Texas Pages

Who would have thought that a book about a plane crash could make you feel better about flying?

Judging by the title, one might expect William Langewiesche's
Fly By Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24) to be a feel-good tale about Chelsey "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot (and local hero -- as noted here) who kept his cool and brought his crippled Airbus A320 into the Hudson River on Jan. 15.

Although the geese that his plane hit were liquefied, all 155 people aboard survived. That's an amazing tale that makes Sullenberger worthy of the praise and attention he has received; Langewiesche notes that data prove "that he was a pilot at the peak of human performance."

But Langewiesche is not into hero worship or myth-making. He's an award-winning journalist -- and a pilot himself (he flew his first solo at 14, notes Publishers Weekly). And his tale of the crash is not only both breezy and technical, it manages to be respectful of Sullenberger while also showing that some of the real heroes of the day were the Airbus engineers -- particularly former test pilot Bernard Ziegler -- who designed a plane that could be flown in such circumstances.

Earlier this month, the 2009 PEN Southwest Book Awards were handed out at a banquet in Dallas. And the winners were:

Fiction: David Stuart, The Angel of Vilcabamba

Poetry: Arthur Sze, The Gingko Light

Nonfiction: Stephanie Elizondo-Griest, Mexican Enough

Translation: Sean Cotter, Lightwall, by Liliana Ursu

A complete list of finalists is posted at the Pen Southwest site.

This just in from Legacy Books:

"Legacy Books has sold out of tickets for the Sarah Palin booksigning on December 4. The response to Mrs. Palin's exclusive appearance has been overwhelming. Barring some cataclysmic, unforeseen circumstance, all customers holding tickets will be able to have their books signed at the December 4 event.

"We are now taking reservations for copies of GOING ROGUE with signed bookplates. There are a limited number of bookplates available. Books with bookplates will be available to purchase beginning December 5 at 9:00 a.m. when the store opens. Call 972.398.9888 to have a copy reserved."

Legacy Books has 1,000 slots available for its Sarah Palin event on Dec. 4. As of the end of Wednesday, they had sold 850 books.

Kyle Hall, the store's director of marketing and events, says its easily the biggest event in his year-old store's history.

Just to put things in perspective, Stephenie Meyer sold 1,000 tickets at the Stonebriar Barnes & Noble on a single day in 2008. Carlo Rich, a national event marketing manager based at the Borders at Preston Road and Royal Lane, recalled that recent large events for him included Laura and Jenna Bush (about 1,500 people), Rachael Ray (more than 1,000), Lauren Conrad (1,000) and Steve Harvey (800-1,000).

(Being a good marketer, he also noted that his store will welcome Mike Huckabee, who regularly draws 500 to 800 people, at 5 p.m. on the day after Thanksgiving to sign A Simple Christmas; Carlo suggested that many people reading this post might be interested in that fact. Point taken, Carlo.)

So no matter what you say what you will about her politics -- and many commenters certainly have already done that -- Palin knows how to sell books. Here is an Associated Press report on the scene elsewhere:

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- College students ditched class, employees skipped work and some huddled in the cold overnight just to make sure they get an orange wristband Wednesday that would let them meet Sarah Palin.
A line of more than a thousand people -- some sporting Palin Power stickers and Palin T-shirts -- moved slowly into a Barnes & Noble store Wednesday to see the former Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor on the first stop of her Going Rogue book tour. During the hours they waited, some broke out in chants of "Palin! Palin! Palin!"

NEW YORK (AP) -- Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, a novel about daring, luck and mortality in 1970s New York, won the fiction prize Wednesday night at the 60th annual National Book Awards.
McCann, who has called his book an act of hope written in part as a response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, praised the generosity of American fiction and of the American people and dedicated his prize to a fellow Irish-American, "good old" Frank McCourt.
"I think he's dancing upstairs," McCann said of the "Angela's Ashes" memoirist, who died last summer after a battle with cancer.
T.J. Stiles' biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon (read The Dallas Morning News review here. was the nonfiction winner and Keith Waldrop's Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy won for poetry. The young people's literature award went to Phillip Hoose's Claudette Colvin, based on the true story of an early civil rights heroine, who joined Hoose on the stage. He thanked her for letting him relate her story, which he had feared would vanish "under history's rug."

A couple of literary items for those who might have missed them:

Chris Vognar took a look at Harvard University Press' New Literary History of America. It's a book, he notes, "As rich as its title is dry." And with essays that range from Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan, it sounds accessible, stimulating and entertaining all at once.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Bush family turned out in force for the Celebration of Reading Dallas. As reported by Alan Peppard in his column, former President George W. Bush brought the house down during a surprise appearance:

"I am writing a book," W. said. "This is going to come as a great surprise to some of our fellow citizens who live on both coasts."

He said he had checked with his publisher, Crown, to get permission to read from the manuscript. "They said, 'No way will you read from the book.' I said, 'I've got to. My mother said to read from the book.' "

Instead, he began reading a parallel-universe version of his West Texas childhood, saying, "Mom was celebrating our new life in the desert by drinking bourbon ... straight bourbon ... right out of the bottle."

He quickly added "Gotcha!" and folded his notes and sat down.

Alan has more here.

Here's what the Associated Press thought of Sarah Palin's book, which we're talking about in advance of her visit to Legacy Books in Plano. (Tickets are available starting today.)

You can read The New York Times' take here.

The AP also scrutinized the book and exhaustively fact-checked it; that story is appended at the end of the review.

By MARK KENNEDY
Associated Press Writer
Going Rogue: An American Life (HarperCollins, 413 pages, $28.99), by Sarah Palin: There should be a feeling of palpable glee running through Sarah Palin's memoir: Now, finally, she gets to talk, unfiltered and unedited.
This is, after all, a politician convinced that the media twists her words, who says she's been parodied and mocked by establishment elites, and who complains she was muzzled by her own party.
Going Rogue: An American Life offers her a chance to answer back, without pesky interference from the likes of Katie Couric or GOP handlers. It is, to steal Nancy Reagan's memoir title, My Turn.
So why is there so little bloodletting, why no mustn't-miss gory bits? Her book, written with an assist from Lynn Vincent, is less the revealing autobiography of a straight-shooting maverick and more a lengthy campaign speech -- more lipstick, less pit bull.

Kyle Hall of Legacy Books sends details for people wanting to get a book autographed by Sarah Palin on Dec. 4.

In short:

Tickets that will enable you to buy a book go on sale tomorrow. Tickets will be required to get in the autograph line. She's not signing anything except copies of her book.

She's not expected to make any kind of public address.

The whole process, as explained in the press release, is posted below

If you were lucky enough to have scored tickets to Christopher Buckley's sold-out appearance as part of SMU's Tate Lecture Series tomorrow night, you can get caught up on his recent works with our reviews of Boomsday (see below) and Supreme Courtship.

You can also take it from me that you should be in for an entertaining evening. I caught the author at last year's Texas Book Festival, and in that pre-election, peak-of-financial collapse, pro-Obama- Austin atmosphere, he brought the house down.

He also explained the Texas connection to the lead character in Supreme Courtship.
And he even explained his personal connection to the book pages of The Dallas Morning News: He was once a contributor, back in the day. I let him know that if the best-selling author/scion of wealth and privilege gig doesn't work out, I'd be happy to have him back as a freelancer, once in awhile.

For some reason, he never called. But I wish him luck tomorrow anyway.

This week's list of local best-sellers was provided by Borders, Preston Road at Royal Lane.

Hardcover Fiction
1. Gathering Storm, by Robert Jordan
2. Ford County, by John Grisham
3. The Lost Symbol, by Dan Brown
4. True Blue, by David Baldacci
5. Kindred in Death, by J.D. Robb
6. The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
7. Help, by Kathy Stockett
8. Scarpetta Factor, by Patricia Cornwell
9. Last Night in Twisted River, by John Irving
10. Pursuit of Honor, by Vince Flynn

Hardcover Nonfiction

1. It's Your Time, by Joel Osteen
2. Book of Basketball, by Bill Simmons
3. Superfreakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt
4. Have a Little Faith, by Mitch Albom
5. What the Dog Saw, by Malcolm Gladwell
6. Big Burn, by Timothy Egan
7. Audacity to Win, by David Plouffe
8. The Big Rich, by Bryan Burrough
9. Lee Brothers Simple, Fresh, Southern Cooking, by Matt Lee
10. Too Big to Fail, by Andrew Sorkin

Paperback Fiction

1. The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane
2. In a Perfect World, by Laura Kasischke
3. Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
4. Last Dickens, by Matthew Pearl
5. Push, by Sapphire

Paperback Nonfiction

1. Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
2. Blind Side, by Michael Lewis
3. Why We Suck, by Denis Leary
4. When You Are Engulfed by Flames, by David Sedaris
5. Night, by Elie Wiesel

Regular DMN contributor and retired TCU Press director Judy Alter alerts us to the following:

An exhibit called "Going to Texas," featuring five centuries of Texas maps, will be open at the Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame Friday through Jan. 3. The exhibit is sponsored by a partnership between the Museum of the Big Bend at Sul Ross University and the Center for Texas Studies at TCU.

A coffee table book, Going to Texas: Five Centuries of Texas Maps, published by TCU Press is available. The book includes 63 color maps, ranging from the earliest European maps of Texas, which are amazing in their distortion, to 19th-century maps urging settlers to move West. Several essays by noted historians explain the significance of each aspect of this exhibit. I

That's the title of an evening with scholar/author Peter Kreeft at Highland Park Presbyterian Church on Nov. 21.

Details below:

Borders last week announced that many of its Waldenbooks and Borders Express stores would be closing nationwide (Wall Street Journal story here.) Among the casualties listed on the Borders.com site are stores at Valley View and Collin Creek malls.

Chain stores tend to get a bad rap, and it's been years since I did any actual book buying at a mall. But this post from the Bookavore blog, spotted on Shelf Awareness, did remind me of a time when Waldenbooks was the definition of a bookstore for me. In that long-ago era before Amazon, it was about the only way for a kid to stock his library. A birthday or Christmas would not be complete without a long, rectangular paper Waldenbooks gift certificate, or two, which would be hoarded until someone could drive me to the mall so I could indulge in a blissful hour or so of deciding what, exactly, I'd be splurging on.

As I'm fond of noting, in my teen years I ended up on the other side of the counter at a standalone B. Dalton (#674, Lakewood, Colo.), and I can tell you from personal experience that the people who work in such places can be as dedicated, literate and, in my case, as unfashionably attired as workers at bookstores anywhere. (B. Dalton, by the way, is about to be reduced to two locations nationwide.)

So I offer a salute to these stores, the workers and the books they moved out into the world. Even if buyers still have ways to get books, you can't convince me that the world is better served by subtracting a bookstore -- even a Waldenbooks -- and adding a shoe boutique or a "for lease" sign.

Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin will do a book signing from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dec. 4 at Legacy Books in Plano, according to Kyle Hall, the store's director of marketing and events. It'll be strictly a signing (Palin won't be speaking), with no personalization. No memorabilia will be signed; books only. Books must be bought at Legacy. As with all Legacy events, if a patron can't come but wants a signed book, Legacy can arrange that over the phone.

Hall says Palin's people called him -- he didn't have to approach them. That's a great sign of Legacy's growing reputation in the independent-bookstore world, and a pretty terrific first-anniversary present for Hall and the store (it opened on Nov. 7, 2008).

Those interested in attending should e-mail info@legacybooksonline.com. For more info, visit the store's web site or call 972-398-9888.

Whenever I cover the Texas Book Festival, it's with an unspoken acknowledgment that any single person purporting to cover such a sprawling event is a liar. I figure I'm able to sample maybe 10 percent of the weekend's events, and that counts sneaking out of some sessions early, slipping into others late and running into authors at barbecue joints afterward.

So I read alternative coverage with interest.

And I'm happy to see that Publishers Weekly came away with a positive take as well:
"The celebratory atmosphere was palpable; as debut novelist Victor Lodato commented, 'the energy here was terrific: a festival that actually felt festive.' "

The hometown paper, the Austin-American Statesman, made it to the festival's opening gala and let Colin Beavan sum up the weekend:

Beavan, author of No Impact Man," his tale of trying to live an extremely green year -- no electricity, no fossil fuel transportation, no meat and only local food -- started his talk by saying, "For a writer, it's pretty amazing to see so many people in one place who still care about books."

While I was out, staff writer Jessica Meyers took a look at the great feature writer Hank Stuever and his new book on Christmas in Frisco.

The book is Tinsel. And the author is scheduled to appear 7 p.m. Nov. 18 at Legacy Books in Plano.

I'm going to steal the last line of her story, because it's a wonderful summary of his work -- and modern suburban Texas:

Texans frame their annual bluebonnet pictures so the Applebee's and freeways don't make it into the shot, he said. "I came to put Applebee's back into the frame."

Sales were clearly brisk at the Barnes & Noble tent, where the good people running things told me that the big sellers included many you'd expect -- Buzz Aldrin, Margaret Atwood, Gail Collins, Richard Russo, Jeannette Walls. Long lines were forming for Barbara Ehrenreich and Douglas Brinkley when we spoke.

I noticed a massive line for cookbook author Lidia Mattichio Bastianich as well.

Among the surprise big-sellers: Stuff White People Like, Luis Alberto Urrea, Po Bronson (NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children) and Jon Scieszka, who was the first author for children featured at the Friday night gala.

I spoke with festival literary director Clay Smith as things were winding down awhile ago, and he seemed pleased with how things had gone. Attendance, he estimated, was probably in the predicted 30,000 range -- which would be a nice feat, considering that this year featured a lot of literary fiction, which does not tend to draw the crowds that a political nonfiction blockbuster does.

(Correcting some earlier info: He gave me the final estimate for the crowds at Buzz Aldrin and Margaret Atwood. I had guessed 600, then 750; he said 800, and that's my final offer.)

I told him that I had found myself listening to quite a bit of gloom-and-doom talk in several of the sessions, and Clay pointed out that the festival, which features only books that have been released within the past year, can be a good reflection of the state of the publishing industry, which is a reflection of where we are as a society. And he noted that by pulling together so many people willing to think about difficult issues, the festival can act as a balm to all that anxiety.

Which is a good a note as any to close on. Except that I'd like to give you the last word: If you were there, what was your experience like? If you weren't there, what would you have liked to have seen in the coverage?

Do not tell Barbara Ehrenreich to have a nice day.

She's not technically against it, but her book, Bright-Sided, How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America is not for the blindly optimistic.

Ehrenreich talked about her book has roots in her breast cancer battle, which exposed her to a world of pink ribbons that she wanted no part of.

"When I was being diagnosed, I was waiting in the radiologist's office, looking at the local newspaper -- I had an idea it was going to be bad news -- and I found an ad in the classifieds for" (she spits these next words out) "a pink breast cancer teddy bear.

"And that was an existential moment for me. Because I realized at that moment, 'I am not afraid of dying. But I'm terrified of dying with pink breast cancer teddy bears."

Ehrenreich, who holds a doctorate in cell biology, wanted no part of the "mandatory optimism" the culture seemed to demand of her. And she noted that contrary to popular wisdom, there is no scientific evidence that having a positive attitude helps fight cancer. And yet, she knows of women who have been excluded from support groups after the disease metastasized, because it was feared their condition would bring other women down.

My nominee for best line of the festival goes to Luis Alberto Urrea. The author of nto the Beautiful North was on a panel with fiction writers who have dealt with Mexico.

Urrea, son of a Mexican father and American mother, was explaining how he dealt with borders, both real and mental, when he stated the basic message he wanted to get across:

"There is no 'them.' There is only 'us.' Sometimes we forget that."

I've ended up at a lot of sessions that have an Apocalyptic air to them, so it was nice to stop in on Jeannette Walls (whom Chris Vognar wrote about recently) and get some inspiration.

Walls, as Chris' article noted, comes from a famously dysfunctional family, and her new book, Half Broke Horses, talks of her grandmother's hardscrabble life.

Walls sought to use the dark parts of her background to bolster the audience and encourage them to embrace the rough spots in their own lives. For example, there was the time she asked her mother why she was in a particularly good mood one day.

"She said, oh the most delightful happened today. I fell off a horse."

Her mother, she said, was well-known for being able to look at the positive side of anything. But the author was bemused. "How could even you think that falling off a horse is a good thing?

"She said, 'Jeannette, Any fool can ride. Knowing how to fall takes great talent.' "

Walls continued: "There's no shame in falling. The only shame that comes is if you don't think you have what it takes to get back up. We all have the strength to get back up."