March 25th

… ought to be a national holiday. It’s Aretha Franklin’s birthday. The first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is 66 today.

Aretha Franklin is the undisputed “Queen of Soul” and the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She is a singer of great passion and control whose finest recordings define the term soul music in all its deep, expressive glory. As Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun observed, “I don’t think there’s anybody I have known who possesses an instrument like hers and who has such a thorough background in gospel, the blues and the essential black-music idiom.…She is blessed with an extraordinary combination of remarkable urban sophistication and of the deep blues feeling that comes from the Delta. The result is maybe the greatest singer of our time.”

Franklin was born in Memphis and grew up in Detroit, where her father, Rev. C.L. Franklin, served as pastor at the New Bethel Baptist Church. One of the best-known religious orators of the day, Rev. Franklin was a friend and colleague of Martin Luther King. Aretha began singing church music at an early age, and recorded her first album, The Gospel Sound of Aretha Franklin, at fourteen. Her greatest influence was her aunt, Clara Ward, a renowned singer of sacred music. Beyond her family, Franklin drew from masters of the blues (Billie Holiday), jazz (Sarah Vaughn) and gospel (Mahalia Jackson), forging a contemporary synthesis that spoke to the younger generation in the new language of soul.

Aretha signed with Columbia Records in 1960 after A&R man John Hammond heard a demo she cut in New York. She remained at Columbia for six years, cutting ten albums that failed to fully tap into her capabilities. Paired with pop-minded producers, she dabbled in a variety of styles without finding her voice. Franklin was never averse to the idea of crossover music, being a connoisseur of pop and show tunes, but she needed to interpret them in her own uncompromising way. In Hammond’s words, “I cherish the albums we made together, but Columbia was a white company who misunderstood her genius.”

Jerry Wexler was waiting in the wings to sign Franklin when her contract with Columbia expired. With her switch to Atlantic in 1966, Aretha proceeded to revolutionize soul music with some of the genre’s greatest recordings. Her most productive period ran from 1967 through 1972. The revelations began with her first Atlantic single, “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Loved You),” a smoldering performance that unleashed the full force of Franklin’s mezzo-soprano. Offering call-and-response background vocals on this and other tracks were Carolyn and Erma Franklin (Aretha’s sisters) and Cissy Houston.

Franklin’s greatest triumph - and an enduring milestone in popular music - was “Respect.” Her fervent reworking of the Otis Redding-penned number can now be viewed as an early volley in the women’s movement. …

Working closely with producer Jerry Wexler, engineer Tom Dowd and arranger Arif Mardin, Franklin followed her triumphant first album with recordings that furthered her claim to the title “Queen of Soul.” Her next three albums - Aretha Arrives (1967), Lady Soul (1968) and Aretha Now (1968) - included “Chain of Fools,” “Think,” “Baby, I Love You,” “Since You’ve Been Gone (Sweet Sweet Baby),” and a soulful rendering of Carole King’s “A Natural Woman.”

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

I Never Loved A Man, Respect, Baby I Love You, A Natural Woman, Chain of Fools, Think, The House That Jack Built, I Say a Little Prayer, Bridge Over Troubled Water — all great, but for NewMexiKen give me Aretha Franklin’s version of You Are My Sunshine.

Elton John is 61 today. Gloria Steinem 74. Astronaut Jim Lovell (the Apollo 13 commander) 80.

Marcia Cross is 46 and Sarah Jessica Parker is 43.

Author Flannery O’Connor was born on this date in 1925.

When she was five, she became famous for teaching a chicken to walk backward; a national news company came to town to film the feat and then broadcast it all around the country. She said, “That was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. It’s all been downhill from there.”
. . .

When she was 25, she was diagnosed with lupus, and she moved in with her mother on a farm in Georgia. The lupus left her so weak that she could only write two or three hours a day. She was fascinated by birds, and on the farm she raised ducks, geese, and peacocks. She traveled to give lectures whenever she felt well enough, and she went once to Europe where, because of a friend’s plea, she bathed in the waters at Lourdes, famed for their supposed healing powers.

She wrote two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and two short-story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). She died at the age of 39 from complications of lupus.

She said, “The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Wow!

Sports Illustrated, which faces fierce daily, even hourly, competition with ESPN, Yahoo Sports and others, has something its main rivals do not: a 53-year trove of articles and photos, most of it from an era when the magazine dominated the field of long-form sports writing and color sports photography.

On Thursday, the magazine will introduce the Vault, a free site within SI.com that contains all the words Sports Illustrated has ever published and many of the images, along with video and other material, in a searchable database.

The New York Times

A way with words

Dan Neil’s review of the Mini includes this:

“The Mini is diamond-laced Champagne, a piano-playing Shetland pony, sex on the wing of an airplane. Simply put, if the Mini Cooper doesn’t put a smile on your face, you’re dead.”

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

The author Dee Brown was born 100 years ago today. His best known work, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, told the story of Indian removal after the Civil War. The book has sold more than 5 million copies and did much to raise the awareness of Americans to a long overlooked part of their history.

Best line of the day, so far

“I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See?”

Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, born on this date in 1902.

Scott Momaday

Pulitzer Prize-winner Scott Momaday is 74 today. He was presented with the National Medal of Arts last year. At first I wasn’t going to reprise this excerpt from House Made of Dawn, but it’s so lovely.

The Navajo Ben Benally remembers a snow-filled day:

And afterward, when you brought the sheep back, your grandfather had filled the barrel with snow and there was plenty of water again. But he took you to the trading post anyway, because you were little and had looked forward to it. There were people inside, a lot of them, because there was a big snow on the ground and they needed things and they wanted to stand around and smoke and talk about the weather. You were little and there was a lot to see, and all of it was new and beautiful: bright new buckets and tubs, saddles and ropes, hats and shirts and boots, a big glass case all filled with candy. Frazer was the trader’s name. He gave you a piece of hard red candy and laughed because you couldn’t make up your mind to take it at first, and you wanted it so much you didn’t know what to do. And he gave your grandfather some tobacco and brown paper. And when he had smoked, your grandfather talked to the trader for a long time and you didn’t know what they were saying and you just looked around at all the new and beautiful things. And after a while the trader put some things out on the counter, sacks of flour and sugar, a slab of salt pork, some canned goods, and a little bag full of the hard red candy. And your grandfather took off one of his rings and gave it to the trader. It was a small green stone, set carelessly in thin silver. It was new and it wasn’t worth very much, not all the trader gave for it anyway. And the trader opened one of the cans, a big can of whole tomatoes, and your grandfather sprinkled sugar on the tomatoes and the two of you ate them right there and drank bottles of sweet red soda pop. And it was getting late and you rode home in the sunset and the whole land was cold and white. And that night your grandfather hammered the strips of silver and told you stories in the firelight. And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow-covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything—where you were little, where you were and had to be.

The Geography of Bliss

This week NewMexiKen has really enjoyed reading The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner (thank you again Veronica and Ken).

The operating conceit of this odyssey memoir is that the author, a professed grouch (“My last name is pronounced ‘whiner,’ and I do my best to live up to the name”), will travel to the world’s happier places to explore to what degree an individual’s happiness is intertwined with a shared geography and culture. To that end, he shoots off to unusual locales — Bhutan, Iceland, Qatar — and to Thailand and India, perpetual stopovers for pleasure seekers, visiting nine foreign countries altogether over the course of a year. His final chapter is about the United States, which “is not as happy as it is wealthy.”

The New York Times

The Times reviewer, Pamela Paul, found Weiner’s humor forced or contrived — I found it amusing.

“We know a thing by its opposite. Hot means nothing without cold. Mozart is enhanced by the existence of Barry Manilow.”

“I picked up the companion book to Grumpy Old Men [a British TV series] and flipped to the foreword, written by a grump named Arthur Smith. He begins by observing that ‘life is shit organized by bastards.’ Then he gets negative.”

But mostly I found Weiner’s insights into what makes us happy — and what doesn’t — interesting.

“Social scientists estimate that about 70 percent of our happiness stems from our relationships, both quantity and quality, with friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. During life’s difficult patches, camaraderie blunts our misery; during the good times, it boosts our happiness.”

“People are least happy when they’re commuting to work.”

And I always find it rewarding to read about other places and other people.

There’s an interesting dialogue with Weiner at World Hum.

Book Lust

A very worthwhile defense of books and reading by Timothy Egan. Go read what he has to say; it’s not long.

And any of Egan’s books are worth reading (I own three), especially The Worst Hard Time, a National Book Award winner.

This Republic of Suffering

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I’s Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century. The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The Civil War’s rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about 2 percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities. As the new southern nation struggled for survival against a wealthier and more populous enemy, its death toll reflected the disproportionate strains on its human capital. Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War.

Above from This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust, a new history of the reaction to the unprecedented death and dying of the American War of the Rebellion.

Edgar Allan Poe

… was born in Boston on this date in 1809.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore–
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door–
Only this and nothing more.”

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;–vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow–sorrow for the lost Lenore–
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore–
Nameless here for evermore.

The first two of 18 stanzas of “The Raven.”

Project Gutenberg has an illustrated version from 1885. The poem was first published in 1845.

The Poe Museum has a nice, concise biography of Poe.

The Library of Congress has a lot of interesting material on Poe.

How many books do you have?

NewMexiKen always looks around whenever I visit a home for the first time to see where the books are, what they are, and how many there are. I try not to judge books by their cover, but I often — though certainly not always — judge people by their books. (By “judge” I simply mean, get an impression.)

Not counting cookbooks, I have books in five bookcases in four rooms, around 700 altogether I believe.

How about you?

What I’m reading

I received The World Without Us by Alan Weisman today and am only about one-third through, but it is a well-paced, interesting natural history.

The premise is what would happen if humanity were removed from the planet, but everything else, including all other creatures, remained in place. How long would our presence even be recognizable? In some instances it would not be long. Indeed, this book should put an end to those doomsday scenario movies with people living in the New York City subways. Without their hundreds of massive electric pumps, the subway tunnels would flood with the first good rain.

A good read, one of five nominees for the National Book Award for nonfiction for 2007.

Award Winners

Caldecott Medal: The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Newbery Medal: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village

ALA | Newbery Medal Winners, 1922-Present

ALA | Caldecott Medal Winners, 1938-Present

The Nine

NewMexiKen received a copy of Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court for Christmas. I’m most of the way through and I recommend it highly.

Toobin tells the story (tells the stories might be a better way of putting it) of the recent Supreme Court. Though he writes about the legal issues before the Court, it’s as much the story of the nine individuals who served as justices from 1994-2005 and the succession that took place in 2005-2006. (Eleven years is the longest that nine justices have ever served together.) Justice O’Connor has the leading role. It’s a readable, well-written, well-paced book.

The Nine was on many lists as one of the best nonfiction books of last year.

‘Apple-scrapple. That’s a keeper.’

A truly substantive interview with The Wire’s David Simon by Nick Hornby.

An excerpt:

[Simon:] But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak.

If you’re into The Wire, you’ll want to read this one. If you wonder what’s with all the fuss about The Wire, you’ll want to read it too.

Link via mental_floss Blog.

Best line of the day, so far

“Still, my faith in the Internet’s information democracy wilted with I once suggested to a friend facing eviction that we Google ‘renter’s rights’ to learn his options, and watched him type in ‘rinters kicked out.’”

Joe Bageant in Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War.

NewMexiKen is three-quarters through Bageant’s book, which I first mentioned here last week. It’s readable, revealing and important, a good compliment to Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

Bageant returned to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, after being away for 30 years. There he learned that his family and friends — the people he grew up with, went to school with, hunted with — are fast becoming a permanent American underclass. He writes of these people with honesty and disdain, but mostly with respect, humor and love — and a lot of important insight.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

… was born in Bedford, England on this date in 1886. From The Writer’s Almanac:

He’s the author of the Antarctic travelogue, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). His book is about a search for the eggs of the Emperor Penguin in 1912. He and his two companions traveled in near total darkness and temperatures that reached negative 77.5 degrees Fahrenheit. He wrote, “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”

As noted in The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer:

Cherry-Garrard’s first-person account of this infamous sufferfest is a chilling testimonial to what happens when things really go south. Many have proven better at negotiating such epic treks than Scott, Cherry, and his crew, but none have written about it more honestly and compassionately than Cherry. “The horrors of that return journey are blurred to my memory and I know they were blurred to my body at the time. I think this applies to all of us, for we were much weakened and callous. The day we got down to the penguins I had not cared whether I fell into a crevasse or not.”

Best opening to a non-fiction book I may have to read

Inside the white ghetto of the working poor

“73 virgins in arab heaven and not a dam one in this bar!”

—Men’s room wall, Burt’s Tavern

Faced with working-class life in towns such as Winchester, see only one solution: beer. So I sit here at Burt’s Tavern watching fat Pootie in a T-shirt that reads: one million battered women in this country and i’ve been eating mine plain! That this is not considered especially offensive says all you need to know about cultural and gender sensitivity around here. And the fact that Pootie votes, owns guns, and is allowed to purchase hard liquor is something we should all probably be afraid to contemplate. Thankfully, even cheap American beer is a palliative for anxious thought tonight.

Then too, beer is educational and stimulates contemplation. I call it my “learning through drinking” program. Here are some things I have learned at Burt’s Tavern:

1. Never shack up with a divorced woman who is two house payments behind and swears you are the best sex she ever had.

2. Never eat cocktail weenies out of the urinal, no matter how big the bet gets.

From Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War by Joe Bageant.

America’s best auto critic begins this week’s review

A couple of weeks ago, when the temperatures dipped into the 40s — or as we call it here in Southern California, the extremes of human endurance — I went shopping in West L.A. It was like base camp at Annapurna. High-heeled hotties had turned in their sex spurs for pairs of Merrell hiking boots. Guys were walking around in zero-degree quilted Marmot jackets. I’m sorry — I just don’t think crampons and bottled oxygen are necessary to make the traverse to the valet stand.

God knows, high-end technical gear is fun. Suunto watches, Adidas glacier glasses. I love it when people use Black Diamond trekking poles and Platypus hydration packs to assault the untamed reaches of Griffith Park. You sure don’t want Jon Krakauer writing a book about you.

Dan Neil

A review that makes me want to hear the song

From the playlist of short-story author Jack Pendarvis:

8 ) God Moves On the Water, Blind Willie Johnson. I don’t care if you’re the most committed liberal secular humanist in the world, I don’t care if you’re Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, Blind Willie Johnson will make you afraid of God. He will also make you afraid of Blind Willie Johnson. There are dozens of recorded songs about the Titanic disaster and what it means. This one is the best.

Update: Here’s part of what All Music has to say about Johnson:

If you’ve never heard Blind Willie Johnson, you are in for one of the great, bone-chilling treats in music. Johnson played slide guitar and sang in a rasping, false bass that could freeze the blood. But no bluesman was he; this was gospel music of the highest order, full of emotion and heartfelt commitment. Of all the guitar-playing evangelists, Blind Willie Johnson may have been the very best. … Not for the faint of heart, but hey, the good stuff never is.

More best books of 2007

Slate Magazine editors and contributors list their best books of 2007.

More best books

Salon names five best fiction and five best nonfiction books of 2007. Tree of Smoke and Legacy of Ashes make these lists, too.

Another book list

The National Book Critics Circle lists the top books of 2007 as voted by its members and former finalists and winners of its awards.

Fiction

1. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
2. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
3. Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (HarperCollins)
4. Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin)
5. Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses (Graywolf)

Nonfiction

1. Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)
2. Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (St. Martin’s)
3. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan Books)
4. David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts (HarperCollins)
5. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (Doubleday)

Poetry

1. Robert Hass, Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005* (HarperCollins)
2. Zbigniew Herbert, Collected Poems: 1956-1998 (Ecco)*
3. Robert Pinsky, Gulf Music (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)*
4. Rae Armantrout, Next Life (Wesleyan University Press)
5. Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf)

*There was a three-way tie for first place in poetry

Two of the fiction works — Tree of Smoke and Out Stealing Horses — are on this list and The New York Times list.

The 10 Best Books of 2007

The New York Times lists its top 10 books of the year.

Fiction

MAN GONE DOWN
By Michael Thomas. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.

OUT STEALING HORSES
By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. Graywolf Press, $22.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.

THEN WE CAME TO THE END
By Joshua Ferris. Little, Brown & Company, $23.99.

TREE OF SMOKE
By Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.

Nonfiction

IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95; Vintage, paper, $14.95.

LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.
By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Bantam Books, $22.

THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.
By Jeffrey Toobin. Doubleday, $27.95.

THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History.
By Linda Colley. Pantheon Books, $27.50.

THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century.
By Alex Ross. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.

William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway

… were married on November 28th in 1582. He was 18, she 26. As with many facets of Shakespeare’s life, there is some confusion about the marriage. Among other things, Shakespeare received a marriage license with an Anne Whatley the day before. Secondly, relatives of Anne Hathaway (or Hathwey) posted bond so that her marriage to Shakespeare could proceed with only one reading of the bans. Perhaps the confusion is best resolved by noting that, six months later, on May 26, 1583, William and Anne’s daughter Susanna was christened. It appears the Bard had a shotgun wedding.

100 Notable Books of the Year

The New York Times will publish its annual best books list next week, but it’s online now.

Road Stories

This is the heaviest travel week of the year. At the book blog Paper Cuts, Dwight Garner is looking for good audio book suggestions for his road trip.

Wow, the perfect book

It’s got everything — sex, violence, courtroom drama and politics — Law & Order SVU and West Wing all in one!

The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder, and the Making of a Great President by Julie Fenster.

Triumphs and Tragedies

You never know what you’ll find at Costco. Yesterday it was Joseph Ellis’s newest book, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, published just last week.

I’ve barely begun, but the book is constructed in the style of Ellis’s Pulitizer prize-winner Founding Brothers — somewhat independent chapters relating stories that illustrate his broader point.

Anyone with an abiding interest in the founding of America should read Founding Brothers. I’ll let you know about this sequel in a day or so.

(Ellis’s His Excellency: George Washington is quite good too, and recommended.)

12,000 and other idle chatter

NewMexiKen has 11,999 songs (tracks) in my iTunes library. And while I have more CDs to import, I thought I should celebrate by getting something special from the iTunes store for number 12,000. Any ideas?

I spilled a lot of bird feed yesterday and this morning the film crew for the remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is sizing up my backyard — a dozen mourning doves, sparrows, finches, a partridge or two, scrub jays.

Apple stock rose more than 8 percent in the first hour this morning on yesterday’s earnings report of $1.01 a share. I keep thinking it’s peaked and “now” would be a bad time to buy — and it’s up nearly 30% in a month. As Jimmy Jones sang:

Oh you need timin’
A tick a tick a tick of good timin’
Timin’ timin’ timin’ timin’
Timin’ is the thing it’s true
Good timin’ brought me to you

Big fuss because J.K. Rowling told an audience Dumbledore was gay. That’s a surprise? Didn’t people read the books?

The Cleveland Indians logo, Chief Wahoo, has got to go. Can you imagine them getting away with that type of a caricature with African or Asian-Americans or Hispanics (think of the fuss over Sambo or the Frito Bandito)?

Overnight Annie and SnoLepard added some interesting pairs in the comments to the Whom would you rather be? list.

The Santa Ana Winds

TalkLeft has a great excerpt from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the Santa Ana winds, those east-to-west hot winds that blow in southern California and fan the fires.

Just an excerpt of the excerpt:

The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushes through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.”

In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn.

National Book Awards Nominees

“God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” a vigorous attack on religion by Christopher Hitchens, and “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A.,” by Tim Weiner, a reporter for The New York Times, both appeared on best-seller lists this year. A from-the-ground-up look at the founding of the United States, “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution” by Woody Holton, joined those two finalists, as did Edwidge Danticat’s wrenching memoir of her family in Haiti, “Brother, I’m Dying,” and Arnold Rampersad’s “Ralph Ellison: A Biography.”
…

[T]he fiction finalists included first-time novelists as well as familiar storytellers. The novices — Mischa Berlinski for “Fieldwork,” about a journalist living in Thailand, and Joshua Ferris for “Then We Came to the End,” a comic story about office life — were joined by Lydia Davis for her seventh collection of short stories, “Varieties of Disturbance”; Denis Johnson for “Tree of Smoke,” a tale of espionage in Vietnam; and Jim Shepard for “Like You’d Understand, Anyway,” a group of stories told in the first person.

The New York Times

Follow the link for the poetry and young people’s literature nominees.

NewMexiKen has read the first two of the non-fiction works, but none of the others. How about you?

Good Morning

The Wall Street Journal has a good review (and a chapter) of Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle — A Terrible Slog.

If you decide to buy the book, here’s the link — The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. NewMexiKen intends to go curl up with the landing at Salerno in a few minutes. It’s a really great read.

I’m experimenting with a new feature that allows you to find material related to the subject matter of any post (any post having more than 30 words). I noticed the WSJ was using the feature — and my very own blog was one of its links — so I thought I’d give it a try. Let me know what you think; the link is in the post metadata. NewMexiKen has almost no control on the selection.

The two strongest Democrats, Governor Richardson and Representative Tom Udall (Stewart’s son) say they aren’t interested in Domenici’s senate seat.

The neighborhood phantom has been back this week after a month when I hadn’t noticed him. Nice new Cadillac sedan, at least. We don’t allow no low rent suspicious people in this neighborhood.

Any ideas for an exciting new NewMexiKen poll?

I like surprises, even $2 ones

NewMexiKen ordered Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 from Amazon last week. It arrived today. As did a message saying: “Because we reduced the price of your pre-release title between shipment (when we charged you) and the release date, you automatically received a refund.”

Nice.

A recipe for sadness

Jon Stewart doesn’t really like Chris Matthews’ new book, Life’s a Campaign — Stewart calls it a “self-hurt book.”

Pointer via Eschaton.

This week’s New Yorker

A quick look at health-care politics from Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker. It wouldn’t take you long to click and read it all, but NewMexiKen liked this summary:

Our health-care system has continued to deteriorate. We spend twice as much as the French and the Germans and two and a half times as much as the Brits, yet we die sooner and our babies die in greater numbers. Thirty-eight million Americans were uninsured in 2000; now it’s forty-seven million. Employer-based health insurance is increasingly expensive, stingy, and iffy. Companies, especially manufacturing companies, are beginning to realize that being deputized to pay the health-care costs of their employees and retirees puts them at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy.

Whether change comes will depend entirely on the next election. If a Democrat wins the Presidency after outlining his or her intentions as specifically as the leading contenders have done, and if the Democrats substantially increase their congressional majorities, then it will happen. If they don’t, it won’t.

Elsewhere in the magazine, Louis Menand has an informative essay about Jack Kerouac and On the Road (50 years old this year): Drive, He Wrote.

And I liked the lead from Anthony Lane’s review of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford:

“It is no mean feat to make a boring film about Jesse James, but Andrew Dominik has pulled it off in style.”

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944

In “The Day of Battle,” Rick Atkinson picks up where he left off in “An Army at Dawn,” his history of the North African campaign, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. A planned third volume, on the Normandy invasion and the war in Europe, will complete “The Liberation Trilogy,” which is shaping up as a triumph of narrative history, elegantly written, thick with unforgettable description and rooted in the sights and sounds of battle.

The New York Times

Indeed, Atkinson’s first volume was superb and highly recommended. I’ve been anxiously awaiting volume two — so much so, I’m placing my order as soon as I decide whether to go buy it at the store so I don’t have to wait until next week, or just get it from Amazon. (Update: D’oh, it’s not out until Tuesday in any case.)

I recommend you read An Army at Dawn first.

An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944

And, by the way, the article from The Atlantic I mentioned, Victory at Sea, is quite good.

[Update October 4: I've commented on the book here.]

Birthday addendum

Earlier NewMexiKen didn’t write anything about William Faulkner who was born on this date in 1897, or even mention Shel Silverstein who was born on this date in 1932. The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media touches on both nicely.

Pure car porn

Let’s assume there’s a bright side to the universe, a place where mercy and justice prevail, where the good are rewarded and the bad punished with equal alacrity. On this sunny shore, public school teachers make six figures, all stray kittens find good homes, and yard gnomes never get their little ceramic heads caved in.

Do not look for the Mercedes-Benz CL63 AMG there. This is the Car of Sauron, a black-hearted sin of mechanical seduction, an automobile to make you eat all your pretty little words about carbon footprints and warming greenhouses. A veritable neutron star of gas-burning evil, this stupendous, beautiful two-door — the rakish coupe version of the obsidian-souled S63 sedan — has the power to corrupt, oh yeah, absolutely. I honestly believe if you loaned this car to Ralph Nader and Ed Begley Jr. for the weekend, by Sunday night they’d be doing doughnuts in a Ralphs parking lot.

Dan Neil

0-to-155 in less than 30 seconds. 518 hp. Neil was getting “about 9 miles per gallon at one point.”

The Nine

No, not baseball. It’s the title of Jeffrey Toobin’s new book: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.

David Margolick has the review in The New York Times. His summary:

So, not surprisingly, “The Nine” is engaging, erudite, candid and accessible, often hard to put down. Toobin is a natural storyteller, and the stories he tells — how a coalition of centrist justices saved Roe v. Wade; why Rehnquist, despite having loathed the rights granted to criminal suspects by Miranda v. Arizona, eventually declined to overturn the decision; how right-wing firebrands deep-sixed the Supreme Court candidacies of Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers — are gripping. But its greatest surprise is that there are few great surprises. Toobin writes about the court more fluidly and fluently than anyone, but his buddies on the bench didn’t tell him much we don’t already know.

Here’s the “first chapter” of The Nine.

Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick review the reviewers of Toobin’s book.