New Malcolm Gladwell Bestseller

A must-read. More HERE.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Coming May 13, available now for pre-order at Amazon.com.

Even Gargoyles Get Bored

Majestyk . . .

. . . stepped into him as he brought the shotgun up, grabbing the barrel with his left hand, and drove his right fist hard into Bobby Kopas's face, getting some nose and mouth, staying with him as Kopas went back against the car door, and slammed the fist into him again, getting his sunglasses this time, wiping them from his face, and pulling the shotgun out of his hands as Kopas twisted and his head and shoulders fell into the window opening.

"Mr. Majestyk," the first Elmore Leonard novel I ever read, was commended to my attention long ago by The Oldtimer. Despite having written 42 others, Leonard says:

"I never had a really brilliant idea," he is saying, coming back into the room. His name is Elmore, but people call him by his high school nickname. "A really great story idea that keeps readers turning the pages. And I just never had one. I always came up with stuff that I'd say, 'Oh, I guess I could make a book about that.' "

And he's quite right. His stories don't turn on big ideas or plot-gulping surprises. He reminds us of Carl Hiaasen (minus the bizarre) or, more apt for their realistic ambiguity, John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee (minus Trav's introspection, of course).

Today the Washington Post does a long profile of Leonard, on the occasion of his receipt of some literary prize or other. If you don't know the world of Elmore Leonard, you should get to know it:

. . . his world is off-kilter America, primarily a vision of the lower end of the post-Vietnam era, when the margins got thin, the morals of the nation got cloudy, and irony became a survival mechanism. It's populated by cops who aren't exactly good, crooks who aren't exactly bad, and women who have an eye for the in-between. There is no judgment. Bad guys don't know they're bad. They brush their teeth and call their moms and then go rob a bank. Cynicism is on view, as is a vast detailing of bars, alcohol, prison cells, loan-sharking operations and gun runners. There is usually a lot of cash in a small container. People get shot. Self-confidence is a requirement. It's a place where getting dead isn't funny, but if this lounge singer shoots a would-be rapist and the bullet goes through him and hits her detective boyfriend right in the butt, well, you have to see the humor in the situation.

Pardon Me, But Have We Met?

"Isabel had in the depths of her nature an . . . unquenchable desire to please . . . ; but the depths of this young lady’s nature were a very out-of-the-way place, between which and the surface communication was interrupted by a dozen capricious forces. She saw the young men who came in large numbers to see her sister; but as a general thing they were afraid of her; they had a belief that some special preparation was required for talking to her. Her reputation of reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic; it was supposed to engender difficult questions, and to keep the conversation at a low temperature."

Henry James, "The Portrait of a Lady"

How Green Were the Nazis?

Today the finalists for this year's The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year were announced by The Bookseller magazine. You can weigh in with your own opinion by participating in their online poll (lower right corner). The winner will be announced on Friday the 13th (of April), just before the opening of the London Book Fair.

Last year's winner was People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It, by Gary Leon Hill (Red Wheel). Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller, said:

While rival literary awards like the Costas and the Orange Broadband Prize have sold out, The Bookseller/Diagram Prize has refused all offers of corporate sponsorship for 29 years. It continues to celebrate the bizarre, the strange, and the simply odd. This year’s shortlist shows that despite publishers cutting back their lists, literary diversity continues to flourish.

This year's six finalists are:

How Green Were the Nazis? ,
edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller (Ohio University Press);

D. Di Mascio’s Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry: An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans,
by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher, and Alan Wilkinson (Past Masters);

The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification,
by Julian Montague (Harry N Abrams);

Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan,
by Robert Chenciner, Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie (Bennett & Bloom);

Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium,
edited by Robert J Anderson, Juliet A Brodie, Edvar Onsoyen and Alan T Critchley (Kluwer);

Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence,
by David Benatar (Clarendon Press).

Why Can't We All Just Quietly Kill Ourselves?

By way of selling his latest book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, Mark Steyn suggested to his publisher that he appear not only in predictably sympathetic forums, but also in those guaranteed to be hard-core anti-American, like NPR and PBS. His publicist supposedly demurred and, when Steyn objected that he was tough enough to take the heat, was corrected:

"I didn’t mean that,” she said. “I meant going on those shows doesn’t sell a lot of books.” As she sees it, your nutso right-wing author does ten minutes on WZZZ Hate-Talk AM at three in the morning and the local Borders sells out the next day. Whereas he’s interviewed for an hour by Terry Gross on NPR, and it sends precisely two listeners out to their bookstore, and only to buy that Andrew Sullivan doorstopper on everything that’s gone wrong with conservatism.

Nonetheless, Steyn persisted and bearded the lion in his den. He doesn't mind the conspiracy fellows, who've proved in their own back yard, to their own satisfaction, that the World Trade Center was brought down by Mossad, using sophisticated vinegar/baking soda bombs. Nor do the blood-for-oil ladies trouble him. He is, instead, "befuddled" by the "pacifists":

. . . the callers who aren’t foaming and partisan but speak in almost eerily calm voices, like patient kindergarten teachers, and say things like “I find it very offensive that your guest can use language that’s so hierarchical” - i.e., repressive Muslim dictatorships are worse than pluralist western democracies - and “We are confronting violence with violence, when what we need is non-violent conflict resolution that’s binding on all sides” – i.e. …well, i.e. whatever.

Half the time these assertions are such enervated soft-focus blurs of passivity, there’s nothing solid enough to latch on to and respond to. But, when, as they often do, they cite Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, I point out that we’re not always as fortunate to find ourselves up against such relatively benign enemies as British imperial administrators or even American racist rednecks. King and Gandhi’s strategies would not have been effective against fellows who gun down classrooms of Russian schoolchildren, or self-detonate at Muslim weddings in Amman, or behead you live on camera and then release it as a snuff video, or assassinate politicians and as they’re dying fall to the ground and drink their blood off the marble. Come to that, King and Gandhi’s strategies would not have been effective against the prominent British Muslim who in a recent debate at Trinity College, Dublin announced that the Prophet Mohammed’s message to infidels was “I am here to slaughter you all.” Good luck with the binding non-violent conflict resolution there.

[snip]

On the whole I prefer those Americans who tune out the foreign-policy bores for wall-to-wall Anna Nicole Smith coverage: at least they’ve got an interest – ask them about the latest scoop on the identity of the father of her child and they’ll bring you up to speed. By contrast, a large number of elite Americans are just as parochial and indifferent to the currents of the age; the only difference is that they choose to trumpet it as a moral virtue. And you can’t avoid the suspicion that, far from having “a lot of work to do”, a lot of us are heavily invested in a belief in “pacifism” because it involves doing no work at all – apart from bending down once every couple of years and slapping the “CO-EXIST” bumper sticker on your new car.

Read the whole thing. H/T to relapsed catholic.

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