Book news: ‘Friday Night Lights,’ Gwen Ifill and more
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Also happening in the land of books today:
- Tonight ‘Friday Night Lights’ returns to TV screens (DirectTV, that is). In a roundtable last month, the New York Times wrote, ‘’Friday Night Lights’ still has the ability to shock us, even 20 years after the events it describes have occurred. If you have never read it or know it only through the TV series or the movie, it’s a book that really shouldn’t be missed.’
- Journalist Gwen Ifill’s upcoming book is creating waves around her role as moderator in tomorrow’s VP debate. Due to be published on inauguration day, the book is titled ‘The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.’
- What does it take to keep a bookstore open in 2008? Regional independent chain Olsson’s in Washington, D.C., shut down without warning yesterday; DCist reported that its doors were closed and locked midafternoon. Now, more than 200 fans have posted their regrets on the store’s message board.
- Poet Hayden Carruth has died at age 87. He won the National Book Award for poetry in 1996 and the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 1992.
- Author William F. Buckley gets the last word regarding his third grandson, whom he efficiently cut out of his multimillion-dollar will. Son Christopher Buckley, the satiric novelist, will get the bulk of his father’s estate; some will go to Christopher’s wife and first two children. As for Christopher’s third child -- born to a one-time mistress, a publicist at Random House -- the 7-year-old boy ‘shall be deemed to have predeceased me,’ grandpa Buckley wrote. Even Gawker, not known for being nice, calls the move ‘unconscionable [bleep].’
-- Carolyn Kellogg
