I guess it’s better than chips, or ciggies, though I won’t say I don’t have battles with those as well. For me, mysteries are the Valium of reading material. (Reading material used to be a euphemism for pot back in my old days; “¿Oyes, no tienes materia de lectura?”) I like to read mysteries in bed. If I can get away with it, I’ll spend an entire rotten-weather Saturday moving from couch to chair to nap to mystery until it’s over and in the clear. Yes, mysteries clear my head of the day since they have nothing to do with my job, my family, my economics, etc.

And I love Soho. The galleys come in all the time, sometimes in yellow wrappers and sometimes with a half-finished, glossy cover. There are cozies and foreigners and toughs and exotics. Here are two that I’ve recently read:

Assasins at Ospreys by R.T. Raichev
It’s not the plotting that’s riveting in this book, it’s the language and the characterization. Antonia Darcy and Major Hugh Payne set off one wintery day to rescue a damsel in distress. Darcy’d met the lady at an author meet-and-greet the last summer; Darcy is a mystery writer, Payne is, well, handsome, smart, and handy.

Goldilocks, as Darcy’d nicknamed her, had been in a wheelchair when they first met. Not any more. She’s lithe and light as champagne. She’s also a terrible flirt even though she’s a newlywed. Sound like a cliché? So do most of Raichev’s characters at first impression. Beware. It’s not that the author’s playing games with identity, it’s that he/she (?) develops his/her characters over the course of the story. And first impressions are not always accurate. Imagine!

Then, there’s the language. Pure delight. Everything from the titles of the chapters: “Malice Aforethought,” “The Enigmatic Mr Lushington,” “Ceaseless Turmoil,” “Unholy Dying,” but the sentences, word choice, dialogue, and conversation topics are delish and delovely. Assasins at Ospreys deserves a whole Saturday uninterrupted.


The Headhunters by Peter Lovesey
I know I’ve read something else by this author, but it was years ago and I’d have to see the cover to pick it out. Anyway, that’s irrelevant because nothing about this book fits easily into any category. Sure, there’s a murder – or rather, a body – in the second chapter, and another one about halfway through, but most of the time, I felt more like I was reading a novel than genre fiction.

For one thing, the detective is not the hero of the story even though it appears she is part of a series. Not only is she not a hero, she is shrill and prefers easy answers. For another thing, the characters behave like real people, speak like real people, and are often inscrutable – out of shame, shyness, or deviousness -- like real people. Finally, I had no idea who the perp was until nearly the end, and that only by process of elimination. That doesn’t happen too often without authorial tricks. Lovesey’s trick was all craft.

Is it Spring Break yet? As I’m writing this, the sun is shining and out the window, two swans glide along the Boardman River. They’re not the only ones gliding and diving: besides the ubiquitous mallards, there are mergansers, buffleheads, scoters, and ring-necks. What a nice day, you’re thinking … sounds like Spring Break. Nope. It’s March and the bay is frozen. The river’s the only open body of water around here and that’s why the crowd.

But I’m thinking about Spring Break; I’m thinking about sitting on the beach, legs stretched to the sun. My son is standing in the surf, fishing, and I’m reaching for a book… which one?



How about Mind, Life, and Universe: Conversations with Great Scientists of Our Time (Chelsea Green, 978-1-933392-43-1, edited by Lynn Margulis and Eduardo Punset). This collection of thirty-six interviews is just long enough, just short enough, just provocative enough to warrant lots of in-between surf gazing.

“People think that the brain appeared suddenly,” says Rodolfo Llinás from the NYU School of Medicine. “This is not true. It took 650 million years to become what it is.”

Hmmm. 650 million years ago there was only one land mass and it was called Pangaea.

How about an interview with Daniel Dennett, director for the Center of cognitive Studies at Tufts. He talks about consciousness, soul, will, language, and ESP. And Edward O. Wilson, Harvard professor (emeritus) and one of the greatest science writers of all time. He talks about extinctions by meteorites and the consequent diversification. The last major extinction happened 65 million years ago, and it takes about ten million years for the earth to recover. Between ten and twenty thousand years ago, the Earth was sa rich in species as it’s ever been. “Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.”

Topics range from the why vodka sometimes refuses to unfreeze, the definition of beauty, and the lack of a biological limit on the human lifespan. What could be more wonderful?

Well, magic, I guess.

In Mind, Life and Universe Diana Deutsch, Professor of Psychology at U-C Sand Diego points out that right-handed people tend to hear high-pitched sounds on the right and low pitched sounds on the left. This is regardless of where those sounds are actually coming from. She calls it an acoustic illusion.

Almost magic, but not quite. There is an explanation.

Did anyone ever stop to ask why Orpheus’s lyre charmed stones and snakes, heaven and earth? If they did, was the answer simply because it’s music?


The Biblical account of the birth of magic, according to Astrology, Art, and Alchemy in Art by Matilde Battistini (translated by Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia, J. Paul Getty Museum, 978-0-89236-907-2) begins with the rebellion of the angels and their outcast from heaven.

These children of heaven, having fallen in love with mortal women, decided to reveal to their brides the secret for dominating the Earth. Thus were the magic arts born, the knowledge of the stars and therapeutic properties of minerals and plants that women received and passed on for millennia.

All right. That sounds like fun.

The rest of the book is just as enticingly written, and is fabulously illustrated with the works of everyone from Marcel Duchamp to Giotto to Riminaldi to Blake. The handy size – 5 ¼ x 7 ¾ -- will pack easily in a bag, and all ages and orthodoxies will find something to wonder about when the rain falls on your holiday parade.

I love Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com). Like most people, I’ve had a series of “learning to see” moments in my life. Some of them were traumatic and some so gradual they went unnoticed. None were what I’d call pleasant. Except for Seth. (Could also be that this particular “learning to see” event wasn’t volcanic so much as just eye-opening.) But besides just eye-opening however, Seth’s mix of curiosity and common sense has given me skills for critiquing and communicating about procedures and policies that used to frustrate and sometimes enrage. Okay, I still get mad, but now I talk about it.

Take a recent visit to the doctor’s office. It’s just routine, nothing special, but I did talk to the receptionist twice in a week because the doctor had to reschedule.

So I leave work and drive to the office. It’s snowing like mad. I park and stumble in. Behold! The office is empty! What’s going on? I’ve been coming to this place for ten years…where did it go?

Apparently, it moved two weeks ago. “They sent out a postcard,” a nurse in the hall informs me, “but not everyone got it.” She hands me a murky Xerox of their new location.

Okay, I’m not in sales, but I do work for a business that requires and relies on sales; on making the customer happy; of anticipating needs. What business doesn’t, you may ask? Doctors, that’s what.

What other business would neglect to tell you on the phone – twice – that they’d recently moved? What other business, for that matter, would routinely keep you waiting 40 minutes (at least) for your appointment? What other business would say, “Oh, that’s okay,” when I informed them I was late because I didn’t know they’d moved. That’s okay? You mean it’s my fault and you’re telling me “that’s okay?”

Now, if this were a normal business blowing me off, say a printer or car repair, I’d walk away. And while my initial response to walking away from my doctor is trepidation, that’s mostly because of laziness: I’d have to find another. But think about it, could she, the new one, be any more anonymous than the one I have? I doubt it. Even after ten years, she doesn’t know a single thing about me apart from the stuff on my chart. Is it hard to find a new doctor? No, not really. Certainly not any harder than finding a new printer or car repair shop.

And the point of this harangue? I suppose it’s to shout out from the rooftops, I’m sick and tired of arrogant doctors and I’m not going to take it any longer. Doctors are a business after all, and as a client, I’ve got choices.

It just occurs to me that there’s another business that systematically treats its clients like they have no choice: public schools.

From Bondage to Belonging:
The Worcester Slave Narratives
Edited by B. Eugene McCarthy and Thomas L. Doughton
University of Massachusetts
978-1-55849-622-4

This book is crazy good. Why don’t they use primary materials like these in middle and high schools? The thought and feelings of these men and women are perfectly intelligible to children of that age, and incredibly powerful as they are the words of the people themselves, not some scholar telling, but real slaves showing.

And with that, I’ll let the people speak for themselves.


The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. 1842
“My infancy was spent upon the floor, in a rough cradle, or sometimes in my mother’s arms; my early boyhood in playing with the other boys and girls, colored and white, in the yard… I knew no difference between myself and the white children nor did they seem to know any in turn. Sometimes my master would come out and give a biscuit to me, and another to one of his own white boys but I did not perceive the difference between us…

“When I began to work, I discovered the difference between myself and my master’s white children. They began to order my about, and were told to do so by my master and mistress. I found, too, that they had learned to read, while I was not permitted to have a book in my hand. To be in possession of anything written or printed was regarded as an offence. And then there was the fear that I might be sold away from those who were dear to me, and conveyed far to the South I had learned that being a slave I was subject to this worst (to us) of all calamities and I knew of other in similar situations to myself, thus sold away… To know, also, that I was never to consult my own will, but was, while I lived, to be entirely under the control of another, was another state of mind hard for me to bear. Indeed all things now made me feel, what I had before known only in words, the I was a slave.”


The Life of John Thompson, A Fugitive Slave; Containing His History of 25 Years in Bondage, and His Providential Escape. Written By Himself. 1856
“The first act of slavery which I recorded in my memory , was the sale of my elder sister, who belonged to Henry Wagar, brother to J,H., and who lived three miles from our plantation. My mother heard of the sale, which was on Saturday, and on Sunday tool us with her to see our beloved sister, who was then in the yard with the trader’s drove, preparatory to being removed far South, on the Monday following. After traveling six miles, we arrived at our place of destination. Mother, approaching the door of the trader’s house, fell upon her knees, in tears begging to be permitted to see her imprisoned daughter, who was soon to be dragged away from her embrace, probably to be seen no more in the flesh. It was not his custom to admit slaves into his yard to see their friends; but at this time, his heart seemed to be moved with compassion, for he opened the door, telling us to go in, which we did.

“Here, the first thing that saluted my ears, was the rattling of the chains upon the limbs of the poor victims. It seemed to me to be a hell upon the earth, emblematical of that dreadful dungeon where the wicked are kept, until the day of God’s retribution, and where their torment ascends up forever and ever. As soon as my sister say our mother, she ran to her and fell upon her neck, but was unable to speak a word. There was a scene which angels witnessed; there were tears which, I believe, were bottled and placed in God’s depository, there to be reserved until the day when He shall pour His wrath upon this guilty nation.”

Something that confounds the office every single day when we open the mail is the lack of professionalism in book cover design. I am sure that there are many, many books with wonderful covers that fail to become bestsellers, but I’m also sure that wonderful books with awful covers are doomed from the get-go.

Remember when album covers were so important? They were inspirations and compliments to the music on the disk. The album cover has been replaced by the music video, but book covers are alive and well. Rather, they ought to be.

Some of the problem comes from the disintegration of specialization. Yes, you could blame it on technology, but that would be too easy. Blame it on the guy who thinks he can do everything just because he’s got the technology.

Bob Sacks (www.bosacks.com) sent out an article on 6 February from the Independent about a new printer that produces 3D objects. I’ve seen similar printers used in the auto industry, but soon they’ll be available, and affordable, to anyone. The means of mass production will (or could) suddenly be everyone’s utility room.

Great, and not so great. Great for designers, craftspeople, artists; not so great for the rest of us who will experience a flood of the home-made and half-baked.

The same thing happened when desktop publishing was introduced – has it been almost 20 years! – spawning ugly newsletters, brochures, pamphlets, and now books galore. Just because you can produce a public document doesn’t mean you should.

An average book cover consumes 10 to 15 hours of a designer’s life. Ask yourself, do you even know what an average book cover looks like? And don’t ask your sister or your girlfriend or your mom, because unless they’re designers, they don’t know either.

A book cover inspires an immediate reaction. Whether that reaction is apathy, derisive cackles, or curiosity is totally up to you. My advice: Hire a professional.

Here’s a site I like to look at. Remember, though, just because you look at this site, it doesn’t make you a designer. http://nytimesbooks.blogspot.com/

Part of my morning reading always includes the online magazine Slate, and today I discovered that the parent company, The Washington Post, had added something new. A magazine, The Root, “that provides thought-provoking commentary on today's news from a variety of black perspectives.”

Okay, doesn’t the title seems a little cliché, and the timing of the debut, well, insincere? Does it take a black man running successfully for president for black perspectives to find a forum?

Or am I wrong. Is my reaction cynical? Am I too inclined (given the season) to see slavishness and pandering where there is only coincidence?

It’s not that we don’t need a forum for black experience and voices. And after all the editor-in-chief is Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. His (and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s) eight-volume, 4,000-entry, completely stupendous African American National Biography is coming out next month from Oxford.

And the title no doubt references the interactive genealogical section that the site also hosts. Through AfricanDNA.com (co-founded by Gates) African Americans can trace their ancestry in a number of different ways, including DNA testing.

The website states that “The Root aims to be an unprecedented departure from traditional American journalism, raising the profile of black voices in mainstream media and engaging anyone interested in black culture around the world.”

We welcome their perspectives and wish them well.

On a personal note, I’ve been collecting great books about African American issues for the last couple of months in anticipation of Black History
Month. Yes, I’m a couple of days early, but here’s the first.

Andrea Cheng has written and illustrated a very unusual book, Where the Steps Were (WordSong, 978-1-932425-88-8) about an ordinary class of third graders, their always extraordinary questions, and the teacher who guides them. Miss D. takes the class through lessons on American history, with an emphasis on the experiences and contributions of blacks. Five of the children narrate the year in poems.

CARMEN
Rosa Parks

Harriet Tubman,
she came before Lincoln,
but then how did Rosa Parks
fit in?
Miss Parks
just died,
Miss D. says.
—And she was a slave?
—No, she was a seamstress
who wanted to sit
in her seat on the bus.
We find 1955
on my time line.
Dang,
that was about one hundred years
after slavery.
That’s the year I was born,
Miss D. says.
—So when you were little,
we couldn’t have sat together
on the bus?

The children also talk about personal concerns and family matters.

JONATHAN
Everything Dies

Grams had a husband once
and so did my mom
but their husbands died.
Everything dies
like these cicadas
all over the playground.
Simon’s dad
was murdered one day
and so was Lincoln
in that theater
and Martin Luther King
talking about dreams.

There is additional tension as their school is to be demolished at the end of the year.

JONATHAN
Keys

Mr. O’Leary
has all the keys,
every last one
to every last door
in our school,
even the bathrooms
and the boiler room
where he took me and Anthony
to show us
all that heat.
What’s he going to do
with those keys
when they tear our school
down?

Cheng’s sister teaches third grade in Cincinnati, and the book is based on her experience. The class takes a field trip to a farm, and finally to a theater to see a play. There, history comes home to roost as the children, sitting in the balcony, are accused without evidence of spitting on the crowd below. Back in their classroom—having missed the play—the children write letters to the theater manager, asking him if their skin color had anything to do with their presumed guilt.

Where the Steps Were is fascinating, heartbreaking, and hilarious. It’s an extraordinary collection of voices of ordinary children. Our ordinary (not) children.

It’s primary day in Michigan, where the main offices of ForeWord magazine are located. Unfortunately, the National Parties are punishing the state for wanting to have more a voice in the election process by canceling some or all of their delegates to the national conventions. While that’s nothing to celebrate, it is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, and for that, we have a few book suggestions from Sleeping Bear Press.

Riding to Washington (Sleeping Bear Press, 978-1-58536-324-7) is the story of a girl who rides with her father on a bus from Indianapolis to Washington, D.C., to see and hear Dr. King speak.

At first, she’s convinced that the only reason she’s going is because she’s too much trouble for her mother to handle alone, what with her two baby brothers. On the way, however, she experiences first-hand the effects of inequality and segregation and comes to understand the need for all people, even little trouble-makers like herself, to do the right thing.

Author Gwenyth Swain’s father and grandfather made this trip in 1963, to march for civil rights. The language of the book is colloquial and historical – a choice that will provide discussion material for classrooms. The book is beautifully illustrated by David Geister, with the colors, sites, and textures of the '60s.

Sleeping Bear of Chelsea, Michigan, began publishing in 1998, and considers its authors and illustrators to be “the heart and soul” of the press. Many of their books would be welcome additions to public or home libraries. Here are two others that celebrate the trials and contributions of Black Americans.

 

Let Them Play by Margot Theis Raven
Illustrated by Chris Ellison
978-1-58536-260-8

In 1955 there were 62 official Little League programs in South Carolina, and all but one were white. This is the story of the Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars, an all-black team, that wins the state tournament by default when none of the other teams will play them. At the Little League Baseball World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the Cannon Street team is invited as guests, but they are not allowed to play. Let Them Play takes its title from the chant shouted by the spectators who attended the World Series final.

 

D is for Drinking Gourd: An African American Alphabet
by Nancy Sanders
Illustrated by E. B. Lewis
978-1-58536-293-6

D is for Drinking Gourd,
and the North Star that led through the night
from station to station on the Underground Railroad,
escaping on a dangerous flight.

From the abolitionists to the Harlem Renaissance, D is for Drinking Gourd celebrates the role the African American community has played in the shaping of America.

It’s deadline time for Book of the Year Awards at ForeWord magazine. FedEx, UPS, and the USPS struggle up our mountainside of stairs – bump … bump … bump — with their dollies of submissions. They’re grumbling; I’m grumbling too.

It’s not that I’m doing a lot of heavy lifting, or that the submissions are inferior. It’s the packaging.

One glance at the wrapping and it’s a dead giveaway who’s the professional and who’s the amateur.

Now, I’m not a snob. I give everything a close look – it’s getting close enough to look that’s the problem.

The professionals have got it down: padded envelope with book and press release. Pull the string and it’s open. The envelope can be recycled. I figure it’s the Golden Rule at work here. The professionals no doubt receive their fair share of manuscript mail and they know what a struggle it is to cut through the tape, the bubble wrap, more tape, the cling film, more tape, Styrofoam jacket, more tape. It makes you crazy. It makes you mad. Is that the first impression you, as a publisher or a writer want to make? Of course not.

So, here’s the thing: If you’re sending books to a distributor, they need to arrive in pristine condition. Go ahead. Bubble wrap them to death.

However, if you’re sending books for review or a contest, dinged corners matter not. It’s not as bad as luggage at the airlines, but it’s not a china shop around here either. We’re not selling books, we’re reviewing.

First of all, no tape. I hate tape. Why do so many people think they’ve got to seal the seal with tape? I’ve got one package around here that is completely enclosed in tape. You could eat off it. Have I opened it? Nope.

Also, I dread anything sent in bubble wrap. I can't get the knife to go through that stuff at all, plus it clings to the book in an unreasonable manner. And then, there's the damned tape!

Speaking of which, choose an envelope that gives your book a bit of room to maneuver. If you have to shove the thing into the wrapping, then I'll have to coax it out. I want a book that leaps into my hands.

No Styrofoam padding. Styrofoam is evil.

No Styrofoam chips. They are the devil’s spawn. (I got a book a while ago from a publisher of spiritual books. The thing was suspended in endless and eternal amounts of Styrofoam chips. What a mixed message.)

Also, if you're sending a book for review or a contest, forget the press kit. Press kits are for newspapers that may be interested in writing a feature without having to do research or make a phone call. At ForeWord, we review books, and the books will speak for themselves.

Forget the bookmarks, stickers, magnets, and pens as well.

But don't forget the one page press release packaged with your book. Got to have that for our filing. (This isn’t necessary for contests, but not a bad idea anyway.)

Oh, and one more thing: No Tape.