In the News, February 2010
Posted 02.08.10: Marc A. Thiessen's Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack is #6 on The Washington Post bestseller list, #9 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and #14 on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list. Regnery published January 18th.
Posted 02.07.10: From Library Journal's starred review of The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch: "An important and highly readable examination of the educational system, how it fails to prepare students for life after graduation, and how we can put it back on track…. Anyone interested in education should definitely read this accessible, riveting book." Basic Books publishes next month.
Posted 01.28.10: Very Important Notice to all Writers' Reps clients:
The Southern District Court of New York has ordered the Opt Out date to the Google Book Settlement extended to January 28, 2010. We urge all of our clients, indeed all authors, to take advantage of this new opportunity to opt themselves out. While we continue to believe that the use of the opt out process chosen by these litigants is unconstitutional and a violation of copyright, we urge all clients to Opt Out anyway—as soon as possible. The Google Book Settlement is not a good deal for anyone. It compromises your very important future legal rights and the value of your economic rights in your copyrights. There is no predicting how much if any of this proposed settlement will survive further court scrutiny on grounds of lack of due process or other violations of law, so it is best for you to be safe rather than sorry. We are confident that Opting Out will not prejudice your future ability to get an as-good or far better deal than this with Google, should you ever choose to publish on Google in the future. For Google to discriminate against you in that way is likely in itself to be illegal on antitrust price-discrimination or other theories of law. Opting Out can be done by logging onto googlebooksettlement.com and registering your name and contact data under the “Opt Out” selection link. Note that there is no longer any requirement to list all one's works, or all other authors' works in which your works appear, due to the many objections that we and others have raised to this entire process. So, to avoid inconvenience to yourself, and to avert the possibility that only such works you actually list are considered to be effectively opted out, we suggest that you simply post the following notice in the box requesting information about works: “This opt out request should be considered to apply to all works whatsoever of mine that appear in any and all books either by myself or by others.” We believe this will be effective in putting the burden back where it belongs, on the publisher, to inform YOU of what precise uses it wishes to make of your work, and to make it clear that they may proceed to use your work without your clear written authorization, at peril of all your rights and remedies at law.
Posted 01.15.10: Terry Teachout's Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong is #32 on this week's New York Times Best Seller list.
Posted 01.11.10: Gordon S. Wood reviewing Crisis and Command in The National Interest: "John Yoo has set out to explain what has happened to presidential power since its beginnings in 1789. Yoo is a professor of law at Berkeley and the author of some controversial memos as a member of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice in the administration of George W. Bush. Since Yoo's robust view of presidential power is well-known, any history of the presidency written by him might initially seem suspect and agenda driven. He realizes only too well that his book is apt to be read ‘as a brief for the Bush administration's exercise of executive authority in the war on terrorism.' But if it is a brief for an expansive understanding of presidential authority, it is a remarkably persuasive one. Although Yoo has mastered an extraordinary number of historical and political science studies of the American presidency, his book is not a full-blown account of the presidency from its beginnings to the present, including all its personal and political aspects; that would make for a far bigger and different book. Instead, Yoo's account is a highly focused and nicely compressed constitutional history of the office.”
Posted 01.10.10: From a review of John Yoo's Crisis and Command by Jack Rakove in Sunday's Washington Post: "Given Yoo's strong conservatism, it would be easy for liberals to dismiss Crisis and Command as one more venture in a hackneyed debate. That would be a big mistake. True to form, Yoo does use his two brief final chapters to defend the George W. Bush legacy and drive progressives nuts with the idea that President Obama has some strangely reactionary ideas struggling to control his brain. But the heart of the book is the highly favorable treatment that Yoo extends to five great presidents—all of whom should rank high on any liberal's list of admirable leaders: Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt—followed by a broad survey of the Cold War presidents from Truman through Reagan. This is a deeply serious history of the presidency, sometimes selective in its emphasis, but always provocative and thoughtful."
Posted 01.03.10: Deborah Solomon has questions for John Yoo in today's New York Times Magazine. The article is titled "Power of Attorney." John Yoo's newest book, Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush is published this week by Kaplan.
Posted 12.21.09: Entertainment Weekly on Yeshiva Boys by David Lehman: “Lehman, at once one of our most playful and thoughtful of poets, demonstrates an unprecedented range here. The book's title derives from a sequence of 12 poems about growing up a religious Jew constantly trying to square his spiritual training with the absurdity, the sensuality, and the evil in the world. Elsewhere, Lehman uses many conveyances—including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes—to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity that never seems drippy or forced.”
Posted 12.17.09: Paul Among the People by Sarah Ruden gets a starred review in the current Booklist: “The astonishingly high quality of the new literature concerned with the greatest missionary apostle continues in poet and classical translator Ruden's [work]…. Ruden is winningly intimate as well as impressively scholarly in this superb book.” Earlier this year, in the March 12th issue of The New York Review of Books, Garry Wills said of Ruden's recent translation of the Aeneid, "Robert Fagles, shortly before his death, set the bar very high for translating [Vergil's] Aeneid. Yet already the scholar-poet Sarah Ruden has soared over the bar.... The translation is alive in every part.... This is the first translation since Dryden's that can be read as a great English poem in itself.”