The books and reviews:

Hundreds of newly released books and advance reader copies are mailed to the newspaper each month from publishing houses, publicists and occasionally from authors (uncorrected proofs are usually discarded.) I also have access to two wire services that features book reviews as part of the newspaper’s subscription. Since we have a limited amount of space, I make editorial decisions on what books I send to our book reviewers (RT staff members and freelancers who are compensated by the newspaper) and what wire stories make the page.

Books are chosen so that a variety of genres are represented (popular and literary fiction, nonfiction, hobbies, lifestyle, young adult books, etc.) with the intent to make the page relevant, timely and appealing to readers. My goal is to feature reviews in the newspaper within six to eight weeks of the book’s release.

Occasionally I feature reviews of older titles as part of our recurring “May I Recommend” feature. We no longer feature reviews of children’s books.

The reviewers:

I match the books to the reviewers based on the reviewer’s reading preferences and their availability to read the book and write the review on deadline. While we do compensate our freelancers, it is a nominal amount –staff writers receive no extra compensation– so our reviewers write for the Books page because they love to read and share their thoughts on books.

Local authors

Continuing the policy of my predecessor, I do not consider self-published books for review. In this age of on-demand and digital publishing, there are far too many self-published works for the limited space of the page. This has disappointed many local authors who have asked me to consider their books for review, but it is necessary to ensure both fairness and the quality of the page.

When a local author (someone who resides in Southwestern Virginia or has strong ties to the area) has an edited book released and mailed to the newspaper by a reputable publishing house or university press, I try– but do not always succeed–to match that book with a local reviewer. That can be a challenge to find an impartial reviewer since the writers community in Roanoke is a well-networked group.

To ensure the integrity of the page, reviewers should not be a friend of the author and if the reviewer and author are acquainted, that will be disclosed in the review. I have used wire reviews of books by local authors to avoid conflict of interest.

Signings and readings

All authors, including those with self-published books, who have signings and readings in Roanoke and New River Valley bookstores and public libraries are encouraged to email details to events@roanoke.com to be featured in the Books and Talks calendar that runs each Monday in the Extra section of the newspaper.

Book review process for the Sunday page is a post from: AirStream Books

Title: William Henry Harrison Publishers: Times Books

Author: Gail Collins

At some point, every schoolchild learns that William Henry Harrison was America’s briefest president, his death from pneumonia in 1841 coming just a month after a record two-hour inaugural address on a wintry day. For young minds, the message is clear: Don’t go outside without a warm coat, and don’t talk so much.

If you aren’t contemplating doctoral studies in American history, what else is there worth knowing? Author Gail Collins ably answers that question with the Harrison entry in Times Books’ noteworthy The American Presidents series, a kind of Nutshell Library for adult history buffs.

True, Harrison’s 31 days in office receive only slightly fewer pages than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 12 years. The point isn’t length – most books in the series are around 200 pages and Harrison’s is about 150 – but presenting concise, readable portraits of the presidents to a broad audience. Indeed, the series may be at its best in its effort to make the lives of Harrison, Warren G. Harding and other lesser presidential lights more accessible and interesting.

Collins, a columnist for The New York Times, achieves that goal in spite of Harrison’s oh-so-limited legacy. Her journalistic eye for the significant fact and the engaging anecdote helps guide readers through a life of achievement and occasional controversy.

Harrison was born in 1773 into a prominent Virginia family, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His father’s death, when William Henry was 18 and studying medicine in Philadelphia, left him without ample funds. He tapped his father’s friends, including George Washington, as he successfully sought an army commission.

The young soldier moved up the ranks while fighting Native Americans in the Northwest Territory, then the lands that would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota. Those exploits led to his appointment as the territory’s secretary and later as the governor of the vast Indiana Territory, all those lands save Ohio.

His lifetime of government service – military general and war hero, Ohio state lawmaker, US congressman and senator, US diplomat, county official – was devoted as much to gaining a regular and plentiful salary as building a young nation. With a wife and 10 children as well as a penchant for investments doomed to failure, Harrison always needed money.

Collins’ accounts of the presidential elections of 1836, the year Harrison lost, and 1840, the year he won, provide the slim biography its most lively pages. Lest we forget, running for president has had its silly, disingenuous and ugly sides since the early years of the republic.

Book Review: Slim biography suits America’s shortest presidency is a post from: AirStream Books

As an author, Michio Kaku is like Walt Disney with a Ph.D., patiently leading his charges from one amazing place to the next; Kaku’s Disneyland is the future. To paraphrase from the old Disney television show theme: The world is a carousel of wonder. Kaku — eminent scientist and professor, co-author of string field theory — possesses that same sense of awe and joy of discovery that made Disney such an icon.

While Disney recruited the best and the brightest to help him forge entertainment using science, “Physics of the Future” uses entertainment to explain science. The ideas expounded upon can be daunting for the layman, but Kaku’s gift is his unerring ability to render the obtuse concrete. There may be a reader to two who may complain that the material is somehow “dumbed down,” but I would argue that those readers have likely researched the subject matter thoroughly already. Besides, there is a vast difference between diluting the material for the easily distracted, and presenting a topic succinctly and clearly; Kaku does the latter.

We begin our journey with the story of the computer, the existence of which was the stuff of fantasy at the turn of the 20th century. The computer as we know it today, in fact, was virtually unthinkable even half a century ago. Moore’s law states that computer power doubles roughly every 18 months. As chips and their attendant uses become less and less expensive, they begin to appear in more and more places; so many places, and in such numbers, that we cease to realize they are even there. The author quotes novelist Max Frisch: “Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” As such, computer technology will continue to blend seamlessly into the fabric of our lives; the predicted future of eyeglasses and contact lenses is astonishing, and gets more so as each iteration begets further advances.

The chapter on artificial intelligence does an admirable job explaining intelligence and consciousness as it relates to constructs: If you’ve seen too many Hollywood movies and expect your toaster to one day rear back and demand respect, you will find many of your worries eased.

Book review | ‘Physics of the Future’ – Courier is a post from: AirStream Books

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Book Review Podcast: The Real ‘Downton Abbey’ and the Feminism of Elizabeth Taylor is a post from: AirStream Books

Presented as an “A-Z of England’s greatest novelist”, the book is really one big excuse for Sutherland to share his favourite theories and facts about Dickens. That the book opens with an A for ‘Amuthement’ and ends with a Z for ‘Zoo Horrors’ will give you a good impression of the author’s eccentric approach. This is a book built to entertain, but underpinned by a long career of scholarship. Sutherland finds his subject an ‘inexhaustible fund of entertainment,’ and bends that spirit onto his own pages.

Just a few examples… Under ‘C’, we learn of Dickens’ attitude to cannibalism. ‘H’ for Hands paints Great Expectations as a ‘masturbator’s manual’. ‘B’ for Blind Spots discusses the mysterious lack of Irish people in Dickens’ novels, and the total absence of that other iconic figure of the age, Queen Victoria. Not many authors could confidently begin a chapter by saying “I believe I was the first to point out a teasing puzzle in Great Expectations…” (a hattery matter), or get away with comparing Dickens to Michael Jackson’s doctor.

Sutherland is clearly a man who knows his subject so well that he’s able to play games with it. The result is a joyful dance of a book that even the most jaded Dickens reader will relish.

The Dickens Dictionary by John Sutherland is out now from Icon Books. Buy here.

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Book Review: The Dickens Dictionary By John Sutherland is a post from: AirStream Books

Bruce Schneier’s newest book explores how security without trust is destined to fail

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I’ve always considered anything written by Bruce Schneier to be part of my ongoing education about IT security. Like Warren Buffet of the financial world, Schneier has a special talent for simplifying complex IT concepts by stripping away the fat. Each book is like its own little graduate course on whichever subject he happens to be discussing. I had a chance to review a pre-release of his forthcoming book “Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive,” and I can say that it is among his best. It explores the end-game emotion for all computer security, trust — and it prompted me to re-think my long-standing proposal for fixing the Internet.

Schneier (who also pens a can’t-miss blog and newsletter) started his career as a nuts-and-bolts cryptographer. His more recent books have tended to touch instead on realms of computer security, such as privacy, human nature, and fear. In “Liars and Outliers,” he argues that in order for societies to advance, they have to trust the systems designed to keep them secure.

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Fear of something naturally leads to the contemplation of whether or not we should trust related scenarios. A ready example is how we treat unexpected emails arriving from friends with strange-looking subject lines, asking us to click on unknown links. Is it really from a friend touting some interesting new content, or is it from a malware program just hoping we will click on the link and get pwned? Schneier’s first main argument is that we need security systems to extend trust beyond small, intimate groups to handle scaling issues. Without trusted security systems, the book declares, we would never have been able to evolve into a civilization.

I tend to measure the quality of a nonfiction book by the amount of highlighting I do in them so I can come back later to re-visit the salient points. By that measurement, I liked “Liars Outliers” a tremendous amount. I highlighted an average of two to three sections on every page. Although some topics are a little overly academic (a theme in some of his more recent works), the mix is very good. Chapters and subjects are short, yet meaty; at no time did I feel like I was plodding along. Well done.

I’m sure every reader will come away with different lessons, but the main ones that will stick with me are:

• Trust underlies all civil society in everything we do.
• When security or societal pressure is applied, it takes time for the lessons and outcomes to be effective, and subsequently measured. As a result, we will always be playing catch-up with cybercriminals.
• Civil society must always bear some negative outcomes or it won’t remain civil in the long run. For example, to get rid of all crime would require a complete loss of freedom. Or from an IT perspective, eradicating all spam would require a severely restricted, and probably, unusable email system.
• Stateless civil-disobedience organizations, such as Anonymous and Wikileaks, are far harder to control than state-bound institutions.
• Lastly, informal societal pressures have a greater impact on outcomes than formal laws and controls.

Overall, I learned enough that I’m going to have to go back and re-examine my treatise on significantly improving Internet security. For one, my Internet safety goal has always been to eradicate all Internet crime. I now realize that my goal should be to right-size Internet crime to an acceptable level.

A second lesson is that it will be very hard to design a perfect proactive security system without taking away too much of the freedom necessary for civilization to take advantage of the positive gains of the technology. Make a system too secure, and you’ll lose the audience you’re trying to protect.

The fact that “Liars and Outliers” prompted me to go back and update my own thinking is truly the measure of Schneier’s latest book. It was so good that I had. Thanks again, Bruce. Can’t wait for your next one.

This story, “Book review: ‘Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive’,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Keep up on the latest developments in network security and read more of Roger Grimes’s Security Adviser blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

Book review: ‘Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive’ is a post from: AirStream Books

The follow-up to Clark’s highly acclaimed fiction debut, Guilt by Association (2011), Degrees again features thirty-something Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Rachel Knight, who is a member of the elite Special Trials Unit – a position that the author held during her tenure at the DA’s office.  This unique role allows Knight not only to have her day in court but to also work investigations alongside the cops, which is a welcome departure from more standard, formulaic legal thriller fare.

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Central to the book’s mysteries (and there are quite a few) is the baffling death of a homeless man struck down in the midst of a bustling city sidewalk.  Though the case nearly falls through the cracks, Rachel salvages it – and unwittingly embroils herself in a host of intricately connected crimes that include the brutal murder of an LAPD officer a year earlier.  Her involvement leads to dire consequences; it also allows for thoughtful, unpretentious commentary on an array of social issues, not the least of which is the plight of the homeless.  (Rachel’s ongoing friendship with the downtrodden but dignified Cletus is particularly illuminating.)

Feisty Detective Bailey Keller and fellow prosecutor Toni LaCollette join Rachel in her crusade for justice – after all, what are “besties” for? – once again proving that there can be solidarity among professional women, even in the face of bitter office politics, personal conflict, and high-stakes intrigue.  This trio’s close-knit, girl-power bond makes for clever banter that brings levity (not to mention food, drink and a multitude of LA hot spots) to an otherwise somber affair.  This likable cast of comrades has clearly captured Clark’s heart, and that fondness resonates in her writing.

Character development, then, is particularly strong in Guilt by Degrees, as Clark reveals a past that was only hinted at in book one.  These personal disclosures have not only influenced Rachel Knight’s career ambitions, but also her relationships – and particularly those with men.  (Readers who enjoyed meeting Lieutenant Graden Hales in Guilt by Association will be happy to know that he reappears in this book – though his bids for Rachel’s affections are not entirely unrivaled.)  The revelations are doled out sparingly but satisfyingly, with the promise of more to come in future installments (of which there will hopefully be many).

With Guilt by Degrees, Clark has managed to do the arduous and make it look easy: she has taken the strongest elements from an already assured debut and melded them into near perfection.  The dialogue is razor sharp, the humor laugh-out-loud funny, and the pacing relentless.  Further, Clark infuses the narrative with a wealth of expertly-informed details shaped by the years that she spent living and breathing her protagonist’s life.  Bullets may fly on the page, but it’s readers that will ultimately be blown away…

***

Guilt by Degrees will be published on May 8, 2012.  

With thanks to Mulholland Books for providing a review copy of the book.

Advance Book Review: ‘Guilt by Degrees’ by Marcia Clark is a post from: AirStream Books

A self-made, successful entrepreneur, Koop’s early years were filled with colorful, interesting and insightful experiences. Graduating “magna cum laude” from the “School of Hard Knocks,” Koop took advantage of every opportunity that came his way and through guts, determination and at times, chutzpah, he managed to build and run numerous successful companies without any formal business education. So, when faced with the unthinkable diagnosis of a deadly, rare form of bone cancer, Koop attacked this life-altering challenge the same way he approached all the other situations he encountered throughout his life – head-on, practical and determined.

Koop’s recounting of his diagnosis, prognosis, surgeries, treatments, complications and long-term effects, gives the reader honest insight as to what the cancer patient is experiencing, feeling emotionally and physically and what this individual needs from those around him. Koop provides excellent advice on what friends and loved ones can do to help, appropriate things to say and how to behave around someone who is ill.

However, this is not the sole focus or purpose of Cancer. Foremost, Koop wants his readers to discover, realize and cherish what is truly important in life – living with love, determination, hope and appreciation no matter what challenges present themselves along the way. This is a book everyone should read and whose message needs to be taken to heart.

View the original article on blogcritics.org

Book Review: Cancer: It’s A Good Thing I Got It! by David A. Koop is a post from: AirStream Books

“One of the great pleasures of the [novel],” Jane Smiley has written, “was something outside of the authors’ plot making and character drawing and theme organizing — it was the pleasure I gained from the author’s passing observations or remarks. I came to see these passing phrases as … precious artifacts of what a man — say, Walter Scott — happened to see one day while he was walking down a street in 1810; or what a woman, Elizabeth Bowen, happened to feel one evening while dancing the fox-trot in 1925; or what another man, Nikolai Gogol, happened to smell and hear by the banks of the Dnieper River one morning in 1820.”

The tension is that this particularity becomes a universalizing impulse, allowing us to imagine our way into circumstances that may appear to have little to do with our own.

Such a dynamic resides at the heart of The Fat Years, the first novel by Chinese writer Chan Koonchung to be translated into English. Taking place in 2013, after a global economic crisis so severe that it “makes the shock of 2008 resemble a mere wobble,” the novel posits a world in which China alone is financially and socially stable.

“Only China has been able to recover, surging forward while the others are on the decline,” says Lao Chen, the novel’s sometime narrator and main protagonist, a Taiwanese living in Beijing. “… Even more importantly, there has been no social upheaval; our society is even more harmonious now.”

There’s a catch, though: Somehow, somewhere, the Chinese people have lost a month, the period between the economic collapse and the beginning of “China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy.” Is it mere forgetfulness? Is it a government conspiracy? “Today, a normal person doesn’t remember,” a character named Little Dong tells Lao Chen halfway through the novel. “[T]hose of us who remember are the abnormal ones.”

For Chan, this is the central issue, although, in truth, the lost month is mostly a McGuffin, a hook to draw us into the narrative. More essential is his portrayal of contemporary China as a place of laughter and forgetting, in which acquisitiveness and creature comforts have insulated the population from larger questions of liberty and identity.

“What is the meaning of existence?” Lao Chen’s friend Little Xi asks, before quoting Jean-Paul Sartre: “We must take responsibility for our own lives.” Yet throughout The Fat Years, Chan offers a vision of China as a culture in which individual responsibility has been eclipsed by an unspoken pact between the government and its citizens, in which the former offers a constrained facsimile of freedom, and the latter indulges in a fog of consumerist bliss.

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“Can we really blame the common people for their historical amnesia?” Lao Chen wonders. “… We are already very free now: 90 percent, or even more, of all subjects can be freely discussed, and 90 percent, or even more, of all activities are no longer subject to government control. Isn’t that enough? The vast majority of the population cannot even handle 90 percent freedom, they think it’s too much. Aren’t they already complaining about information overload and being entertained to death?”

On the one hand, that’s the stuff of satire, a dystopian riff out of Aldous Huxley or Philip K. Dick. At the same time, Chan is after something deeper, a consideration of the way forgetting influences polity. “During the Cultural Revolution and at the beginning of Reform and Opening,” he writes, “there were very few books in the bookstores, and everyone knew that the true facts were being suppressed. But, today, thought Lao Chen, there is a profusion of books everywhere, so many they knock you over, but the true facts are still being suppressed. It’s just that people are under the illusion that they are following their own reading preferences and freely choosing what they read.”

There it is again, that information overload — but even more a certain kind of information overload, the overload of trivia. In such a landscape, government doesn’t need to suppress unpleasant history; we do it ourselves, every day, simply by not paying close enough attention to the facts at hand. “For the great majority of young mainland Chinese,” Chan suggests, “the events of the Tiananmen Massacre have never entered their consciousness; they have never seen the photographs and news reports about it, and even fewer have their family or teachers ever explained it to them. They have not forgotten it; they have never known anything about it. In theory, after a period of time has elapsed, an entire year can indeed disappear from history — because no one says anything about it.”

This is it: that sense of the particular with a touch of the universal creeping in. This is what Forster and Smiley were getting at, and it’s a key factor in The Fat Years as well. Here, Chan has crafted a cunning caricature of modern China, with its friction between communism and consumerism, its desire to reframe the Revolution in terms of “market share and the next big thing.” But he has also identified a deeper dislocation, one stretching beyond China.What is the malaise of the West, after all, if not a similar imbalance between materialism and inattention, in which history eludes us not because of anyone erasing it but because we don’t remember anymore? When Chan writes, late in the novel, that “the Central Propaganda organs did do their work, but they were only pushing along a boat that was already on the move,” he may as well be speaking for all of us.

“If the Chinese people themselves had not already wanted to forget,” he notes, “we could not have forced them to do so. The Chinese people voluntarily gave themselves a large dose of amnesia medicine.” The point is that we are responsible for what happens, just as we have always been.

Book review: The Fat Years is a post from: AirStream Books