Debating the First Draft of W.: The Authors vs. Oliver Stone
If you haven't run across it yet, for the past week Slate has been hosting a high-powered panel discussion bringing Oliver Stone together with three (and, finally, a fourth) of the best-known chroniclers of the Bush administration, to discuss his use of their work and others in his new movie W. Along with Jacob Weisberg, the former Slate editor whose book, The Bush Tragedy, provides much source material for the 41/43 father-son drama Stone portrays, they brought in Bob Woodward and Ron Suskind, who between them have written seven bestsellers on the administration, and today, on what appears to be the final day of the discussion, Hubris coauthor Michael Isikoff joined in with a specific anecdote from his book that Stone used for the movie.
There's a lot of discussion of Stone's dramatic license with the reported facts, with some pointed criticism (and Stone's defenses) of a few of the movie's more Stonian interpretive flights (which just about everyone who's seen W. has noted he has reined in considerably this time), and there's a lot of debate between the journalists about the exact timeline of when the war was decided upon. But what I like best is the shoptalk among these guys who have all been trying to write the first draft of history, without much help from the primary participants. Here's Suskind giving Woodward a backhanded compliment about his unique access:
Bob, clearly, has sat in what journalists generally consider "access heaven" in his unmatched colloquies with Bush. You have witnessed Bush jumping out of his chair to make a point, and many other moments from your interviews provide some signature scenes of this period. But, I wonder, Bob, if you think, looking back, that access to Bush has not been as valuable—hour for hour—as it has been with other presidents whom you've interviewed. I think it's fair to say that Bush and his team don't believe that truthful public disclosure and dialogue are among their central obligations. Other presidents have railed against the troublemakers in the press, but they felt, often reluctantly, that letting the American people know their mind—the good-enough reasons that drive action—was part of their job description. Frankly, I think the best book of your quartet is State of Denial—the one for which, I gather, you were not given access to Bush. But that's a rare occurrence. (The last president you wrote about who wouldn't grant an audience was Nixon, and, of course, you and Carl notched a few historic bell-ringers back then.)
And here's Isikoff arguing that all their discussion of various memos and anecdotes are somewhat beside the point in trying to figure out when the Decider decided (which he backs up with an anecdote from his own book):
We can debate endlessly what really motivated Bush in making the audacious decision to invade Iraq—the threat of WMD, the cooked-up evidence about connections between Saddam and al-Qaida, the need to be pre-emptive in the post-9/11 era, the desire to secure Mideast oil supplies. But I think the "tear it all down" line captures the essence of Bush's worldview. Why monkey around with diplomacy, U.N. inspections, and halfway measures? And the search for one key moment to pinpoint the "decision" time is probably illusory. Bush the Decider didn't actually decide in Cabinet or war-council meetings. His White House didn't thrash out option memos and debate them endlessly. He decided on what his gut told him, and his gut instincts were that he had had enough of trying to "box in" Saddam Hussein and that it was time to kick his ass and remove him through military force.
This all gives me an opportunity to point to a couple interviews I did for our Election 2008 store this fall with two of the participants above: Woodward and Suskind. They are both, like their recent books, The War Within and The Way of the World, focused mostly on events after those in Stone's movie. Woodward is concerned mostly with discussing a much later (and more successful) decision: Bush's choice to go forward with the "surge" in Iraq:
And with Suskind, we talked less about his administration reporting and more about what is the real focus of The Way of the World, the threat of nuclear proliferation and the importance of America's moral identity in controlling them:
I know not everybody (me included) prefers listening to reading, so I'll post transcripts of these separately in the next day or so as well. --Tom



First of all, as you regular readers may have noticed, that weeklong States break hasn't prevented me from falling behind the state-a-day plan again. That's likely to be true for the next bit: I'm fairly deep underwater with everything else right now in my finite days (and find myself spending more and more time on each state, for good reasons), so for the next couple of weeks, while things are frantic, I'm going to be spacing out the posts a bit. But we have some excellent guests coming up, including today, so stay tuned.
Despite being born & bred in Maine, her State by State essay and her book list below are both full of the From Aways, the non-natives whose acceptance in their adopted state is apparently predicated on their capacity to amuse, and with whom she has come, despite her birth certificate, to identify. Here's a favorite section from her Maine piece:
This one's fun. After
I was taking Illinois a little for granted when it started to appear on the horizon. Yeah, Bellow, Terkel, Mamet, etc.: I knew there would be plenty there. But when I sat down to make up the list, I almost filled my 21 delegates before I got started. And these aren't just books that happen to have been written in Illinois, or by folks who grew up there and then moved on: they are about Illinois (or, most often, about Chicago: people have been trying to figure that "somber city" out for as long as it's represented on-the-make modernity). No wonder the 
Okay, we're back on the march. I'm not sure that anyone even noticed 

Aravind Adiga just became the third debut novelist (and the first of the three not to include the word "God" in his or her title) to 
With Krugman prominently in the fray for a solution to the current global meltdown (he's been advocating for a 
When I say "Indiana books" do you say "Booth Tarkington!"? Well I do, which may not be the best advertisement for Indiana books, since when you say "Booth Tarkington" most people say "Who?" (And even if you say "The Magnificent Ambersons," most people, if they said anything, would say "Orson Welles!" Or, if they were me, "Anne Baxter!") But scratch the surface a little and you get a fascinating tour of 20th-century America, including two well-loved writers who brought World War II home (in very different ways) and two of the landmark sociological studies of the midcentury, in honor of one of which I've chosen today's quarter subject, perhaps the least likely to be approved by the United States Mint.
Louisiana, with almost as much per capita power in book-writing (and book-inspiring) as music-making, is one of those midsize states where you could fill up their book delegation with strictly iconic material. And god knows if I was doing the choosing that's what we'd end up with: a list of books you all could nod and say you'd heard of and maybe even read. So my thanks to Peter Charles Melman, our guest nominator for the Pelican State (can't a state as lively as Louisiana do better than that for a nickname?), for finding the right balance between familiar but undeniable and lesser-known but necessary. Even if he did knock my dear, dear Moviegoer off the list at the last moment: that's ice cold, Pete.
Pete was born in New York and has recently moved back there as part of the Great Brooklyn Writer Migration of the 00s, but he spent his teens in Lafayette, LA, and returned there for grad school in writing. And he returned again in his first novel, 
We've put together a more complete list of his 
I have to confess: I came pretty close to feeling that I had failed Ohio. This big battleground state is alloted 20 delegates, and I was scuffling a bit to get to that number. But somehow, remembering that Bill Waterson was from, of all places, Chagrin Falls, OH, made me feel a little better about my list, though it took me an extra day to get it on the blog and, as is my refrain, I am sure there are blind spots (or just plain old errors in judgment) that can be remedied with your help.
The problem--the only problem--with a wonderful guest post like 
I'm already on record in this cross-country wander as being once narrowly diverted from a
Sullivan, who was an editor at Harper's and now contributes to GQ, was born, like Hunter S. Thompson, in Louisville, and is even more qualified to make this selection than I'd thought, as he was the lucky one to do the Paris Review interview (
Okay, I'm starting to sound like a WWF announcer (are you ready ruuuuuuumble?) but it is funny that the same Nobel season in which the Swedish chair of the literature prize committee asserted that Americans were
If you want to return to the bitter days of this '80s scientific controversy (carried on amid the general panic, anger, and shame surrounding the AIDS crisis), NBC's Robert Bazell has a
Vermont didn't fall into place as easily for me as
I've been looking forward to Rhode Island day, in part because, my
Thanks to Brad for shouldering the biggest and most thankless task of trimming the countless fine books from the Empire State down to a
Kenan was raised in Chinquapin, North Carolina (needless to say, in the eastern part of the state), and after years in New York and elsewhere, he has returned to teach in Chapel Hill at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina. After his debut novel, 
I've had a few inquiries about why I didn't include Edgar Allan Poe, so famously deceased in Baltimore, on my
This is a bit of a case of people-who-live-in-glass-coffins, as the history-obsessed Horwitz has picked at many of those old bones himself, in bestselling books of travel and history like
Thought you'd see Robert Frost replace the Old Man of the Mountain to the right? Oh, by all rights you should, but I must be feeling punchy after making mostly canonical choices so far, so instead you get Grace Metalious, the "Pandora in Blue Jeans" who peeked behind the curtain of small town New England propriety in Peyton Place, and gave New Hampshire its biggest blockbuster until Dan Brown discovered the Renaissance.
We have our second guest contributor today, and our first from among the
Okay, here it is: the reason I started this whole escapade, my newly minted Frederick Douglass quarter. Looks pretty sharp, doesn't it?

As impressed as I was with
I meant to post this yesterday, in honor of
For a state that has always struggled to find its identity in the shadow of nearby cities--while being best known perhaps for the highway that gets you from of those cities to the other--New Jersey has produced a powerhouse lineup of writers and books that aren't just from Jersey, but are consciously about Jersey. There are a few mid-size states that might be able to compete with NJ's top 15, but, with the exception perhaps of Louisiana, I'm not sure that any of them will be as full of books that don't just happen to be from that state--they couldn't be from anywhere else. Here are my suggestions:
We're pleased to move into the big battleground state of Pennsylvania today with a great deal of help. Our first guest Books of the States contributor is Pittsburgh native Stewart O'Nan. He has since moved on to Connecticut, where recent books of his like
P.S. All due respect to former Gov. Tom Ridge, who made the pick, but the
We start
When I first met Minnesota's own Matt Weiland at BookExpo a few years ago, he was living in London, as an editor for the great literary magazine Granta, and had gone native to the extent that he (and his friend Sean Wilsey) had edited a book on soccer, 




For those of you who don't swim against the chronological current of the blog (or who don't read the comments section), I just wanted to point you to an 

Also in Slate, fairly-legendary-himself editor Gerald Howard contributed an



Talking about yourself in the third person is generally reserved for dictators, professional athletes, and movie stars, but in this morning's
If, like me, you still haven't read either B, the three Benjamin Black books (all published since the last Banville appeared--can you tell he's having fun?) are
We learned, like everyone else, that Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon professor whose "Last Lecture" became one of the most popular videos on the net and then a 



But when reading around about Holtzman, I was reminded that his name was on the spine of one of my favorite books growing up. I had two paperbacks in my early teens that I read and read to the point that their covers fell off: 
New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera, following up on his declaration that Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's Barbarians at the Gate was "one of the greatest business books ever written," posted an annotated list of his