Saturday, January 16, 2010

Biographies “Vampires, dinosaurs and God: The 2009 holiday guide to book buying - Vancouver Sun” plus 3 more

Biographies “Vampires, dinosaurs and God: The 2009 holiday guide to book buying - Vancouver Sun” plus 3 more

Vampires, dinosaurs and God: The 2009 holiday guide to book buying - Vancouver Sun

Posted: 16 Jan 2010 04:54 AM PST

Got a bookworm on your holiday gift list? That's great news: books slip easily into stockings, are a quick find both in stores and online, can be easily exchanged or returned, and come in only one size. And whether you're shopping for a Twilight loving tween or a well-read aristocrat, there is something on the book shelves for everyone this year.

We've perused the best-sellers lists and beyond, picking out the season's hottest titles in both fiction and non-fiction for children, teens, and adults. From celebrity bios to children's collections, we've found new classics as well as special editions of old favourites.

In fiction Vancouver-based author Douglas Coupland has returned with a millennial update of his '90s novel, Generation X, focusing on the latest cohort of tech-savvy youngsters, Generation A. About a Boy author Nick Hornby is also back with Juliet Naked, and the ever present Stephen King has penned yet another thriller, Under the Dome. For something more festive, check out Augusten Burroughs' collection of comical Christmas stories, You Better Not Cry.

Both Sarah Palin and Andre Aggassi have written (or had ghostwriters write) biographies of their respective journeys in the non fiction category. Pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman has put out another collection of essays, Eating the Dinosaur, and famed Darwinist Richard Dawkins has released his latest all-on-assault of the God theory, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

Though both the Twilight and Gossip Girl franchises have published their final chapters teens still can't get enough of blood suckers or secret swapping high school students. New this season is the prequel to Lisi Harrison's Gossip Girl-esque series The Clique, Charmed and Dangerous, along with another addition to the long list of vampire books, Molly Harper's Nice Girls Don't Date Dead Men.

For children old classics like Curious George and Winnie the Pooh have been re-packaged for a new generation alongside new titles in the kid-lit category, like Antoinette Portis' best-selling Not A Box.

Check out the cover art for our selections in the galleries.

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Perfect timing for Ayn Rand biographies - Concord Monitor

Posted: 09 Jan 2010 10:20 PM PST

You can admit it now: Maybe in your teens, or in college, you experimented. Hiding in your dorm or your parents' basement, you took hit after hit. Your friends began wondering why you'd changed, but it was too late: Ayn Rand was in your bloodstream.

My own dealer was a libertarian teaching assistant who introduced me to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in graduate school; soon I was subscribing to Rand-inspired newsletters and quoting Howard Roark and John Galt - Rand's two most famous creations - on the virtues of selfishness and individualism. It took the better part of a year to get over it, but, like so many others, I eventually realized that architects shouldn't go around blowing up buildings and that, above all, you can't really divide all humans into capitalist geniuses and collectivist looters.

Now, two new beautifully timed Ayn Rand biographies - appearing just as the financial crisis and Obamanomics have sparked interest in her defense of pure capitalism - offer ammunition for fans and skeptics alike. As Jennifer Burns explains in Goddess of the Market, critics of Rand's one-dimensional characters and overwrought prose miss her underlying political impact. "For over half a century," writes Burns, "Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to a life on the right," a one-woman awakening for burgeoning conservatives. Yet while Anne C. Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made agrees that Rand has helped shape views on individual rights for three generations of Americans, both books end up revealing how hard it is to live out Rand's worldview - a difficulty exemplified most painfully by the ultimate devotee: Rand herself.

In a life spanning most of the 20th century, Rand sought to live up to her own fictional characters, falling deeper into that world she made and farther from reality. The result was a sad existence, rife with the personal and intellectual contradictions she detested in others. She prized reason above all else yet was notoriously emotional; she claimed to live for no one's approval but agonized over every last critic; she lionized free markets but never invested in stocks; she praised independent thinkers yet demanded mindless loyalty from friends and associates. Not even Rand, it turns out, could be her own true believer.

Rand's literary themes and worldview emerged early in life. Born Alisa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, she was a "lonely, alienated child," oppressed by a mother who constantly questioned her worth - much as Rand would later do to her own acolytes. An academic standout but friendless in school, Alisa saw herself as "a heroine unfairly punished for what was best in her," says Burns, a recurring theme in her fiction. She admired her father's refusal to continue working after the Red Guard confiscated his pharmacy during the Bolshevik revolution. His actions inspired her major work, Atlas Shrugged, in which capitalists decline to keep producing rather than allow the state to pillage their productivity.

Rand was enamored of all things American - especially movies, which she watched by the hundreds - and migrated to the United States at age 20, made her way to Hollywood and began working on short fiction and plays. There she met and married Frank O'Connor, a middling actor who was "stunningly beautiful . . . tall, slender, with a classic profile." He helped her acquire U.S. citizenship, encouraged her in the darkest days of her writing, and inspired the look of her male protagonists. Yet he would never live up to their heroism. O'Connor emerges as one of the gloomiest individuals in these biographies, retreating into gardening, painting and alcohol to escape Rand's suffocating presence.

As her reputation grew with the 1943 publication of The Fountainhead - the best-selling tale of a hunky young architect who would rather destroy his creation than forsake his independence - Rand acquired a growing collection of fans, taking a particular liking to admiring and handsome young men. Foremost among these was Nathaniel Branden, who first reached out to her as a Fountainhead-obsessed college student. Though 25 years her junior, Branden became the most pivotal relationship in her life. He was her intellectual heir, popularizer and lover.

"You are my lifeline to reality," Rand told Branden as she slipped into depression and paranoia after Atlas Shrugged received harsh reviews. "Without you, I would not know how to exist in this world." (Her long reliance on amphetamines to power her through marathon writing sessions didn't help her mood, either.) And she even felt pressured by her novel's hero: "John Galt wouldn't feel this," she mused aloud in her New York City home. "I would hate for him to see me like this."

One way she got by was through infamous Saturday night salons, all-night affairs attended by Branden, his wife and a small group of her most dedicated followers (including a young Alan Greenspan, whom Rand nicknamed "the Undertaker.") In these gatherings, held throughout the 1950s and '60s in Rand's New York City home, Rand would hold court on her philosophy - now dubbed Objectivism - and pass judgment on the actions of "the Collective," as the participants called themselves. The moniker, intended ironically, ended up oddly apropos. Acceptance of Rand's entire worldview was a requirement for admission; even deviating from her tastes in art and fashion became verboten. "Check your premises!" Rand would exhort her followers.

"In all of her most crucial relationships, Rand would see others favorably largely to the degree that they mirrored her unusual self," Heller explained. The result was a steady stream of friendships gone wrong; whenever Rand decided that someone displayed "anti-life" tendencies, she cast them out. Years later, after a wrenching break with Branden, she privately wished him decades of impotence for daring to start another affair. Crossing Rand was not just bad manners; in her book, it was a moral failing.

While Heller's biography is the more comprehensive of the two - detailing everything from the books Rand loved as a child to her fumbling affair with Branden - Burns, a historian at the University of Virginia, emphasizes Rand's impact on American conservatism. Though her Russian roots forever informed her politics, Rand's U.S. political awakening flowed from her revulsion against Roosevelt's New Deal. She became a volunteer for Republican presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie in 1940, even conducting opposition research on FDR and blasting the president on New York City street corners. "What she wanted, more than anything else," writes Burns, "was someone who would stand up and argue for the traditional American way of life as she understood it: individualism."

But no person or movement ever measured up. Right-wing icons such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were not sufficiently conservative, the libertarian movement was simply stealing her ideas, and not even free-market economist Friedrich Hayek was good enough. ("The man is an ass, with no conception of a free society at all," she scribbled in the margins of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.)

In the end, up until her death in 1982, it seemed the only one who ever measured up in her mind was, well, Rand herself. Branden later described to Heller the principles he taught to Objectivism students in the 1960s. Among them: "Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived. . . . No one who disagrees with Ayn Rand on any fundamental issue can be a fully consistent individual."

In a made-up world, it was easy to believe it. "It was more and more true that we were living inside the world of Atlas Shrugged," Branden admitted.

He should have checked his premises.

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Slacker Radio now hits Canada - Mobiletor.com

Posted: 16 Jan 2010 03:56 AM PST

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Music zealots may now be seen tripping the light fantastic behind the doors with some peppy tunes in mind. Making them leap and skip playfully even more, Slacker has recently proclaimed that users in Canada can now enjoy Slacker Personal Radio. The ...

Allen Barra on Yogi Berra: One of My Favorite Sports Biographies Ever - Huffingtonpost.com

Posted: 22 Dec 2009 12:23 AM PST

There's no question that Allen Barra is one of the best long-form sports journalists working today. (One I'd put near him is L. Jon Wertheim, whose Running the Table, rating: 90, and Blood in the Cage, rating: 79, are among the best books ever written about billiards and mixed martial arts, respectively.) His 2005 book The Last Coach, a biography of Paul "Bear" Bryant, considered by many to be the greatest college football coach of all time, was simply masterful (rating: 90); I loved it even though I have no interest in college football. His new book, Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee, a biography of his near-namesake, is just as good. Yogi's one of the most famous living athletes, author of numerous World Series highlights, a number of memoirs, and scores of half-remembered quotes, and Barra's book is the first comprehensive biography of the man; it's also one of the quintessential baseball biographies. Any Yankee fan, any baseball fan, will enjoy it.

Long-form baseball writing is harder than ever these days because of the widening rift in the baseball writing community over the merits and proper use of advanced statistics. It's a generational thing: old-school sportswriters are still attached to newspapers, and are dwindling as newspapers shed staff, and they're an aging bunch. They're getting more and more outnumbered by internet professionals and bloggers like me who pontificate about sports in other media. This also frequently leads to disdain for advanced baseball research performed by fans and laymen. Barra gracefully tiptoes through this minefield. In deference to the sportswriting of the time, he characterizes Yogi's year-to-year performances with standard stats like home runs, RBI, and batting average. But in an absorbing, thoughtful appendix, he quotes the work of well-known baseball researchers and sabermetricians like Bill James, Pete Palmer, Eddie Epstein, Rob Neyer, and more, to put Yogi's career in proper context. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Barra is an old-school writer comfortable with the new world of baseball statistics.

The author starts the book with the audacious claim that his subject, one of the most famous men in America, is vastly underrated as a player -- that his reputation as a quotable clown obscures his career as arguably the greatest catcher in baseball history. But he also gives a sense of Yogi the man. He was a shy, humble, devout Catholic who still carried photos of his late parents in his wallet well into his '60s, who has been married to his wife for 60 years, and who is far happier to talk about his grandchildren than himself. But he was a fierce competitor supremely confident in his own abilities and self-worth. He threatened holdouts for a higher salary from the Yankees' famously skinflint general manager, George Weiss, until he got the amount of money that he wanted. And, in 1985, after George Steinbrenner fired him as manager of the Yankees without telling him personally, he swore he'd never again set foot in Yankee Stadium as long as Steinbrenner was manager, an oath he kept for 14 years until Joe Dimaggio convinced Steinbrenner to personally apologize.

Of course, Berra's era is the golden age of the Yankees -- he won ten World Series from the late '40s to the early '60s, and was the undeniable leader of ten different World Champion teams. (That's a record. By a lot.) It's also the tentative, rocky, hesitant period of integration in baseball. Of course, the 1950s are perhaps the most-written about decade in baseball, so while Barra on Berra yields new, interesting details, the atmospherics of the era are a bit more warmed-over -- so he often tends to fast-forward through the seasons to get to the parts that really matter, the World Series. And that's fine. Barra's obviously fond of his protagonist, so if you have a real problem with the Yankees winning every year, you're not going to find much of a sympathetic voice on the page. Berra runs into a little more trouble after he retires, as political upheaval in the Yankee front office resulted in his being fired as Yankee manager on two different occasions, despite relative success with the team. He went through further drama, which Barra touches only lightly, when his son Dale Berra, also a major leaguer, was implicated in the 1980's cocaine scandal.

Yogi's a man who's lived a full life and lived it well. The book doesn't exactly read like a hagiography, but Barra clearly doesn't have much bad to say about the man -- nor does anyone else. I couldn't help smiling while reading it. And I'm already hungry for Barra's next.

Rating: 93
Crossposted on Remingtonstein.

Follow Alex Remington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alexremington

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