The Help: Nonfiction from APM: The Story

For nearly two years ‘The Help’ has been on bestseller lists across the country. It’s a fictional account of African-American maids and their white employers in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 60’s. Today, Dick talks with Alma Cousin who was a real-life maid in Jackson at that time, along with Elizabeth Hays, one of the white children she cared for.

Listen to the APM podcast here.

'The Help': In Service to Servants Poorly Treated from Politics Daily by Bonnie Goldstein

Despite a long apologetic addendum "in her own words" revealing her gratitude and affection for her own family's "stout and dark-skinned" maid, I confess I was slightly suspicious of Stockett and put off by her use of an inconsistent and condescending dialect for the working women ("her legs is so spindly, she look like she done growed em last week"). I know she wanted to convey hardships resulting from the steep racial divide but wondered if careless insensitivities laced through the narration were intended to underscore despicably egregious Jim Crow laws in force at the time, or if they reflected the author's own ambivalence.

Read the full post by Bonnie Goldstein here.

Book Buzz: 'The Help' paperback is late, 'Angelina' release is early from Books: Book reviews, news and bestseller list - USATODAY.com ...

'Help' isn't on the way: For publishers, it's nirvana when a hardcover book sells so well you can keep postponing the paperback edition. Kathryn Stockett's debut novel, The Help, which is No. 15 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, was published in February 2009, and it's still a hardcover hit. The book hit No. 35 on July 23, 2009, and hasn't left the top 50 since. (Nearly 2.6 million copies are in print.) There is no scheduled date for a regular paperback edition "because the hardcover is doing so well," says the book's editor and publisher, Amy Einhorn. There will be a movie tie-in paperback to coincide with the film version, tentatively set to hit screens in fall 2011. It stars Zombieland's Emma Stone as a white girl who befriends a black maid (Doubt's Viola Davis) in 1962 Mississippi.

Of course they've got a movie on the way. Read the full USA Today story here.