The National Book Award Winners

FICTION
Colum McCann
Let the Great World Spin

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in Colum McCann’s intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s

The National Book Foundation

NONFICTION
T.J. Stiles
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt

Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington’s presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation’s largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire. In The First Tycoon, T.J. Stiles offers the first complete, authoritative biography of this titan, and the first comprehensive account of the Commodore’s personal life.

The National Book Foundation

POETRY
Keith Waldrop
Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy

This compelling selection of recent work by poet Keith Waldrop presents three related poem sequences—“Shipwreck in Haven,” “Falling in Love through a Description,” and “The Plummet of Vitruvius”—in a virtuosic poetic triptych. In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop’s romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.

The National Book Foundation

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
Phillip Hoose
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice

On March 2, 1955, a slim, bespectacled teenager refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Shouting “It’s my constitutional right!” as police dragged her off to jail, Claudette Colvin decided she’d had enough of the Jim Crow segregation laws that had angered and puzzled her since she was a child.

But instead of being celebrated, as Rosa Parks would be when she took the same stand nine months later, Claudette found herself shunned by many of her classmates and dismissed as an unfit role model by the black leaders of Montgomery. Undaunted, she dared to challenge segregation again a year later—as one of the four plaintiffs in the landmark busing case, Browder v. Gayle.

The National Book Foundation

Best economic hard times are still with us line of the day

“The combined percentage of loans in foreclosure or at least one payment past due was 14.41 percent…”

Mortgage Bankers Association via Calculated Risk

Not everybody needs to run for president

… but Elizabeth Warren should.

Warren Winning Means You Won’t Sell It If You Can’t Explain It

The criticism doesn’t bother her, Warren said. She learned to shake things off growing up in Norman, Oklahoma, with three older brothers “in a family of car parts and fist fights,” she said. “It was get tough or die, and I decided to get tough.”

Good profile.

Best line of the day

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

Interview with Umberto Eco: ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’

I must be 26th

The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs In America.

Aggregation 'R Us

Leaf me alone

The Abstract City Blog with a clever montage of leaves. Amusing. Artistic.

On the Beach

We humans are drawn to the shore, with some 40% of the world’s population living within 100 kilometers of a coast. Coastal areas have made recent news with the arrival of several storms, concerns about rising sea levels and other environmental and conservation efforts. Collected here are a handful of photographs from around the world of people and animals at the shoreline, playing, working, struggling or relaxing on the border between land and sea. (36 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

Best line of the morning

“A Texas man is in jail after trying to sell pot door-to-door. They didn’t buy his excuse that he was just trying to increase sales for the little girls who came after him selling cookies.”

Shoebox — Newsdroppings

Keeping down with the Joneses

A Czech fable: A poor farmer whose livestock is a single dairy cow goes to the field one morning to milk the cow and discovers that she’s dead. He falls to his knees and looks skyward, shaking his fists and cursing God for his misfortune. Suddenly a voice is heard from the heavens: “Your cries have reached me, my son. Tell me what you would like me to do.” The farmer gazes upward and says to God, “Please, Lord, kill my neighbor’s cow.”

Emily Yoffe at Slate Magazine.

I think you could substitute Czech with just about any other group.

Maxine

A Maxine Thanksgiving card from Shoebox. It’ll make you smile — and then wonder why you’ve just smiled.

The World's Most Famous Lobo

The Sports Pickle wonders if UNM soccer player Elizabeth Lambert is related to the great Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Jack Lambert. Click for an awesome photo of Jack, a nine-time Pro Bowler.

Meanwhile, at The New York Times there is an adult-like interview with Ms. Lambert — Those Soccer Plays, in Context. Well done, and worth your time if you’ve paid any attention to this story.

How does she do it?

Another remarkable photo. Be sure to click for the larger version.

How do you do it? Please tell us Elaine.

Best line of the evening, so far

“A kid got nailed in the face during a dodgeball game at his school, and now he might sue the city. Maybe he needs to sue evolution for not giving him the reflexes to survive in middle school gym class.”

Deadspin

November 17th

Today is the birthday

… of Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). Inhofe is the senator who has said, “man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” He’s 75, his age having now exceeded his IQ.

… of Gordon Lightfoot. The singer is 71.

I can see her lyin’ back in her satin dress
In a room where you do what you don’t confess
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you bin creepin’ round my back stairs
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you bin creepin’ round my back stairs

… of Martin Scorsese. The Oscar-winning director is 67.

… of Danny DeVito. The actor/director/producer is 65. Very early in his career DeVito played Martini in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

… of Lorne Michaels. The producer of Saturday Night Live is 65.

So he moved back to Canada, where he formed a comedy duo with Hart Pomerantz, and they had a television variety show on Canadian television, The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour. They contracted their talents to comedic acts in the United States, writing for Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, Joan Rivers, and Woody Allen. They also wrote for the NBC show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and then NBC asked Michaels to come up with a comedy show to replace the Johnny Carson reruns that aired Saturday nights at 11 p.m.

Michaels recruited talent from all sorts of places. Dan Aykroyd was a fellow Canadian, and Chevy Chase, John Belushi, and Gilda Radner had worked on the National Lampoon show. Muppet creator Jim Henson created sketches for the show, and recent Harvard grad Al Franken was signed on as a writer. And so Michaels put together the first season, 1975–1976, and won an Emmy for it.

The Writer’s Almanac

… of Tom Seaver. Tom Terrific, the baseball hall-of-famer is 65.

… of Elvin Hayes. The basketball hall-of-famer is 64.

… of Howard Dean. The physician politician is 61.

… of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The actress is 51. Mastrantonio was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for “The Color of Money.”

… of Daisy Fuentes, 43. Sophie Marceau is 43, too.

Rock Hudson was born on this date in 1925; he died in 1985. Hudson got a best actor Oscar nomination for “Giant.”

Soichiro Honda was born on this date in 1906; he died in 1991. Honda started as an auto mechanic at age 15.

The Pledge of Allegiance is un-American

Michael Lind has written a really provocative piece about the Pledge of Allegiance.

Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s.

Just go read it.

Harbinger of Doom

I think Tom wants to drink alone.

What brings joy to others gives me a feeling deep in my gut that is familiar to anyone who remembers what it’s like to be six years old and watching an accidentally-released helium balloon float into the sky, just out of reach.

Just go read it.

Criticism of Gladwell Reaches Tipping Point

Some interesting commentary at CJR on the reaction to Malcolm Gladwell ends with this:

Gladwell’s earlier books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers have been publishing phenomena. Tipping Point alone has been on bestseller lists for five years. Gladwell in many ways is the social science equivalent of the New York Times foreign affairs columnist Tom Friedman, another favorite target of critics whose books sell huge numbers. Both are popularizers, in some sense hucksters, adept at phrase-making and simplifying (and often over-simplifying) complex subjects. A key difference, however, is that when Friedman is wrong, he helps start wars. When Gladwell makes a mistake, he dilutes public understanding of science – not a good thing, surely, but he’s a feature writer; that’s what they do.

Finding the laws that govern us

The Official Google Blog describes an important new source:

As many of us recall from our civics lessons in school, the United States is a common law country. That means when judges issue opinions in legal cases, they often establish precedents that will guide the rulings of other judges in similar cases and jurisdictions. Over time, these legal opinions build, refine and clarify the laws that govern our land. For average citizens, however, it can be difficult to find or even read these landmark opinions. We think that’s a problem: Laws that you don’t know about, you can’t follow — or make effective arguments to change.

Starting today, we’re enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in.

Click the Official Google Blog link above to learn more. Attorneys must be used to this kind of access, but the cross referencing seems new to me. At least new to have it for free.

Best line of the morning, so far

“Katey can dribble a basketball, juggle a set of knives, and text a friend all at the same time. It’s not so much impressive as it is terrifying.”

dooce®

Jeez, and I can’t even fill the kitchen sink and text at the same time. (The iPhone has just about fully recovered though.)

My view

Taken through the window from my chair at the iMac. 38 degrees, 50% humidity. Gorgeous.

It’s 3.3 miles as the GPS flies to the platform near the visitor center at the top of the Sandia Crest (the center and the towers are just visible if you click on the image and view the larger version). It’s 10,678 feet above sea level up there; just 6,070 where I sit.

Best line of last night

“You know who’s coming to New York City? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is coming here. He’s coming to New York City for the big trial, and also, he’s promoting his new book, ‘Really Going Rogue.’”

David Letterman

Top 10 Bad Messages from Good Movies

Some interesting thoughts on kid’s movies from GeekDad at Wired.com.

No witnesses

EL PASO — A 7-year-old Glen Cove Elementary School third-grader was attempting to run away from gunmen when he was shot several times in the back, Juárez police say.

The same gunmen had just shot and killed his father.

The boy, Raul Xazziel Ramirez-Ramirez, is the youngest student from an El Paso school to die in the savage and unrelenting war among rival drug cartels in Juárez. The death toll this year has already reached a little more than 2,200.

Raul was reportedly visiting his father in Juárez when he was gunned down.

El Paso Times

Best line of the day, so far

“Amid the publicity blitz for her new book, Going Rogue, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said today that ’she was looking forward to reading it, big time.’”

Borowitz Report