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Book Wrangler

9/26/04

By Bob Patterson

 

Last week New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was in Los Angeles to promote her book Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk ($25.95 Putnam Publishing Group).  Next week Hunter S. Thompson will be at Book Soup in Los Angeles to help promote the sale of his new book Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk ($23 Simon & Schuster).

 

Interviewing either one would be the basis for an excellent installment of the Book Wrangler.  Seeing both authors in the same room at the same time, would put to rest our rather serious doubts that the two different manuscripts were produced on different computers.  Wasn’t the typography for both manuscripts identical?  Could two different writers produce political satires with virtually identical underlying cynicism?  What duya bet the Book Wrangler doesn’t get to interview both of them simultaneously?

 

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We’ve had excellent results by recommending books we like and hope our reader will also like.  Sometimes you don’t have to read a book to know you can recommend it to a friend, whose preferences are known.  One book which we are sure at least one regular reader will enjoy is The Excellent 11: Qualities Teachers and Parents Use to Motivate, Inspire, and Educate Children by Ron Clark ($19.95  Hyperion)  Just because someone has become a retired teacher doesn’t mean they stop reading about their craft. 

 

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Is Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 by Gerald L. Posner ($24.95) supposed to remind older readers of Why England Slept by John Kennedy?  Kennedy wrote a senior thesis at Harvard in 1940 and it was published as a book.  It was republished in 1961. 

 

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When you have a cousin that has a book with a vulgar title, how do you plug his book without getting vulgar yourself?  You link to the Amazon page, of course!

 

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It seems many biographies of a famous beat writer want to be titled Kerouac.  The newest biography is Kerouac: The Definitive Biography by Paul Maher, Jr. and David Amram ($27.95 Taylor Trade Publishing).  Why are there so many different biographies of the beatnik writer?  Isn’t it like what president Reagan said about redwood trees?  “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.”

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Are the ladies being left out of the Civil War reenactments?  Not if they read book like Who Wore What? Women's Wear 1861-1865 by Juanita Leisch (price unavailable Thomas Publications).   Don’t the folks in Kansas have big Quantrill reenactments?

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Just in case you are wondering, we searched Amazon and Google and could not find any reference to a Poisons for Dummies book.

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Our friend Chef Teddy doesn’t know anyone at CBS News, but this year he says he is tempted, for a Christmas present, to give a copy of The Complete Manual of Typography By James Felici ($45 Adobe Press) to one of their reporters.

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 2004 – Robert Patterson































 
 
 
 

Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 - Alan M. Pavlik
 
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The inclusion of any text from others is quotation
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