Rick Bragg: All over but the Shoutin'

The author, Rick Bragg, won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996, for his work with The New York Times. Rick Bragg recently spoke in front of Alabama's state legislature. The Gadsden Times reported this: “Remember My People,” was Bragg's topic and even though he spun yarns and told good natured tales, there was an edge to his voice several times as he defined just who his people are and how they can be taken advantage of by the powerful. “I know that lucky people, rich people, comfortable people don't need a lot of help,” said Bragg, whose best selling book “All Over But the Shoutin'” is partly the story of growing up dirt poor — “I come from several generations of poor white trash in northeast Alabama,” he said proudly — and his incredibly strong mother who raised him and his two brothers while married to an abusive, alcoholic father. “But I am not asking you to give my people, working people, anything they don't earn,” he said. “But I believe that every society, every great society really is judged by how it treats its working people and poor. See that Gadsden Time piece here. Rick Bragg also wrote these interesting books: The Most They Ever Had, The Prince of Frogtown (Vintage), Ava's Man, and Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg.

Lauren Redniss: Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout

The New York Times recently said this about the book:

The graphic-novel genre is no longer young, but it retains, like Drew Barrymore and certain indie bands, a quirky and semi-adorable glow. Its fragile vibe is Etsy, not Best Buy. Attacking a pile of graphic novels is not unlike chucking a sackful of baby pandas into a river. If many graphic novels are, as Barack Obama put it about Hillary Rodham Clinton, likable enough, few are knotty works of art, things you’d eagerly give to both the sulky teenager in your life and your grandmother who reads serious nonfiction and thinks comics are infra-dig. Few zigzag toward the earth like mid-August lightning. The tail end of 2010 has delivered such a keeper, however, in Lauren Redniss’s graphic biography, “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout.” Here’s to hoping it doesn’t get lost amid the grog and tinsel and pay-per-view screenings of “Elf.”

Read that New York Times piece here.

Greg Lawrence: Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

The Wall Street Journal recently juxtaposed two books on the same topic:

William Kuhn's "Reading Jackie" and Greg Lawrence's "Jackie as Editor" are seemingly the same book—chronological accounts of her 19-year career at the publishers Viking and Doubleday—but they are actually very different. Mr. Kuhn's is heavy on hagiography and analysis, Mr. Lawrence's is an energetically reported and crisply written story of a whip-smart, middle-age working woman who marshaled wits, charm, steely will and, of course, unmatched connections to make a new life for herself. In 1975, Jackie (as both authors choose to call her) found herself stranded in a 15-room Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York after the death of her second husband, the coarse billionaire Aristotle Onassis. Two debonair godfathers rescued her from idleness and depression. The first was Tom Guinzburg, an old friend who had inherited Viking from his father and who invited Jackie to be a consulting editor for $10,000 a year. When that job ended badly, John Sargent, another charmer, brought her to Doubleday, where she had a long and productive run.

Read that article, in full, here. The Huffington Post also covered the book and author: Lawrence, just one of the many authors whose careers she touched, says that one of the most revealing anecdotes he's ever heard about Jackie came from a friend, editor Joe Armstrong, who visited her in Martha's Vineyard less than a year before she died. "I remember in her living room she had all these books," Armstrong told Lawrence. "And she said, `These are my other best friends.'" Read that blog post here.

Jane Smiley and "The Man Who Invented the Computer"

The New York Times introduces the new Jane Smiley book this way:

“You know the story of the invention of the computer?” one character asks another midway through Jane Smiley’s best-selling 1995 novel “Moo.” The speaker, an animal scientist, dreams of striking it rich by pioneering a new dairy-farming technology. To that end, he hopes to pry major grant money out of the agricultural industry, and he wields the history of the computer as both cautionary tale and crowbar. “The short version,” he explains, “is that the guy at Iowa State who invented the computer in the late ’30s never patented a thing. . . . And the university . . . forgot about the old machine, and threw it out.” Now, in Smiley’s new book, “The Man Who Invented the Computer,” we have the long version. The title character — the ­real-life “guy at Iowa State” — is John Vincent Atanasoff, a physicist and mathematician who invented the computer largely out of frustration. Anyone who has studied calculus knows that solving differential equations is a tedious process: labor-­intensive, error-prone, slow. That process grows more arduous as equations grow more complex, and by the 1930s, as Smiley recounts, the difficulty of calculation was impeding scientific advancement. In response, Atanasoff designed a machine to do what his own mind could not. “I did not want to search and invent,” he confessed, “but sadly I turned in that direction.”

Read that NYT piece here.

Curtis Wilkie and the Dickie Scruggs Story

Richard Scruggs is probably the only man in his prison, or even perhaps the entire U.S. Federal prison system, that is currently legally being paid $20 million a year, up until the year 2025, as part of a few legal settlements he'd put together with Big Tobacco in America. NPR's Morning Edition covered the book and the Dickie Scruggs story. See also: Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South, Arkansas Mischief: The Birth of a National Scandal. NPR notes that: Right now, Scruggs is serving a sentence in an Ashland, Ky., prison. But he has held on to his money — and continues to make more. As Wilkie says, Scruggs' tobacco settlement fee arrangements will continue to pay him $20 million a year until the year 2025. View the webpage for this feature story, here. Read an excerpt here.

The Tuesday, November 9, 2010 Charlie Rose Conversation with Felix G. Rohatyn

CHARLIE ROSE: Felix Rohatyn is here. He is known as the man who saved New York City when it almost went bankrupt in 1975. For years he was an investment banker. He became the consummate deal maker. He was on the front lines of a new culture that saw the biggest leveraged buyouts of the ‘80s and ‘90s. In 1997, he left the world of finance to become the United States ambassador to France. He writes about all of this in a new memoir. It is called "Dealings, a Political and Financial Life." I am very pleased to have him back at this table. In full disclosure, he is a great friend of mine, and one of the great things we have done in the history of this program is that we went to France when he was ambassador and did a one-hour profile of him there. And, in fact, the way he starts his book is a story he told me on film, which you can see on our website. And secondly, I hope he will remember that this is a book that I said you have to write, and now he has written it. Welcome. FELIX ROHATYN: Thank you. Thank you, always a pleasure. CHARLIE ROSE: You open this book with the scene of you leaving France.

The full Charlie Rose interview as well as the transcript of the discussion can be found here. The New York Times covered the book, and introduced the title and author, as well as his personal story, this way: Felix Rohatyn’s memoir, modestly titled “Dealings: A Political and Financial Life,” is the sort of vaulting success story that makes one yearn for the big-hearted America of the mid-20th century, a less mean and more innocent time when not every career seemed calculated and not every banker was a subject of scorn, and when the country welcomed enterprising immigrants. Find that NYT piece here. The Daily Reckoning, a financial column and blog of sorts, mentioned the author and book as well:

Felix Rohatyn just published his autobiography, Dealings: A Political and Financial Life. He remembers a meeting in 1975 with the then deputy mayor of New York, James Cavanaugh. The city’s finances had so deteriorated that it was not able to issue long-term bonds. (This is a timely reminder of what to expect in 2011: There will be states and cities unable to issue bonds or rollover debt. If the federal government, including the ever-expanding Federal Reserve, does not or cannot fill the gap, scrip will be issued to pay municipal bills and salaries.) Cavanaugh claimed that New York City was running a balanced budget. Rohatyn disagreed. Cavanaugh “breezily” patronized Rohatyn: “I see you don’t know much about municipal finance.” The investment banker who had negotiated the largest merger in American corporate history (ITT and Hartford Insurance Company) shot back: “Mr. Cavanaugh, I may not know much about municipal finance. But I know about bulls**t. And what you’re giving me is pure bulls**t.”

See that DR piece here. See also: Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now, The Embassy of the Future, The Future of the Transatlantic Defense Community: Final Report of the Csis Commission on Transatlantic Security and Industrial Cooperation in the Twenty-First Century (Csis Panel Report), Biography - Rohatyn, Felix G(eorge) (1928-): An article from: Contemporary Authors.

Kosovo PM Seeks To Sue European Investigator by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Marty, a Swiss senator, led a team of investigators to Kosovo and Albania in 2009, following allegations of organ trafficking published in a book by former U.N. War Crimes tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte who said she was given information by Western journalists. Marty's investigation found that there were a number of detention facilities in Albania, where both Kosovan opponents of the KLA and Serbs were allegedly held once the hostilities in Kosovo were over in 1999, including a "state-of-the-art reception center for the organized crime of organ trafficking." EU investigators looking into claims that organ harvesting took place in northern Albania have said they found no proof of the allegations. The EU police force in Kosovo on Wednesday called for those with evidence to come forward.

NPR posted this AP story; read it here. The Telegraph said this about the alleged organ trafficking:

Allegations of the Kosovo Liberation Army's alleged trade in civilian organs stem from a book by U.N. War Crimes tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, based on information she has said she received from Western journalists. In response to the allegations, Swiss senator Dick Marty led a Council of Europe team of investigators to Kosovo and Albania in 2009. The council's report is to be released to the public in France on Thursday.

Read that Telegraph report and story here. See also: U.S. Department of State Press Briefing for Dec 15, 2010.