Writer Sues Book Reviewer for Libel

It seems that an Israeli author has filed a libel lawsuit against a book reviewer who dared point out the weaknesses in her book.  Normally, I would laugh about this kind of misguided and frivolous lawsuit, expecting that the plaintiff would end up losing and having to pick up the court costs of the defendant.

But this one gets complicated.  According to the newser website:

...the Israel-based writer of an English-language book by a Dutch publisher that was reviewed in 2007 by a German professor for an American journal decided to sue in a French court.

The idea of shopping the world for a sympathetic judge is becoming more common as an increasing number of countries allow that kind of thing to happen - a scary trend, in my opinion.

As for the alleged libelous statements...how does this grab you?

Thomas Weigend wrote it (the book) has "analytical nuggets" and “meticulously covers all relevant topics,” but observed that it rehashes "the existing legal set-up" and found the author's “conceptual grasp” of some matters to be questionable.

If that is libelous, I suspect all book bloggers are guilty as charged by this crazy woman. It's disturbing to see yet another author trash her professional reputation by doing something so ludicrous. Here's hoping it costs her a bundle of Israeli, German, French, Dutch and American currency.

Standing at the Crossroads

Every so often comes along a novel that just won't stop haunting me. This time it’s Standing at the Crossroads, by Charles Davis – a novel of Sudan’s “civil war” as seen through the eyes of three very different people. First, there is Kate, a white woman traveling on her own and photographing the atrocities she witnesses as she makes her way across the country. Kate is determined to expose Sudan’s ugly truth to the world in naïve hope that someone, somewhere, will care enough to intervene in the slaughter taking place there in God’s name. Next, there is a little girl, almost mute, who has somehow managed to escape the slaughter of her village and is wandering the desert alone, and, finally, there is the book’s narrator, a black African man known to the villagers as “The Story Man” and to whites as “The Barefoot Librarian.”

This barefoot librarian lives and breathes Western novels. In honor of his favorite book, Moby Dick, he introduces himself to the reader as Ishmael, but remarks that he is a witness, not an outsider. Ishmael carries his library on his back, walking from village to village where he reads stories and leaves books behind in exchange for a place to sleep and something to eat. He acquires his books from those Westerners he encounters in the country and is always on the lookout for their castoffs. Hoping to get books from Kate, he approaches her at a crossroads village just as she is threatened by several “Warriors of God,” a group of religious fanatics willing to kill, burn, and mutilate in the name of their brand of religion. By defying the Warriors of God, Ishmael and Kate make a mortal enemy of the group’s leader and, if they are to survive, they will have to walk across the desert, just one step ahead of the men on horseback who want to torture and kill them.

Standing at the Crossroads has all the makings of a first rate thriller but it is more than that. It is the story of a remarkable man who has used the best of Western literature to transform himself into something unique for his time and place. Ishmael is not a religious man; rather, his entire philosophy of life is based upon his fiction reading. This is a man who, while walking what he estimates has been more than 20,000 miles, imagines that his friend Huck Finn or Miss Havisham is walking beside him in friendly conversation. He has a story for every occasion and he knows just when to tell them.

Though it is filled with much tragedy and violence, Standing at the Crossroads still manages to be a “feel good” novel of sorts in that no reader will be able to recall The Barefoot Librarian without indulging in a little mental smile about him. Reading and books are his life in every way. This is a man who adapted the very idea of reading into a survival tool, as when he was burying himself and Kate in sand in order to escape the approaching horsemen:

“I have never done this before, never inhumed myself, but the sensation is familiar, for it is what I have been doing my whole life long with reading, burying myself in books so that I will be invisible to the outside world and the outside world will be invisible to me. Inter yourself one way or another and you will feel safe, however illusory that safety might be.


The horsemen are not readers. If they were readers, they would know that you must pay attention to small details…I hear them pass, conversing in dull, bored voices, perhaps fifty feet from where we are lying, barely daring to breathe.”

This one I will remember for a long time, and I suspect already that it is destined to be one of the best books I read in all of 2011.

Rated at: 5.0
 
(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

I'm Surrounded

As I write this, it's about 12:40 p.m. and I've just finished lunch here in my local Barnes & Noble cafe - not a lunch to brag about, but it will get me through the afternoon. This is something I haven't done for a while and I had forgotten how calming an experience it can be. There is definitely something to be said for spending an hour or so completely surrounded by books and people who actually read them (as my Canadian buddy, Cip, will attest).

I've been reading Hitch 22, last year's Christopher Hitchens memoir for a few days now (should finish it today, I think) and I've been struck by his admiration of George Orwell, an author I only know through the books 1984 and Animal Farm. In one of those moments of serendipity that so often occur, I spotted on a bargain book cart at the store's entrance a copy of the 2002 Hitchens book Why Orwell Matters, a book I didn't even know existed - at the skinflint pleasing price of $3.50. I'll be boring you guys with my thoughts on that one in a few weeks, I suspect.

I also found a discounted copy of Anne Rice's Called Out of Darkness: A Spititual Confession from 2008. This is the book in which Rice explains her return to Catholicism after many years of living life as an atheist. This is another book I missed upon it's publication, but since I've often wondered about Rice's transformation, I jumped all over the chance to grab a copy for six bucks. I'm making an effort to read more nonfiction this year, so both of these books fit right in to my 2011 reading plan.

That's it for now; I can only spare another thirty minutes to hit the shelves upstairs, so I have to run. Have a great Sunday afternoon, everyone.

The Finkler Question

The Finkler Question, winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, focuses on one Julian Treslove, a man standing at the crossroad of life not at all sure about which direction he should turn.  He is not happy about where he is standing, that much he does know - and he senses that, in order to salvage the remainder of his life, he needs a complete makeover.

Treslove, twice married, abandoned both wives so early in the marriages that he barely knows his two sons.  He once worked as a radio programmer for the BBC but now resents the experience so much that he can barely stomach walking past his old building.  Now he works, when the agency can find it for him, as a celebrity lookalike at parties, not exactly a step up from being a BBC producer.  Treslove does not know who he is, much less who he wants to be.  His life has lost its meaning.

Even Teslove’s oldest friendship seems to be based more on rivalry and competition than on companionship.  Sam Finkler, popular author and television personality, makes his living selling shallow, but bestselling, self-help books.  Finkler, a Jew whose wife has recently died, is so rabidly anti-Zionist that he helps form a group of likeminded Jews who meet once a week to declare their shame in public.  When the Treslove and Finkler reconnect with elderly professor Libor Sevick, who has just lost his wife of more than fifty years, Treslove, as the single non-Jew in the trio, feels more disconnected from life than ever. 

In his great desire to belong, and to create a new identity for himself, Treslove decides to recreate himself in the image of a contemporary London Jew.  He immerses himself into the lives of his two friends, learns Yiddish, and even finds a Jewish lover who is in charge of the soon-to-opened Museum of Anglo-Jewish Culture (located down the road from the Abbey Road recording studio made famous by the Beatles).  Julian Treslove is determined to become “a Finkler,” and author Howard Jacobson uses Treslove’s quest  to explore the whole “Finkler Question” and what it means to be a modern day “Finkler.”

Is The Finkler Question worthy of the Man Booker Prize?  In the sense that a tragicomedy like this one can so successfully explore the meaning of identity to the offspring of a people who have been so misunderstood, and have suffered so much personal violence over the past 2,000 years, yes it does.  That said, this is not an easy novel to like.  Its two main characters, Treslove and Finkler, are equally unlikable and unsympathetic – both are, in fact, more fools than not.  Too, despite Jacobson’s reputation as a writer who uses a good bit of humor in his novels, I found very little of it in evidence here.  I suspect that might be because it is of the “inside baseball” type of humor that only those having grown up in the Jewish faith can fully understand and appreciate. 

I do appreciate the insights Jacobson offers into contemporary Judaism as it is practiced and lived today,  but I am yet to answer the “Man Booker Prize question” even in my own mind.

Rated at: 3.5

Borders Finally Pulls the Plug

(Lara Cooper / Noozhawk photo)

Well, as predicted, they've gone and done it.

Borders finally filed for bankruptcy protection this morning and a few of the numbers associated with that move have become public:

Around 200 of the 642 stores will be shut down.


Of the approximately 19,000 Borders employees, some 6,000 are expected to lose their jobs.


The company has secured $505 million in financing to be used in reorganizing under Chapter 11 rules.


Borders shares can now be had for 18 cents each - an all-time low share price for the company.


Borders owes $41.1 million to Penguin Group, $36.9 million to Hatchett Book Group, and $33.8 million to Simon & Schuster - only a small portion of the company's total debt of $1.3 billion.


Hiring 4 CEOs in five years (none of them with bookseller experience, by the way) is not a great idea.


A complete list of the stores being shut down can be found here.   (Surprisingly, none of the seven Houston stores are on the list but Dallas and Austin get hit hard.) 

Borders always did seem to be a step behind Barnes & Noble to me and I never really enjoyed browsing my local Borders the way I enjoy browsing so many other bookstores. There is just something about the layout of the store that creates such a sterile atmosphere that I seldom spend any real time (or money) there. I can't put my finger on what it is exactly, but it's some combination of a less than personable staff and the floor plan that irks me.

But that's just me, one customer. Where Borders seems to have been most shortsighted is in never really positioning itself in the e-book market; the company never could carve out an e-book niche for itself.  I mean, come on...all of us could see the trend coming years ago.  Right?  But for some reason, the revolving door managers of Borders missed the boat completely. Does anyone think "Borders" when they think e-books? Seriously?

I hate to be a pessimist when it comes to the survival of any bookstore but I can't see a way that this is going to end well. Borders could not compete in the market place even when it was supposedly financially healthy (the company has not shown an annual profit since 2006). How is a company as financially crippled as this one going to compete in that same market place?

I sincerely hope that I'm wrong, but that's not because I particularly love Borders bookstores.  It's just that it would be a shame to see this huge chain bite the dust after it ruthlessly put so many indie bookstores out of business during the last two decades.  Is Amazon.com going to the the only major bookseller still standing ten years from now?

My Name Is Mary Sutter

Before it was over, the War Between the States would claim several hundred thousand lives. Sadly, a good many of those lives were given up by men who never saw a battlefield or by those who succumbed to secondary infections spread to them by the very doctors and nurses whose job it was to save their lives. Volunteers, especially at the start of the war, were thrown together in crowded camps within which little regard was given to sanitation. Young men from rural areas were suddenly victim to numerous infectious diseases to which they had never been exposed. Those from the city, not as likely to fall to the more common diseases, were still easy prey to the dysentery that ravaged the tent cities.

The war offered a unique opportunity to someone like Mary Sutter, the heroine of Robin Oliveira’s Civil War novel, My Name Is Mary Sutter. Already an accomplished midwife in her native Albany, New York, Mary desires more. With all her heart, she wants to become a surgeon. The local medical school, however, refuses even to consider the possibility of admitting a female and none of the doctors in the area will agree to teach her what he knows. When Mary hears that Dorothea Dix has convinced President Lincoln to allow her to recruit female nurses, she heads to Washington to offer her services to Dix - only to find out that she is too young to qualify.

But no one would accuse Mary Sutter of being a quitter. If Dix will not accept her as a nurse, she will find someone who will. A chance meeting with John Hay, one of Lincoln’s White House secretaries, ultimately leads Mary to the Union Hotel Hospital and the job of assisting the hospital’s chief surgeon, William Stipp. Stipp needs Mary’s help as badly as she needs him to teach her, so the two form a partnership each of them will barely survive. Mary is shocked by what she sees: the hospital is short on supplies and long on patients, Dr. Stipp seems to be learning as he goes, and many of the wounded survive horrific amputation surgery in good shape only to die within days anyway.

My Name Is Mary Sutter is Civil War history as seen primarily through the eyes of the doctors and nurses who struggled, so often in vain, to save the lives of the wounded and sick soldiers placed in their care. Robin Oliveira vividly portrays the medical knowledge and limitations of the day, be it through her detailed descriptions of amputations or those of the potential terrors associated with childbirth of the period. She also reminds her readers of the great number of lives lost so needlessly to secondary infection, a medical problem that would not be solved until after the war.

All of this is tied together by the intriguing story of the Sutter family itself and how the war all but destroyed it. Some readers, I suspect, will find some aspects of the family story to be a little too strongly of the sort found in romance novels; others will find this to be the best part of the book. My Name Is Mary Sutter will appeal to a variety of readers.

Rated at: 3.5