Penguin Books Online Digest, 7/27 - 7/31, 2009

FEATURES

FEATURE Skykeepers Jessica Andersen (Signet)

FEATURE Spider-Touched Jory Strong (Berkley)

FEATURE Storm of Visions Christina Dodd (Signet)

FEATURE Laced with Magic Barbara Bretton (Berkley)

FEATURE Cape Storm Rachel Caine (Roc)

FEATURE Vanished Kat Richardson (Roc)

FEATURE Skin Deep Mark Del Franco (Ace)

FEATURE The Red Tree Caitlin Kiernan (Roc)

FEATURE Benny & Shrimp Katarina Mazetti (Penguin)

FEATURE Julia Child: A Life Laura Shapiro (Penguin)

FEATURE The Defectors Daniel Silva (Putnam)

VIDEOS

VIDEO The Secret Scripture Sebastian Barry (Penguin)

VIDEO Julia Child: A Life Laura Shapiro (Penguin)

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Hi Guys-

I was reading a magazine the other day and I saw a tiny blurb talking about the connection between eating red meat and MRSA (methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus)...remember that super-bug that was wiping people out in hospitals and long term care facilities because bacteria can flourish in these environments and many of the people there have compromised immune systems and are heavily antibiotic-reliant?

Well, it seems that MRSA is back in a big way and you'll never guess how...turns out that confined animal feeding operations (aka factory farms) have become a spectacular breeding ground for this vicious little villain because the animals are compromised and so antibiotic-reliant. And then it's passed on to us, through the meat we eat and since we are so heavily antibiotic-reliant and compromised, MRSA can thrive in us, too. Wow, another selling point for McDonald's, Arby's and Wendy's!

And it gets better. A new study has been released linking the consumption of red meat and dairy products to an increased risk of pancreatic cancer. The study was done by the Division of Cancer, Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, MD (wow, that's a mouthful...) and was initiated because ‘up to now, the link between pancreatic cancer and dietary fat, a risk factor that people can do something about, has been inconclusive.' Ay, ay, ay!!!! But I held out hope...

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New York, NY...July 30, 2009 - NBC's Today show announced this morning that Ingrid Law's Newbery Honor winner and New York Times bestseller SAVVY will be Al Roker's next Book Club Pick this fall. The TV host and young fans will have a chance to interview the author in the studio on Friday, August 28^th during a live show.  SAVVY was published under the joint venture between Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, and Walden Media and will soon be a major motion picture from Walden Media.

Al's Book Club for Kids has become synonymous with outstanding children's literature. The club began in 2007 as a way to get kids to keep reading and not experience the "summer slide". Roker chooses books for kids between the ages of 9-11 and then gives them the opportunity to discuss what they are reading. Past selections have included The Golden Compass, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and The Tale of Despereaux, in addition to other acclaimed titles.

Ingrid Law is thrilled to be part of this growing institution and said, "It's wonderful to have the opportunity to share SAVVY with Al's Book Club. After all, the only ‘summer slide' we should aim for in children's reading is the one kids can find in the playgrounds of their imagination."

Lauri Hornik, President and Publisher of Dial Books for Young Readers commented, "Al Roker has such perfect taste!  All of our hopes for the fabulous SAVVY have now come true with exciting news, and we couldn't be happier." 

Francis X Flaherty, EVP Publisher of Walden Media said, "Walden Media has always worked to bring classic stories to a wide audience through our films and publishing division. We are so glad that through Mr. Roker's book club SAVVY can continue in that tradition"

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A lot of people ask me what it is I mean by "The World in Six Songs." The idea is that music is crucial to the human identity and that music set the stage for the evolution of complex behaviours such as language, the transmission of information between generations and large-scale cooperative undertakings.  Below I give a brief explanation of each kind of song, and why they are beneficial to human fitness.

Friendship: Friendship songs centre around group cohesion, whether it be for war, or the bonding of different cliques in high school. For example, in prehistoric warfare, attackers would sometimes ambush another tribe using loud instruments (especially drums) to surprise the targets while they were still sleeping. Countertactics employing the use of singing may also have been used as a signal that the group was awake.  These songs serve to protect a tribe/group or succeed in the takeover of another. In the context of social groups, they provide a sense of community and belonging, bringing people together.  Two songs from our era that can be considered "friendship" songs are:

"Know Your Enemy" - Green Day

"Volunteers" - Jefferson Airplane (or if you still want to keep it modern, you could use "Megalomaniac" by Incubus. It isn't as much of a war song as a political song, but it's in the same vein).

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It's always a roll of the dice at events you haven't done before; you never know if anybody's going to show up. Judy and I were whistling down the I-5 in the San Joaquin Valley, and the temperature was burnishing the golden hills at a hundred and thirteen degrees.

I was fortunate to be selected by the Autry National Center to kick off their book club at the Western Heritage Museum in Los Angeles-it was to be the swan song of The Dark Horse tour. "It's the debut of the program, so there might not be very many people..."

I glanced at her. "Yep, I know."

If you haven't ever been, the Autry is my favorite museum in the world, and one of the few where you can ride your horse on the equine trails of Griffith Park, tie off to the hitching rails at the museum, and go in. Try that at the Guggenheim.  

When Gene Autry started the museum, he was adamant that it not be about the glorification of himself but more of a celebration of the entire West. Back in the late eighties, Judy and I were in LA when I started exhibiting symptoms familiar to every wife-I stood by the doors of stores and jingled the truck keys in my pocket and stood on sidewalks (not my natural element) and looked into the distance with my eyes set in a hard squint.

"Why don't you go to the Gene Autry Museum?"

I'd been to the Roy Rogers Museum in Victorville, California (now having moved to Branson), and though I loved Roy, hadn't enjoyed the experience. "I don't think I can stand to see Champion stuffed."

"It's not like that."

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It was a mistake to have accepted Amy's invitation. We had been broken up for two years and the last thing I wanted was to rekindle any part of our relationship. But I feared that declining could somehow be misconstrued as me still being fearfully, immaturely, trapped in the past, unable to move forward and "just be friends," proof no doubt that I harbored feelings for her and lamented my decision to end the relationship.

So I said, "Yes, Amy, that sounds great. I'd love to see the performance with you."

The performance was by Zingaro, a French dance company who famously incorporated live horses into their act, and it was staged, for lack of an adequate venue, under a giant big top tent in Battery Park. It was all the rage in New York City. And it was also very expensive. So my motives in accepting were duplicitous.

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In the winter of 2008, Perigee published a quirky paperback original called The No S Diet, by Reinhard Engels and Ben Kallen. More manifesto than prescriptive guide, the book presents a strikingly simple way to lose weight -- one that's easy to remember and (just as important) easy to stick to: no snacks, sweets, no seconds -- except on days that start with S (Saturdays, Sundays and special days).

The book grew out of software engineer Reinhard Engels's popular blog, and is the result of his own long quest to simplify the complicated, often overly complex weight-loss methods dieters adopt and then typically drop shortly before or after seeing results. It's one of a series of quirky programs Engels has dubbed Everyday Systems -- simple, commonsense solutions to everyday problems. (Some of the other problems his systems tackle are litigiousness, problem drinking, and idleness.)

Each of his solutions hinges on one simple premise: find an irresistibly simple way to eliminate excess.

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I wrote This is Your Brain on Music (TIYBOM) because I wanted to share with others the exciting things I learned about how music affects the brain (chemically, electrically and structurally) and the mind (cognitively). It covered the basics of music and brain science, and combined the two to illustrate all the many processes involved that we take for granted when we listen to music. I strived for a style that was accessible to the educated layperson, but still true to the science.  My editor asked me to include personal anecdotes to illustrate the book, which I did reluctantly.  Some readers say those stories are their favorite parts, some readers hate them, expecting something more like a textbook I think. But overall, the level of the book was well-received by many hundreds of thousands of readers, and so I aimed for a similar approach while writing The World in Six Songs (TWISS).

TIYBOM was a logical stepping-stone for writing TWISS. After covering the basics of science (neuroscience and psychology) and music in TIYBOM, in its final chapter I introduced the role of music in evolution. In TWISS, I wanted to present evolutionary biology in the same way I presented neuroscience in TIYBOM. The basics covered in TIYBOM were incorporated into my argument for music's ability to increase evolutionary fitness, and its role in the evolution of human nature. TWISS took off from the technical and delved into the cultural ubiquity of music, and its importance on a more global scale. In TWISS, I presented six categories of songs (Friendship, Joy, Comfort, Knowledge, Religion, and Love) that I felt, based on my research, were crucial to human nature, and explained how music was an important element of human evolution. I looked at the role of music in settings such as war, religious ceremonies, bonding, the transmission of information, and love. For those who enjoyed TIYBOM, TWISS would be an enjoyable read and an extension of what I elucidated in TIYBOM.

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1. You really haven't lived until you've seen a college English class analyze your love life.  The students, in my case, were discussing scenes from a book I'd written, a memoir about growing up fat and dealing with issues of body image, family, and relationships.  A grad student acquaintance had chosen to assign it to her introductory lit course and she invited me to visit the class weblog and observe the discussion for a week.  On the last day, she said, I could respond and answer questions.

I tingled to think about it. A lit class! Maybe they would talk about how I explored the shifting nature of identity or my subtle critique of diet culture. Or maybe they'd discover some other brilliant theme that my subconscious genius had woven into the rich tapestry of narrative!  Instead they picked apart my choice of boyfriends.  One day I checked the blog and found, to my horror, that they'd really gone to town on the breakup scene in chapter 34.

"Jeez, I saw it coming," one girl said. "Why didn't she?"

"She's really in denial," another one wrote. "She should have dropped him like a bad habit."