Last Goodnights on Good Morning America, ABC News

The Last Goodnights, by John West 

9781582434483 | $32.50 hc | in stock
Counterpoint / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Author John West was interviewed on Good Morning America on February 4th. Immediately after the broadcast, the GMA website received over 250 comments on the interview, which prompted ABC News to post a story online as well:

Parents Ask Son to Help Their Suicide, ‘I Wasn’t About to Argue’

Feb. 4, 2009

In November 1998, John West’s father, who had recently been diagnosed with cancer, asked him an extraordinary favor: help him commit suicide.

After the tremendous weight of those words settled squarely on West’s shoulders, he looked at his father and said the only thing he knew to say, "You got it."

So, on the evening of July 2, 1999, John helped his father take a cocktail of pills. By morning, he was dead. The death was attributed to the cancer, and only West knew better.

Months later, his mother asked West the same devastating favor and, again, he agreed.

For more than a decade, West kept the secrets to himself, not even telling his sisters the role he had played. Now, he is coming out with his side of the story in a book called "The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents With Their Suicides."

(continued on the ABC news website)

Learn to Draw Comic Art on YTV’s The Zone

Learn to Draw Comic Art, by Anthony Stanberry
978-0973712230 | $9.95 pb | in stock
White Knight Book Distribution (Georgetown Terminal)

On November 24th between 4-6pm, Anthony Stanberry will be on YTV’s The Zone promoting his new book Learn to Draw Comic Art, as well as his other titles, Blac Ice, and Create Your Own Comic Book 1+2. He will be drawing the host as a character from the new book and will also be having a drawing competition with the host.

Rawi Hage is a finalist the for Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize

Cockroach, by Rawi Hage
978088784209 | $29.95 hc | in stock
House of Anansi (HarperCollins)

Rawi Hage’s Cockroach has been announced as one of the finalists for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize:

THE ROGERS WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE ($25,000)
Jury: Lawrence Hill (Burlington, Ontario), Annabel Lyon (Vancouver), and Heather O’Neill (Montreal)

Each finalist for this prize receives $3,500.

The International Festival of Authors will hold a reading by the finalists of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize on October 29, 2008. For further information visit www.readings.org.

The finalists of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize will also be in attendance at this year’s Writers’ Trust Gala, a prestigious fundraising event to be held on October 28, 2008, at Toronto’s Four Seasons Hotel. The Writers’ Trust Awards event will take place in Toronto at the Isabel Bader Theatre on November 17, 2008.

Chabon’s Maps & Legends in the Free Press

Maps and Legends, by Michael Chabon
978-1932416893 | $26.50 hc | in stock
McSweeney’s / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

The Winnipeg Free Press reviewed Chabon’s first collection of essays on June 1:

Chabon essays full of writing joy

Reviewed by Jill Wilson

NOVELIST Michael Chabon used to have a website, now sadly defunct, whose homepage contained this epigraph from S.J. Perelman: "Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws."

The Berkeley-based author has always gloried in the pulpy trappings of genre fiction, from the comic-book-creating heroes of his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to the Raymond Chandler-esque hard-boiled detective in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

His novels have all the high-minded literary merit in the world (see: Pulitzer) but they also have big, juicy plots that crackle with the promise of atom-smashers and damsels in distress.

In Maps and Legends, his first collection of essays, his intentions are signalled by the book jacket itself, a typically beautiful McSweeney’s creation that layers three different-coloured jackets like overlapping worlds, wherein Viking ships, sea monsters, ogres and monkey kings co-exist.

In its pages, Chabon addresses the role of the storyteller, and explores how writers lead the reader into different worlds by examining some of his own influences (Arthur Conan Doyle, comic-book genius Will Eisner) and authors he admires (Cormac McCarthy, Philip Pullman of the His Dark Materials trilogy).

In Trickster in a Suit of Lights, Chabon laments the short story’s evolution into contemporary plotlessness. The intention to entertain "came to seem suspect, unworthy, and somehow cold and hungry at its core," he writes. "No self-respecting literary genius, even occasional makers of avowed entertainments like Graham Greene, would ever describe him- or herself as primarily an ‘entertainer.’ An entertainer is a man in a sequined dinner jacket, singing She’s a Lady to a hall filled with women rubber-banding their underpants up onto the stage."

His essay on Conan Doyle has the enthusiasm of a fan letter, while it makes a case that the Sherlock Holmes author invented a certain way to nest stories within stories that raised the detective genre into a perfectly driven narrative machine.

His writing, as ever, has a kind of controlled exuberance; every word is meticulously chosen, but the reader can still sense the joy Chabon takes in finding that perfect turn of phrase. In making the argument that "all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aenid forward, is fan fiction," he claims that writers seek out the maps left by those who came before them and take a different route in the same country. "All novels are sequels; influence is bliss."

The latter part of the book is dedicated to pieces about Chabon’s own writing: how he came to abandon a Sherlockian science-fiction novel set on Mars and instead write his acclaimed debut, the Fitgeraldian and decidedly Earthbound The Mysteries of Pittburgh; how The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’s fanciful world of an alternate Jewish homeland in Alaska evolved out of a Yiddish phrasebook.

Most interesting, perhaps, is the final essay, Golems I Have Known: A Trickster’s Memoir, in which Chabon addresses the way autobiography and pure fiction meld in an author’s work. It’s an especially relevant observation in this era of faked memoirs that it’s the novelist’s job to lie in order to entertain.

Jill Wilson is a Free Press copy editor.

 

Sad, Mad and Bad in the NYT

Sad, Mad and Bad, by Lisa Appignanesi
978-1552786765 | $34.95 hc | in stock
McArthur & Co. (HarperCollins)

The New York Times has reviewed Lisa Appignanesi’s book examining women and the psychiatric industry:

Diagnosis: Female

By KATHRYN HARRISON

Published: April 27, 2008

Back when Zelda Fitzgerald, her skirts wet from diving into public fountains, was accelerating from madcap toward outright madness, a Wharton School economist named George Taylor made the seemingly fey observation that hemlines rose and fell with the stock market, proposing a causal connection between two presumably separate spheres of human enterprise. Fashion, as the now familiar “hemline index” suggested, is socially determined. With prosperity come optimism and tolerance for risk; women are emboldened to show off a more daring length of leg. But what of more empirical, utilitarian domains? Surely doctors hypothesize independently of whatever forces drive style. Take, for example, the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Most of us trust psychiatry to remain immune to fads. And it does, doesn’t it?

One of the consistently fascinating and disturbing aspects of “Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors” is Lisa Appignanesi’s assiduous tracking of the modishness of what might be mistaken for a sui generis discipline. Of course, as anyone who has visited a psychiatric hospital — or ridden the subway — can attest, crazy is what we call people who refuse to conform to accepted norms of behavior. And the definition of nonconformity must change in step with styles of conforming.

“Mad, Bad and Sad” is, Appignanesi tells her readers, not only “the story of madness, badness and sadness and the ways in which we have understood them over the last 200 years,” but also a survey of the mad, bad and sad themselves, the particular women, including Zelda Fitzgerald, Lucia Joyce, Virginia Woolf and many less famous patients, who suffered “frenzies, possessions, mania, melancholy, nerves, delusions, aberrant acts, dramatic tics, passionate loves and hates, sex, visual and auditory hallucinations, fears, phobias, fantasies, disturbances of sleep, dissociations, communion with spirits and imaginary friends, addictions, self-harm, self-starvation, depression” and so on. Phew. A list like this makes a girl grateful that Freud even bothered to ask what such desperate, deluded creatures might want. No wonder the 19th century couldn’t build enough asylums to house them.

It seems that as soon as society relinquished witchcraft as the crime for which to punish an overtly liberated woman, it settled on madness as the reason to incarcerate her. As Appignanesi observes, “Patients could well find themselves the victims of a doctor’s prejudice about what kind of behavior constituted sanity: this could all too easily work against women who didn’t conform to the time’s norms of sexual behavior or living habits.”

That diagnoses conceived by male doctors would be subject to men’s changeable views of women — romantic, patronizing, idealistic, misogynistic: the choices are limited only by the imagination — comes as no surprise; it’s the meticulous and exhaustive account of these theories offered in “Mad, Bad and Sad” that is sobering. Victorian women who weren’t locked up for falling victim to lypemania (melancholy), monomania, homicidal monomania or “moral insanity” were at risk of neurasthenia, a “mirror image of rebellion” in which their “nervous depletion” was explained as the result of their “incursion into the masculine sphere of intellectual labor,” a strain that constitutions formed for tender sentiment couldn’t be expected to support. And then came hysteria, which “best expresses women’s distress at the clashing demands and no longer tenable restrictions placed on women in the fin de siècle.”

If male doctors conspired to define madness, responding to behaviors that flouted the social conventions of their culture, female patients, in the attempt to understand themselves and their context, and maybe even to create or bolster identity, colluded with those same doctors to satisfy the changing definitions of madness. “Often enough,” Appignanesi notes, “extreme expressions of the culture’s malaise, symptoms and disorders mirrored the time’s order.” Anorexia, she writes, “is usually an illness of plenty not of famine, as depression is one of times of peace and prosperity, not of war.” Having wept, raved, trembled and hallucinated our way into the 21st century, when “the sum of information available in any given minute is larger than it has ever been in history,” we’ve conceived “a condition in which attention is at a deficit.”

The Healthy CEO does interviews for BNN and CEO TV

The Healthy CEO, by Larry Ohlhauser
978-0973734225 | $34.95 pb | in stock
White Knight Book Distribution (Georgetown Terminal)

Author Larry Ohlhauser has done interviews this week with BNN and CEO TV about his new book, The Healthy CEO. Air dates to come.

Tons of huge media for McMafia

McMafia, by Misha Glenny
978-0887842047 | $29.95 hc | in stock
House of Anansi Press (HarperCollins)

Misha Glenny’s McMafia had a huge amount of media coverage this past weekend, including reviews in the Globe & Mail, New York Times, The Economist, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal.

From the Globe & Mail review:

Around the world in 80 crimes

JULIAN SHER

April 12, 2008

A middle-class woman sips her white wine in a comfortable neighbourhood in Surrey, England, when a knock on the door announces a pizza delivery. The man at the door promptly shoots her several times in the head.

It’s a case of mistaken identity. The assassin was after her sister, a BBC producer whose Armenian husband had gotten into some shady dealing with Chechens. The entire family has since gone into hiding, on the run from the rising crime lords in the former Soviet Union.

Misha Glenny starts his rollicking book with that anecdote and never lets the reader go, determined to shake us into realizing none of us are safe in the end from the tentacles of the new global underworld. Glenny, a former BBC correspondent, pulls off with aplomb what is always the biggest challenge for true-crime writers: making it matter.

He reveals the politics of crime and the crime in politics. Glenny’s central thesis is that two powerful currents in the 1990s – the fall of communism and the liberalization of international financial and commodity markets – unleashed a golden age for capitalism but also for crooks. “They were also good capitalists and entrepreneurs,” he notes wryly, who “saw real opportunity in this dazzling mixture of upheaval, hope and uncertainty.”

Glenny first spotted this trend covering the wars in former Yugoslavia for the BBC in 1990s. But, as he says, “Nobody had connected the dots.” He sets out to do that, sketching a map of the world you thought you knew. But you have been reading the wrong road signs.

McMafia takes you down the “new silk route” from Asia to Europe, a criminal highway that extends from the former Soviet republics to the troubled Balkans and the turmoil in Pakistan and Afghanistan, allowing for the swift and easy transfer of people, narcotics and cash. Glenny takes you along the silnice hanby, the Highway of Shame, linking Dresden and Prague via the heart of the old Czechoslovakia, where young Eastern European women sell themselves for a few dollars.

Few countries escape Glenny’s penetrating wrath. Israel has let itself be colonized by “oligarchs and organized crime bosses” from Russia. Dubai has become the “washing machine of the world,” where money-laundering is blatant and easy. The Nigerians perpetuating those ubiquitous e-mail scams – don’t laugh, one survey estimated they pulled in more than $3-billion from 38 countries – grew up in the “sewers of Nigeria corruptocracy.” They are simply mimicking the criminal behaviour of their “thieving elite.” In China, a country that once wiped out its opium shame, the heroin trade has returned with a vengeance. China, in turn, is now turning North Korea – renowned as the world’s largest producer of virtually undetectable counterfeit U.S. $100 bills – into an economic vassal.

Even British Columbia’s booming marijuana trade comes in for searing criticism. (A disclosure is in order here: Glenny cites a book I co-authored on the Hells Angels as “very revealing” about Canada’s politics of crime.) Assuming law enforcement estimates of at least a $4-billion annual trade in B.C. bud, involving 100,000 workers, Glenny argues “western Canada is home to the largest per capita concentration of organized criminal syndicates in the world.”

What is remarkable is how businesslike the new crime bosses are. The Firm, one of the super gangs in South Africa, operated an informal bank, offering start-up capital to prospective members. Colombian drug lords, “like good global entrepreneurs … sought out new marketing and distribution strategies” when they realized the collapse of the Berlin Wall offered a new middle class and fresh markets.

But they are a seedy and dangerous bunch as well: “Nixon,” a narco-trafficker in Bogota who “snorted, screwed and shot his way across Colombia.” Chen Kai, part of China’s “political criminal nexus” between local tycoons and Communist Party bosses. And Viktor Bout, the “merchant of death,” who was arrested recently for selling arms to a Colombian guerrilla group, the latest in a long list of unsavoury clients.

And there are the heart-wrenching tales of their victims, such as Ludmila, the sex slave in Tel Aviv who was tricked into coming to Israel only to be brutalized, raped and infected with HIV.

If Glenny’s portrait of crime is grim, his prognosis for the future is even bleaker. He lashes out at “unimaginative politicians who lack the vision or interest to address the structural inequities in the global economy upon which crime and instability thrive.” He concludes that a cynical Russia, an incompetent European Union, a hostile United States and the unstoppably ambitious China have combined to usher in a “vigorous springtime for both global corporations and transnational organized crime.”

Glenny’s book is bound to dissatisfy some. Not everyone will buy his cogent arguments to legalize drugs, although he points out the billions spent on the so-called “war on drugs” has simply left an industry that has merely grown in size, profits and human sacrifice. He notes that cybercrime represents perhaps the “greatest challenge for public law enforcement,” but – except for the Nigerian scam artists – devotes little time to it. And one would wish there was more on the good guys: We only meet a handful of investigators, and then only briefly, who are trying to do battle against the behemoth.

But Glenny’s book should be appreciated for the powerful wake-up call it is. Think of it as a Lonely Planet Guide of Organized Crime. Don’t leave home without it. Our brave new world of globalization may be flat, but it also very, very crooked.

Julian Sher is the author of five books about crime and the justice system. The latest is One Child at a Time: Inside the Police Hunt to Rescue Children from Online Predators.

Confirmed media for Everybody I Shot is Dead

Everybody I Shot is Dead, by Deborah Chesher
978-0979654206 | $69.95 hc | in stock
Chesher Cat Productions / White Knight Book Distribution (Georgetown Terminal)

This last-minute drop-in title from White Knight Books is a celebrity photo book — a collection of shots Deborah took as rock photographer for many magazines from 1974-1979. This is a self-published, high-quality coffee table book with 208 pages and over 400 never before seen photos.  Celebrity photos include: Waylon Jennings, Tammy Wynette, Jerry Garcia & Frank Zappa, among many others.

Confirmed media includes Associated Press and Canadian Press features (both sometime this week), a review in the November Quill & Quire, and forthcoming reviews in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, People Magazine, GiftBook, GuitarWorld, Photo Life, Playboy, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Focusmagazine, and Fox News.

Ripley’s Believe it or Not! on Montel Williams

The Remarkable… Revealed, by Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
978-1893951228 | $34.95 hc | in stock
Mint Publishing (Perseus Distribution Service)

The Montel Williams show will do an audience book give-away of The Remarkable Revealed during a show about unexplained events and strange stories. Air date either Oct. 31 or Nov. 1, 2007.

Ripley’s Remarkable Revealed on YTV, in The Magazine

The Remarkable… Revealed, by Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
978-1893951228 | $34.95 hc | in stock
Mint Publishing (Perseus Distribution Service)

On October 1, Lily Capehart (lizard hypnotist, age 11, featured on page 238 of The Remarkable Revealed) talked about the book and her uncanny talent with the hosts of “The Zone” on YTV. Fun and inter-active, most watched station for children programming in Canada. Three segments aired shortly after the taping.

Also, the nationally distributed children’s magazine The Magazine features The Remarkable Revealed in their October issue.