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As Gustav bears down on New Orleans and the residents of coastal Louisiana evacuate, there is little the rest of us can do except watch, wait and hope for the best. And, maybe, read an exceptional account of Hurricane Katrina and its effects on some of those residents, "The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous."
Written by Ken Wells, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and Louisiana native, "The Good Pirates" focuses not on New Orleans but on the adjacent St. Bernard Parish, equally as devastated by the storm. But when the hurricane winds, tornadoes, torrential rains and sudden floodwaters withdrew, St. Bernard's was virtually ignored by authorities, who focused on New Orleans. Rescuers were very slow to arrive; the people of St. Bernard's, many of whom had stayed behind, sheltered their neighbors who had survived and paddled out to rescue those were stranded.
The history of the region is critical to the residents' response, according to Wells, and he tells it in colorful detail — including, yes, pirates. Wells explains the difference between Creole and Cajun and how early French and Spanish settlers ended up in this one place. These chapters alternate with 2005, when the storm rages around the town's residents. He literally ends an early chapter with a wave bearing down on a van with a woman, her two daughters, her brother and their ailing father. It's a breathtaking cliffhanger.
The excitement and history notwithstanding, it's the stories of the survivors that are unforgettable. In some places, floodwater filled homes in less than 20 minutes. How did a 91-year-old woman survive? Why was she compelled, after evacuation, to return?
Author Ken Wells has done a commendable job of bringing the threatened bayous of Louisiana to life. You can listen to his appearance on NPR, which has posted an excerpt — the opening pages — of his book on their site.
— Carolyn Kellogg
Photo of a house in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward in May 2008 by Carolyn Kellogg
As we noted yesterday, the biography of relatively unknown Sarah Palin was being snapped up by people eager to learn more about John McCain's choice for VP.
Today the book -- "Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment on Its Ear," by Kaylene Johnson -- is at No. 12 in all of books on Amazon. It is the No. 1 bestseller in Biographies & Memoirs of Women and also No. 1 in Biographies & Memoirs of Leaders and Notable People -- Politicians.
The Wall Street Journal quotes author Johnson as saying that "the book has been selling well in Alaska because people really like
her." That's probably an old quote, as the book is now selling well pretty much everywhere.
And some in Alaska aren't Palin-boosters. The Anchorage Daily News says local politicians are "stunned." Republican state Senate President Lyda Green, who, along with Johnson, is from Palin's hometown of Wasilla, said: "She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?"
Many are looking to Johnson's bio for the answer to that question.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
UPDATE: "Sarah" is now, after 1pm Pacific, at #10 on Amazon's sales chart; it's the only biography in the top 10.
Photo credit: Kiichiro Sato / Associated Press
For two weeks in September, The Big Read's red hybrid will be traversing the country, fostering a literary life wherever it may. Actually, it's not the car that'll be fostering literature (although since it says "The Big Read" in bright letters on the side, it is promoting reading) -- it'll be National Endowment for the Arts Director of Literature David Kipen, the tall guy behind the wheel.
Kipen has posted a map of his itinerary so far. He's leaving Washington, D.C., making his way south and west to New Orleans, crisscrossing Texas, coming out to see the Pacific, then heading back east via Nevada, Colorado and Wisconsin. In each of his scheduled stops, he'll be joining in on events celebrating local Big Read projects, in which communities read one book together.
The funny thing is, each city seems to have picked an atypical book. In San Francisco, they're reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," (set in New York), while Winston-Salem, N.C., is reading John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" (set in California). Kipen will learn about dog sledding in Colorado, where they're reading "The Call of the Wild" by Jack London (set in Canada's Yukon territory).
Kipen has asked for hints: where to eat, landmarks to see, generous and/or literary resting places or stops along the way. We think, while he's in San Francisco, he should head across the bay to Oakland and visit Jack London Square (it's closer than Canada). While there, he should take some pictures to share with the folks in Colorado.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Photo by George Kelly via Flickr
 Chances are Sarah Palin is having a pretty good day. Yesterday she was governor of Alaska; today she's John McCain's running mate.
Kaylene Johnson must be nearly as happy. She is the Alaskan author who penned "Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment Upside Down." Will people wanting to know more about the Alaskan governor turn to this bio to tell them more?
At 159 pages, it's easy to tackle. According to one review, it's a straightforward accounting of Palin's history.
Author Kaylene Johnson has written two other books and many articles about Alaska. On her website, she writes about the process of putting together the book. She talked to Palin's childhood basketball coach, her aerobics instructor, her pastor, her siblings; she spoke with the governor twice. Johnson writes: I had watched Palin’s rise to the state’s highest office with interest. Jaded as I was about politics in general, the notion that people could take government back into their own hands renewed my faith in the democratic process. It was an opportunity to learn and write about a fascinating woman who made Alaskan history by being the first woman and the youngest governor ever elected.
The only review on Amazon says that "Sarah" is "almost breathlessly optimistic" and wishes it weren't so "lightweight." The book started the day with an Amazon sales rank of about 300,000. As of 11am Pacific, it had risen all the way to 2,294 -- leaping over more than 290,000 other books. How far will it rise?
-- Carolyn Kellogg
UPDATE: And by noon it was at #775. Epicenter, the book's publisher, is figuring out how to fill the new demand -- Barnes & Noble alone wants 15,000 copies.
"He was not shaken by the accident reports, not alarmed. What got on his nerves was the incessant hum of wheels on either side of him, the headlights rushing to meet him every hundred yards, and also the sensation of being caught in a tide, with no way of escaping either to right or to left, or even of driving more slowly, because his mirror showed a triple string of lights following bumper-to-bumper behind him."
That's Georges Simenon, taking on the peculiar horrors of Labor Day weekend in his 1955 novel "Red Lights" (NYRB Classics: 154 pp., $14 paper).
Simenon, of course, is best known for his mysteries featuring Paris police superintendent Inspector Maigret, but for 10 years -- between 1945 and 1955 -- he lived in the U.S., where he wrote some of his most bleak and existential fiction, the so-called romans durs. Here, he gives us Steve Hogan, a frustrated suburbanite, traveling with his wife from New York to Maine to pick up their kids at summer camp. It's a journey that will detour wildly, as Steve drinks his way up the Eastern Seaboard, into a very real dark night of the soul.
Simenon, as always, is great on the details: the way the city empties and the highways fill up, traffic moving at a snail's pace, the Hogans' small car claustrophobic, a battleground in which the minor, ongoing resentments of a marriage not only simmer but explode.
Yet even more, what makes the book so resonant is his ability to evoke Steve's psychological state, his inner conflict between obligation and identity, with an acuity so sharp it hurts. It's no coincidence that Simenon chose this most American of holiday weekends as the setting for a quintessentially American drama, in which the tame surface of domestic life is peeled back, inch by inch, to reveal the roiling tensions underneath.
David L. Ulin
photo by Andrea Allen via Flickr
Is book signing a curse? Prompted by a U.S. Craigslist ad for sweatshop-style autograph forgers, the U.K. has been abuzz with the legendarily traumatic author signings: James Ellroy taking down a stack of 65,000 first editions, Stephen King signing until his fingers cracked, the autograph line demanding their autographs in blood. David Sedaris admits that after seven hours he loses his decorum, writing a cheerful "Abortions, $13!" in one woman's book.
So signing is tiring, exasperating and sometimes unwise. But if it makes fans happy, isn't it worth it? Jacket Copy asked several readers -- who are also writers -- to tell us about their favorite autographed books. Turns out they're from that same David Sedaris... and Allen Ginsberg, Faye Weldon and more (here's a gallery). The details, which are the heart of the matter, from Maud Newton, Nam Le, Claire Zulkey, Said Sayrafiezadeh, Jami Attenberg, Anne Fernald, Mark Haskell Smith and me after the jump.
Continue reading Favorite signatures: from Ginsberg to Sedaris »
Tim Rutten reviews Alfred Muñoz Molina's "A Manuscript of Ashes," a book that was first published in Spain in 1986 and has only now debuted, in translation, in the U.S. This version is "by turns elegiac, incantatory and deeply sensual," Rutten says. It is also a story within a story, a layered fiction of detection and discovery.
The layering of worlds through words is something Muñoz Molina had on his mind when he spoke at the PEN World Voices festival in 2005. He tells of riding the subway and seeing a woman reading Proust: At the moment the woman opened the book [by Proust] and plunged into her reading, some sort of cosmic yet invisible shift took place. She is no longer on the train on this workday morning. She has fled, at least partially, to a different country. She is surrounded not by solemn, sleepy New York subway riders, but perhaps by the haughty guests at an elegant Parisian dinner. She is living in this present moment, between 8:50 and 8:55 A.M., and at the same time in the half-imagined, half-remembered evening Marcel Proust wrote about, and also in the actual time during which Proust — asthmatic, insomniac — was writing, when day was undistinguishable from night because the thick curtains were always drawn. A dying man trying to put off the end so that he could finish the same novel this lady in front of me reads so effortlessly.
Muñoz Molina goes on to ask if writing can change anything. But here he's really already answered his question: It can reach through time and transport the mind. Which sometimes is change enough.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
In the photograph above, from December 1963, President Lyndon Baines Johnson uses his charm on Sen. Richard Russell.
Today is the 100th anniversary of Johnson's birth. Although he was reviled by the activists of the Vietnam era, Johnson was undeniably a champion of civil rights, using whatever he had to -- including intimidation and guile -- to push the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act through congress. In an online-only piece in "The New Yorker," George Packer writes that Johnson achieved greater things in domestic legislation than any President other than F.D.R.... Johnson’s Presidency represented the zenith of American liberalism, and its downfall.
Biographer Robert Caro ("The Power Broker") has written about Johnson, in all his complexity, in "Path to Power," "Means of Ascent" and "Master of the Senate," for which he won his second Pulitzer. Caro is working on the fourth volume of his LBJ biography, and, as he tells Packer, reading today's headlines. I am writing right now about how he won for black Americans the right to vote. I am turning from what happened forty-three years ago to what I am reading in my daily newspaper — and the thrill that goes up and down my spine when I realize the historical significance of this moment is only equaled by my anger that they are not giving Johnson credit for it.
Packer concludes that he'd like the Democrats to "do [Johnson] the justice of speaking his name." The thing is, many who spoke out against the Vietnam War still won't say it very nicely.
— Carolyn Kellogg
Photo credit: National Archives / Lyndon Baines Johnson Library
The third part of Denis Johnson's serial novel "Nobody Move" is out in the September Playboy, and starting next Tuesday, we'll be back on the case, with Richard Rayner, Carolyn Kellogg, Tod Goldberg, Susan Straight and I weighing in on this newest installment, as well as the project as a whole.
What's the latest with Anita and Jimmy? Will Gambol ever get his revenge?
Stay tuned. We'll let you know. ...
— David L. Ulin
Photo by Chor Ip via Flickr
• The Melbourne Writers Festival has kicked off, and a few blog reports have popped up.(via) Hits so far: Augusten Burroughs, Nam Le and, despite only appearing via satellite from Edinburgh, Salman Rushdie.
• Remember when Random House shelved "The Jewel of Medina," a novel about Muhammad's wife, amid speculations that it might be as controversial as "The Satanic Verses"? Well, a Danish publisher now says it would like to publish the book — as if the Danes needed another Muslim controversy.
• One of the best bookstore names ever: New York's Unopressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Books. Making its politics eminently clear — plus, it's cheap!
• When the Man Booker shortlist is announced, excerpts of the in-the-running books will be available via text or audio message to fans in England. After the Sept. 9 announcement, readers who send a text message will get their free shortlist short excerpt; those who like what they hear can purchase the whole thing.
• In Mexico City, Daniel Hernandez salutes Colombian-born author Alvaro Mutis, who turned 85 yesterday.
• The man who co-wrote "100 Things to Do Before You Die" has. Dave Freeman, an ad executive, died after a fall in his home in Venice, Calif., on Aug. 17. He was 47.
— Carolyn Kellogg
Photo by macinate via flickr
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Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
Deputy Book Editor, Los Angeles Times
Lead blogger, Jacket Copy
email: jacketcopyla [at] gmail.com
Assistant Book Editor
Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times