AC / DC

Man, those guys in AC/DC haven't aged too well...

Buy this book: AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War

Ghost Plane

A great idea, nicely executed.

Buy this book: Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program

The Gaze

There's a good reason why the type looks so "circus-y": "Loosely organized around a neurotic obese woman and a feisty dwarf, (The Gaze) teems with parallel plots and digressions, freely leaping from modern apartment living in Istanbul to a 19th-century Turkish freak show and fur hunts in 17th-century Siberia."

I think I just found a book for vacation :-)

Buy this book: The Gaze

Mission to America

"Kirn’s satirical novel follows two young men who are dispatched from a cloistered religious community in rural Montana to recruit converts from present-day America." Fun to think if this has wound up in the "wrong" hands.

Buy this book: Mission to America

Johnny Cash: The Biography

I know why his eyes are closed here, but when I first saw this I thought more of his death than of anything else.

Buy this book: Johnny Cash: The Biography



UPDATE: Here's the other cover that readers are discussing in their comments:

Leap Days

Ugh. Leap Days is new. The Bryson book is from 2000.

Buy this book: Leap Days: Chronicles of a Midlife Move

The Boy Detective Fails

I thought this was a McSweeney's title when I first saw it; it's Planet Punk instead. I was a huge Encyclopedia Brown fan when I was a kid...perhaps this is the next book for me to read?

Travels in the Scriptorium

"Both chilling and poignant, Travels in the Scriptorium is vintage Auster: mysterious texts, fluid identities, a hidden past, and, somewhere, an obscure tormentor." And apparently, a really really big horse.

Guest Blogger Tom Kelly

I've arranged what I hope will be a nice treat for y'all. Author Tom Kelly has graciously agreed to guest-host this blog from October 23-27.

Tom is the author of three novels: Payback (1997), The Rackets (2001), and Empire Rising (2005). Both The Rackets and Empire Rising were selected as Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times; read a review of Empire Rising by Joe Klein here.

Tom won't be posting cover designs, although he might be willing to discuss the covers for his books -- I'll make sure they're available for all to see. But the real point is to do something different for a week, and I thought it would be fun to have a great writer answer some of your questions. (Lord knows how much this is going to cost me in beer, but it's worth it :-))

If you haven't read Tom's books, grab a copy below. You'll be glad you did.

Bad Faith

Yikes:

The bottomless corruption, political and personal, of French fascism is explored in this absorbing biography of one of its most loathsome figures—Louis Darquier, commissioner for Jewish affairs under the Vichy regime. A violent anti-Semite and paid Nazi propagandist before WWII, he helped organize the deportation of French Jews, including thousands of children, to Auschwitz during the German occupation.

The UK cover is on top; the US on the bottom. I simply don't understand the UK cover. Not sure if that's Darquier on the cover, but if I saw this on the bookshelf I would never think it's a book about "one of French fascism's most loathsome figures." The US version? Much better.




And this book has caused quite a row:

The British-based author and former publisher Carmen Callil has become embroiled in a growing dispute over the limits of freedom of speech in America after a party celebrating her new book on Vichy France was cancelled because of the opinion she expresses about the modern state of Israel. Full story here.