Media interviews are a popular way for writers to introduce new books they hope will catch the viewer's eye and generate interest in their work. Here's a selection of forthcoming Kindle books by authors scheduled for interviews on TV and radio programs. Books are arranged in chronological order by the date of the scheduled interview.
On CBS's 60 Minutes (Oct 16, 2011)
Van Gogh: The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Random House, 2011. Print Length: 976 p. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (1 review). Kindle edition $19.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Working with the full cooperation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Naifeh and Smith have accessed a wealth of previously untapped materials. While drawing liberally from the artist’s famously eloquent letters, they have also delved into hundreds of unpublished family correspondences, illuminating with poignancy the wanderings of Van Gogh’s troubled, restless soul. Though countless books have been written about Van Gogh, and though the broad outlines of his tragedy have long inhabited popular culture, no serious, ambitious examination of his life has been attempted in more than seventy years. Naifeh and Smith have re-created Van Gogh’s life with an astounding vividness and psychological acuity that bring a completely new and sympathetic understanding to this unique artistic genius whose signature images of sunflowers and starry nights have won a permanent place in the human imagination." - Publisher.
On NPR's All Things Considered (Oct 21, 2011):
Scenes from Village Life, by Amos Oz. Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Print Length: 192 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (14 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"A portrait of a fictional village, by one of the world’s most admired writers. In the village of Tel Ilan, something is off kilter. An elderly man complains to his daughter that he hears the sound of digging under his house at night. Could it be his tenant, a young Arab? But then the tenant hears the mysterious digging sounds too. The mayor receives a note from his wife: 'Don’t worry about me.' He looks all over, no sign of her. The veneer of new wealth around the village - gourmet restaurants and art galleries, a winery - cannot conceal abandoned outbuildings, disused air raid shelters, rusting farm tools, and trucks left wherever they stopped. Amos Oz’s novel-in-stories is a brilliant, unsettling glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life...a parable for Israel, and for all of us." - Publisher.
On NPR's Weekend Edition (Oct 22, 2011):
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz. Henry Holt and Co., 2011. Print Length: 384 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (20 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now,
Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict. Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a dashing spy. On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee." - Publisher.
On CBS's 60 Minutes (Oct 23, 2011):
Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print Length: 656 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (14 reviews). Kindle edition $16.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years - as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues - Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted." - Publisher
On C-SPAN2's Book TV (Oct 23, 2011):
A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in this Life and the Next, by David Horowitz. Regnery Publishing, 2011. Print Length: 256 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (8 reviews). Kindle edition $9.18. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"New York Times bestselling author David Horowitz is famous for his conversion from 1960s radicalism. In
A Point in Time, his lyrical yet startling new book, he offers meditations on an even deeper conversion, one which touches on the very essence of every human life. Part memoir and part philosophical reflection,
A Point in Time focuses on man’s inevitable search for meaning - and how for those without religious belief, that search often leads to a faith in historical progress, one that is bound to disappoint. Horowitz remembers his father, a political radical who put his faith in just such a redemptive future. He examines this hope through the other great figure who organizes these reflections, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose writings foreshadowed the great tragedies of the social revolutions to come. Horowitz draws on eternal themes: the need we have to make sense out of the lives we have been given, our desire to repair the injustices we encounter, and the consequences of our mortality." - Publisher.
On C-SPAN2's Book TV (Oct 23, 2011):
Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico's Drug Wars, by Sylvia Longmire. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print Length: 256 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (6 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Having followed Mexico's cartels for years, border security expert Sylvia Longmire takes us deep into the heart of their world to witness a dangerous underground that will do whatever it takes to deliver drugs to a willing audience of American consumers. The cartels have grown increasingly bold in recent years, building submarines to move up the coast of Central America and digging elaborate tunnels that both move drugs north and carry cash and U.S. high-powered assault weapons back to fuel the drug war. Channeling her long experience working on border issues, Longmire brings to life the very real threat of Mexican cartels operating not just along the southwest border, but deep inside every corner of the United States. She also offers real solutions to the critical problems facing Mexico and the United States... " - Publisher.
On NPR's The Diane Rehm Show (Oct 25, 2011):
Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, by Patrick J. Buchanan. Thomas Dunne Books, 2011. Print Length: 496 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (16 reviews). Kindle edition $14.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"The author of six New York Times bestsellers traces the disintegration to three historic changes: America’s loss of her cradle faith, Christianity; the moral, social, and cultural collapse that have followed from that loss; and the slow death of the people who created and ruled the nation. America was born a Western Christian republic, writes Buchanan, but is being transformed into a multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic stew of a nation that has no successful precedent in the history of the world. Where once we celebrated the unity, the melting pot and shared experience, that the Depression and World War gave us, our elites today proclaim, 'Our diversity is our greatest strength!' - even as racial, religious, and ethnic diversity are tearing nations to pieces. Less and less do we Americans have in common. More and more do we fight over religion, morality, politics, history, and heroes. And as our nation disintegrates, our government is failing in its fundamental duties, unable to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars. How Americans are killing the country they profess to love, and the fate that awaits us if we do not turn around, is what
Suicide of a Superpower is all about." - Publisher.
On NPR's The Diane Rehm Show (Oct 27, 2011)
The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good, by Robert Frank. Princeton University Press, 2011. Print Length: 256 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (6 reviews). Kindle edition $14.23. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
Who was the greater economist - Adam Smith or Charles Darwin? The question seems absurd. Darwin, after all, was a naturalist, not an economist. But Robert Frank, New York Times economics columnist and best-selling author of
The Economic Naturalist, predicts that within the next century Darwin will unseat Smith as the intellectual founder of economics. The reason, Frank argues, is that Darwin's understanding of competition describes economic reality far more accurately than Smith's. Smith's theory of the invisible hand, which says that competition channels self-interest for the common good, is probably the most widely cited argument today in favor of unbridled competition- - and against regulation, taxation, and even government itself. But what if Smith's idea was almost an exception to the general rule of competition? That's what Frank argues, resting his case on Darwin's insight that individual and group interests often diverge sharply. Far from creating a perfect world, economic competition often leads to 'arms races,' encouraging behaviors that not only cause enormous harm to the group but also provide no lasting advantages for individuals, since any gains tend to be relative and mutually offsetting. The good news is that we have the ability to tame the Darwin economy..." - Publisher.
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Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.
For those Kindle readers who, like me, read for entertainment, scanning the book reviews in People magazine is good way to check out new people-related books - celebrity bios, popular novels, absorbing nonfiction - just hitting bookstore shelves. Featured in the December 12th issue of People:
"Before he met the young girl who became Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip had a tumultuous upbringing in Greece, France, Nazi Germany, and Britain. His mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was born deaf; she was committed to a psychiatric clinic when Philip was eight. His father, Prince Andrew of Greece, already traumatized by his exile from his home country, promptly shut up the family home and went off to live with his mistress, effectively leaving his young son an orphan. Remarkably, Philip emerged from his difficult childhood a character of singular vitality and dash - self-confident, opinionated, and devastatingly handsome. In this authoritative and wonderfully compelling book, acclaimed biographer Philip Eade brings to vivid life the storm-tossed early years of one of the most fascinating and mysterious members of the royal family." - Publisher.
"From one of the greatest writers of our time, his first collection of short stories, written between 1979 and 2011, chronicling - and foretelling - three decades of American life Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white-collar prison and outer space, these nine stories are a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo’s iconic voice, from the rich, startling, jazz-infused rhythms of his early work to the spare, distilled, monastic language of the later stories. In Creation, a couple at the end of a cruise somewhere in the West Indies can’t get off the island—flights canceled, unconfirmed reservations, a dysfunctional economy. In Human Moments in World War III, two men orbiting the earth, charged with gathering intelligence and reporting to Colorado Command, hear the voices of American radio, from a half century earlier. In the title story, Sisters Edgar and Grace, nuns working the violent streets of the South Bronx, confirm the neighborhood’s miracle, the apparition of a dead child, Esmeralda." - Publisher.
