Speaker.” But turn it over and you'll find a picture of Whittaker--or "Big Jim," as he was known then and ever since--standing astride the summit of the tallest mountain on the planet, ice axe raised over his head in what must have been a heady mix of triumph, joy, and disbelief (relief would have to wait until after the descent). He was--is--the first American to accomplish the feat, and either the 10th or 11th overall, depending on how you're counting. Nawang Gombu, who took that picture, was Whittaker's climbing partner that day--May 1, 1963, 50 years ago tomorrow--and as Big Jim tells it, they chose to summit as a team, together.

Whittaker's and Gombu's achievement wasn't the only highlight of the expedition. Three weeks later, on another spine of Everest’s three-sided pyramid, Thomas Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld drove a new route up the perilous West Ridge, over the summit, and down Whittaker's South Col route, pausing overnight to bivouac at 28 thousand feet. It was the first traverse of an eight-thousand meter peak, but they had no choice—their route up provided no way back down. As an incredible feat of daring and perserverance, mountaineers consider it to be one of the greatest accomplishments in Everest (and climbing) history. Even a half-century later, it has been rarely repeated.

May 1, 1963, was a life-changing moment for Whittaker: He suddenly found himself befriended by the Kennedys--vacationing with the family and hosting them in his own home--and later ran RFK’s campaign in Washington State; he became CEO of REI (Recreational Equipment Incorporated--he was previously its first full-time employee); he led two expeditions to K2, the second of which put the first Americans atop the world’s second-highest peak; and he returned to Everest in 1990 to lead a team comprised of Cold War antagonists to the top. And those are just the highlights.

But the unassuming kid from West Seattle stayed the same. He simply feels amazed at his own fortune: lucky.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary, Mountaineers Books has published extraordinary new editions of Whittaker’s autobiography, A Life on the Edge, and Hornbein’s account of his and Unsoeld’s epic climb, Everest: The West Ridge.  Both are oversized hardcovers, filled with incredible images (many by Whittaker’s wife, Dianne Roberts, who photographed their K2 expeditions and has an amazing business card of her own), with new forewords by climber/authors Ed Viesturs and Jon Krakauer. These are essential books for mountaineers, armchair or otherwise.

When you look at pictures of these men, they are almost always smiling (especially Unsoeld), even as some of them are ported down mountains without so many of the toes they started up with. Certainly there are grittier images available, and maybe those are just the pictures they selected for the books, but I'd like to think not. When asked why he was so determined to climb Everest, British climber George Mallory famously said, "Because it's there." Whittaker, Tom Hornbein, and the rest of the 1963 expedition didn't climb the mountain because it was there; they climbed it because they were here, present on what Big Jim calls “this magical planet.” They were living with purpose, and they knew it. Jim and Dianne still are.

Though he’s been busy with media and events to mark the date, Jim and Dianne made time to stop by the Brave Horse Tavern in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood for a chat about Everest, the Kennedys, and more. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

(Click here to learn more about Everest, K2, and other classics of mountaineering—many of which are published by Mountaineers books--and visit Jim Whittaker’s web site for more information, including additional photographs from his personal collection. )

Jon Foro: You were specifically picked for the Everest team due to your Mt. Rainier experience. Did that prepare you the way you thought it might?

Jim Whittaker: I guided on Rainier through college, for three summers, and I climbed a lot, and I was on the ski patrol. So I'd done a lot of different things in the outdoors. (On McKinley, we had an accident--one of our team got a broken ankle and it took us a while to get down.  I meant to ask Norman [Dyhrenfurth, the expedition leader] whether that was what really drew his attention, because it was on nation-wide news that we were stranded on the summit of Mt. McKinley.)

Yeah, it did, it did. The thing is, the Northwest has got the glaciers. The East Coast, The middle states, even the Rockies don't have the glaciers. But here, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, they've got snow and ice--everything that Mount Everest has except that extra fourteen thousand feet. We have the crevasses, the seracs, we've got the weather--incredibly bad weather could hit.... So it was a great training ground. So I went over fairly confident--maybe overconfident--that we could knock off the mountain.

Omnivoracious Makes Time's Best Blog List

Time has announced the 2012 edition of their list of the 25 best blogs, and we’re delighted to announce that Omnivoracious has made the list. Time's Matt Peckham calls Omnivoracious "wonderfully agnostic when it comes to genres, covering everything from sci-fi to self-help, the popular to the obscure, prose to pictorial works and beyond. But it’s also a place where book lovers get down in the trenches and talk shop with (or about) some of the very best authors in the business."

Highlighting blogs "that aren’t yet household names," the list runs the gamut from NPR's eclectic All Songs Considered and the inspirational DIY ethos of design*sponge to the good-natured schadenfreude of Awkward Family Photos and the literary festishism of Bookshelf Porn (a favorite of ours, as well). Make sure to check out all 25.

We at Omnivoracious are thrilled and humbled to receive this honor, and we offer our heartfelt thank yous to Matt Peckham, Time, and all the writers who make the blog a smorgasbord for book lovers of all tastes.

--the Omnivoracious contributors

 

Amazon Asks Steven Rinella, Author of "Meat Eater"

Steven Rinella eats meat. Since his days as a squirrel-chasing eight-year-old in Twin Lake, Michigan, Rinella has hunted his own meat--and he eats all kinds. His new book, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter, recounts his experiences as a hunter of game both large and small; it's a thoughtful meditation on the ethics of killing for food, the influence of hunting on the American experience, and the value of bringing ourselves closer to the meat we eat.

Rinella, also the star of two real-life adventure shows and the author of American Buffalo (an Amazon Best Books of the Year selection for 2008), talks to us about some of the stranger things he's eaten, his collections of skulls and "completely odorless" animal scat, his favorite piece of fan mail, and more.

 

Describe Meat Eater in 10 words. 

Adventure, food, ethics, history, family, violence, wilderness, killing with respect.

 What was your scariest experience in the wild? 

I used to think of grizzly bear run-ins as my scariest moments in the wild. I started having these encounters in 1997 when I moved from Michigan to Montana, and they increased significantly once I started hunting in Alaska around the year 2000. Back then, I would count it as a potentially hazardous situation even if I had a grizzly stand up and look at me from a hundred yards away. But over time I realized that the threat of grizzlies lives mostly in our heads. There’s no doubt that they could kill you flat out, without any trouble, but usually they’re tripping over themselves trying to get away from you. So now I'm much more relaxed about it. Just last week, I was hunting caribou on the North Slope of Alaska's Brooks Range. There was a moment when I realized that my cell phone had been destroyed by a leaking bottle of DEET insect repellent, and I was cursing about that just when I saw this grizzly heading into my camp and toward a cache of freshly butchered caribou meat.  Rather than going after the bear, I continued to lament about my phone until a friend urged me to focus on what he considered to be the larger problem. So what do I worry about now that I'm done worrying about bears? Falling off mountains, rock slides, and avalanches. I had a scare hunting mountain goats on some icy cliff faces last fall, and that’s my number one worry nowadays.   

What’s the weirdest thing you've ever eaten?

I've eaten many strange things. A few that come to mind immediately are beaver tail, domestic dog, electric eel, porcupine, muskrat, the contents of a buffalo's gall bladder, the raw fat plucked from behind the eyeball of a caribou. But I always remind myself that these things are only strange in the context of contemporary American society. For other people, in other times, these items were staples and even delicacies. So to call them weird is to approach the subject from a somewhat limited perspective. 

 What's on your nightstand?

Right now I'm reading Lone Survivors: How We Came To Be the Only Humans on Earth, by the paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer. As an avid hunter, I'm an anthropology buff. After all, the vast bulk of human history is one big long hunting story. Stringer's book is full of interesting tidbits. Like how Neanderthal skeletons often demonstrate injuries that seem consistent with modern day rodeo riders, such as lesions and fractures around the head and neck. But rather than riding large animals, Neanderthals were highly carnivorous humans who likely practiced a "confrontational" style of hunting that resulted in getting kicked, trampled and rolled upon by large critters. He also talks about evidence of hunting weapons, such as spears, going back some 300,000 to 400,000 years in Europe. Reading about the deep antiquity of my fellow hunters sets my head reeling. It inspires me, and helps me to answer that ever-present question: why do I hunt?

What do you collect?

I keep around a good number of animal skulls, mostly from things I've killed and eaten. Right now, on my walls, I have skulls from a buffalo, a Dall sheep, and a mule deer. On my mantelpiece I have skulls from two bears, a javelina, an antelope, plus a skull from a whitetail deer my dad killed in the 1960s and an elk vertebra that I found in Idaho. The white tail deer skull still has my father's steel arrowhead rattling around in the brain cavity. He was aiming at the deer’s heart but it swung its head around and then dropped dead instantly. The elk vertebra has an arrowhead buried into it, just a quarter-inch from the spinal column. The bone had actually healed around the arrowhead, demonstrating that the elk survived the wound. It's a totem that reminds me of the very fine line that separates success and failure in hunting. I used to also collect animal scat. I had a black bear dropping that was formed around another bear's toe and claw. And a coyote dropping that was formed around a deer's hoof. I also had these beautiful grizzly bear scats showing all the different things they eat. One was comprised of pine nut husks; one was comprised of elk hair and bone; one was comprised of grasses and sedges; one was mostly insect carapaces. I'd dry them out and lacquer them and keep them in a glass-topped display case. Visitors would always be blown away by how cool they were. Completely odorless, too. Now that collection is if being curated by my brother Matt, who lives in Miles City, Montana. He takes good care of it, and adds and subtracts specimens as he sees fit.

What's the best piece of fan mail you ever received?

After publishing my second book, I got the following email from an elderly man. This guy has the most natural and beautiful style, and I believe that it’s completely accidental. He’s one of those rare people who can just jot down thoughts in a way that’s lyrical and poetic and compelling. That is, I don’t think he labored over this email. I think it just rolled out like this. To me, it reads like a letter you might get from Cormac McCarthy's great-grandfather: 

“Just finished your book American Buffalo and was carried back in memory some 70-plus years to my youth in Montana. My uncle Buddy and Aunt Alice owned a small ranch in eastern Montana and a neighbor was a retired pioneer by the name of Dan Bowman. Dan knew the country like you know the back of your hand and once took me to place much as you describe in your book where the Indians stampeded the buffalo off a ledge into a pit some 6-8 feet deep. The Indians would then slaughter them at their leisure. This pit was full of bones and for many years I had a buffalo skull with a hole dead center between the eyes. My father got rid of it when I left for the army at age 22. I have no idea why he did so since he could not see it having lost both hands and eyes in WW1. That pit is probably still there untouched although I doubt that I would ever be able to locate it again.”

What talent or superpower would you like to have (not including flight or invisibility)?

I wish I didn’t need so much damn sleep. If I go a few nights without getting eight hours, I start to fall apart. And since hunting means a lot of early mornings, I’m often thinking about going to bed before it even gets dark out. It’s embarrassing. All those lost hours!

Hawks vs. Doves: Schneier on Security

If there is such thing as the Godfather of Security, Bruce Schneier is it. He is the author of the seminal treatise on computer security and crypto technique, Applied Cryptography, which Wired described as "the book the National Security Agency wanted never to be published." In the years since Applied's original 1994 release, Schneier has extended his range and ambition, writing the layman's guide to digital warfare, Secrets and Lies, while Beyond Fear: Thinking About Security in an Uncertain World discussed security's role and efficacy in the post 9/11 world. 

With his latest book, Liars and Outliers, Schneier goes delves even deeper into the philosophy of security, considering the nature of trust--its necessity, as well as its limits. Employing game theory in an examination of human behavior, Schneier explains why there will always be populations of "defectors," and why we will always need measures to mitigate the damage they cause.

Mr. Schneier recently paid a visit to the Amazon campus to talk about his new book, and he stayed behind for a few more questions about the NSA and the Red Queen Effect. See more of Bruce Schneier's books here, and check out his blog for interesting commentary on the TSA and giant squid, among other topics.

 

That's Some Catch, That Catch-22

Happy birthday to Catch-22 author Joseph Heller, on what would have been his 89th. If you haven't read it (and you should), the novel follows Yossarian, a bombardier named stationed in Italy during World War II, who is as determined to escape the war alive as the military bureaucracy seems determined to kill him. Much of it reads like Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?" with mortal consequences. Like this:

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to."

There you go. As a comment on war's ability to bend reason and reality, Catch-22 has proved remarkably durable, spawing a line of absurdist horror stories. So, in honor of Heller's birdthday and the 51st anniversary of Catch-22's publication, here are five descendants of Heller's mad, mad, mad, mad masterpiece:

 

 Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

Our top pick for the Best Books of May, Ben Fountain's debut novel is "The Catch-22 of the Iraq war." Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War, says so right on the jacket, and he would know. In his review, Amazon's Neal Thompson says Billy Lynn "manages a sly feat: giving us a maddening and believable cast of characters who make us feel what it must be like to go to war--and return."

 

 

Who's in Charge Here?

With a a PhD in political science from Stanford University, Ian Bremmer knows a thing or two about international events and their effects on markets. His latest book, Every Nation for Itself, looks at the current state of the world and global leadership--or lack thereof--offering valuable insight for navigating the the rough and unpredictable seas of the 21st century.

Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World: Release 2.0, speaks to Bremmer about the "G-Zero" world and what uncertainty means to the United States and its future.

Fareed Zakaria: What is a G-Zero world, and how did we get here?

Ian Bremmer: The G-Zero is a world without effective, consistent leadership. It’s not the G7 world where Western industrialized powers set the agenda. It’s not a G20 world where developed and developing states find some way to work together on tough transnational problems. It’s a world where no can be counted either to pay the piper or call the tune.

I love the story in your book The Post American World, about Colin Powell making peace between Spain and Morocco over a disputed island in time to go swimming with his grandkids. I included a story in Every Nation for Itself about how Lyndon Johnson diverted about 20 percent of America’s wheat crop in 1965 to help India feed its people during a drought. The leadership capacity that these two stories illustrate isn’t what it used to be, and Europe has too many serious problems of its own to try to take up the slack. At the same time, we can’t expect emerging powers like China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Russia, or the wealthy Gulf monarchies to fill this vacuum because their governments have neither the bandwidth nor the desire to accept the risks and burdens that come with much greater international leadership.

But Every Nation for Itself is not about the shifting balance of international power. In fact, we can’t know what the longer-term future holds for America, Europe, China or any of these other countries. There are good reasons to bet on U.S. resilience, but that will depend on the quality of American leadership in years to come. The rest will continue to rise, but some of them will have more staying power than others.

We can forecast with great confidence, however, that the world has entered a period of transition, one in which global leadership will be in short supply. Every Nation for Itself is about that historic shift and the tremendous challenges and opportunities it will create--for the global economy, for relations between the world’s most powerful governments, and for the world’s ability to cope with a variety of what we might call “problems without borders.”

We Are Talking About This.

Let's talk about Sweet Farts. I'm guessing we're mostly grownups here, but we are going to talk about the series of books called Sweet Farts. Sweet Farts by Raymond Bean.

Like many of you (as I imagine you), Sweet Farts is not something I ever contemplated picking up. Aside from being 43 years old, I also never contemplated bringing it home to my five-year-old, since I thought only the worst could come from it, as parents--especially parents of boys--should instinctively know.

I try to take several multi-day backpacking trips every summer, and last year my son started expressing interest in camping. I decided a light introduction was in order, so I took him to a "resort" in the Cascades--a compound of nine rustic cabins at the northern edge of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, all lacking electricity and the usual civilized amenities. The caretakers met us at the parking lot and drove us up the mountain on a deeply rutted eight-mile logging road, dropping us off with our packs and cooler at our tiny A-frame called Larkspur. 

And then it rained. Not your typical Pacific Northwest drizzle, but a socked-in-drops-the-size-of-hummingbirds mountain storm. We made a couple of easy forays into the forest and called it good, deciding to wait out the rain till morning, but in the morning, it was even worse. Suddenly I was looking at 24 hours in a 20x10 unelectified box with an easily bored pre-K jaguar. Edmond Dantès never had it so bad.

In a move of total desperation, I reached for my Kindle, which I had brought in order to catch up with my unread pile of virtual New Yorkers. (By the way, that's the biggest benefit of the Kindle that I have found: there's no guilt in an invisible stack of unread magazines.) Incredibly, I had one bar of reception, and given the weather, maybe only one chance to get it right. It had to be something that would take some time to read aloud, while absolutely guaranteed to keep him entertained. Sweet Farts.

I started reading, my son predictably doubled over at all of the expected places. But while I was reading, I learned something else about Sweet Farts: it's actually about teaching scientific method. As it turns out, the protagonist--Keith--is a fourth-grade boy with a perception problem. That is, he's mistakenly fingered as the perpetrator of several heinous gas attacks, and accordingly ostracized and dubbed "S.B.D." by his classmates. Rather than play the victim, Keith takes the offensive, planning a series of experiments designed to eliminate the foulest odors of human gas. A quest to find the titular Sweet Farts.

Still with me?

Author Raymond Bean (a nom de plume) is a school teacher, so we may infer that he is an expert in the field. He takes the experiments seriously, and Keith's hypothoses and test results are rigorously documented. By the end, the reader has a good sense of the process required to reach sound conclusions based on a series of testing and iteration.

Also, there are lots of fart jokes, and my kid loved it. So Mr. Bean seems to be onto something where it comes to getting kids interested in reading. After the jump, take a look at his five tips to encourage young people to develop a lifelong love of words in the age of video games and infinite cable TV. And check out all three Sweet Farts books, as well as other titles by Raymond Bean.

Comments? Let 'em rip.

"The Day in Its Color": Pictures of a Lost Continent

In 1938, erstwhile businessman Charles Cushman snapped an image of the Golden Gate Bridge using the relatively new Kodachrome color film. It would be the first of over 14,000 frames of indelible Americana--people, urban scenes, and landscapes--that he would capture over a 30-year cross-country odyssey.

Unlike Walker Evans or Henri Cartier-Bresson, who chose similar subject matter to wide acclaim, Cushman was by no means considered an artist or professional, for no larger reason than that nobody knew who he was. Besides, color photogaphy had something of a gauche reputation in the higher-minded circles. Cushman was doing this for himself, and he was so far underground that his collection was only recently "discovered" and archived when he donated his photographs to Indiana University, his alma mater. (See Vivian Maier for another recently celebrated amateur "street photographer.") 

The Day in Its Color (Oxford University Press) serves as a companion piece to the Cushman archives, a collection of over 150 color prints contextualized with commentary on setting, period, and photographic equipment and technique. And it is fascinating, not only for the beautiful frankness of the portraits and street-life shots, but for the way the reproductions of the super-saturated photographs breathe reality into images of a truly vanished world. A shot of a rickety "confectionary cart" in the muddy streets of Chicago (surely a predecessor to Windy City "street cheese") would look pre-industrial if not for the color, while a 1939 portrait of Cushman himself at the rim of the Grand Canyon (dressed for leisure in a suit, fedora, and a remarkably short tie) gives you an idea what Sam Spade might look like on vacation. It's occasionally jarring, like seeing color footage of World War II for the first time.

But beyond the archaic curiousity of the set, Cushman knew what he wanted from his camera, and the best shots speak to an opportunistic readiness to capture the ephemeral moments of a rapidly vanishing culture. Select images from the book, including the ones described above, are available after the jump.

Jeffrey Zaslow (1958-2012)

Jeffrey Zaslow, a longtime writer for the Wall Street Journal and co-author of the 2008 best-seller The Last Lecture (with Randy Pausch), has died at the age of 53. In 2011, he published Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope, a collaboration with congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly. Zaslow died in a car accident in Michigan following an appearance to promote his most recent book, The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters, a nonfiction narrative of a small-town bridal shop.

: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters

Pull On Your Trousers and Press PLAY

For anyone like me who has never been consumed by a video game as an adult--and feels like they might have missed out on an essential 21st century cultural experience--here is Waiting for Godot:

 

 

Bonus game: You are Nick Carraway, fighting your way through mansions teeming with harrowing flappers and butlers in this playable version of Great Gatsby for NES.

Happy Friday!

HODGMAN IN A PILGRIM SUIT. CHASING A TURKEY. AFTER THE JUMP.

Leonardo da Vinci, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Benjamin Franklin. Masters of many pursuits, polymaths, Renaissance Men. Not since Nineteen Eighty-Five David Byrne has one man come close to fulfilling this lofty ideal, but John Hodgman is coming awfully close. Among his accomplishments:

• A serious, inveterate Scrabble fanatic
• A respectful, innovative grower of antebellum hipster facial hair
• Human representation of a PC

Even beyond that, Hodgman has authored the Complete World Knowledge trilogy, the ultimate reference on mole-men, hobo names, and sundry information aspiring to varying degrees of factuality. The final installment, That Is All, arrives November 1, and will drop new knowledge upon the world, including:

• "How to Make Your Own Wine in a Toilet, Even If You Are Not in Prison"
• A new list of 700 "ravenous god-things" prepared to re-enter our dimension in 2012 (you may have already met Chthulu Carl, the Tentacled Hobo)
• "Ted Danson's Secret"

But all this is just an excuse for a books blog to pass along this post from Bon Appétit, wherein they tease an upcoming interview with "America's Last Pilgrim" with a fabulous ANIMATED GIF--possibly the first one created since 1998, at least by someone over 12 years old.

HODGMAN IN A PILGRIM SUIT. CHASING A TURKEY. AFTER THE JUMP.

Book Expo America 2011 Is in the Books

(just one quadrant of the vast and exotic BEA tradeshow floor)

For the uninitiated, Book Expo America is the annual publishing industry convergence of authors, publishers, and booksellers, all descending on New York's Javits Center for a bacchanalia of books--many, many books. A small contingent from Omnivoracious made the trip to connect with authors and talk about their fall titles--and now that the last galley has been spirited away in a rolly suitcase and the final awkward, open-bar-inspired dance has been danced, we can share some of our (not always literary) highlights. Without further ado: our recap, after the jump.

[Note: the author interviews mentioned below will appear as the books near their publication dates and will be posted on Omnivoracious and the book product pages, as well as in The Backstory, our space for author interviews and other unique content.]

Omni Daily News

Maybe they caught him with a weather machine: The Guardian's Ed Pilkington interviews Abdulrahman Zietoun--the real-life hero of Dave Eggers's Zeitoun--who stayed in New Orleans to help in the aftermath of Katrina, only to be arrested as a suspected terrorist.

Hot stuff: At the Daily Beast, Melissa Milgrom discusses the rising hipness of stuffed animal carcasses and her book, Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, an Amazon.com Best of the Month selection for March.

I wonder if he signed them "Jerome": On March 16, the Morgan Library opens an exhibit of 10 letters from J.D. Salinger to his friend E. Michael Mitchell, who designed the original cover to The Catcher in the Rye. (via Vulture)

The bestsellers of our youth: Fire up the flux capacitor and travel back to the day when business fables ruled the earth--Amazon.com's bestsellers in books for the week of March 6, 2000.

--Jon

Omni Daily News

Next up: e.e. cummings:  Frustrated copy editors around the world rejoice with the news that scholars Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon have made some 9,000 "corrections and alterations" to James Joyce's  Finnegan's Wake. (via Reading Copy)

War between the stakes: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter author Seth Grahame-Smith lists his top 10 horror inspirations for The Huffington Post.

Movers & Shakers:  Take Ivy--previously unranked, but currently sitting at #234--tops our Movers & Shakers list. Due in August, it's a reprint edition of Japanese photographer T.Hayashida's 1960s collection of Ivy League photographs that neatly captures the distinct sameness (and dare I say it, immortality?) of preppie style. It's ranking reflects it's cult status--copies are rare and coveted, selling for upwards of $1,000. More information here.

--Jon

Omni Daily News

Serving the sentence: The New Yorker's Book Bench blog reports on a clever project by Electric Literature: recruiting visual artists to create short animations of single sentences from authors such as Aimee Bender, Rick Moody, and Michael Cunningham. A sample:

Trail blazers: Peter Robins at the Guardian looks at the emerging trend of jacketless hardcovers, calling them "unnecessary and vulnerable encumbrance[s]." Collectible dealers may disagree.

"Imagine if you will": Not exactly news (or even book news, for that matter), but this 1981 story from KRON TV (San Francisco) on the first newspapers to test the waters of the Internet is interesting, if only for ironic hindsight: a mention of "both local San Francisco newspapers," and an editor's remark that they're "not in it to make money."

Moving & Shaking: Bruce Feiler's American Prophet: Moses and the American Story takes the top spot today on the Mover's & Shakers list. Please appreciate my restraint in stretching metaphors here.

--Jon

Hanging on the Colophon

What's in a logo? With MIT Press, apparently more than I realized.

Scorsese's new flick, Shutter Island, put me in the mood to browse one of last year's creepier books, Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals--published by MIT and written up in this space in October of last year.

Now, I've seen the MIT colophon thousands of times over the years, stamped on spines of books I'll never be smart enough to read. But today it hit me that it's not just a classy little icon, but it actually represents the letters MITP. It's the P, for Press, that had made it such an uncrackable code all that time. It took three seconds to confirm this at the MIT Press blog, and to discover that:

• It was created in 1963 by Media Lab designer Muriel Cooper, whose work with early computers greatly influenced user interface design
• Some people mistake it for the Black Flag logo
• The online MITPTyper application converts a text-string into an MIT-style logo, which is both very cool and possibly useless
• My original title for this post (High Colophonic) had already been scooped

--Jon

Omni Daily News

Dude. Page 36, third paragraph: The French National Library shells out $9.5 million for the original manuscript of Casanova's memoirs, The Story of My Life. (via The Huffington Post)

They hate him for his killer author photos: Over at The Daily Beast, Olivia Cole examines "Amis-Rage," the conflagration of shrill that erupts each time Martin Amis publishes a book. (More on Amis at The Guardian.)

There's almost certainly somebody who can't wait for this: James Cameron is writing a prequel to Avatar. Kind of like how George Lucas wrote the prequel to The Phantom Menace, when it was called Star Wars, but not yet a prequel. Top that, Cameron. (via abebooks.com's Reading Copy blog)

Moving & Shaking: Disorder in the Court: Great Fractured Moments in Courtroom History, a collection of absurd, true-life courtroom exchanges--originally published in 1992--charges to #1 today on our Movers & Shakers list.

--Jon

Omni Daily News

The smart money's on Governing Lethal Behaviour in Autonomous Robots: The highly anticipated longlist for the 2010 oddest book title prize (a contest conceived in 1978 on "a particularly dull day at the Frankfurt book fair") has been announced. Sleeper pick: Schoolgirl Milky Crisis.

Maybe they're trying to make it even more prestigious: The West Australian Government drops its $110,000(A) Australia-Asia Literary Award after one year. (via the Literary Saloon)

Recalling an era of savage readers: The Millions traces the origins and ponders the future of the deckle edge:

The deckle edge dates back to a time when you used to need a knife to read a book. Those rough edges simulate the look of pages that have been sliced open by the reader. The printing happened on large sheets of paper which were then folded into rectangles the size of the finished pages and bound. The reader then sliced open the folds.

Moving & shaking: Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, David DeKok's account of a subterranean fire that transformed a Pennsylvania community into a ghost town, rises to #1 on our Movers & Shakers list this morning.

--Jon

Omni Decade Crush: It's Over, People

Ok, right up front: I don't like lists. They're arbitrary, destined to exclude worthy items, rigid, and too easily informed by itinerant moods. (And don't get me started on lists by committee.) So this, the last installment of Omni Decade Crush, eschews the ranked list form for notes about just few of my favorite books from the decade. Sure, I liked The Corrections and Kavalier & Clay as much as the next yahoo, but here's a different collection presented in my preferred method of communication: the disorganized, impudent ramble. (This is why I get Friday duty, I think)

In the Weekend Warrior category (a specialty of mine): Miracle in the Andes (2006), Nando Parrado's first-person account of the 1972 plane crash that stranded a Uruguayan rugby team on a glacier, miles from anywhere. If you're familiar with Alive (either the book or the movie), then you know the grisly and heartbreaking details. Miracle is more than a rehash of that story--it's a page-turner unto itself, strengthened with the perspective of hindsight and experience. Also worth reading: The Last Season, Eric Blehm's investigation into the mystery of a ranger's disappearance in the Sierra Nevada; American Buffalo, Steven Rinella's natural history/Alaskan adventure combo-pack; and Steve House's Beyond the Mountain, winner of the Best Book (Mountain Literature category) at the 2009 Banff Mountain Book Festival. (Look it up!)

In the I Can't Believe I'm the First to Mention It category: Charlie Huston. Among those in this office who appreciate a quick, blunt jab upside the head or an unexpected rib-shot (ask my coworkers sometime), his Hank Thompson trilogy achieves epic status. Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things, and A Dangerous Man track the progress (regress?) of an unassuming everyman caught in a jam to his destiny of savage brutality and existential (and physical) ruin. It's impossible, of course, but if They make these into movies (and They really should), Mickey Rourke of different eras would be perfect for the roles: Diner  Rourke for Caught Stealing; Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man Rourke for Six Bad Things; and The Wrestler Rourke for A Dangerous Man.

In the Where Did This Guy Come From category: I think only someone named Donald Ray Pollock could have written a book like Knockemstiff, a collection of interwoven stories about a town haunted by living revenants: huffers, murderers, sex fiends, and their hapless (though not innocent) victims, all tethered to the woebegone "holler" by their own self-inflicted shortcomings and depravities. Pollock pulls no punches--his prose is blunt and visceral, as well as stylish and skilled--and reading these mini grand guignols can be like crunching on a mouthful of your own broken teeth. Astonishing, but not for the weak.

In the I Bet They Love Their Jobs, Because It Shows category: AMMO Books (American Modern) describe themselves as publishers of "provocative, one-of-a-kind titles, that bring you the best books of our time ... with amazing design, thoughtful writing, and exquisite printing." (I quote them because I wholeheartedly agree, and I've not much to add.) Founded in 2006, they launched themselves with easily one of my favorite books of the decade: Gonzo, a (super) deluxe, boxed hardcover with words and previously unpublished photographs by the Good Doctor himself. 2007 brought Lucha Loco, a collection of over 120 bizarre and bizarrely moving portraits of the luminaries of masked Mexican wrestling, and they closed the decade with The Contact Sheet, a collection of iconic photographs that placed back into the context of their original sessions, right next to the next to the near-misses and the never-minds (take heart, aspiring photographers!). Published in November, Contact moved briskly, and is currently only available at a premium.

--Jon

Omni Yearly News: 2003

The Iraq War began in March, and the Human Genome Project announced it had accomplished its mission of sequencing the complete human genetic code in April, while Arnold Schwarzenegger followed the release of Terminator 3 in July with his election as governor of California in October. It was a year of blockbusters in books, with the fifth Harry Potter installment rivaled by a surprise hit thriller that suggested a secret history of the Catholic Church. Audrey Niffenegger and Khaled Hosseini made debuts with novels that would become perennial bestsellers in paperback, while our editors' choice for the best book of the year was an electrifying story of addiction and recovery whose status as a memoir was still a few years from being questioned.

What we were reading: Continuing in Tom’s Old Media Monday tradition, here's a run-down of how the critics received some of our picks for the year's best books: 

• Janet Maslin on A Million Little Pieces  (astutely suspicious, a year and a half before Frey pissed off Oprah and became the poster boy for memoirists cum fabulists): "This story is supposed to be all true. It is supposed to be a scorchingly honest account of how its author sunk to unimaginable depths, railed against the Twelve Step program that was supposed to help him and ultimately found his own form of salvation. His account does have grit and myopic immediacy that could make it a campus classic, what with such attention-getting incidents as the time this self-loathing author pulls off his own toenails. But in charting the course of his experience, he follows a memoirist's Twelve Step pattern that is as familiar as what Rehab offers."
• Mark Bowden on Jarhead: "Jarhead is some kind of classic, a bracing memoir of the 1991 Persian Gulf war that will go down with the best books ever written about military life.… Swofford writes with humor, anger and great skill. His prose is alive with ideas and feeling, and at times soars like poetry. He captures the hilarity, tedium, horniness and loneliness of the long prewar desert deployment, and then powerfully records the experience of his war."
• A.O. Scott on The Fortress of Solitude: "The Fortress of Solitude is crowded beyond my powers of summary with lessons, insights, facts, dates, song titles and minor characters. But I much prefer its mess and sprawl to the tightly wound intellectual parlor tricks of earlier Lethem novels."
• Erik Larson on The Devil in the White City: "[Larson] wants to tell the whole story, both the glory of Burnham's creation and the sordid details of the first known urban psychopath in American history. It is not a comfortable fit. He uses language well, but has little sense of pacing or focus…. It must be said, however, that though this grab-bag approach slows the narrative, it does allow the inclusion of some good stories about characters like Buffalo Bill Cody."
• Robert Harris on Positively Fifth Street: "[McManus] wins $866,000 in a single hand and takes the lead, and now we're into this with him, willing to pore over his recounting of hand after hand and becoming intimate with the strategies of marathon no-limit poker. He's not afraid to admit his overwhelming fear when a hand is decided on the turn of a final card, ''fifth street.'' But for all his self-deprecation, McManus is smart. He knows that the professionals have him marked as a weak player, so he doesn't play like one…. and walks out with just under $250,000--and, even better for a writer, a great story."

Great Debuts of 2003: The Kite Runner, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Vernon God Little, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!

Top Five Amazon Editors' Picks: A Million Little Pieces, The Time Traveler's Wife, Jarhead, Moneyball, Shutter Island

Top Five 2003 Amazon Bestsellers: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Da Vinci Code, The South Beach Diet, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

In Memoriam: Among the authors who passed away in 2003: Roberto Bolaño, George Plimpton, Robert McCloskey, Carol Shields, William Steig, Edward Said, John Gregory Dunne, Leonard Michaels, Hugh Kenner,  and Amanda Davis

• See our Books of the Decade: 2003 page
• See our overall Books of the Decade: 2000-2009 page

--Jon