Bookviews by Alan Caruba, January  2001

While the newspapers, magazines and broadcasts are constantly filled with headlines and stories declaring the end of the world and endless "threats" to the environment, our health, and everything else, it is good news to read that It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years by Stephen Moore and the late Julian L. Simon ($14.95, Cato Institute). You will learn that the median family income has nearly doubled since 1950. Over half—52%--of Americans own stocks, five times as many than 1965. We are all living longer, healthier lives than ever before in the history of the nation. Those are the wonderful FACTS that can be found in this great book. For the truth and a defense against the endless torrent of lies that passes for news these days, this book is chock full of data about health, the environment, natural resources, and much, much more.

The First Measured Century ($20, American Policy Institute) tells the story of how Americans have been studying Americans since 1900 to today. It’s authors, Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks and Ben J. Wattenberg, tell how early sociologists began to accumulate statistical data about the lives of ordinary citizens. The book examines fifteen areas of American life such as population, work, education, family and health. What emerges is a fascinating portrait about life at the beginning of the last century and the astonishing advances that occurred over those hundred years. It also dispels a lot of myths. We spend more time with our children, move around less, read more, and our highways are safer. This book is also a PBS television documentary.

For those with an interest in outer space there’s Living in Space: From Science Fiction to Science Fact ($29.95, Firefly Books Ltd) by Giovanni Caprara. It’s a large format softcover filled with photos and a text that is a complete account of human activity on the starry frontier that tracks a hundred year history filled with interesting facts and insights. A good companion book would be Designs on Space: Blue prints for 21^st Century Space Exploration by Richard Wagner with illustrations by Howard Cook ($24, Simon & Schuster). It is an excellent introduction to the cutting-edge machinery that will get us into space, probes and rockets, as well as a look at the International Space Station and even human habitat on Mars.

The Safe Sites Internet Yellow Pages ($29.99, Thomas Nelson Publisher) is ideal for parents concerned about their children’s use of the Internet. In nearly half of America’s households there’s a child who uses the Internet and some 60% of parents say they restrict their children’s use in some way. This huge, comprehensive directory lists websites in more than 100 categories that include news, sports, computers, entertainment, and health, among others. It even includes the top 500 websites from the Best of the Christian Web. There’s also a CD-ROM available for $12.99. Another book with a religious theme is The Ten Commandments ($12.95, Liguorui Publications), an interpretation by Mitch Finley who sees them as timeless challenges. His book is an excellent refresher course for Jews and Christians who enjoy exploring theological questions.

Make some youngster deliriously happy by giving him or her either the Harry Potter 2001 Calendar in its page-a-day version or as a monthly wall calendar ($12.99, Andrew McMeel Publishing.) Beautifully illustrated, both offer a year’s worth of fun. There’s fun, too, in Teeny Tiny Earnest ($16.95, Barnesyard Books, PO Box 254, Sergeantsville, NJ 08557-0254), a wonderful story by Laura T. Barnes with lovely illustrations by Carol A. Camburn. Ideal for children ages four to nine. Earnest, a miniature donkey, learns to accept his size. From McGraw-Hill there’s Molly and Emmett’s Camping Adventure, the first in a series written and illustrated by Marylin Hafner ($12.95) Emmett is the cat. Molly is the one who takes to the wilds of her backyard. Strictly for the youngest readers. Older children will enjoy Make-A-Saurus ($24.95, Firefly Books Ltd) by Brian Cooley and Mary Ann Wilson that shows how Cooley makes his replicas and then shows the reader how to use ordinary household materials to make their own.

I Married Dr. Jekyll and Woke Up Mrs. Hyde ($22.95, iUniverse) by my friend Dr. Alma Bond, a noted psychoanalyst now retired and writing from Key West. The book reflects the findings of 71 interviews and a questionnaire with divorced women to determine the big question; what went wrong? Divorce is a major social problem in America with nearly half of all marriages failing. The book explores the issue of self-identity as the key to improving marital relationships. Happily, she is a felicitous writer who can take complex psychological issues and make them easily understood. This book will prove of special interest to anyone involved in counseling and any woman seeking the answer to keep their own marriage from failing.

I liked Top Students, Top Parents by Kathleen Burns ($24.95, Family Literacy Press, 2516 Santa Fe Dr., Pueblo, CO 81006) who believes that good students are made at home, not at school. A teacher and a mother, the author provides an excellent guide to show parents countless ways to help their children become top students in school. For the parent who wants to jumpstart their child’s success in school from the very earliest grade on up, this book is recommended. New and expecting parents may want to pick up a copy of Diane Rozario’s The Immunization Resource Guide ($13.95, Patter Publications, PO Box 204, Burlington, IA 52601) that covers the topics of vaccine safety and effectiveness, their effect on the immune system, and some of the objections that have been voiced about them. It is a very thorough reference, now in its fourth edition.

Just out this month, Mediscams by Chuck Whitlock ($22.95, Renaissance Books) is chock full of advice on how to spot and avoid healthcare scams, medical frauds, and quackery of all kinds, whether it’s a local physician or a major healthcare provider or drug manufacturer. This book is going to get tongues wagging for the way it exposes a wide range of nonsense from exercise pills to the very real dangers of plastic surgery, and, of course, the HMOs that collect your premiums and deny you the care you thought you were paying to receive. If health is a concern of yours, read this book!

Let me close by noting that Robert and Jean Hollander, a scholar and poet, have translated Dante’s The Inferno ($35, Doubleday Broadway). The book is the opening section of Dante Alighieri’s epic theological poem, La Divina Commedia. Robert has taught Princeton students the joys of this classic for nearly forty years. This new translation, side by side with the original Italian, makes the visit to Hell much more accessible. Of course, it always has been!

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Okay, the holidays are over and it’s time to get back to doing what we all love almost as much as shopping, making the money with which to shop!

The communications function is vital to every business today. If you wanted to reach the 4,284 news outlets in Washington, DC, not to mention the 4,684 correspondents and editors based there, where would go to find this information? The answer is Hudson’s Washington News Media Contacts Directory 2001 ($237, Hudson Directory, 44 West Market Street, Rhinebeck, NY 12572). Why would you want to do that? Because Washington, DC is the nation’s nerve center as far as the media is concerned. If you have a story to tell the world, you want to move it through the DC press. Howard Penn Hudson has been publishing this remarkable media directory for a long time now and it works. Another media directory that works is the Talk Show Yearbook ($185, Broadcast Interview Source, 2233 Wisconsin Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20007 or 1-800-Yearbook.) It is the definitive guide to the nation’s most influential television and radio talk shows with all the names, addresses, phone numbers and more you need to turn yourself into a fabulously popular talk show guest like myself.

Prentice Hall Press has been around a long time as a respected publisher of books about business topics and they have a number of excellent titles as the new year begins. Their Mutual Fund Investor’s Guide 2001 by Kirk Kazanjian ($20) will appear to the more than one third of all Americans who invest in mutual funds as well as those thinking about it. It answers questions such as how to sift through the thousands of choices, what to do with funds that have lost money, whether it’s time to invest or get out? This thick softcover is filled with data on the most promising funds as selected by a national recognized investment expert. This book is your first, best investment before you select a fund.

E-Leadership by Dr. D. Quinn Mills, Ph.D. ($26, Prentice Hall Press) explains what went wrong with the dot-com mania that has left so many companies in the dust after millions were invested and spent. This professor at the Harvard Business School offers some good advice if you have a dot-com idea you think will make you a millionaire. If you’re the kind that likes living dangerously, you may be one of the estimated four to seven million online traders. Now there’s a book for these investing thrill seekers, eXtreme Investor by Randy Rodma with Don Logay ($17.95, Entrepreneur Press) is a guide for those in-and-out traders, providing a wealth of information about junk bonds, IPOs and other investment ventures where the stakes are high. It offers practical advice, but for most the best advice is still to invest long-term in blue chips.

For those seeking to run a successful company, Impact Hiring: The Secrets of Hiring a Superstar by Frederick W. and Barbara Ball ($26, Prentice Hall Press) reveals how to cut through the clutter at a time when the search for talented employees is getting more fiercely competitive. This is a real game plan for those who need to negotiate a win/win compensation package after identifying top talent. The Leadership Investment by Robert M. Fulmer and Marshall Goldsmith ($27.95, Amacom) addresses one of the great challenges, how to transform managers into leaders who can make tough decisions, motivate the ranks, and beat the competition. Based on decades of research and global study by the American Productivity and Quality Center, the authors provide an in-depth look at the best practices in leadership development today.

Another look at the essential issue of leadership development is The Mindful Corporation: Liberating the Human Spirit at Work by Paul Nakai and Ron Schultz ($25, Leadership Press, dist. by Gulf Publishing Co.) The authors explore the way success is intrinsically tied to the level of satisfaction of their employees. How to implement this is the topic and the authors show out to operate and tap into the way we think about work and how it influences our decisions. Rather than a company that works in a constant state of crisis, the book shows how to focus everyone on success and adapt to changing circumstances.

Serious management means serious Budgeting ($49.95, John Wiley & Sons) and that’s the title and topic of a book by Nils H. Rasmussen and Christopher J. Eichorn. Today’s corporations are in a constant state of flux and change, so budgeting takes on far more importance. The book addresses the new technology available, current trends, software selection and how to implement a budget.

In a similar fashion, Managing Crises Before They Happen by Ian I. Mitroff with Gus Anagnos ($24.95, Amacom) addresses one of the biggest problems facing companies today. Just consider what has happened to Firestone when news broke that faulty tires had caused more than 80 deaths. By all reports, the company ignored danger signals and then tried to cover up information as it set about recalling their tires too slowly. This kind of crisis can strike any company and this book provides the big-picture thinking that forms the essential core of any successful crisis management program. The authors describe the mechanisms that should be in place and the proactive measures needed to prevent and limit the impact. In these times, reading this book is essential.

For employees, the question is always how to succeed and two books look at the best ways to achieve success. Masters of Networking: Building Relationships for Your Pocketbook and Soul edited by Dr. Ivan R. Misner, Ph.D. and Don Morgan, MA, brings together a series of commentaries by people like Harvey Mackay, John Naisbitt, and others. It is packed with valuable insights and personal examples demonstrating why networking is possibly the most effective marketing tool today, revealing the characteristics of the most successful networkers, and how to build a successful networking lifestyle through effective communication and long-term partnerships. For those inside a corporation, the question is always how to crack through to the top level and the authors of From the Outside In ($17.95, Amacom) address the fact that people tend to hire and promote those who are just like them, frequently young, white, straight and male. If that doesn’t describe you, Rene Blank and Sandra Slipp, Ph.D., with Vincent Ford, offer seven strategies if you are not part of this dominant group. They show how to get noticed without having to suppress who you really are by overcoming feelings of hostility and distrust, learning to be comfortable and socialize with people who are different, and building a network of friends throughout the organization.

For those who run small businesses, Money-Tree Marketing by Patrick and Jennifer A. Bishop ($18,95, Amacom) offers ways to double your profits in 90 days or less. The book teaches entrepreneurs how to generate customers, regardless of their budget or marketing experience. This is a serious book about techniques to acquire and use "customer profiles" and how to treat them well once they get in the door. It’s the kind of book that separates those who can’t figure out what to do and those who have discovered where their customers are and how to reach them.

A business success story is told by Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop. Business as Unusual ($24.95, Thorsons) tells of her 25 years devoted to combining success with corporate social responsibility. Her dedication to issues of poverty, social justice, ethics, and even spirituality made her very different from others, so this book is not your standard text about team building, customer service and other comparable topics. Today, The Body Shop has 1,500 stores serving 86 million customers in 47 markets and in 24 languages.

And, of course, there are always dissenters who see big business, often called postmodern capitalism with its concentrated economic power, as a threat. They look at the prosperity and see a threat to democracy. Thomas Frank has penned an assault on the new capitalist order, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy ($26, Doubleday) and, frankly, I disagree with everything he says, but he does spell out the popular notion that spreading prosperity not only here at home, but worldwide is a bad thing. Everywhere today’s leaders of nations have come to understand that they must invest in education, not the machinery of war, to join the success of developed nations. They understand that multinational corporations introduce concepts of democracy among their workers. While I disagree with the author, I offer this book as an example of why some nations remain mired in debt and poverty, while others are welcoming the new forces that enrich their people and their society.

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Christopher Darden, the LA district attorney who gained fame in the O.J. Simpson trial, is back with a second novel, L.A. Justice, ($25.95, Warner Books) written with Dick Lochte. Their first, The Trials of Nikki Hill, was well received and I think this one will be, too. Darden’s legal smarts are very much in evidence as Nikki Hill, this time, finds herself in the midst of a thorny plot of murder when the wealthy lover of an even wealthier man is found with her head blown off. Ms. Hill, the prosecutor takes on a case of an accused killer who is either a psychopath or innocent of the crime. The problem is that bodies keep piling up in cases that seem unrelated, but she is beginning to put the pieces of the puzzle together, staying one step behind the killer.

Los Angeles is also the setting for a taunt noir thriller, Roadhouse Blues, by Baron R. Birtcher ($24.95, Durban House Pub. Co., 7502 Greenville Ave, Suite 500, Dallas, TX 75231). Newly retired from the LAPD homicide squad, Mike Travis is building a charter sailing business, but a phone call changes that brings him back into an investigation of a killer who is leaving a bloody trail. Travis helps his former partner track him from Santa Catalina Island to the smoky nightclubs of West Hollywood. It’s a good read.

The law is the basis for a first novel by attorney Peter A. Greenburg. Schemes is not due out until April of this year. Motivated by the lack of reality often missing in popular legal fiction, the author focuses on civil law, based on real cases, providing an explanation of the legal principles and economic factors at work when greed takes over instead of a quest for justice. The main character, an attorney, has a talent for altering the facts, enlisting accomplices, and, not surprisingly, enjoys enough success to open his own law firm. This isn’t about shootouts and other mayhem. It’s what really happens when bad people misuse the law intended to protect good people.

Annette Meyers introduces her poet/sleuth in last year’s Free Love in which she evoked the Prohibition era of Greenwich Village. Now she’s back with another Olivia Brown mystery, Murder Me Now, ($23.95, Mysterious Press/Warner). The literary element, her Edna St. Vincent Millay-like heroine will please those who have read the poet. Ms. Brown is enjoying the literary life, conquering men’s hearts, writing sonnets, but the frozen body of a young nanny found hanging from a tree during a weekend in the country brings out her sleuthing instincts. For a visit to the 1920’s Village and a good mystery yarn, you’ll want to curl up with this one.

The world of literature is the backdrop for Ex-Libris by Ross King ($24.95, Walker and Company) due out next month. This one is strictly for people who are into the world of libraries and literary research. A London bookseller, Isaac Inchbold, receives a cryptic summons to a remote country house to find some missing texts pillaged from a magnificent library during the English Civil War. He must solve the historical puzzle that could lead him to the texts. This definitely does not fit American reading tastes that prefer the genres described above, but for bibliophiles, it will prove a real treat.

In Pursuit of Balance by Marta S. Gabor ($24.95, Optyon Books, 20 Surrey Road, Great Neck, NY 11020) is a tale of love in the time of Communism in the 1970’s. Published in October, it is a story of repression, uprooting, emigration, and the emotions and moral choices through which the characters pass as they travel from Romania, Hungary, Israel, and to the United States, living out an unconventional love story encompassing the last three decades of the 20^th century. If you enjoy richly textured, dense plots and the social aspects of different political and economic systems, you will find this a very interesting story.

Just published in December, The Living Image by Dennis Hardin ($17.95, Rutledge Books, 107 Mill Plain Road, Suite 302, Danbury, CT 06811) is a provocative novel that examines the role of art in society. When a journalist, Trish Vinson, is sent to cover painter Joseph Anton’s controversial show, roundly condemned for his lushly erotic work, seen as corrupt and pornographic, they find themselves drawn to one another, becoming lovers. As his model, she becomes a cultural icon and both the object of a powerful detractor’s effort to destroy them. The key word here is "erotic" and it can, indeed, offend one’s sensibilities.

An enjoyable reading experience is Delilah by Marcus Goodrich ($19.95, The Lyons Press) that was first published in 1941. Many feel that this story of a Navy destroyer patrolling the waters south of the China Sea is one of the great novels written about the sea for its crews adventures encountering gunrunners, missionaries, racial unrest, and religious intolerance. James A. Michener wrote the introduction, noting the story’s authenticity and putting it in historical context. Let us thank the Lyons Press for rediscovering and publishing this classic of 20^th century literature.

Here’s a tip, skip the movie and just pick up the audiotape of Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses ($18, Random House Audio Publishing Group) as read by Brad Pitt. If you want to read the book, it’s available from Knopf. The book, published in 1992, was met with universal acclaim as a romantic adventure. The movie has received less than glowing reviews. As with most movies that begin as novels, you’re usually better off with the book.

Finally, if you are one of those who have not bought into all the hype about the Kennedy’s you will thoroughly enjoy the self-published The Kennedys Are Driving Him Crazy! by John Randolph Parker ($11.95, iUniverse) It can be purchased via Amazon.Com direct from Bookviews.Com. It is set in 1993, time for the media to note the 30^th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the 25^th for his brother, Robert. The protagonist, John Maxfield, is less than thrilled who reviews the many reasons JFK should never have been president. It’s not so much a novel as an opportunity for Parker to vent about Kennedy worship, something he does very well.

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I sometimes think there are as many books about writing books as there are of any other kind. The explosion of e-publishing has probably caused more people to think about publishing their own novels and other books as any other reason, but it is quite true that Americans continues to read tons of books each year and there is a proliferation of small, independent publishers, in addition to the many self-publishing ventures.

For an incisive look at the publishing industry these days, I heartily recommend Jason Epstein’s Book Business: Publishing, Past, Present and Future ($21.85, W.W. Norton). Having risen to become a distinguished editor and publisher at Doubleday, Epstein created their Anchor Books division and later the Library of America, a collection of classic American literature. For anyone interested in about learning the history and gleaning a glimpse at the future of publishing, this is "must" reading. Best of all, Epstein has written a very entertaining book filled with his personal memories of times when editors and authors were friends, not interchangeable commodities.

Alpha Books, a division of Macmillan USA, is famed for its "The Complete Idiot’s Guide" series and they have three out for writers that include Publishing Science Fiction, Screenwriting, and Journaling ($16.95 each) all written by people who know what it takes in each of these genres. The last is more about keeping a personal journal than having it published. Now out in its second edition is my friend, Sheree Bykofsky’s guide to Getting Published, part of the series and available from Amazon.Com for only $13,56. A top literary agent, Sheree knows whereof she speaks. One would certainly do well to pick up these and other guides if your intent is to see print some day.

Guerrilla Marketing for Writers ($14.99, F&W Publications) is one of those titles that tells you pretty much the whole story. Written by three pro's, Jay Conrad Levinson, Rick Frishman and Michael Larsen, the book offers a hundred ways to market one’s book before and after it’s published. This is the nitty-gritty of low-cost, yet effective marketing techniques to generate free publicity, use the Internet, get the most from conferences and festivals, and much more. Well worth the cost and then some!

Finally, from Prometheus Books there’s The Complete Guide to Literary Contests 2001 with information on more than 500 contests with which to build a reputation as a writer. It is a fat book filled with all the information needed to submit one’s book, rules and guidelines, et cetera.

That’s it for this month!