Roy Miller's Blog, page 172
June 2, 2017
BookExpo 2017: No More Book Deserts: Jason Reynolds
This content was originally published by on 2 June 2017 | 4:00 am. Source link With three novels coming out this fall, you might never guess that Jason Reynolds didn’t like to read books in elementary school, or even high school. Source link
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Robert Caro, Nearing the End of His Epic L.B.J. Bio, Eyes a Trip to Vietnam
This content was originally published by JOHN WILLIAMS on 2 June 2017 | 9:05 pm. Source link He continued: “I want to go to the great battlefields of Hue. I want to describe — there are a number of good books on this, but I always want to go for myself — what it’s like…
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Women Booksellers Rule
This content was originally published by on 2 June 2017 | 4:00 am. Source link Librarian and writer Rosalind Reisner discovers a Depression-era quiz for women booksellers—and finds that not much has changed when dealing with book buyers. Source link
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BookExpo 2017: Hillary Clinton Receives Warm Bookselling Welcome
This content was originally published by on 2 June 2017 | 4:00 am. Source link In front of a packed main stage crowd, Hillary Rodham Clinton chatted for an hour with Cheryl Strayed about politics, what books mean to her, and her upcoming memoir. Source link
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It’s Not You, It’s Me: A Writer’s Reflections on Rejection
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 2 June 2017 | 1:15 pm. Source link If you’re a writer and you don’t often feel like punching something—or someone—you’re not doing something right. Every writer feels rejection. When I first started vying for acceptance at The New Yorker for my illustrations, I met with…
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Justice Ginsburg’s workout becomes a book
This content was originally published by Associated Press on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am. Source link WASHINGTON (AP) — Jane Fonda, Richard Simmons and Ruth Bader Ginsburg? The 84-year-old Supreme Court justice is about to join the ranks of workout superstars with a book about her exercise routine. “The RBG Workout: How She Stays…
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How a Band of Conspirators Saved Timbuktu’s Treasured Manuscripts From Al Qaeda’s Torch
This content was originally published by TOM ZOELLNER on 2 June 2017 | 11:30 am. Source link Photo Enterprising librarian: Abdel Kader Haidara showing steel lockers filled with rescued manuscripts in Bamako, Mali, in 2013. Credit Klaas Tjoelker THE STORIED CITYThe Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its PastBy Charlie EnglishIllustrated. 400…
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‘The Long Haul’ Is a Trucker’s Slangy Tour of the Road
This content was originally published by JENNIFER SENIOR on 31 May 2017 | 9:45 pm.
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Other terms that will prove catnip for lovers of professional slang: bobtailing, deadheading, lollipops. (Driving a tractor without a trailer; driving an empty truck; those tiny green mile markers freckling the interstate.) Hitting a low bridge is “getting a haircut.” “Chicken chokers” are truckers who move animals, “parking lot attendants” are truckers who move cars, and “suicide jockeys” are truckers who move hazardous materials. Fellows like Murphy are called bedbuggers; and their trucks, roach coaches.
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Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
I will try not to think about either of those last terms the next time I relocate. Nor will I think about the fact that movers sometimes inspect the contents of your boudoir. Murphy’s recommendation: “Salt the lingerie drawer with plastic snakes or a loaded mousetrap.” (Who says the vagina dentata is a myth?)
“The Long Haul” can be almost shamefully enjoyable, allowing readers to have their fix of “fabulous-life-of” porn and class outrage, too. You wouldn’t believe the downpour of indignities and diminishments Murphy has weathered over the years — being videotaped from one room to the next, being banished to distant porta-potties when functional bathrooms were steps away. One client — an ex-banker from an ex-bank — was so awful that Murphy ordered his crew to install the guy’s eight gravestones of Qing dynasty emperors upside down.
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How Murphy came to read Chinese is another story, and it’s inseparable from the strengths and weaknesses of this memoir.
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As he himself says, Murphy does not meet your average trucker profile. He was raised in Cos Cob, a comfortable suburb of Connecticut and spent three years at Colby College before dropping out to drive a truck. (Hence the elementary Chinese. He studied it for a semester.) He’s an amateur sociologist and a philosopher, opining on such topics as the origins of the “anti-urban, anti-statist” trucker culture and the transcendent pointlessness of material possessions.
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Yet there’s a huge question at the heart of Murphy’s memoir, and it’s one he never answers: How did a guy like him — who falls asleep reading Jane Austen, who has a crush on Terry Gross — become a long-haul mover?
Murphy gives us a partial explanation. He was a restless adolescent. “Many young male neurotics find out early that hard labor is salve for an overactive mind,” he writes. Moving furniture gave him a measure of self-determination he badly craved. A whole subset of truckers, he notes, are tumbleweeds, preferring to “go through life on an anonymous surface.” They’re ghosts in snakeskin boots.
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What the reader doesn’t realize, at least for a long while, is that Murphy is a member of that subset. Midway through “The Long Haul,” he does something disconcerting and entirely unexpected: He gives up driving. For more than 20 years, if I’m calculating correctly. And he never says why.
Now, I’m not saying this omission is on par with the 18½ missing minutes of conversation between Richard Nixon and H. R. Haldeman. But it does seem like a literary crime of some sort. It makes you wonder, at any rate, whether those years contain the real story about this man. He alludes to “an avalanche of poor decisions,” though we never learn what they were. We simply know that at 51, Murphy found himself in a city out West where he knew no one and had “no job, no plans, no nothing,” and wanted back in his truck.
At just the moment our engagement with Murphy should deepen, it shallows. He gets his second act. But we never learn what went wrong in Act I.
This jagged hole — which flutters in the middle of the memoir where decades of experience should be woven through — isn’t the only thing that compromises Murphy as a narrator. There’s something occasionally mannered and artificial about his dialogue, which tends toward the screwball or the Socratic, depending on the moment. (Though at its best, it’s kind of great, as if Hepburn and Tracy were handed their own CBs.)
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And Murphy is clearly conflicted about class, justifiably furious at the rich executives who condescend to him but equally condescending to his trucker brethren who earn far less than he does. (Which, in a good year, can be as much as $250,000.) Murphy senses, probably correctly, that their preoccupation with the status of their vehicles is a kind of anxious compensation for low wages.
“‘Whatcha drivin’?’ is a standard first question at truckstop coffee counters,” he writes. “‘Got a bank account?’ would be my first question.”
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That’s pretty harsh.
What redeems this book, time and time again, are the stories Murphy tells. My goodness, how astonishing they are, and how moving, and how funny, and how just plain weird. Wait until you get to the one about the unlikely polygamist. Or the client who dies, mid-move. The next time you think of your movers as invisible, remember: They see all of your secrets. They know exactly who you are.
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BookExpo 2017: Stop Harassment Now: Gretchen Carlson
This content was originally published by on 1 June 2017 | 4:00 am.
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“I decided early on that I was not going to sit down and shut up,” says former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson. Last July she filed a lawsuit against her former boss, the late Roger Ailes, for firing her because she complained about sexual harassment at the network. After that Ailes was ousted from Fox, but when she left, Carlson says that she felt like she was “jumping off a cliff without knowing what lies below.” She also began receiving thousands of emails from women who had been harassed.
“I have stacks of them in my office, and I responded to every one,” Carlson says. “Most had never told their husbands about what had happened to them, and many had ruined their careers when they spoke up.” In Be Fierce: Stop Harassment and Take Your Power Back (Center Street, Sept.) Carlson shares those stories along with her own experiences and insights from experts working to confront the problem of sexual harassment. “We need to start talking about it,” she says. “We can’t expect things will change simply because there are a couple of high profile cases.”
When Carlson began to ask some of the women who’d written to her if they’d be willing to have their stories included in the book, she was unsure how they would react. “But 98% of them said ‘yes.’ I think because I would be doing the interviews myself, there was a level of trust. They didn’t have to worry about how they were depicted,” Carlson says. The book also includes a chapter on men, “enlightened men who are working to empower women in the workplace. As long as 95% of Fortune 500 companies are run by men, we need them,” Carlson notes. She provides a playbook that shows women how to develop a plan if they do step forward to complain about sexual harassment. “Often women take it and take it,” she says. “When they finally do something about it, there’s really no going back for them. They need a plan.”
Carlson’s also passionate about addressing what she sees as the dangers inherent in arbitration clauses now commonly found in employment contracts. “They’re sold as a benefit to employees, but they’re not,” she says. “They’re fooling us into thinking we’ve come so far when it comes to sexual harassment. But it’s really that we’re not hearing about these cases anymore, because they’re shrouded in secrecy. In most cases when women go to arbitration, the perpetrators stay in the workplace.”
Carlson isn’t just writing about the issues faced by women in the workplace; she’s taking practical steps to confront them. She recently created the Gift of Courage Fund. Its primary goal is to help girls and young women recognize their full potential, as well as to help women gain a safe and nurturing place in the workforce.
After the book’s publication, there’ll be a national book signing tour, and Carlson plans to host events at universities and high schools across the country to address the growing problem of campus sexual abuse. “If this book helps one person to come forward,” she says, “it will all be worth it.”
Today, 1–2 p.m. Gretchen Carlson will sign blads of the first 100 pages of Be Fierce at the Hachette booth (2502, 2503).
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June 1, 2017
BookExpo 2017: The Big Books of the Show
This content was originally published by on 1 June 2017 | 4:00 am.
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Debuts and the latest releases from a number of heavy hitters–among them John Grisham, Jeffrey Egenides and Jennifer Egan–were among the books being touted as the “big ones” of this year’s BookExpo.
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