Sundays at Border - 20 August 2006 - Welcome Ego Surfers! Edition

I've noticed that most of the very few hits on this blog come from Google, Technorati, and Feedster searches for author names, and it seems to be a different name each time. Now, it could be that some first-time authors have already generated enough buzz that people are searching out what they can on them. But it seems a safer bet that this kind of one-to-a-customer search is coming from nervous authors checking on their newborns. For which I have a great deal of sympathy.

So here's the deal. This particular weekly entry is just my way of getting a feel for what's in the market. The stuff that looks good, I'll likely buy and read. The others, probably not. But if I didn't think your book looked good, and you want to change my mind, feel free to get in touch with me.

So, my quick takes the new-and-reviewed:

History
There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975, by Jason Sokol, reviewed by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post. Here's the part that everyone will be talking about: "[i]t's difficult not to approach Sokol's book with sheer astonishment that it has been written by one so young." Here's the part that makes me want to pick it up: "he has read a huge amount of material ignored by others -- the personal testimony of whites whose lives were changed by the movement -- and his account of what happened to them is sound and perceptive."

Two Elvis Books - Fortunate Son: The Life of Elvis Presley, by Charles L. Ponce de Leon and Me and a Guy Named Elvis: My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley, by Jerry Schilling with Chuck Crisafulli, both reviewed by Joe Heim in the Washington Post. Fortunate Son reads like "an overlong Wikipedia entry" -- yeowch. On the other hand, it looks like Schilling and Crisafulli have shown us an Elvis that could have fronted Entourage, which is at least a fresh take.

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips, reviewed by Dave Itzkoff in the New York Times. Itzkoff calls it a "thoughtful and meticulous biography." And the description of a woman caught up in an increasingly complicated pseudonym sounds more compelling each time I read about it. (The Times has the first chapter up, and, kludgy present-tense intro paragraphs aside, it reads well.)

LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, by Randall B. Woods, reviewed by Alan Brinkley in the New York Times. Good Lord, another LBJ Biography? Maybe -- according to Brinkley, "Woods has produced an excellent biography that fully deserves a place alongside the best of the Johnson studies yet to appear." (First chapter is up, and it looks like Woods is trying some fictional techniques in his biographing.)

Dead Man in Paradise, by James MacKinnon, reviewed by Ian Thomson in the Independent. A "true-crime thriller" investigating the murder of a Jesuit priest in the post-Trujillo Dominican Republic. The possibility of purple prose worries me a little, but the period is fascinating, and Thomson thinks the language problems are just "hiccups in a superb work of reportage."

Iron Kingdom, by Christopher Clark, reviewed by Brendan Simms in the Independent. A history of Prussia, or, as Simms calls it "a sophisticated yet accessible acocunt of how a middling German dynasty manoeuvred its way into the European pentarchy of powers." Which is really just a hiccup in an interesting review of a book that I'd be a sucker for anyway.

Historical Fiction
The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas, translated with an introduction by Richard Pevear, reviewed by Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. Yes, Dumas wrote historical fiction -- he lived in the 19th century, and provided "long, scenic excursions into French history ... for the newspaper readers of mid-19th-century Paris." Rafferty thinks he was a "hack with genius," and that Pevear's translation brings out his "pure nuttiness," which sells me, frankly.