Roy Miller's Blog, page 211
April 22, 2017
This Week's Bestsellers: April 24, 2017
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Easter and Passover 2017 coincided with each other, and with related new releases, including ‘The True Jesus,’ #2 in Hardcover Nonfiction. Plus the Pulitzer announcements drive sales of ‘The Underground Railroad’ and other winners, and a favorite Star Wars villain returns.
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A Daughter Continues Her Father’s Legacy, and His Series
This content was originally published by GREGORY COWLES on 21 April 2017 | 3:46 pm.
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Anne Hillerman
The Inheritance: Anne Hillerman’s new novel, “Song of the Lion” — about a car bombing at a high school basketball game and the deeper plot behind it — enters the hardcover fiction list at No. 8. If Hillerman’s name sounds familiar, then so should those of her central characters: Lt. Joe Leaphorn, Sgt. Jim Chee and Police Officer Bernadette Manuelito, all of whom appeared in a popular and long-running detective series by Anne’s father, Tony Hillerman, before his death in 2008. “Song of the Lion” is Anne Hillerman’s third addition to the catalog. “My dad and I never talked about my continuing the series,” Hillerman told me in a recent email. But she and her husband, the photographer Don Strel, did collaborate with him on a nonfiction book (“Tony Hillerman’s Landscape”) that was eventually published in 2009, a year and a day after her father’s death. “Don and I did a book tour and, inevitably, the people in the audience asked if Dad had any novels pending for posthumous release,” she said. “I must have been asked the ‘any more stories coming?’ question a hundred times. When I told them no, I could sense their disappointment. As I healed from the worst of my grief, I realized I desperately missed those stories too.”
Before she turned to novels, Hillerman worked as a reporter, editor and reviewer of books and restaurants for a Santa Fe newspaper, The New Mexican — where her father, as it happens, was once executive editor — and for a regional edition of The Albuquerque Journal. “I covered lots of different topics,” she said: “the school board, the Santa Fe Opera, the New Mexico Legislature, some police stuff, the fate of teenage runaways and more.” (Suddenly, her novel’s high school sports angle feels foreordained.) “I miss the intensity of journalism and the camaraderie of a busy office,” she said, “but I am relishing this midlife career change.”
Now Lie in It: For the second week in a row, the top-selling book on the advice list (available online) is Adm. William H. McRaven’s “Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life … and Maybe the World.” A retired member of the Navy SEALs who commanded the mission that killed Osama bin Laden, McRaven originally compiled these tips for the 2014 commencement at the University of Texas, Austin — the “year’s best graduation speech,” according to Inc. magazine. Making your bed, he explained, starts the day with a sense of accomplishment. “And if by chance you have a miserable day,” he added, “you will come home to a bed that is made.”
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April 21, 2017
Quirks Work At Quirk Books
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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For the Philadelphia-based indie with more than a few surprise bestsellers in its tanks, Quirk’s the name and quirk’s the game.
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Elizabeth Warren on Big Banks and Their (Cozy Bedmate) Regulators
This content was originally published by GRETCHEN MORGENSON on 21 April 2017 | 5:20 pm.
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The capture of our regulatory and political system by big and powerful corporations is real. And it is a central and disturbing theme in the new book by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts.
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“This Fight Is Our Fight” contains juicy but depressing anecdotes about how our most trusted institutions have let us down. It also shows why, years after the financial crisis, big banks are still large, in charge and, basically, unaccountable for their actions.
“In too many of these organizations, there are rewards for cheating and punishments for calling out the cheaters,” Ms. Warren said in an interview Wednesday. “As long as that’s the case, the biggest financial institutions will continue to put their customers and the economy at risk.”
Ms. Warren’s no-nonsense views are bracing. But they are also informed by a thorough understanding of how dysfunctional Washington now is. This failure has cost Main Street dearly, she said, but has benefited the powerful.
Wells Fargo got a lot of criticism from Ms. Warren, both in her book and in my interview — and on live television during the Senate Banking Committee hearing on the account-opening mess in September. She was among the harshest cross-examiners encountered by John G. Stumpf, who was Wells Fargo’s chief executive at the time. “You should resign,” she told him, “and you should be criminally investigated.” (Mr. Stumpf retired the next month.)
This week, Ms. Warren called for the ouster of the company’s directors and a criminal inquiry into the bank.
“Yes, the board should be removed, but that’s not enough,” she told me. “There still needs to be a criminal investigation. The expertise is in the regulatory agencies, but the power to prosecute lies mostly with the Justice Department, and if they don’t have either the energy or the talent — or the backbone — to go after the big banks, then there will never be any real accountability.”
Banks are not the only targets in Ms. Warren’s book. Others include Wal-Mart, for its treatment of employees; for-profit education companies, for the way they pile debt on unsuspecting students; the Chamber of Commerce, for battling Main Street; and prestigious think tanks, for their undisclosed conflicts of interest.
My favorite moments in the book involve the phenomenon of regulatory capture: the pernicious condition in which institutions that are supposed to police the nation’s financial behemoths actually come to view them as clients or pals.
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One telling moment took place in 2005, when Ms. Warren, then a Harvard law professor, was invited to address the staff at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a top regulator charged with monitoring the activities of big banks.
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She was thrilled by the invitation, she recalled in the book. After years of tracking various problems consumers experienced with their banks — predatory lending, sky-high interest rates and dubious fees — Ms. Warren felt that, finally, she’d be able to persuade the regulators to crack down.
Her host for the meeting was Julie L. Williams, then the acting comptroller of the currency. In a conference room filled with economists and bank supervisors, Ms. Warren presented her findings: Banks were tricking and cheating their consumers.
After the meeting ended and Ms. Williams was escorting her guest to the elevator, she told Ms. Warren that she had made a “compelling case,” Ms. Warren writes. When she pushed Ms. Williams to have her agency do something about the dubious practices, the regulator balked.
“No, we just can’t do that,” Ms. Williams said, according to the book. “The banks wouldn’t like it.”
Ms. Warren was not invited back.
Ms. Williams left the agency in 2012 and is a managing director at Promontory, a regulatory-compliance consulting firm specializing in the financial services industry. When I asked about her conversation with Ms. Warren, she said she had a different recollection.
“I told her I agreed with her concerns,” Ms. Williams wrote in an email, “but when I said, ‘We just can’t do that,’ I explained that was because the Comptroller’s office did not have jurisdiction to adopt rules to ban the practice. I told her this was the Federal Reserve Board’s purview.”
Interestingly, though, Ms. Warren’s take on regulatory capture at the agency was substantiated in a damning report on its supervision of Wells Fargo, published by a unit of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Wednesday.
The report cited a raft of agency oversight breakdowns regarding Wells Fargo. Among them was its failure to follow up on a slew of consumer and employee complaints beginning in early 2010. There was no evidence, the report said, that agency examiners “required the bank to provide an analysis of the risks and controls, or investigated these issues further to identify the root cause and the appropriate supervisory actions needed.”
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Neither did the agency document the bank’s resolution of whistle-blower complaints, the report said, or conduct in-depth reviews and tests of the bank’s controls in this area “at least from 2011 through 2014.” (The agency recently removed its top Wells Fargo examiner, Bradley Linskens, from his job running a staff of 60 overseeing the bank.)
“Regulatory failure has been built into the system,” Ms. Warren said in our interview. “The regulators routinely hear from the banks. They hear from those who have billions of dollars at stake. But they don’t hear from the millions of people across this country who will be deeply affected by the decisions they make.”
This is why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau plays such a crucial role, she said. The agency allows consumers to sound off about their financial experiences, and their complaints provide a heat map for regulators to identify and pursue wrongdoing.
But this setup has also made the bureau a target for evisceration by bank-centric politicians.
“There was a time when everything that went through Washington got measured by whether it created more opportunities for the middle class,” Ms. Warren said. “Now, the people with money and power have figured out how to invest millions of dollars in Washington and get rules that yield billions of dollars for themselves.”
“Government,” she added, “increasingly works for those at the top.”
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For Bookstores, A Perfect Storm for Sales
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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As Independent Bookstore Day turns three, booksellers in 48 states see an opportunity to make strong Saturday sales even stronger.
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‘Hamlet Globe to Globe’ – The New York Times
This content was originally published by on 21 April 2017 | 6:35 pm.
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In The New York Times Book Review, Stephen Greenblatt reviews Dominic Dromgoole’s “Hamlet Globe to Globe.” Greenblatt writes:
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“Hamlet Globe to Globe” is a compulsively readable, intensely personal chronicle of performances in places as various as Djibouti and Gdansk, Taipei and Bogotá. The book is in large part a tribute to the perils and pleasures of touring. The Globe troupe had to possess incredible stamina. Keeping up an exhausting pace for months on end — Lesotho on the 1st of April, Swaziland on the 3rd, Mozambique on the 5th, Malawi on the 8th, Zimbabwe on the 10th, Zambia on the 12th, and on and on — they would fly in, hastily assemble their set, unpack their props and costumes, shake hands with officials, give interviews to the local press, and mount the stage for two and a half hours of ghostly haunting, brooding soliloquies, madcap humor, impulsive stabbing, feigned and real madness, graveside grappling, swordplay and the final orgy of murder. Then after a quick job of disassembling and packing, they were off to the next country.
On this week’s podcast, Dromgoole talks about “Hamlet Globe to Globe”; Judith Newman discusses new books about sex and relationships; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; and John Williams and Gregory Cowles on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.
Here are the books mentioned in this week’s “What We’re Reading”:
“Killers of the Flower Moon” by David Grann
“Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give” by Ada Calhoun
“American War” by Omar El Akkad
“A Good Life” by Ben Bradlee
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.
How do I listen? Two ways
From a desktop or laptop , you can listen by pressing play on the button above.
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3. Subscribe. Once on the series page, tap on the “subscribe” button to have new episodes sent to your phone free. You may want to adjust your notifications to be alerted when a new episode arrives.
4. Or just sample. If you would rather listen to an episode or two before deciding to subscribe, just tap on the episode title from the list on the series page. If you have an internet connection, you’ll be able to stream the episode.
On your Android phone or tablet:
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2. Search for the series. Click on the magnifying glass icon at the top of the screen, search for the name of the series, and select it from the list of results. You might have to scroll down to find the “Podcasts” search results.
3. Subscribe. Once on the series page, click on the word “subscribe” to have new episodes sent to your phone for free.
4. Or just sample. If you would rather listen to an episode or two before deciding to subscribe, just click on the episode title from the list on the series page. If you have an internet connection, you’ll be able to stream the episode.
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Celebrating Independent Bookstores
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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What’s so special about independent bookshops? Bob Eckstein, author-illustrator of 'Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores,’ shows and tells.
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Board Books Keep Soaring After Easter Bump: The Weekly Scorecard
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Board books and mass merchandisers were the big winners in the final week before Easter. Unit sales of board books were 148% higher in the week ended Apr. 16, 2017, than in the comparable week in 2016.
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Gustave Flaubert's Works Ranked
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Peter Brooks, author of ‘Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris,’ ranks Flaubert’s works.
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2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 21
This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 21 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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For today’s prompt, pick an object (any object), make it the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles could include: “Toothbrush,” “Rake,” “Pilot G2 Premium Gel Roller Pen,” or any number of other objective titles. Have fun with it.
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Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!
In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.
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Here’s my attempt at an Object Poem:
“Dexter Maxi Load Thoroughbred 600 Commercial Washer”
such a big silver machine
with a small astronaut window
revealing a quick spin to the left
& a tumble to the right
all my clothes so clean
so bright
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). He had to use the laundromat yesterday after his washing machine at home started leaking water.
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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Poetry Challenge 2017, Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides Blog, What's New
About Robert Lee Brewer
Senior Content Editor, Writer's Digest Community.
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