Nancy Klingener is Community Affairs Manager for the Monroe County Public Library in the Florida Keys. She is also Board President of the Key West Literary Seminar.
Why, oh why, in the post James Frey world, does anyone think they can write a flagrantly fake memoir and get away with it? Today's New York Times reports on the latest case, a book called "Love and Consequences" that even received a good review from the Times' fearsome Michiko Kakutani. The most painful detail could be that the writer, Margaret B. Jones, was narced out by her own sister who called the publisher after Jones was profiled in the Times' House & Home section. Ouch.
Titlepage.tv, the new book chat show that is available free online, made its debut today, with a show titled "All Over the Map," featuring Richard Price (who's getting raves for his new novel Lush Life but, more importantly, writes some episodes for my current DVD addiction, The Wire), Colin Harrison, Susan Choi and Charles Bock. The episodes are also available for download in iTunes format -- perfect for iPod viewing/listening on the treadmill! The show is hosted by Daniel Menaker, who was a longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker, a former editor in chief at Random House and was a gracious presence on stage at this year's Key West Literary Seminar. The show also has a blog, called Loud, Please! -- now part of my own honored blogroll, to the right.
All three of the movies at the Tropic Cinema right now started out as books -- on the big screen is the big seller, "The Kite Runner," based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini. But the other two movies, both based on nonfiction books, have been getting boffo reviews: "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," the true story of a French editor who suffers a stroke and manages to write a book through a system of the only voluntary motion he has left -- blinking one eye. Because I'm a documentary fan, I'm looking forward to "The Rape of Europa," based on the 1994 book about the Nazi pillaging of European art during World War II. See you on Eaton Street ...
Over the weekend I finally finished reading The Scarlet Professor by Barry Werth, a biography of the literary critic and Smith professor Newton Arvin.
Arvin won a National Book Award and wrote several respected biographies -- but he's remembered as the target of a pornography bust in 1960, which targeted him because he was gay. And once he had been confronted, he immediately named a couple other smith instructors who also had some material then considered obscene (pretty tame by our standards, and it was later ruled not obscene but not before the lives of the three men had been ripped apart).
It's a terrible sad story, especially since you know the whole time where it's going, but still interesting -- and a good reminder of how horribly many gay people suffered, within living memory for many.
The book held special resonance for me since much of it takes place in Northampton, Mass., home of Smith College. I was born in the same hospital where Arvin died (four years afterwards) and grew up in the area. I rode horses and worked at the Smith College stables in high school (right below the state mental hospital where Arvin was admitted multiple times) and my first internship at a 'real" newspaper was at the Hampshire Gazette in Northampton and my cousin and her family live there today. So I know the place a bit, and it was interesting to read about its social and political climate in the earlier parts of the 20th century. (In a completely gratuitous aside, check out the city of Northampton's official website, above -- and compare it in ease of use and general user-friendliness to, say, the city of Key West site. Not to be all they-do-it-better-where-I-came-from, but ...)
The last book review I wrote as editor of Solares Hill (though probably not the last book review I will write for Solares Hill) is in the current edition of Solares Hill. It's a good nonfiction read called 40 Days and 40 Nights by a fellow named Matthew Chapman. It's about the trial in Dover, Pa., over the introduction of intelligent design into high school science classes. Chapman happens to be a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, who (along with Alfred Russel Wallace) figured out natural selection and who is the demon of those who oppose teaching science in science classes. You can get my review in the Solares Hill PDF or online at The Citizen's web page, www.keysnews.com (the Solares Hill book review is posted there every week, WAAAAAAY down at the bottom of the page).Also in the Citizen and on its web page is my husband Mark Hedden's birding column, which this week happens to concern books about birding -- also the subject of a recent talk he gave at Voltaire Books. Sad to say I've only read one of the titles he discusses, The Song of the Dodo (and I agree with his assessment -- it's a great book -- so great I actually loaned it to someone who never returned it -- and bought another hardcover copy to replace it -- it's never being loaned again). Just to bring things full circle, Quammen's most recent book, also a very good read, is a biography of, you guessed it, Charles Darwin.
On a totally unrelated note, as long as I'm linking to my own stuff I might as well throw in the new FKCC Library Blog post I wrote about a cool interview from the Paris Review with Key West's own Harry Mathews.