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A Lion Among Men | Gregory Maguire (Book Excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:04:00 +0000

A Lion Among Men (The Wicked Years - Book 3) | Gregory Maguire (Book Excerpt)

Book price (Amazon.com)

The time came for her to die, and she would not die; so perhaps she might waste away, they thought, and she did waste, but not away; and the time came for her to receive final absolution, so they set candles upon her clavicle, but this she would not allow. She blasphemed with gusto and she knocked the scented oils across the shroud they'd readied on a trestle nearby.

"God love her," they said, in bitter, unconvincing voices—or perhaps they meant May the Unnamed God love her, our unrepentant sister Yackle, for we certainly can't.

"Sink me in the crypt," she said, speaking directly to them for the first time in years. "You're too young to know; that's how they used to do it. When the time came for an elder to go and she wouldn't, they settled her down in the ossuary so she could chummy up to the bones. Supplied her with a couple of candles and a bottle of wine. Let her get used to the notion. They came back a year later to sweep up the leavings."

"Mercy," said whoever was nearby to hear.

"I insist," she replied. "Check with Sister Scholastica and she'll bear me out." "She's raving mad," said someone else, chocolately. Yackle approved of chocolate, and indeed, everything edible. Since Yackle's eyesight had gone out for good a decade earlier, she identified individuals by the degree and idiosyncracy of their halitosis.

"She's always been raving mad," said a third observer, Vinegarish Almonds. "Isn't that rather sweet?"

Yackle reached for something to throw, and all she could find was her other hand, which wouldn't detach.

"She's doing sign language." "The poor, deluded dovelette." "Clinging to life so—whatever for?" "Perhaps it isn't her time."

"It is," said Yackle, "it is, I keep telling you. Won't you fiends let me die? I want to go to hell in a handbasket. Put me out of my misery and into the Afterlife where I can do some real damage, damn it."

"She's not herself," said someone.

"She was never reliably herself, to hear tell," said another.

The bedsheets caught fire spontaneously. Yackle found she was rather enjoying this, but it helped neither her reputation nor her rescue that the only liquid nearby with which to douse the flames was cognac.

Still, Yackle was not to be dissuaded. "Isn't there a Superior in the House?" she asked. "Someone who can lay down the law?"

"The Superior Maunt died a decade ago," they replied. "We work by consensus now. We've noted your request to be interred alive. We'll put it on the agenda and take it up next week at Council."

"She'll burn the House down, and us with it," muttered a novice, sometime later. Yackle could tell that the innocent speaker was talking to herself, to stoke her courage.

"Come here, my duckie," said Yackle, grasping. "I smell a little peppermint girl nearby, and no garlicky matron hovering. Are you the sentry? On our own, are we? Come, sit nearer. Surely there is still a Sister Apothecaire in residence? With her cabinets of nostrums and beckums, tonics and tablets? She must possess a sealed jar, it would be dark blue glass, about yea-high, pasted over with a label picturing three sets of crossed tibias. Couldn't you find this and pour me out a fatal little decoction?"

"Not a spoonful of it, I en't the grace to do it," said Peppermint Girl. "Let go a me, you harpy. Let go or—or I'll bite you!"

Out of charity to the young, Yackle let go. It would do the poor girl no good to take a bite of old Yackle. The antidote en't been invented yet, and so on.

Hours and days pass at elastic rhythms for the blind. Whether the pattern of her naps and wakings followed the ordinary interruptions of daylight by nighttime, Yackle couldn't tell. But someone she recognized as Broccoli Breath eventually informed her that the sorority had decided to bow to Yackle's final wish. They would install her in the crypt among the remains of women long dead. She could approach bodily corruption at whatever speed appealed to her. Three candles, and as to nourishment, red or white?

"A beaker of gasoline and a match as a chaser," said Yackle, but she was indulging in a joke; she was that pleased. She nominated a saucy persimmon flaucande and a beeswax candle scented with limeberries—for the aroma, not for the light. She was beyond light now.

"Good voyage, Eldest Soul," they sang to her as they carried her down the stairs. Though she weighed no more than sugarbrittle she was awkward to move; she couldn't govern her own arms or legs. As if motivated by a spite independent of her own, her limbs would keep ratcheting out to jab into doorjambs. The procession lacked a fitting dignity.

"Don't come down for at least a year," she sang out, giddy as a lambkin. "Make that two. I might be old as sin itself, but once I start rotting it won't be pretty. If I hammer at the cellar door don't open it; I'm probably just collecting for some public charity in hell."

"Can we serenade you with an epithalamium, as you go to marry Death?" asked one of the bearers, tucking in the shroud to make it cozy.

"Save your doggy breath. Go, go, on to the rest of your lives, you lot. It's been a swell, mysterious mess of a life. Don't mind me. I'll blow the candles out before I lower my own lights."

A year later when a sister ventured into the crypt to prepare for another burial, she came across the hem of Yackle's shroud. She wept at the notion of death until Yackle sat up and said, "What, morning already? And I having those naughty dreams!" The maunt's tears turned to screams, and she fled upstairs to start immediately upon a long and lively career as an alcoholic.

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The Tale of Despereaux | Kate DiCamillo (Book Excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:35:00 +0000

The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread | Kate DiCamillo (Book Excerpt)

Book price (Amazon.com)

This story begins within the walls of a castle, with the birth of a mouse. A small mouse. The last mouse born to his parents and the only one of his litter to be born alive.

"Where are my babies?" said the exhausted mother when the ordeal was through. "Show to me my babies."

The father mouse held the one small mouse up high.

"There is only this one," he said. "The others are dead."

"Mon Dieu, just the one mouse baby?"

"Just the one. Will you name him?"

"All of that work for nothing," said the mother. She sighed. "It is so sad. It is such the disappointment." She was a French mouse who had arrived at the castle long ago in the luggage of a visiting French diplomat. "Disappointment" was one of her favorite words. She used it often.

"Will you name him?" repeated the father.

"Will I name him? Will I name him? Of course, I will name him, but he will only die like the others. Oh, so sad. Oh, such the tragedy."

The mouse mother held a handkerchief to her nose and then waved it in front of her face. She sniffed. "I will name him. Yes. I will name this mouse Despereaux, for all the sadness, for the many despairs in this place. Now, where is my mirror?"

Her husband handed her a small shard of mirror. The mouse mother, whose name was Antoinette, looked at her reflection and gasped aloud. "Toulèse," she said to one of her sons, "get for me my makeup bag. My eyes are a fright."

While Antoinette touched up her eye makeup, the mouse father put Despereaux down on a bed made of blanket scraps. The April sun, weak but determined, shone through a castle window and from there squeezed itself through a small hole in the wall and placed one golden finger on the little mouse.

The other, older mice children gathered around to stare at Despereaux.

"His ears are too big," said his sister Merlot. "Those are the biggest ears I've ever seen."

"Look," said a brother named Furlough, "his eyes are open. Pa, his eyes are open. They shouldn't be open."

It is true. Despereaux's eyes should not have been open. But they were. He was staring at the sun reflecting off his mother's mirror. The light was shining onto the ceiling in an oval of brilliance, and he was smiling up at the sight.

"There's something wrong with him," said the father. "Leave him alone."

Despereaux's brothers and sisters stepped back, away from the new mouse.

"This is the last," proclaimed Antoinette from her bed. "I will have no more mice babies. They are such the disappointment. They are hard on my beauty. They ruin, for me, my looks. This is the last one. No more."

"The last one," said the father. "And he'll be dead soon. He can't live. Not with his eyes open like that."

But, reader, he did live.

This is his story.

The Tale of Despereaux | Movie Trailer

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The Christmas Sweater | Glenn Beck (Book Excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:58:00 +0000

The Christmas Sweater | Glenn Beck (Book Excerpt)

Book price (Amazon)

The wipers cut semicircles through the snow on the windshield. It's good snow, I thought as I slid forward and rested my chin on the vinyl of the front seat.

"Sit back, honey," my mother, Mary, gently commanded. She was thirty-nine years old, but her tired eyes and the streaks of gray infiltrating her otherwise coal black hair made most people think she was much older. If your age was determined by what you'd been through in life, they would have been right.

"But Mom, I can't see the snow when I sit back."

"Okay. But just until we stop for gas."

I scooted up farther and rested my worn Keds on the hump that ran through the middle of our old Pinto station wagon. I was skinny and tall for my age, which made my knees curl up toward my chest. Mom said I was safer in the backseat, but deep down I knew that it wasn't really about safety, it was about the radio. I was constantly playing with it, changing the dial from her boring Perry Como station to something that played real music.

As we continued toward the gas station, I could see the edge of downtown Mount Vernon through the snow. A thousand points of red and green Christmas lights lined the edges of Main Street. Hot summer days in Washington State were rare, but when they happened, the light poles covered in Christmas lights seemed out of place. They hung there in a kind of backward hibernation until a city worker would plug them in and replace the bulbs that didn't wake up. But now, in December, the lights were working their magic, filling us kids with excitement for the season.

That year I was more anxious than excited. I wanted it to be the year that Christmas finally returned tonormal. For years, Christmas mornings in our home had been filled with gifts and laughter and smiling faces. But my father had died three years earlier — and it seemed to me that Christmas had died with him.

Before my father's death I didn't think much about our financial situation. We weren't wealthy, we weren't poor — we just were. We'd had a nice house in a good neighborhood, a hot dinner every night and, one summer, when I was five years old, we even went to Disneyland. I remember getting dressed up for the airplane ride. The only other vacation I remember happened a few years later when my parents took me to Birch Bay — which sounds exotic but was really just a rocky beach about an hour away from our home.

Back then we never wanted for anything, except maybe more time together.

My father bought City Bakery when I was young — it had been in town since the 1800s. He put in long hours at work, leaving almost every morning before the sun (or his son) rose. My mother would get me off to school, clean up around the house a little, start some laundry, and then join him at the bakery for the rest of the day.

After school I would walk to the bakery to help my parents out. On some days the walk took less than half an hour, but it usually took me a lot longer. At least a few days each week I would stop at the edge of downtown in the middle of the bridge that crossed the I5 freeway and watch the cars and trucks whiz by. A lot of kids would stand there and spit onto the roadway below, hoping to hit a car, but I wasn't that kind of kid. I just imagined myself spitting.

I complained a lot about having to be at the bakery so much, especially when my dad made me wash the pots and pans, but secretly I loved to watch him work. Others might have called him a baker, but I thought of him as a master craftsman or a sculptor. Instead of a chisel he used dough, and instead of clay he used frosting — but the result was always a masterpiece.

Dad and my uncle Bob both apprenticed in their father's bakery from the time they were my age. Donning aprons, they washed a seemingly never-ending line of pots and pans, and they would learn recipes after school. In my dad's case, it wasn't long before the apprentice was more skilled than the master.

Dad just had a knack for baking. He was the only one in the family who could bring his recipes to life. It wasn't long before City Bakery's breads and desserts were known as the best in town. Dad loved his creations almost as much as he loved his family.

Saturdays were special because it was the day my father spent most of his time icing and decorating cakes. Not coincidentally, it was also the day I liked to work with him the most. Well, work might be a bit of an exaggeration, as I didn't do much baking myself. Taking bread out of the proof box after it had risen was about as far as he'd let me go — but I watched him closely, and I took advantage of my role as "official frosting taster" as often as possible.

Although Dad continually tried to teach me his recipes, I never quite got them down. Mom blamed it on my having the attention span of a gnat, but I knew it was really because I liked eating better than I liked baking. I was never interested in being a baker; it was too much work and you had to get up way too early. But Dad never gave up hope that one day I might change my mind.

His first mission was to teach me how to make cookies, but not long after putting me in charge of the cookie dough and mixer he realized he'd made a mistake. A big mistake. If he'd left me alone with that raw dough for just a few more minutes, he wouldn't have had enough left to bake. After that, Dad smartly switched his tactic from hands-on lessons to pop quizzes. He'd show me how to make a few batches of German chocolate cake, then he'd test me on the recipe and toss flour in my face when I invariably mentioned some ingredient that had no business being in a cake. Like meat.

One day, right in the middle of an apple-strudel quiz, Dad's cashier (my mother) came into the back to ask if he'd mind helping a customer. This wasn't entirely unusual — Dad would come up front once in a while, mainly in the afternoons while the ovens were cooling and my mom made the daily trip to the bank. I think it was secretly one of his favorite times of the day; he was a real people person, and he loved to watch the faces of his customers as they sampled his latest creation.

That day, I watched as Dad greeted Mrs. Olsen, a woman who seemed to me like the oldest person in town. She was a regular customer. When my mom waited on her, I noticed that she'd always spend a little extra time just listening to Mrs. Olsen's stories. I guess she thought Mrs. Olsen was lonely. Dad treated her with the same kind of respect. He smiled warmly as he spoke to her, and I noticed the faintest hint of a smile begin to form on her face as well. Dad had that effect on a lot of people.

Mrs. Olsen had come in for a single loaf of bread, but Dad spent five minutes trying to talk her into everything from his napoleons to his German chocolate cake. She kept refusing, but my dad insisted, saying it was all on him. She finally relented, and her smile stretched from ear to ear. She told him that he was too kind. I remember the word "kind" because I thought it was simple, and yet so true. My dad was kind.

After her bread had been bagged and her free treats boxed, Mrs. Olsen reached into her purse and pulled out a kind of money I'd never seen before. As far as I could tell it wasn't cash. It looked more like coupons — except we didn't offer any coupons. As she turned to leave the store, my heart began to race. Had Dad just been scammed right in front of me? The bakery paid our bills (and, more importantly, it paid for my presents). I crept up next to my father at the cash register and, not thinking she could hear me, whispered, "Dad, that's not money."

Mrs. Olsen stopped dead in her tracks and looked at my father. He, in turn, glared at me. "Eddie, into the back, please. Right now." His voice had a definite edge to it. He then gave Mrs. Olsen a sympathetic nod and another warm smile, and she turned and continued out the door. I knew I was in trouble.

As I walked through the opening into the back, my face felt hotter than the oven I was now standing in front of. "Eddie, I know you didn't mean it, but do you know how embarrassing that was for Mrs. Olsen?"

"No," I replied. I honestly didn't.

"Eddie, Mrs. Olsen is a very good customer of ours. Her husband passed away about a year ago and she's had a hard time making ends meet. You're right, what she gave me isn't money, but it's just like it for people who need it. They're called food stamps, and our government is helping her buy groceries until she can get back on her feet. We don't talk about them in front of her because she doesn't like the fact that she has to ask others for help."

Dad explained that while our family would never accept help from anyone, especially the government, there were good people who needed it. I immediately felt sorry for Mrs. Olsen — sorry for anyone who needed to rely on others for that kind of help. And I was glad that we would never be in that position.

A few months later I got a chance to prove to my father that I'd learned my lesson.

Mom had once again run to the bank, and I was in the front of the store putting fresh macaroons into the display case while Dad waited on customers. I watched as, once again, he accepted the funny-looking coupons as payment — this time from a guy buying bread, a pie, and a dozen cookies. But now, instead of warm smiles, friendly conversation, and yummy dessert suggestions, my father was completely silent.

After the customer left it was my turn to do the questioning. I followed him into the back. "What's wrong, Dad?" I asked.

"I know that man, Eddie. He can work, but he chooses not to. Anyone who can earn money has no business taking it from others."

I eventually came to understand that my father, who'd grown up poor and struggled for everything we owned, had continually rejected offers of help from others. He had worked hard to build a business and provide for his family. He believed others should do the same. "The government," he told me one night, "is there to act as a safety net, not a candy machine."

I don't know if my mother had grown up with the same attitude or if she'd just learned it from all those years with my dad — but she felt the exact same way. With him now gone we were really struggling, but she refused to consider asking anyone for help. "We'll get through this, Eddie," she told me more than once. "Things are just a little tight right now, but there are so many others who need it more than we do."

As usual, Mom was being an optimist. "A little tight" didn't begin to describe how frugal we had become. When we went out to dinner, which was only on very special occasions, she would always give me the same warning before the waitress appeared: "Remember, Eddie, don't order any milk, we have plenty of it at home. No need to be wasteful."

I knew better. It wasn't about waste, it was about money. That was all it was ever about. Mom worked seemingly endless hours at a seemingly endless number of jobs, our house was crumbling faster than Dad's famous apple turnovers, and I hadn't gotten a brag-worthy Christmas present since the Star Wars Millennium Falcon I'd gotten two years earlier.

But this year would be different. I had been on my best behavior for months now. I'd taken out the garbage before Mom had asked, used my finely honed dishwashing skills at home, and had generally made sure that she wouldn't have any excuse to not get me the bike I deserved.

Still, I wasn't leaving anything to chance. Every time a relative or neighbor asked what I wanted for Christmas, I made sure my mother was close enough to hear my finely tuned response: A red Huffy bike with a black banana seat.

The Ford's loud motor snapped me out of yesterday's memories. We were on Main Street, and the once distant lights now glowed brightly through our foggy windows. I tried to look out the back windshield to see where we were, but I could only see my mop of dirty-blond hair reflecting back.

Mom drove cautiously, although downtown seemed to be virtually deserted. A light turned red at the intersection ahead, and she slowly eased the car to a stop.

"Eddie, look!" She was pointing out the passenger-side window.

I rubbed my hand back and forth on the glass to clear the condensation. We had come to a stop right outside Richmond's Sporting Goods' big storefront window, the very place I had first seen the Huffy I'd been dreaming about all year.

My eyes expertly searched the window, darting from baseball bats to gloves to sleds to...there it was. The Huffy. My Huffy. Its bright red frame, shiny chrome handlebars, and black banana seat sparkled brilliantly through the snow and fog.

"Wow." It was the only word I could come up with.

Mom wasn't looking at the bike anymore, she was looking at me in the rearview mirror. I couldn't see her mouth, but I knew that she was smiling. I smiled back. Perry Como provided the sound track.

"You want to pump the gas?" she asked a few minutes later as she pulled up to the self-service island. We stopped for gas a lot because our Pinto was always thirsty and Mom usually only had enough money to fill the tank partway.

"Sure," I said, leaping over the seat and following her out the door. "Can I get some Red Vines when I go in to pay?"

"I'm sorry, Eddie," my mother said gently. "I have the money for Red Vines but not enough for the dentist." She smiled. "Now, scoot." I knew she didn't have money for the dentist, but her excuse didn't fool me. I knew she didn't have money for Red Vines either.

I gave her the best look of disappointment I could muster. Still, deep down, I had hope. No money for Red Vines could mean that she was saving it all for something else.

My bike.

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Your Heart Belongs to Me | Dean Koontz (Book Excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:27:00 +0000

Your Heart Belongs to Me | Dean Koontz (Book Excerpt)

Book price (Amazon)

Ryan Perry did not know that something in him was broken. At thirty-four, he appeared to be more physically fit than he had been at twenty-four. His home gym was well equipped. A personal trainer came to his house three times a week.

On that Wednesday morning in September, in his bedroom, when he drew open the draperies and saw blue sky as polished as a plate, and the sea blue with the celestial reflection, he wanted surf and sand more than he wanted breakfast.

He went on-line, consulted a surfcast site, and called Samantha. She must have glanced at the caller-ID readout, because she said, "Good morning, Winky."

She occasionally called him Winky because on the afternoon that she met him, thirteen months previously, he had been afflicted with a stubborn case of myokymia, uncontrollable twitching of an eyelid.

Sometimes, when Ryan became so obsessed with writing software that he went thirty-six hours without sleep, a sudden-onset tic in his right eye forced him to leave the keyboard and made him appear to be blinking out a frantic distress signal in Morse code. In that myokymic moment, Samantha had come to his office to interview him for an article that she had been writing for Vanity Fair. For a moment, she had thought he was flirting with her-and flirting clumsily.

During that first meeting, Ryan wanted to ask for a date, but he perceived in her a seriousness of purpose that would cause her to reject him as long as she was writing about him. He called her only after he knew that she had delivered the article.

"When Vanity Fair appears, what if I've savaged you?" she had asked.

"You haven't."

"How do you know?"

"I don't deserve to be savaged, and you're a fair person."

"You don't know me well enough to be sure of that."

"From your interviewing style," he said, "I know you're smart, clear-thinking, free of political dogma, and without envy. If I'm not safe with you, then I'm safe nowhere except alone in a room."

He had not sought to flatter her. He merely spoke his mind.

Having an ear for deception, Samantha recognized his sincerity.

Of the qualities that draw a bright woman to a man, truthfulness is equaled only by kindness, courage, and a sense of humor. She had accepted his invitation to dinner, and the months since then had been the happiest of his life.

Now, on this Wednesday morning, he said, "Pumping six-footers, glassy and epic, sunshine that feels its way deep into your bones."

"I've got a deadline to meet."

"You're too young for all this talk about death."

"Are you riding another train of manic insomnia?"

"Slept like a baby. And I don't mean in a wet diaper."

"When you're sleep-deprived, you're treacherous on a board."

"I may be radical, but never treacherous."

"Totally insane, like with the shark."

"That again. That was nothing."

"Just a great white."

"Well, the bastard bit a huge chunk out of my board."

"And-what?-you were determined to get it back?"

"I wiped out," Ryan said, "I'm under the wave, in the murk, grabbin' for air, my hand closes around what I think is the skeg."

The skeg, a fixed fin on the bottom of a surfboard, holds the stern of the board in the wave and allows the rider to steer.

What Ryan actually grabbed was the shark's dorsal fin.

Samantha said, "What kind of kamikaze rides a shark?"

"I wasn't riding. I was taken for a ride."

"He surfaced, tried to shake you off, you rode him back down."

"Afraid to let go. Anyway, it lasted like only twenty seconds."

"Insomnia makes most people sluggish. It makes you hyper."

"I hibernated last night. I'm as rested as a bear in spring."

She said, "In a circus once, I saw a bear riding a tricycle."

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"It was funnier than watching an idiot ride a shark."

"I'm Pooh Bear. I'm rested and cuddly. If a shark knocked on the door right now, asked me to go for a ride, I'd say no."

"I had nightmares about you wrestling that shark."

"Not wrestling. It was more like ballet. Meet you at the place?"

"I'll never finish writing this book."

"Leave the computer on when you go to bed each night. The elves will finish it for you. At the place?"

She sighed in happy resignation. "Half an hour."

"Wear the red one," he said, and hung up.

The water would be warm, the day warmer. He wouldn't need a wet suit.

He pulled on a pair of baggies with a palm-tree motif.

His collection included a pair with a shark pattern. If he wore them, she would kick his ass. Figuratively speaking.

For later, he took a change of clothes on a hanger, and a pair of loafers.

Of the five vehicles in his garage, the customized '51 Ford Woodie Wagon-anthracite-black with bird's-eye maple panels-seemed to be best suited to the day. Already stowed in the back, his board protruded past the lifted tailgate windows, skeg up.

At the end of the cobblestone driveway, as he turned left into the street, he paused to look back at the house: gracefully sloping roofs of red barrel tile, limestone-clad walls, bronze windows with panes of beveled glass refracting the sun as if they were jewels.

A maid in a crisp white uniform opened a pair of second-floor balcony doors to air the master bedroom.

One of the landscapers trimmed the jasmine vines that were espaliered on the walls flanking the carved-limestone surround at the main entrance.

In less than a decade, Ryan had gone from a cramped apartment in Anaheim to the hills of Newport Coast, high above the Pacific.

Samantha could take the day off on a whim because she was a writer who, though struggling, could set her own hours. Ryan could take it off because he was rich.

Quick wits and hard work had brought him from nothing to the pinnacle. Sometimes when he considered his origins from his current perch, the distance dizzied him.

As he drove out of the gate-guarded community and descended the hills toward Newport Harbor, where thousands of pleasure boats were docked and moored in the glimmering sun-gilded water, he placed a few business calls.

A year previously, he had stepped down as the chief executive officer of Be2Do, which he had built into the most successful social-networking site on the Internet. As the principal stockholder, he remained on the board of directors but declined to be the chairman.

These days, he devoted himself largely to creative development, envisioning and designing new services to be provided by the company. And he tried to persuade Samantha to marry him.

He knew that she loved him, yet something constrained her from committing to marriage. He suspected pride.

The shadow of his wealth was deep, and she did not want to be lost in it. Although she had not expressed this concern, he knew that she hoped to be able to count herself a success as a writer, as a novelist, so that she could enter the marriage as a creative-if not a financial-equal.

Ryan was patient. And persistent.

Phone calls completed, he transitioned from Pacific Coast Highway by bridge to Balboa Peninsula, which separated the harbor from the sea. Cruising toward the peninsula point, he listened to classic doo-wop, music younger than the Woodie Wagon but a quarter of a century older than he was.

He parked on a tree-lined street of charming homes and carried his board half a block to Newport's main beach.

The sea poured rhythmic thunder onto the shore.

She waited at "the place," which was where they had first surfed together, midway between the harbor entrance and the pier.

Her above-garage apartment was a three-minute walk from here. She had come with her board, a beach towel, and a small cooler.

Although he had asked her to wear the red bikini, Samantha wore yellow. He had hoped for the yellow, but if he had asked for it, she would have worn red or blue, or green.

She was as perfect as a mirage, blond hair and golden form, a quiver of light, an alluring oasis on the wide slope of sun-seared sand.

"What're those sandals?" she asked.

"Stylin', huh?"

"Are they made from old tires?"

"Yeah. But they're premium gear."

"Did you also buy a hat made from a hubcap?"

"You don't like these?"

"If you have a blowout, does the auto club bring you a new shoe?"

Kicking off the sandals, he said, "Well, I like them."

"How often do they need to be aligned and balanced?"

Soft and hot, the sand shifted underfoot, but then was compacted and cool where the purling surf worked it like a screed.

As they waded into the sea, he said, "I'll ditch the sandals if next time you'll wear the red bikini."

"You actually wanted this yellow one."

He repressed his surprise at her perspicacity. "Then why would I ask for the red?"

"Because you only think you can read me."

"But I'm an open book, huh?"

"Winky, compared to you, Dr. Seuss's simplest tale is as complex as Dostoyevsky."

They launched their boards and, prone upon them, paddled out toward the break.

Raising his voice above the swash of the surf, he called to her: "Was that Seuss thing an insult?"

Her silvery laughter stirred in Ryan memories of mermaid tales awash with the mysteries of the deep.

She said, "Not an insult, sweetie. That was a thirteen-word kiss." Ryan did not bother to recall and count her words from Winky to Dostoyevsky. Samantha noticed everything, forgot nothing, and was able to recall entire conversations that had occurred months previously.

Sometimes he found her as daunting as she was appealing, which seemed to be a good thing. Samantha would never be predictable or boring.

The consistently spaced waves came like boxcars, four or five at a time. Between these sets were periods of relative calm.

While the sea was slacking, Ryan and Samantha paddled out to the lineup. There, they straddled their boards and watched the first swell of a new set roll toward the break.

From this more intimate perspective, the sea was not as placid and blue as it had appeared from his house in the hills, but as dark as jade and challenging. The approaching swell might have been the arching back of some scaly leviathan, larger than a thousand sharks, born in the deep but rising now to feed upon the sunlit world.

Sam looked at Ryan and grinned. The sun searched her eyes and revealed in them the blue of sky, the green of sea, the delight of being in harmony with millions of tons of water pushed shoreward by storms three thousand miles away and by the moon now looming on the dark side of the earth.

Sam caught the second swell: on two knees, one knee, now standing, swift and clean, away. She rode the crest, then did a floater off the curling lip.

As she slid out of view, down the face of the wave, Ryan thought that the breaker-much bigger than anything in previous sets-had the size and the energy to hollow out and put her in a tube. Good as it gets, Sam would ride it out as smoothly as oil surging through a pipeline.

Ryan looked seaward, timing the next swell, eager to rise and walk the board.

Something happened to his heart. Already quick with anticipation of the ride, the beat suddenly accelerated and began to pound with a force more suited to a moment of high terror than to one of pleasant excitement.

He could feel his pulse throbbing in his ankles, wrists, throat, temples. The tide of blood within his arteries seemed to crescendo in sympathy with the sea that swelled toward him, under him. The sibilant voice of the water became insistent, sinister.

Clutching the board, abandoning the attempt to rise and ride, Ryan saw the day dim, losing brightness at the periphery. Along the horizon, the sky remained clear yet faded to gray.

Inky clouds spread through the jade sea, as though the Pacific would soon be as black in the morning light as it was on any moonless night.

He was breathing fast and shallow. The very atmosphere seemed to be changing, as if half the oxygen content had been bled out of it, perhaps explaining the graying of the sky.

Never previously had he been afraid of the sea. He was afraid of it now.

The water rose as though with conscious intention, with malice. Clinging to his board, Ryan slid down the hunchbacked swell into the wide trough between waves.

Irrationally, he worried that the trough would become a trench, the trench a vortex. He feared that he would be whirled down into drowning depths.

The board wallowed, bobbed, and Ryan almost rolled off. His strength had left him. His grip had grown weak, as tremulous as that of an old man.

Something bristled in the water, alarming him.

When he realized that those spiky forms were neither shark fins nor grasping tentacles, but were the conceptacles of a knotted mass of seaweed, he was not relieved. If a shark were to appear now, Ryan would be at the mercy of it, unable to evade it or resist.

Chapter Two

As suddenly as the attack came, it passed. Ryan's storming heart quieted. Blue reclaimed the graying sky. The encroaching darkness in the water receded. His strength returned to him.

He did not realize how long the episode had lasted until he saw that Samantha had ridden her wave to shore and, in the relative calm between sets, had paddled out to him once more.

As she came closer, the concern that creased her brow was also evident in her voice: "Ryan?"

"Just enjoying the moment," he lied, remaining prone on his board. "I'll catch one in the next set."

"Since when are you a mallard?" she asked, by which she meant that he was floating around in the lineup like a duck, like one of those gutless wannabes who soaked all day in the swells just beyond the break point and called it surfing.

"The last two in that set were bigger," he said. "I have a hunch the next batch might be double overhead, worth waiting for."

Sam straddled her board and looked out to sea, scanning for the first swell of the new set.

If Ryan read her correctly, she sensed that he was shining her on, and she wondered why.

With his heart steady and his strength recovered, he stopped hugging the board, straddled it, getting ready.

Waiting for the next wave train, he told himself that he had not experienced a physical seizure, but instead merely an anxiety attack. At self-deception, he was as skilled as anyone.

He had no reason to be anxious. His life was sweet, buttered, and sliced for easy consumption.

Focused on far water, Samantha said, "Winky."

"I see it."

The sea rose to the morning sun, dark jade and silver, a great shoulder of water shrugging up and rolling smoothly toward the break.

Ryan smelled brine, smelled the iodine of bleeding seaweed, and tasted salt.

"Epic," Sam called out, sizing the swell.

"Monster," he agreed.

Instead of rising into a control position, she left the wave to him, her butt on the board, her feet in the water, bait for sharks. A squadron of gulls streaked landward, shrieking as if to warn those on shore that a behemoth was coming to smash sand castles and swamp picnic hampers.

As the moment of commitment neared, apprehension rose in Ryan, concern that the thrill of the ride might trigger another... episode.

He paddled to catch the wave, got to his feet on the pivot point, arms reaching for balance, fingers spread, palms down, and he caught the break, a perfect peeler that didn't section on him but instead poured pavement as slick as ice. The moving wave displaced air, and a cool wind rose up the curved wall, pressing against his flattened palms.

Then he was in a tube, a glasshouse, behind the curtain of the breaking wave, shooting the curl, and his apprehension burst like a bubble and was no more.

Using every trick to goose momentum, he emerged from the tube before it collapsed, into the sparkle of sun on water filigreed with foam. The day was so real, so right. He admonished himself, No fear, which was the only way to live.

All morning, into the afternoon, the swells were monoliths. The offshore breeze strengthened, blowing liquid smoke off the lips of the waves.

The beach blanket was not a place to tan. It was for rehab, for massaging the quivers out of overtaxed muscles, for draining sinuses flooded with seawater, for combing bits of kelp and crusted salt out of your hair, for psyching each other into the next session. Usually, Ryan would want to stay until late afternoon, when the offshore breeze died and the waves stopped hollowing out, when the yearning for eternity-which the ocean represented-became a yearning for burritos and tacos.

By two-thirty, however, during a retreat to the blanket, a pleasant weariness, the kind that follows work well done, overcame him. There was something delicious about this fatigue, a sweetness that made him want to close his eyes and let the sun melt him into sleep....

As he was swimming effortlessly in an abyss vaguely illuminated by clouds of luminescent plankton, a voice spoke to him out of the deep: "Ryan?"

"Hmmmm?"

"Were you asleep?"

He felt as though he were still asleep when he opened his eyes and saw her face looming over him: beauty of a degree that seemed mythological, radiant eyes the precise shade of a green sea patinaed by the blue of a summer sky, golden hair crowned with a corona of sunlight, goddess on a holiday from Olympus.

"You were asleep," Samantha said.

"Too much big surf. I'm quashed."

"You? When have you ever been quashed?"

Sitting up on the blanket, he said, "Had to be a first time."

"You really want to pack out?"

"I skipped breakfast. We surfed through lunch."

"There's chocolate-cherry granola bars in the cooler."

"Nothing but a slab of beef will revive me."

They carried the cooler, the blanket, and their boards to the station wagon, stowed everything in back.

Still sodden with sunshine and loose-limbed from being so long in the water, Ryan almost asked Samantha to drive.

More than once, however, she glanced at him speculatively, as if she sensed that his brief nap on the beach blanket was related to the episode at the beginning of the day, when he floated like a mallard in the lineup, his heart exploding. He didn't want to worry her.

Besides, there was no reason to worry.

Earlier, he'd had an anxiety attack. But if truth were known, most people probably had them these days, considering the events and the pessimistic predictions that constituted the evening news.

Instead of passing the car keys to Sam, Ryan drove the two blocks to her apartment.

Samantha showered first while Ryan brewed a pitcher of fresh iced tea and sliced two lemons to marinate in it.

Her cozy kitchen had a single large window beyond which stood a massive California pepper tree. The elegant limbs, festooned with weeping fernlike leaves divided into many glossy leaflets, appeared to fill the entire world, creating the illusion that her apartment was a tree house.

The pleasant weariness that had flooded through Ryan on the beach now drained away, and a new vitality welled in him.

He began to think of making love to Samantha. Once the urge arose, it swelled into full-blooded desire.

Hair toweled but damp, she returned to the kitchen, wearing turquoise slacks, a crisp white blouse, and white tennies.

If she had been in the mood, she would have been barefoot, wearing only a silk robe.

For weeks at a time, her libido matched his, and she wanted him frequently. He had noticed that her desire was greater during those periods when she was busiest with her writing and the least inclined to consider his proposal of marriage.

A sudden spell of virtuous restraint was a sign that she was brooding about accepting the engagement ring, as though the prospect of matrimony required that sex be regarded as something too serious, perhaps too sacred, to be indulged in lightly.

Ryan happily accepted each turn toward abstinence when it seemed to indicate that she was on the brink of making a commitment to him. At twenty-eight, she was six years younger than he was, and they had a life of lovemaking ahead.

He poured a glass of iced tea for her, and then he went to take a shower. He started with water nearly as cold as the tea.

In the westering sun, the strawberry trees shed elongated leaf shadows on the flagstone floor of the restaurant patio.

Ryan and Samantha shared a caprese salad and lingered over their first glasses of wine, not in a hurry to order entrees. The smooth peeling bark of the trees was red, especially so in the condensed light of the slowly declining sun.

"Teresa loved the flowers," Sam said, referring to her sister.

"What flowers?"

"On these trees. They get panicles of little urn-shaped flowers in the late spring."

"White and pink," Ryan remembered.

"Teresa said they look like cascades of tiny bells, wind chimes hung out by fairies."

Six years previously, Teresa had suffered serious head trauma in a traffic accident. Eventually she had died.

Samantha seldom mentioned her sister. When she spoke of Teresa, she tended to turn inward before much had been said, mummifying her memories in long windings of silence.

Now, as she gazed into the overhanging tree, the expression in her eyes was reminiscent of that look of longing when, straddling her surfboard in the lineup, she studied far water for the first sign of a new set of swells.

Ryan was comfortable with Sam's occasional silences, which he suspected were always related to thoughts of her sister, even when she had not mentioned Teresa.

They had been identical twins.

To better understand Sam, Ryan had read about twins who had been separated by tragedy. Apparently the survivor's grief was often mixed with unjustified guilt.

Some said the intense bond between identicals, especially between sisters, could not be broken even by death. A few insisted they still felt the presence of the other, akin to how an amputee often feels sensations in his phantom leg.

Samantha's contemplative silence gave Ryan an opportunity to study and admire her with a forthrightness that was not possible when she was aware of his stare.

Watching her, he was nailed motionless by admiration, unable to lift his wineglass, or at least disinterested in it, his eyes alone in motion, traveling the contours of her face and the graceful line of her throat.

His life was a pursuit of perfection, of which perhaps the world held none.

Sometimes he imagined that he came close to it when writing lines of code for software. An exquisite digital creation, however, was as cold as a mathematical equation. The most fastidious software architecture was an object of mere precision, not of perfection, for it could not evoke an intense emotional response.

In Samantha Reach, he'd found a beauty so close to perfection that he could convince himself this was his quest fulfilled.

Gazing into the tree but focused on something far beyond the red geometry of those branches, Sam said, "After the accident, she was in a coma for a month. When she came out of it... she wasn't the same."

Ryan was kept silent by the smoothness of her skin. This was the first he had heard of Teresa's coma. Yet the radiance of Sam's face, in the caress of the late sun, rendered him incapable of comment.

"She still had to be fed through a tube in her stomach."

The only leaf shadows that touched Samantha's face were braided across her golden hair and brow, as though she wore the wreath of Nature's approval.

"The doctors said she was in a permanent vegetative state."

Her gaze lowered through the branches and fixed on a cruciform of sunlight that, shimmering on the table, was projected by a beam passing through her wineglass.

"I never believed the doctors," she said. "Teresa was still complete inside her body, trapped but still Teresa. I didn't want them to take out the feeding tube."

She raised her eyes to meet his, and he had to make of this a conversation.

"But they took it out anyway?" he asked.

"And starved her to death. They said she wouldn't feel anything. Supposedly the brain damage assured that she'd have no pain."

"But you think she suffered."

"I know she did. During the last day, the last night, I sat with her, holding her hand, and I could feel her looking at me even though she never opened her eyes."

He did not know what to say to that.

Samantha picked up her glass of wine, causing the cross of light to morph into an arrow that briefly quivered like a compass needle seeking true north in Ryan's eyes.

"I've forgiven my mother for a lot of things, but I'll never forgive her for what she did to Teresa."

As Samantha took a sip of wine, Ryan said, "But I thought... your mother was in the same accident."

"She was."

"I was under the impression she died in the crash, too. Rebecca.

Was that her name?"

"She is dead. To me. Rebecca's buried in an apartment in Las Vegas. She walks and talks and breathes, but she's dead all right." Samantha's father had abandoned the family before the twins were two. She had no memory of him.

Feeling that Sam should hold fast to what little family she had, Ryan almost encouraged her to give her mother a chance to earn redemption. But he kept silent on the issue, because Sam had his sympathy and his understanding.

His grandparents and hers-all long dead-were of the generation that defeated Hitler and won the Cold War. Their fortitude and their rectitude had been passed along, if at all, in a diluted form to the next generation.

Ryan's parents, no less than Sam's, were of that portion of the post-war generation that rejected the responsibilities of tradition and embraced entitlement. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was the parent, that his mother and father were the children. Regardless of the consequences of their behavior and decisions, they would see no need for redemption. Giving them the chance to earn it would only offend them. Sam's mother was most likely of that same mind-set.

Samantha put down her glass, but the sun made nothing of it this time.

After a hesitation, as Ryan poured more wine for both of them, he said, "Funny how something as lovely as strawberry-tree flowers can peel the scab off a bad memory."

"Sorry."

"No need to be."

"Such a nice day. I didn't mean to bring it down. Are you as ferociously hungry as I am?"

"Bring me the whole steer," he said.

In fact, they ordered just the filet mignon, no horns or hooves.

As the descending sun set fire to the western sky, strings of miniature white lights came on in the strawberry trees. On all the tables were candles in amber cups of faceted glass, and busboys lit them.

The ordinary patio had become a magical place, and Samantha was the centerpiece of the enchantment.

By the time the waiter served the steaks, Sam had found the lighter mood that had characterized the rest of the day, and Ryan joined her there.

After the first bite of beef, she raised her wineglass in a toast.

"Hey, Dotcom, this one's to you."

Dotcom was another nickname that she had for him, used mostly when she wanted to poke fun at his public image as a business genius and tech wizard.

"Why to me?" he asked.

"Today you finally stepped down from the pantheon and revealed that you're at best a demigod."

Pretending indignation, he said, "I haven't done any such thing. I'm still turning the wheel that makes the sun rise in the morning and the moon at night."

"You used to take the waves until they surrendered and turned mushy. Today you're beached on a blanket by two-thirty."

"Did you consider that it might have been boredom, that the swells just weren't challenging enough for me?"

"I considered it for like two seconds, but you were snoring as if you'd been plenty challenged."

"I wasn't sleeping. I was meditating."

"You and Rip Van Winkle." After they had assured the attentive waiter that their steaks were excellent, Samantha said, "Seriously, you were okay out there today, weren't you?"

"I'm thirty-four, Sam. I guess I can't always thrash the waves like a kid anymore."

"It's just-you looked a little gray there."

He raised a hand to his hair. "Gray where?"

"Your pretty face."

He grinned. "You think it's pretty?"

"You can't keep pulling those thirty-six-hour sessions at the keyboard and then go right out and rip the ocean like you're the Big Kahuna."

"I'm not dying, Sam. I'm just aging gracefully."

He woke in absolute darkness, with the undulant motion of the sea beneath him. Disoriented, he thought for a moment that he was lying faceup on a surfboard, beyond the break, under a sky in which every star had been extinguished.

The hard rapid knocking of his heart alarmed him.

When Ryan felt the surface under him, he realized that it was a bed, not a board. The undulations were not real, merely perceived, a yawing dizziness.

"Sam," he said, but then remembered that she was not with him, that he was home, alone in his bedroom.

He tried to reach the lamp on the nightstand... but could not lift his arm.

When he tried to sit up, pain bloomed in his chest.

____________________________________________

Older Post:

American Lion | Jon Meacham (Book Excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:15:00 +0000

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House | Jon Meacham (Book Excerpt)

Book price (Amazon)

Christmas 1828 should have been the happiest of seasons at the Hermitage, Jackson’s plantation twelve miles outside Nashville. It was a week before the holiday, and Jackson had won the presidency of the United States the month before. “How triumphant!” Andrew Donelson said of the victory. “How flattering to the cause of the people!” Now the president- elect’s family and friends were to be on hand for a holiday of good food, liquor, and wine–Jackson was known to serve guests whiskey, champagne, claret, Madeira, port, and gin–and, in this special year, a pageant of horses, guns, and martial glory.

On Wednesday, December 17, 1828, Jackson was sitting inside the house, answering congratulatory messages. As he worked, friends in town were planning a ball to honor their favorite son before he left for Washington. Led by a marshal, there would be a guard of soldiers on horseback to take Jackson into Nashville, fire a twenty- four- gun artillery salute, and escort him to a dinner followed by dancing. Rachel would be by his side. In the last moments before the celebrations, and his duties, began, Jackson drafted a letter. Writing in his hurried hand across the foolscap, he accepted an old friend’s good wishes: “To the people, for the confidence reposed in me, my gratitude and best services are due; and are pledged to their service.” Before he finished the note, Jackson went outside to his Tennessee fields.

He knew his election was inspiring both reverence and loathing. The 1828 presidential campaign between Jackson and Adams had been vicious.Jackson’s forces had charged that Adams, as minister to Russia, had procured a woman for Czar Alexander I. As president, Adams was alleged to have spent too much public money decorating the White House, buying fancy china and a billiard table. The anti- Jackson assaults were more colorful. Jackson’s foes called his wife a bigamist and his mother a whore, attacking him for a history of dueling, for alleged atrocities in battles against the British, the Spanish, and the Indians–and for being a wife stealer who had married Rachel before she was divorced from her first husband. “Even Mrs. J. is not spared, and my pious Mother, nearly fifty years in the tomb, and who, from her cradle to her death had not a speck upon her character, has been dragged forth . . . and held to public scorn as a prostitute who intermarried with a Negro, and my eldest brother sold as a slave in Carolina,” Jackson said to a friend.

Jackson’s advisers marveled at the ferocity of the Adams attacks. “The floodgates of falsehood, slander, and abuse have been hoisted and the most nauseating filth is poured, in torrents, on the head, of not only Genl Jackson but all his prominent supporters,” William B. Lewis told John Coffee, an old friend of Jackson’s from Tennessee. Some Americans thought of the president-elect as a second Father of His Country. Others wanted him dead. One Revolutionary War veteran, David Coons of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was hearing rumors of ambush and assassination plots against Jackson. To Coons, Jackson was coming to rule as a tribune of the people, but to others Jackson seemed dangerous–so dangerous, in fact, that he was worth killing. “There are a portion of malicious and unprincipled men who have made hard threats with regard to you, men whose baseness would (in my opinion) prompt them to do anything,” Coons wrote Jackson.

That was the turbulent world awaiting beyond the Hermitage. In the draft of a speech he was to deliver to the celebration in town, Jackson was torn between anxiety and nostalgia. “The consciousness of a steady adherence to my duty has not been disturbed by the unsparing attacks of which I have been the subject during the election,” the speech read. Still, Jackson admitted he felt “apprehension” about the years ahead. His chief fear? That, in Jackson’s words, “I shall fail” to secure “the future prosperity of our beloved country.” Perhaps the procession to Nashville and the ball at the hotel would lift his spirits; perhaps Christmas with his family would.

While Jackson was outside, word came that his wife had collapsed in her sitting room, screaming in pain. It had been a wretched time for Rachel. She was, Jackson’s political foes cried, “a black wench,” a “profligate woman,” unfit to be the wife of the president of the United States. Shaken by the at- tacks, Rachel–also sixty-one and, in contrast to her husband, short and somewhat heavy–had been melancholy and anxious. “The enemies of the General have dipped their arrows in wormwood and gall and sped them at me,” Rachel lamented during the campaign. “Almighty God, was there ever any thing equal to it?” On the way home from a trip to Nashville after the balloting, Rachel was devastated to overhear a conversation about the lurid charges against her. Her niece, the twenty-one- year- old Emily Donelson, tried to reassure her aunt but failed. “No, Emily,” Mrs. Jackson replied, “I’ll never forget it!”

When news of her husband’s election arrived, she said: “Well, for Mr. Jackson’s sake I am glad; for my own part I never wished it.” Now the cumulative toll of the campaign and the coming administration exacted its price as Rachel was put to bed, the sound of her cries still echoing in her slave Hannah’s ears.

Jackson rushed to his wife, sent for doctors, did what he could. Later, as she lay resting, her husband added an emotional postscript to the letter he had begun: “P.S. Whilst writing, Mrs. J. from good health, has been taken suddenly ill, with excruciating pain in the left shoulder, arm, and breast. What may be the result of this violent attack god only knows, I hope for her recovery, and in haste close this letter, you will pardon any inaccuracies A. J.” Yet his hopes would not bring her back.

Rachel lingered for two and a half days. Jackson hovered by her side, praying for her survival. He had loved her for nearly four decades. His solace through war, politics, Indian fighting, financial chaos, and the vicissitudes of life in what was then frontier America, Rachel gave him what no one else ever had. In her arms and in their home he found a steady sense of family, a sustaining universe, a place of peace in a world of war. Her love for him was unconditional. She did not care for him because he was a general or a president. She cared for him because he was Andrew Jackson. “Do not, My beloved Husband, let the love of Country, fame and honor make you forget you have me,” she wrote to him during the War of 1812. “Without you I would think them all empty shadows.” When they were apart, Jackson would sit up late writing to her, his candle burning low through the night. “My heart is with you,” he told her.

Shortly after nine on the evening of Monday, December 22, three days before Christmas, Rachel suffered an apparent heart attack. It was over. Still, Jackson kept vigil, her flesh turning cold to his touch as he stroked her forehead. With his most awesome responsibilities and burdens at hand, she had left him. “My mind is so disturbed . . . that I can scarcely write, in short my dear friend my heart is nearly broke,” Jackson told his confidant John Coffee after Rachel’s death.

At one o’clock on Christmas Eve afternoon, by order of the mayor, Nashville’s church bells began ringing in tribute to Rachel, who was to be buried in her garden in the shadow of the Hermitage. The weather had been wet, and the dirt in the garden was soft; the rain made the gravediggers’ task a touch easier as they worked. After a Presbyterian funeral service led by Rachel’s minister, Jackson walked the one hundred fifty paces back to the house. A devastated but determined Jackson spoke to the mourners. “I am now the President elect of the United States, and in a short time must take my way to the metropolis of my country; and, if it had been God’s will, I would have been grateful for the privilege of taking her to my post of honor and seating her by my side; but Providence knew what was best for her.” God’s was the only will Jackson ever bowed to, and he did not even do that without a fight.

In his grief, Jackson turned to Rachel’s family. He would not–could not–go to Washington by himself. Around him at the Hermitage on this bleak Christmas Eve was the nucleus of the intimate circle he would maintain for the rest of his life. At the center of the circle, destined both to provide great comfort and to provoke deep personal anger in the White House, stood Andrew and Emily Donelson. They had an ancient claim on Jackson’s affections and attention, and they were ready to serve.

While Andrew–who was also Emily’s first cousin–was to work through the president- elect’s correspondence, guard access to Jackson, and serve as an adviser, Emily, not yet twenty- two, would be the president’s hostess. Attracted by the bright things of the fashionable world and yet committed to family and faith, Emily was at once selfless and sharp- tongued. Born on Monday, June 1, 1807, the thirteenth and last child of Mary and John Donelson, Emily was raised in the heart of frontier aristocracy and inherited a steely courage–perhaps from her grandfather, a Tennessee pioneer and a founder of Nashville–that could verge on obstinacy. It was a trait she shared with the other women in her family, including her aunt Rachel. “All Donelsons in the female line,” wrote a family biographer, “were tyrants.” Charming, generous, and hospitable tyrants, to be sure, but still a formidable lot–women who knew their own minds, women who had helped their husbands conquer the wilderness or were the daughters of those who had. Now one of them, Emily, would step into Rachel’s place in the White House.

On Sunday, January 18, 1829, Jackson left the Hermitage for the capital. With the Donelsons, William Lewis, and Mary Eastin, Emily’s friend and cousin, Jackson rode the two miles from the Hermitage to a wharf on a neighboring estate and boarded the steamboat Pennsylvania to travel the Cumberland River north, toward their new home. He was, as he had said to the mourners on the day of Rachel’s burial, the president- elect of the United States.

Before he left Tennessee, he wrote a letter to John Coffee that mixed faith and resignation. His thoughts were with Rachel, and on his own mortality. “Whether I am ever to return or not is for time to reveal, as none but that providence, who rules the destiny of all, now knows,” Jackson said.

His friends hoped that service to the nation would comfort him. “The active discharge of those duties to which he will shortly be called, more than anything else, will tend to soothe the poignancy of his grief,” said the Nashville Republican and State Gazette in an edition bordered in black in mourning for Rachel. In a moving letter, Edward Livingston, a friend of Jackson’s and a future secretary of state, saw that the cause of country would have to replace Rachel as Jackson’s central concern. Referring to America, Livingston told the president- elect: “She requires you for her welfare to abandon your just grief, to tear yourself from the indulgence of regrets which would be a virtue in a private individual, but to which you are not permitted to yield while so much of her happiness depends upon your efforts in her service.” Jackson understood. To rule, one had to survive, and to survive one had to fight.

The travelers wound their way through the country to the capital, passing through Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, where it snowed. The president- elect was complaining of sore limbs, a bad cough, and a hand worn out from greeting so many well- wishers. “He was very much wearied by the crowds of people that attended him everywhere, anxious to see the People’s President,” Mary Eastin wrote her father.

Ten days into the voyage, Emily Donelson finally found a moment to sit down. For her the trip had been a blur of cannons, cheers, and tending to colds–she had one, as did her little son Jackson. “I scarcely need tell you that we have been in one continual crowd since we started,” Emily wrote her mother. Their quarters were overrun by guests, and there were ovations and shouts of joy from people along the banks of the river. The social demands of the presidency had begun, really, the moment Jackson and his party left the Hermitage. But Emily was not the kind to complain, at least not in her uncle’s hearing. She loved the life that Jackson had opened to her and her husband.

“You must not make yourself unhappy about us, my dear Mother,” Emily added, sending warm wishes to her father. The handwriting was shaky as the letter ended; the water was rough, the pace of the craft fast. “I hope you will excuse this scrawl,” Emily said, “as it is written while the boat is running.”

The speed of the boat did not seem to bother Andrew Jackson, but then he was accustomed to pressing ahead. He was constantly on the run, and had been all his life. For him the journey to the White House had begun six decades before, in a tiny place tucked away in the Carolinas–a place he never visited, and spoke of only sparingly, called Waxhaw.

Jackson grew up an outsider, living on the margins and at the mercy of others. Traveling to America from Ireland in 1765, his father, the senior Andrew Jackson, and his mother, Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson, moved into a tiny community a few hundred miles northwest of Charleston, in a spot straddling the border between North and South Carolina. “Waxhaw” came from the name of the tribe of native Indians in the region, and from a creek that flowed into the Catawba River. Though the Revolutionary War was eleven years away, the relationship between King George III and his American colonies was already strained. The year the Jacksons crossed the Atlantic, Parliament passed the Quartering Act (which forced colonists to shelter British troops) and the Stamp Act (which levied a tax on virtually every piece of paper on the continent). The result: the Massachusetts legislature called for a colonial congress in New York, which issued a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances” against King George III. Striking, too, was a remark made by a delegate from South Carolina, the Jacksons’ new home. “There ought to be no more New England men, no New Yorkers,” said Christopher Gadsden of Charleston, “but all of us Americans!”

Jackson’s father, meanwhile, was trying to establish himself and his family in the New World. Though a man, his son recalled, of “independent” means, he was, it seems, poorer than his in- laws, who might have made him feel the disparity. While the other members of the extended family began prospering, Jackson moved his wife and two sons, Hugh and Robert, to Twelve Mile Creek, seven miles from the heart of Waxhaw. His wife was pregnant when the first Andrew Jackson died unexpectedly. It was a confusing, unsettling time. The baby was almost due, a snowstorm–rare in the South–had struck, and Jackson’s pallbearers drank so much as they carried his corpse from Twelve Mile Creek to the church for the funeral that they briefly lost the body along the way.

Soon thereafter, on Sunday, March 15, 1767, Mrs. Jackson gave birth to her third son, naming him Andrew after her late husband. He was a dependent from delivery forward. Whether the birth took place in North or South Carolina has occupied historians for generations (Jackson himself thought it was South Carolina), but the more important fact is that Andrew Jackson came into the world under the roof of relatives, not of his own parents. Growing up, he would be a guest of the houses in which he lived, not a son, except of a loving mother who was never the mistress of her own household. One of Mrs. Jackson’s sisters had married a Crawford, and the Crawfords were more affluent than the Jacksons. The loss of Mrs. Jackson’s husband only made the gulf wider. When the Crawfords asked Mrs. Jackson and her sons to live with them, it was not wholly out of a sense of familial devotion and duty. The Jacksons needed a home, the Crawfords needed help, and a bargain was struck. “Mrs. Crawford was an invalid,” wrote James Parton, the early Jackson biographer who interviewed people familiar with the Jacksons’ days in Waxhaw, “and Mrs. Jackson was permanently established in the family as housekeeper and poor relation.” Even in his mother’s lifetime, Jackson felt a certain inferiority to and distance from others. “His childish recollections were of humiliating dependence and galling discomfort, his poor mother performing household drudgery in return for the niggardly maintenance of herself and her children,” said Mary Donelson Wilcox, Emily and Andrew’s oldest daughter. He was not quite part of the core of the world around him. He did not fully belong, and he knew it.

God and war dominated his childhood. His mother took him and his brothers to the Waxhaw Presbyterian meetinghouse for services every week, and the signal intellectual feat of his early years was the memorization of the Shorter Westminster Catechism. Most stories about the young Jackson also paint a portrait of a child and young man full of energy, fun, and not a little fury. Like many other children of the frontier, he was engaged in a kind of constant brawl from birth–and in Jackson’s case, it was a brawl in which he could not stand to lose ground or points, even for a moment.

Wrestling was a common pastime, and a contemporary who squared off against Jackson recalled “I could throw him three times out of four, but he would never stay throwed.” As a practical joke his friends packed extra powder into a gun Jackson was about to fire, hoping the recoil would knock him down. It did. A furious Jackson rose up and cried “By God, if one of you laughs, I’ll kill him!”

Perhaps partly because he was fatherless, he may have felt he had to do more than usual to prove his strength and thus secure, or try to secure, his place in the community. “Mother, Andy will fight his way in the world,” a neighborhood boy recalled saying in their childhood. Clearly Jackson seethed beneath the surface, for when flummoxed or crossed or frustrated, he would work himself into fits of rage so paralyzing that contemporaries recalled he would begin “slobbering.” His prospects were not auspicious: here was an apparently unbalanced, excitable, insecure, and defensive boy coming of age in a culture of confrontation and violence. It was not, to say the least, the best of combinations.

His mother was his hope. His uncles and aunts apparently did not take a great deal of interest. They had their own children, their own problems, their own lives. Elizabeth Jackson was, however, a resourceful woman, and appears to have made a good bit out of little. There was some money, perhaps income from her late husband’s farm, and gifts from relatives in Ireland–enough, anyway, to send Jackson to schools where he studied, for a time, under Presbyterian clergy, learning at least the basics of “the dead languages.” He learned his most lasting lessons, however, not in a classroom but in the chaos of the Revolutionary War.

The birth of the Republic was, for Jackson, a time of unrelenting death. A week after Jackson’s eighth birthday, in March 1775, Edmund Burke took note of the American hunger for independence. “The temper and character which prevail in our Colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art,” he said. Within sixteen months Burke was proved right when the Continental Congress declared independence on July 4, 1776, a midsummer Thursday. By 1778, the South was the focus of the war, and the British fought brutally in Georgia and the Carolinas. In 1779, Andrew’s brother Hugh, just sixteen, was fighting at the front and died, it was said, “of heat and fatigue” after a clash between American and British troops at the Battle of Stono Ferry, south of Charleston. It was the first in a series of calamities that would strike Jackson, who was thirteen.

The British took Charleston on Friday, May 12, 1780, then moved west. The few things Jackson knew and cherished were soon under siege. On Monday, May 29, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, roughly three hundred British troops under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton killed 113 men near Waxhaw and wounded another 150. It was a vicious massacre: though the rebels tried to surrender, Tarleton ordered his men forward, and they charged the Americans, a rebel surgeon recalled, “with the horrid yells of infuriated demons.” Even after the survivors fell to the ground, asking for quarter, the British “went over the ground, plunging their bayonets into everyone that exhibited any signs of life.”

The following Sunday was no ordinary Sabbath at Waxhaw. The meetinghouse was filled with casualties from the skirmish, and the Jacksons were there to help the wounded. “None of the men had less than three or four, and some as many as thirteen gashes on them,” Jackson recalled.

He was so young, and so much was unfolding around him: the loss of a brother, the coming of the British, the threat of death, the sight of the bleeding and the dying in the most sacred place he knew, the meetinghouse. The enemy was everywhere, and the people of Waxhaw, like people throughout the colonies, were divided by the war, with Loyalists supporting George III and Britain, and others, usually called Whigs, throwing in their lot with the Congress. As Jackson recalled it, his mother had long inculcated him and his brothers with anti- British rhetoric, a stand she took because of her own father, back in Ireland. The way Mrs. Jackson told the story, he had fought the troops of the British king in action at Carrickfergus. “Often she would spend the winter’s night, in recounting to them the sufferings of their grandfather, at the siege of Carrickfergus, and the oppressions exercised by the nobility of Ireland, over the labouring poor,” wrote John Reid and John Eaton in a biography Jackson approved, “impressing it upon them, as their first duty, to expend their lives, if it should become necessary, in defending and supporting the natural rights of man.” These words were written for a book published in 1817, after Jackson defeated the British at New Orleans and preparatory to his entering national politics, which may account for the unlikely image of Mrs. Jackson tutoring her sons in Enlightenment political thought on cold Carolina evenings. But there is no doubt that Jackson chose to remember his upbringing this way, which means he linked his mother with the origins of his love of country and of the common man.

In the split between the revolutionaries and the Loyalists Jackson saw firsthand the brutality and bloodshed that could result when Americans turned on Americans. “Men hunted each other like beasts of prey,” wrote Amos Kendall, the Jackson intimate who spent hours listening to Jackson reminisce, “and the savages were outdone in cruelties to the living and indignities on the dead.”

Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton–known as “Bloody Tarleton” for his butchery–once rode so close to the young Jackson that, Jackson recalled, “I could have shot him.” The boy soaked up the talk of war and its rituals from the local militia officers and men. Months passed, and there were more battles, more killing. “Boys big enough to carry muskets incurred the dangers of men,” wrote Kendall–and Jackson was big enough to carry a musket.

In April 1781, after a night spent on the run from a British party, he and his brother Robert were trapped in one of their Crawford relatives’ houses. A neighboring Tory alerted the redcoats, and soon Andrew and Robert were surrounded. The soldiers ransacked the house, and an imperious officer ordered Jackson to polish his boots.

Jackson refused. “Sir,” he said, with a striking formality and coolness under the circumstances for a fourteen- year- old, “I am a prisoner of war, and claim to be treated as such.” The officer then swung his sword at the young man. Jackson blocked the blade with his left hand, but he could not fend it off completely. “The sword point reached my head and has left a mark there . . . on the skull, as well as on the fingers,” Jackson recalled. His brother was next, and when he too refused the order to clean the boots, the officer smashed the sword over Robert’s head, knocking him to the floor.

In some ways, Andrew was strengthened by the blows, for he would spend the rest of his life standing up to enemies, enduring pain, and holding fast until, after much trial, victory came. Robert was not so fortunate. The two boys were taken from the house to a British prison camp in Camden, about forty miles away. The journey was difficult in the April heat: “The prisoners were all dismounted and marched on foot to Camden, pushed through the swollen streams and prevented from drinking,” Jackson recalled. The mistreatment continued at the camp. “No attention whatever was paid to the wounds or to the comfort of the prisoners, and the small pox having broken out among them, many fell victims to it,” Jackson said. Robert was sick, very sick. Their mother managed to win her sons’ release, and, with a desperately ill Robert on one horse and Mrs. Jackson on another, a barefoot Andrew–the British had taken his shoes and his coat–had to, as he recalled, “trudge” forty-five miles back to Waxhaw.

They made a ragged, lonely little group. En route, even the weather turned against them. “The fury of a violent storm of rain to which we were exposed for several hours before we reached the end of our journey caused the small pox to strike in and consequently the next day I was dangerously ill,” Jackson recalled. Two days later Robert died. “During his confinement in prison,” Jackson’s earliest biography said, Robert “had suffered greatly; the wound on his head, all this time, having never been dressed, was followed by an inflammation of the brain, which in a few days after his liberation, brought him to his grave.”

Two Jackson boys were now dead at the hands of the British. Elizabeth nursed Andrew, now her only living child, back from the precipice–and then left, to tend to two of her Crawford nephews who were sick in Charleston.

Jackson never saw her again. In the fall of 1781 she died in the coastal city tending to other boys, and was buried in obscurity. Her clothes were all that came back to him. Even by the rough standards of the frontier in late eighteenth- century America, where disease and death were common, this was an extraordinary run of terrible luck.

For Jackson, the circumstances of Elizabeth’s last mission of mercy and burial would be perennial reminders of the tenuous position she had been forced into by her own husband’s death. First was the occasion of her visit to Charleston: to care for the extended family, leaving her own son behind. However selfless her motives–she had nursed the war’s wounded from that first Waxhaw massacre in the late spring of 1780–Elizabeth had still gone to the coast for the sake of Jackson’s cousins, not her own children. The uncertainty over the fate of her remains was a matter of concern to Jackson even in his White House years. He long sought the whereabouts of his mother’s grave, but to no avail. Perhaps partly in reaction to what he may have viewed as the lack of respect or care others had taken with his mother’s burial, he became a careful steward of such things–a devotee of souvenirs, a keeper of tombs, and an observer of anniversaries. The first woman he ever loved, his mother, rested in oblivion. The second woman who won his heart, Rachel, would be memorialized in stateliness and grandeur at the Hermitage after her death, and in his last years he would spend hours in the garden, contemplating her tomb. Bringing his mother home had been beyond his power. The story of Jackson’s life was how he strove to see that little else ever would be.

Rachel Jackson believed her husband drew inspiration from his mother’s trials. It was from her courage in facing what Rachel called “many hardships while on this earth” that Jackson “obtained the fortitude which has enabled him to triumph with so much success over the many obstacles which have diversified his life.”

Jackson often recounted what he claimed were his mother’s last words to him. In 1815, after his triumph at New Orleans, he spoke of his mother to friends: “Gentlemen, I wish she could have lived to see this day. There never was a woman like her. She was gentle as a dove and as brave as a lioness. Her last words have been the law of my life.”

Andrew, if I should not see you again, I wish you to remember and treasure up some things I have already said to you: in this world you will have to make your own way. To do that you must have friends. You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you. To forget an obligation or be ungrateful for a kindness is a base crime–not merely a fault or a sin, but an actual crime. Men guilty of it sooner or later must suffer the penalty. In personal conduct be always polite but never obsequious. None will respect you more than you respect yourself. Avoid quarrels as long as you can without yielding to imposition. But sustain your manhood always. Never bring a suit in law for assault and battery or for defamation. The law affords no remedy for such outrages that can satisfy the feelings of a true man. Never wound the feelings of others. Never brook wanton outrage upon your own feelings. If you ever have to vindicate your feelings or defend your honor, do it calmly. If angry at first, wait till your wrath cools before you proceed.

No matter how many of these words were hers, and how many were created by Jackson and ascribed to her memory, Elizabeth Jackson cast a long shadow in the life of her only surviving son.

Jackson spiraled downward and lashed out in the aftermath of his mother’s death. Before now, living in other people’s houses, Jackson had learned to manage complicated situations, maneuvering to maintain a passably cheerful (and grateful) face among people who gave him shelter but apparently little else. “He once said he never remembered receiving a gift as a child, and that, after his mother’s death, no kind, encouraging words ever greeted his ear,” recalled Mary Donelson Wilcox.

The Revolutionary War drew to a close with the American victory at Yorktown, Virginia, on the afternoon of Friday, October 19, 1781. Two years later, on Wednesday, September 3, 1783, came the Treaty of Paris, and the United States was now an independent nation. For Jackson, though, the end of war brought little peace. Living for a time with some Crawford relatives, Jackson got into a fight with one of their guests, a Captain Galbraith. Jackson thought him “of a very proud and haughty disposition,” and the two found themselves in an argument, and “for some reason,” Jackson recalled, “I forget now what, he threatened to chastise me.” Jackson replied with a flash of fire. “I immediately answered, ‘that I had arrived at the age to know my rights, and although weak and feeble from disease, I had the courage to defend them, and if he attempted anything of that kind I would most assuredly send him to the other world.’” That was enough for Jackson’s current Crawford host to shuffle him off to another relative. Having the unstable orphan around presented too many problems, not least the possibility of his attacking other guests.

Then came a crucial interlude in Jackson’s life: a sojourn in the cultivated precincts of Charleston. He had come into some money–either from his grandfather or perhaps from the sale of his mother’s property–and used it to finance a trip to the coast where he fell in with a fast, sophisticated circle. Some Charlestonians had retreated to the Waxhaw region during the worst of the fighting on the coast, so Jackson had something of an entrée when he arrived. Here he found the pleasures of the turf, of good tailors, and of the gaming tables. “There can be little doubt that at this period he imbibed that high sense of honour, and unstudied elegance of air for which he has been since distinguished,” wrote the early Jackson biographer Henry Lee–as well as little doubt that his love of racehorses and fine clothes had its beginnings in Charleston, too.

After Jackson returned to Waxhaw, he grew restless. From 1781 to 1784, he tried his hand at saddle making and school teaching–neither seems to have gone very well–and then left South Carolina for good. For the rest of his life, for a man who adored talk of family, friends, and old times, Jackson mentioned Waxhaw very little, the only exceptions being conversation about his mother and about Revolutionary War action in the region–both things that he could claim as his own.

Decade after decade, he never chose to find the time to go to Waxhaw. Acknowledging the gift of a map of the region the year before he was elected president, Jackson wrote a well- wisher: “A view of this map pointing to the spot that gave me birth, brings fresh to my memory many associations dear to my heart, many days of pleasure with my juvenile companions”–words that might, taken alone, suggest warm memories of his frontier youth.

Referring to his “juvenile companions,” Jackson said, “but alas, most of them are gone to that bourne where I am hastening and from whence no one returns”–in other words, they were dead. “I have not visited that country since the year 1784,” he added–which, since he was writing in midsummer 1827, means that forty- three years had passed since he bothered to return. Turning as close to home as he could, Jackson concluded: “The crossing of the Waxhaw creek, within one mile of which I was born, is still, however, I see, possessed by Mr John Crawford, son of the owner (Robert) who lived there when I was growing up and at school. I lived there for many years, and from the accuracy which this spot is marked in the map, I conclude the whole must be correct.” With that Jackson signs off. The subject is closed.

Still, the roots of Jackson’s intellectual and rhetorical imagination lie in Waxhaw. Down the years Jackson could quote Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Alexander Pope, and almost certainly read more books than his harshest critics believed, but the foundations of his worldview most likely came from his childhood Sundays in South Carolina, where he spent hours soaking in eighteenth- century Presbyterianism.

Elizabeth Jackson wanted her Andrew to be a minister, an ambition for him that may have been among the reasons he was able to envision himself rising to a place of authority. Even more so than in succeeding American generations, clergymen played a central and special role in the life of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were often the most educated men in a given place, conversant not only with scripture but with ancient tongues and the touchstones of English literature. They held center stage, with a standing claim on the time and attention (at least feigned) of their flocks, and they presided at the most important public moments of a Christian’s life–baptism, communion, marriage, death. Jackson’s sense of himself as someone set apart–the word “ordain” derives from the word “order,” and an ordained figure is one who puts things in order, arranges them, controls and even commands them–may have come in part from hearing his mother speak of him in such terms.

Jackson found other, larger spheres over which to preside than Carolina churches, but it would be a mistake to pass too quickly over the lasting influence his churchgoing had on the way he thought, spoke, wrote, and saw the world. He attended services at the Waxhaw meetinghouse throughout his early years, and these childhood Sabbaths are worth considering in trying to solve the mystery of how a man with so little formal education and such a sporadic–if occasionally intense–interest in books developed his sense of history and of humanity.

The service the Jacksons attended most likely started in midmorning. A psalm was sung–but without organ music, for Presbyterians were austere not only in their theology but in their liturgy–and a prayer said. Church historians suspect such prayers could stretch beyond twenty minutes in length. Then came a lesson from scripture–the selection could range from an entire chapter of a book of the Bible to a shorter reading followed by an explication–followed by the centerpiece of the morning: the minister’s sermon, an address that could range in length from thirty minutes to an hour. Another psalm or hymn closed the morning, which had by now consumed two hours of the day. There was a break for lunch, then an afternoon version of the same service, which everyone attended as well.

From his babyhood, then, Andrew Jackson probably spent between three and four hours nearly every Sunday for about fourteen years hearing prayers, psalms, scripture, sermons, and hymns: highly formalized, intense language evoking the most epic of battles with the greatest of stakes. In the words flowing from the minister on all those Sundays, Jackson would have been transported to imaginative realms where good and evil were at war, where kings and prophets on the side of the Lord struggled against the darker powers of the earth, where man’s path through a confusing world was lit by a peculiar intermingling of Christian mercy and might. God may well plan on exalting the humble and meek, but Jackson also heard the call of Gideon’s trumpet–the call to, as Saint Paul put it, fight the good fight.

Throughout his life, when he was under pressure, Jackson returned to the verses and tales of the Bible he had first heard in his childhood. He referred to political enemies as “Judases,” and at one horrible moment during the attacks on Rachel’s virtue in the 1828 campaign, Jackson’s mind raced to the language and force of the Bible in a crowded collection of allusions. “Should the uncircumcised philistines send forth their Goliath to destroy the liberty of the people and compel them to worship Mammon, they may find a David who trusts in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Jacob, for when I fight, it is the battles of my country,” Jackson wrote a friend.

That the image of King David–ancient Israel’s greatest monarch–came to Jackson’s mind is telling, for the connection he himself was drawing between David’s struggles and his own suggests the breadth of Jackson’s heroic vision of himself. David was a ruler who, chosen by the prophet Samuel, rose from obscurity to secure his nation and protect his people. A formidable soldier, he was a man of greatness and of God who was not without sin or sadness: that he stole Bathsheba, another man’s wife, stretches the analogy further than Jackson would ever have gone, but the story of lost fathers and sons in the tale of the death of David’s son Absalom echoed in Jackson’s own life. The Lord’s promise to David in II Samuel–“And thine house and thine kingdom shall be established for ever before thee; thy throne shall be established for ever”–would have resonated in Jackson’s imagination, for his life was dedicated to building not only his own family but his nation, and perhaps even founding a dynasty in which Andrew Donelson, as his protégé, might, as Jackson put it, “preside over the destinies of America.”

Jackson said he read three chapters of the Bible every day. His letters and speeches echo both scripture and the question- and- answer style of the Shorter Westminster Catechism. If the Bible, psalms, and hymns formed a substantial core of Jackson’s habits of mind, books about valor, duty, and warfare also found their way into his imagination. Jackson had only a handful of years of formal education–he was the least intellectually polished president in the short history of the office–and his opponents made much of his lack of schooling. When Harvard University bestowed an honorary degree on President Jackson in 1833, the man he had beaten for the White House, John Quincy Adams, a Harvard graduate, refused to come, telling the university’s president that “as myself an affectionate child of our Alma Mater, I would not be present to witness her disgrace in conferring her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.” Adams’s view was common in Jackson’s lifetime.

Jackson was not, however, as unlettered as the caricatures suggest. He was no scholar, but he issued elegant Caesar- like proclamations to his troops, understood men and their motives, and read rather more than he is given credit for. “I know human nature,” he once remarked, and he had learned the ways of the world not only on the frontier but also in snatches of literature. There was Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield, a story of redemption (the vicar faces much misfortune, yet perseveres through faith to a happy ending). It is not difficult to see why Jackson was drawn to the tale. “The hero of this piece,” Goldsmith wrote in an “Advertisement” for the book, “unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth: he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family.”

Jackson’s surviving library at the Hermitage is full of books of theology, history, and biography. There are numerous volumes of sermons (most, if not all, of them Rachel’s), and a fair collection of the works of Isaac Watts. His secular shelves are heavy on Napoleon, George Washington, and the American Revolution.

A favorite book was Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs. The story of Sir William Wallace–a reluctant, noble warrior brought into combat against the domineering and cruel English when the king’s soldiers murder his wife–affected Jackson perhaps more than any other piece of writing outside scripture. “I have always thought that Sir William Wallace, as a virtuous patriot and warrior, was the best model for a young man,” Jackson once wrote. “In him we find a stubborn virtue . . . the truly undaunted courage, always ready to brave any dangers, for the relief of his country or his friend.”

The story, published in 1809, is something of a potboiler. More colorful than subtle, it is nonetheless a powerful book, and Jackson thrilled to it. “God is with me,” Wallace says as he realizes his wife is dead. “I am his avenger . . . God armeth the patriot’s hand!” The cause of Scotland became one with Wallace’s personal crusade for justice.

Jackson, too, had lost those he loved to the English. Orphaned in Waxhaw, he would struggle to build and keep a family everywhere else. In those distant forests, makeshift battlefields, and richer relatives’ houses he had seen the centrality of strength and of self- confidence. Both elements, so essential to his character and his career, can be traced to his mother’s influence, which was brief but lasting. In his mind she remained vivid and her example did, too–the example of strength amid adversity and of persevering no matter what. It is also likely that her dreams remained with him: chiefly her ambitious hope that he would become a clergyman, thus exercising authority and earning respect, all in the service of a larger cause. In the end Jackson chose to serve God and country not in a church but on battlefields and at the highest levels–but he did choose, as his mother had wished, to serve.

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Alex & Me | Irene M. Pepperberg (Book Excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:23:00 +0000

Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence | Irene M. Pepperberg (Book Excerpt)

Book price (Amazon)

My Wonderful Life Moment

How much impact could a one-pound ball of feathers have on the world? It took death for me to find out. And so I write the story of a particular bird's life, but it must begin at the end.

"Brainy Parrot Dies, Emotive to the End," ran a New York Times science section headline on September 11, 2007, the day after our press release announcing Alex's passing. "He knew his colors and shapes, he learned more than 100 English words," wrote Benedict Carey, "and with his own brand of one-liners he established himself in television shows, scientific reports and news articles as perhaps the world's most famous talking bird." Carey quoted my friend, colleague, and expert on dolphin and elephant communication, Diana Reiss: "The work revolutionized the way we think of bird brains. That used to be a pejorative, but now we look at those brains—at least Alex's—with some awe."

I found myself saying much the same thing in the newspaper, magazine, radio, and television interviews that overwhelmed me those first few days. People would ask, "What is all the fuss about, why was Alex so special?" and I'd say, "Because a bird with a brain the size of a shelled walnut could do the kinds of things that young children do. And that changed our perception of what we mean by ‘bird brain.' It changed the way we think about animal thinking." That was the scientific truth I had known for many years, and now the idea was beginning to be accepted. But that didn'thelp me with the personal devastation.

Friends drove up from Washington, D.C., that first weekend to ensure I would not be alone, that I would eat and at least try to rest. I functioned each minute, hour, day on automatic pilot, doing whatever was necessary, deprived of sleep, torn by grief. And all amidst this very public outpouring. I was aware of it, of course, yet not fully aware, not then, anyway. I was cognizant of the gathering acclaim, inevitably so because of this endless stream of interviews. But it seemed to involve someone else, or at least had an unreality to it. The phone would ring and I'd click into "interview mode," responding as I had many other times when something Alex had done occasioned a media blitz, responding in a professional manner to the inquiries. This time, however, I'd fall apart until the next call.

Pictures of Alex appeared on CNN, in Time magazine, and in scores of other places across the country. National Public Radio ran a story on All Things Considered: "Alex the Parrot, an Apt Student, Passes Away." ATC's host, Melissa Block, said, "Alex shattered the notion that parrots are only capable of mimicking words." Diane Sawyer did a two-and-a-half-minute segment on ABC's Good Morning America—long for morning television, I'm told. "And now I have a kind of obituary," she began, "and I want to inform the next of kin about a death in the family. And, yes, the next of kin would be all of us." She said that Alex had been a kind of bird genius, "opening new vistas on what animals can do." She aired a video that showed Alex answering questions about the color, shape, and number of objects, and so on. The video landed on YouTube. The previous day, CBS anchor Katie Couric devoted more time to Alex's life and death than to major political stories.

Two days later, the prominent British newspaper, The Guardian, wrote, "America is in mourning. Alex, the African Grey parrot who was smarter than the average U.S. president, has died at the relatively tender age of 31." The story was spreading around the world, eventually to Australia. Robyn Williams, from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's radio Science Show, interviewed me, the second time we'd talked about Alex and his achievements. The first time, five years earlier, we'd talked about what other feats Alex might achieve in his future. Not this time.

I was told that the New York Times article had been the most e-mailed story of the day, even while General David Petraeus was testifying in Washington, D.C., on Iraq. A second New York Times article, on September 12, in its Editorial Notebook section, was titled simply "Alex the Parrot," by Verlyn Klinkenborg. This piece was a little more philosophical than most. "Thinking about animals—and especially thinking about whether animals can think—is like looking at the world through a two-way mirror," Klinkenborg began. "There, for example, on the other side of the mirror, is Alex. . . . But looking at Alex, who mastered a surprising vocabulary of words and concepts, the question is always how much of our reflection we see." The article ended: "The value [of the work] lies in our surprise, our renewed awareness of how little we allow ourselves to expect from the animals around us." A lovely piece, another acknowledgment. But it still felt unreal.

Even Jay Leno had a crack at Alex, on his late-night TV show. (A friend told me about it; I don't have a working TV.) "Sad news: a thirty-year-old parrot by the name of Alex, who had been used by researchers at Harvard University to study how parrots communicate, has died," said Leno. "I believe his last words were, ‘Yes, I want a cracker!' " He went on, "This parrot was very intelligent. They say he knew over one hundred words. They say his intelligence was somewhere between a dog and Miss Teen South Carolina." Sigh.

By now every major newspaper had covered Alex's death, noting his remarkable cognitive skills and our breakthrough work together. Even the venerable British science journal Nature wrote about it in "Farewell to a Famous Parrot." "Pepperberg has published dozens of scientific papers about Alex's verbal, mathematical and cognitive abilities," noted David Chandler, "and the two have appeared on a wide variety of television programmes and popular press stories." Chandler continued, "In the process, they have transformed people's understanding of the mental abilities of non-human animals." (A bittersweet irony here: when I started working with Alex three decades earlier, a paper I submitted to Nature was summarily dismissed without review—as was another I had submitted more recently.)

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo | Stieg Larsson (Book Excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:30:00 +0000

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo | Stieg Larsson (Book Excerpt)

Book price (Amazon)

A Friday in November

It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna. They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day–which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call.

“It arrived.”

“What is it this year?”

“I don’t know what kind it is. I’ll have to get someone to tell me what it is. It’s white.”

“No letter, I suppose.”

“Just the flower. The frame is the same kind as last year. One of those do-it-yourself ones.”

“Postmark?”

“Stockholm.”

“Handwriting?”

“Same as always, all in capitals. Upright, neat lettering.”

With that, the subject was exhausted, and not another word was exchanged for almost a minute. The retired policeman leaned back in his kitchen chair and drew on his pipe. He knew he was no longer expected to come up with a pithy comment or any sharp question which would shed a new light on the case. Those days had long since passed, and the exchange between the two men seemed like a ritual attaching to a mystery which no-one else in the whole world had the least interest in unravelling.

The Latin name was Leptospermum (Myrtaceae) rubinette. It was a plant about ten centimetres high with small, heather-likefoliage and a white flower with five petals about two centimetres across.

The plant was native to the Australian bush and uplands, where it was to be found among tussocks of grass. There it was called Desert Snow. Someone at the botanical gardens in Uppsala would later confirm that it was a plant seldom cultivated in Sweden. The botanist wrote in her report that it was related to the tea tree and that it was sometimes confused with its more common cousin Leptospermum scoparium, which grew in abundance in New Zealand. What distinguished them, she pointed out, was that rubinette had a small number of microscopic pink dots at the tips of the petals, giving the flower a faint pinkish tinge.

Rubinette was altogether an unpretentious flower. It had no known medicinal properties, and it could not induce hallucinatory experiences. It was neither edible, nor had a use in the manufacture of plant dyes. On the other hand, the aboriginal people of Australia regarded as sacred the region and the flora around Ayers Rock.

The botanist said that she herself had never seen one before, but after consulting her colleagues she was to report that attempts had been made to introduce the plant at a nursery in Göteborg, and that it might, of course, be cultivated by amateur botanists. It was difficult to grow in Sweden because it thrived in a dry climate and had to remain indoors half of the year. It would not thrive in calcareous soil and it had to be watered from below. It needed pampering.

The fact of its being so rare a flower ought to have made it easier to trace the source of this particular specimen, but in practice it was an impossible task. There was no registry to look it up in, no licences to explore. Anywhere from a handful to a few hundred enthusiasts could have had access to seeds or plants. And those could have changed hands between friends or been bought by mail order from anywhere in Europe, anywhere in the Antipodes.

But it was only one in the series of mystifying flowers that each year arrived by post on the first day of November. They were always beautiful and for the most part rare flowers, always pressed, mounted on watercolour paper in a simple frame measuring 15cm by 28cm.

The strange story of the flowers had never been reported in the press; only a very few people knew of it. Thirty years ago the regular arrival of the flower was the object of much scrutiny–at the National Forensic Laboratory, among fingerprint experts, graphologists, criminal investigators, and one or two relatives and friends of the recipient. Now the actors in the drama were but three: the elderly birthday boy, the retired police detective, and the person who had posted the flower. The first two at least had reached such an age that the group of interested parties would soon be further diminished.

The policeman was a hardened veteran. He would never forget his first case, in which he had had to take into custody a violent and appallingly drunk worker at an electrical substation before he caused others harm. During his career he had brought in poachers, wife beaters, con men, car thieves, and drunk drivers. He had dealt with burglars, drug dealers, rapists, and one deranged bomber. He had been involved in nine murder or manslaughter cases. In five of these the murderer had called the police himself and, full of remorse, confessed to having killed his wife or brother or some other relative. Two others were solved within a few days. Another required the assistance of the National Criminal Police and took two years.

The ninth case was solved to the police’s satisfaction, which is to say that they knew who the murderer was, but because the evidence was so insubstantial the public prosecutor decided not to proceed with the case. To the detective superintendent’s dismay, the statute of limitations eventually put an end to the matter. But all in all he could look back on an impressive career.

He was anything but pleased.

For the detective, the “Case of the Pressed Flowers” had been nagging at him for years–his last, unsolved and frustrating case. The situation was doubly absurd because after spending literally thousands of hours brooding, on duty and off, he could not say beyond doubt that a crime had indeed been committed.

The two men knew that whoever had mounted the flowers would have worn gloves, that there would be no fingerprints on the frame or the glass. The frame could have been bought in camera shops or stationery stores the world over. There was, quite simply, no lead to follow. Most often the parcel was posted in Stockholm, but three times from London, twice from Paris, twice from Copenhagen, once from Madrid, once from Bonn, and once from Pensacola, Florida. The detective superintendent had had to look it up in an atlas.

After putting down the telephone the eighty-two-year-old birthday boy sat for a long time looking at the pretty but meaningless flower whose name he did not yet know. Then he looked up at the wall above his desk. There hung forty-three pressed flowers in their frames. Four rows of ten, and one at the bottom with four. In the top row one was missing from the ninth slot. Desert Snow would be number forty-four.

Without warning he began to weep. He surprised himself with this sudden burst of emotion after almost forty years.

Friday, December 20

The trial was irretrievably over; everything that could be said had been said, but he had never doubted that he would lose. The written verdict was handed down at 10:00 on Friday morning, and all that remained was a summing up from the reporters waiting in the corridor outside the district court.

Carl Mikael Blomkvist saw them through the doorway and slowed his step. He had no wish to discuss the verdict, but questions were unavoidable, and he—of all people—knew that they had to be asked and answered. This is how it is to be a criminal, he thought. On the other side of the microphone. He straightened up and tried to smile. The reporters gave him friendly, almost embarrassed greetings.

"Let's see . . . Aftonbladet, Expressen, TT wire service, TV4, and . . . where are you from? . . . ah yes, Dagens Nyheter. I must be a celebrity," Blomkvist said.

"Give us a sound bite, Kalle Blomkvist." It was a reporter from one of the evening papers.

Blomkvist, hearing the nickname, forced himself as always not to roll his eyes. Once, when he was twenty-three and had just started his first summer job as a journalist, Blomkvist had chanced upon a gang which had pulled off five bank robberies over the past two years. There was no doubt that it was the same gang in every instance. Their trademark was to hold up two banks at a time with military precision. They wore masks from Disney World, so inevitably police logic dubbed them the Donald Duck Gang. The newspapers renamed them the Bear Gang, which sounded more sinister, more appropriate to the fact that on two occasions they had recklessly fired warning shots and threatened curious passersby.

Their sixth outing was at a bank in Östergötland at the height of the holiday season. A reporter from the local radio station happened to be in the bank at the time. As soon as the robbers were gone he went to a public telephone and dictated his story for live broadcast.

Blomkvist was spending several days with a girlfriend at her parents' summer cabin near Katrineholm. Exactly why he made the connection he could not explain, even to the police, but as he was listening to the news report he remembered a group of four men in a summer cabin a few hundred feet down the road. He had seen them playing badminton out in the yard: four blond, athletic types in shorts with their shirts off. They were obviously bodybuilders, and there had been something about them that had made him look twice—maybe it was because the game was being played in blazing sunshine with what he recognised as intensely focused energy.

There had been no good reason to suspect them of being the bank robbers, but nevertheless he had gone to a hill overlooking their cabin. It seemed empty. It was about forty minutes before a Volvo drove up and parked in the yard. The young men got out, in a hurry, and were each carrying a sports bag, so they might have been doing nothing more than coming back from a swim. But one of them returned to the car and took out from the boot something which he hurriedly covered with his jacket. Even from Blomkvist's relatively distant observation post he could tell that it was a good old AK4, the rifle that had been his constant companion for the year of his military service.

He called the police and that was the start of a three-day siege of the cabin, blanket coverage by the media, with Blomkvist in a front-row seat and collecting a gratifyingly large fee from an evening paper. The police set up their headquarters in a caravan in the garden of the cabin where Blomkvist was staying.

The fall of the Bear Gang gave him the star billing that launched him as a young journalist. The downside of his celebrity was that the other evening newspaper could not resist using the headline "Kalle Blomkvist solves the case." The tongue-in-cheek story was written by an older female columnist and contained references to the young detective in Astrid Lindgren's books for children. To make matters worse, the paper had run the story with a grainy photograph of Blomkvist with his mouth half open even as he raised an index finger to point.

It made no difference that Blomkvist had never in life used the name Carl. From that moment on, to his dismay, he was nicknamed Kalle Blomkvist by his peers—an epithet employed with taunting provocation, not unfriendly but not really friendly either. In spite of his respect for Astrid Lindgren—whose books he loved—he detested the nickname. It took him several years and far weightier journalistic successes before the nickname began to fade, but he still cringed if ever the name was used in his hearing.

Right now he achieved a placid smile and said to the reporter from the evening paper:

"Oh come on, think of something yourself. You usually do."

His tone was not unpleasant. They all knew each other, more or less, and Blomkvist's most vicious critics had not come that morning. One of the journalists there had at one time worked with him. And at a party some years ago he had nearly succeeded in picking up one of the reporters—the woman from She on TV4.

"You took a real hit in there today," said the one from Dagens Nyheter, clearly a young part-timer. "How does it feel?"

Despite the seriousness of the situation, neither Blomkvist nor the older journalists could help smiling. He exchanged glances with TV4. How does it feel? The half-witted sports reporter shoves his microphone in the face of the Breathless Athlete on the finishing line.

"I can only regret that the court did not come to a different conclusion," he said a bit stuffily.

"Three months in gaol and 150,000 kronor damages. That's pretty severe," said She from TV4.

"I'll survive."

"Are you going to apologise to Wennerström? Shake his hand?"

"I think not."

"So you still would say that he's a crook?" Dagens Nyheter.

The court had just ruled that Blomkvist had libelled and defamed the financier Hans-Erik Wennerström. The trial was over and he had no plans to appeal. So what would happen if he repeated his claim on the courthouse steps? Blomkvist decided that he did not want to find out.

"I thought I had good reason to publish the information that was in my possession. The court has ruled otherwise, and I must accept that the judicial process has taken its course. Those of us on the editorial staff will have to discuss the judgement before we decide what we're going to do. I have no more to add."

"But how did you come to forget that journalists actually have to back up their assertions?" She from TV4. Her expression was neutral, but Blomkvist thought he saw a hint of disappointed repudiation in her eyes.

The reporters on site, apart from the boy from Dagens Nyheter, were all veterans in the business. For them the answer to that question was beyond the conceivable. "I have nothing to add," he repeated, but when the others had accepted this TV4 stood him against the doors to the courthouse and asked her questions in front of the camera. She was kinder than he deserved, and there were enough clear answers to satisfy all the reporters still standing behind her. The story would be in the headlines but he reminded himself that they were not dealing with the media event of the year here. The reporters had what they needed and headed back to their respective newsrooms.

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The Audacity of Hope | Barack Obama (Book Excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:58:00 +0000

The Audacity of Hope | Barack Obama (Book Excerpt)

Book price (Amazon)

It’s been almost ten years since I first ran for political office. I was thirty-five at the time, four years out of law school, recently married, and generally impatient with life. A seat in the Illinois legislature had opened up, and several friends suggested that I run, thinking that my work as a civil rights lawyer, and contacts from my days as a community organizer, would make me a viable candidate. After discussing it with my wife, I entered the race and proceeded to do what every first-time candidate does: I talked to anyone who would listen. I went to block club meetings and church socials, beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the street to hand them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I’d get some version of the same two questions.

“Where’d you get that funny name?”

And then: “You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?”

I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years earlier, when I’d first arrived in Chicago to work in low-income neighborhoods. It signaled a cynicism not simply with politics but with the very notion of a public life, a cynicism that–at least in the South Side neighborhoods I sought to represent–had been nourished by a generation of broken promises. In response, I would usually smile and nod and say that I understood the skepticism, but that there was–and always had been–another tradition to politics, a tradition that stretched from the days of the country’s founding to the glory of the civil rightsmovement, a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done. It was a pretty convincing speech, I thought. And although I’m not sure that the people who heard me deliver it were similarly impressed, enough of them appreciated my earnestness and youthful swagger that I made it to the Illinois legislature.

Six years later, when I decided to run for the United States Senate, I wasn’t so sure of myself.

By all appearances, my choice of careers seemed to have worked out. After spending my two terms during which I labored in the minority, Democrats had gained control of the state senate, and I had subsequently passed a slew of bills, from reforms of the Illinois death penalty system to an expansion of the state’s health program for kids. I had continued to teach at the University of Chicago Law School, a job I enjoyed, and was frequently invited to speak around town. I had preserved my independence, my good name, and my marriage, all of which, statistically speaking, had been placed at risk the moment I set foot in the state capital.

But the years had also taken their toll. Some of it was just a function of my getting older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention, each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws–the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip. In me, one of those flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness; an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me. It’s a flaw that is endemic to modern life, I think–endemic, too, in the American character–and one that is nowhere more evident than in the field of politics. Whether politics actually encourages the trait or simply attracts those who possess it is unclear. Lyndon Johnson, who knew much about both politics and restlessness, once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.

In any event, it was as a consequence of that restlessness that I decided to challenge a sitting Democratic incumbent for his congressional seat in the 2000 election cycle. It was an ill-considered race, and I lost badly–the sort of drubbing that awakens you to the fact that life is not obliged to work out as you’d planned. A year and a half later, the scars of that loss sufficiently healed, I had lunch with a media consultant who had been encouraging me for some time to run for statewide office. As it happened, the lunch was scheduled for late September 2001.

“You realize, don’t you, that the political dynamics have changed,” he said as he picked at his salad.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing full well what he meant. We both looked down at the newspaper beside him. There, on the front page, was Osama bin Laden.

“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he said, shaking his head. “Really bad luck. You can’t change your name, of course. Voters are suspicious of that kind of thing. Maybe if you were at the start of your career, you know, you could use a nickname or something. But now... "His voice trailed off and he shrugged apologetically before signaling the waiter to bring us the check.

I suspected he was right, and that realization ate away at me. For the first time in my career, I began to experience the envy of seeing younger politicians succeed where I had failed, moving into higher offices, getting more things done. The pleasures of politics–the adrenaline of debate, the animal warmth of shaking hands and plunging into a crowd–began to pale against the meaner tasks of the job: the begging for money, the long drives home after the banquet had run two hours longer than scheduled, the bad food and stale air and clipped phone conversations with a wife who had stuck by me so far but was pretty fed up with raising our children alone and was beginning to question my priorities. Even the legislative work, the policy-making that had gotten me to run in the first place, began to feel too incremental, too removed from the larger battles–over taxes, security, health care, and jobs–that were being waged on a national stage. I began to harbor doubts about the path I had chosen; I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream, after years of waiting tables between auditions or scratching out hits in the minor leagues, he realizes that he’s gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grown-up and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.

Denial, anger, bargaining, despair–I’m not sure I went through all the stages prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived at acceptance–of my limits, and, in a way, my mortality. I refocused on my work in the state senate and took satisfaction from the reforms and initiatives that my position afforded. I spent more time at home, and watched my daughters grow, and properly cherished my wife, and thought about my long-term financial obligations. I exercised, and read novels, and came to appreciate how the earth rotated around the sun and the seasons came and went without any particular exertions on my part.

And it was this acceptance, I think, that allowed me to come up with the thoroughly cockeyed idea of running for the United States Senate. An up-or-out strategy was how I described it to my wife, one last shot to test out my ideas before I settled into a calmer, more stable, and better-paying existence. And she–perhaps more out of pity than conviction–agreed to this one last race, though she also suggested that given the orderly life she preferred for our family, I shouldn’t necessarily count on her vote.

I let her take comfort in the long odds against me. The Republican incumbent, Peter Fitzgerald, had spent $19 million of his personal wealth to unseat the previous senator, Carol Moseley Braun. He wasn’t widely popular; in fact he didn’t really seem to enjoy politics all that much. But he still had unlimited money in his family, as well as a genuine integrity that had earned him grudging respect from the voters.

For a time Carol Moseley Braun reappeared, back from an ambassadorship in New Zealand and with thoughts of trying to reclaim her old seat; her possible candidacy put my own plans on hold. When she decided to run for the presidency instead, everyone else started looking at the Senate race. By the time Fitzgerald announced he would not seek reelection, I was staring at six primary opponents, including the sitting state comptroller; a businessman worth hundreds of millions of dollars; Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s former chief of staff; and a black, female health-care professional who the smart money assumed would split the black vote and doom whatever slim chances I’d had in the first place.

I didn’t care. Freed from worry by low expectations, my credibility bolstered by several helpful endorsements, I threw myself into the race with an energy and joy that I thought I had lost. I hired four staffers, all of them smart, in their twenties or early thirties, and suitably cheap. We found a small office, printed letterhead, installed phone lines and several computers. Four or five hours a day, I called major Democratic donors and tried to get my calls returned. I held press conferences to which nobody came. We signed up for the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade and were assigned the parade’s very last slot, so that my ten volunteers and I found ourselves marching just a few paces ahead of the city’s sanitation trucks, waving to the few stragglers who remained on the route while workers swept up garbage and peeled green shamrock stickers off the lampposts.

Mostly, though, I just traveled, often driving alone, first from ward to ward in Chicago, then from county to county and town to town, eventually up and down the state, across miles and miles of cornfields and beanfields and train tracks and silos. It wasn’t an efficient process. Without the machinery of the state’s Democratic Party organization, without any real mailing list or Internet operation, I had to rely on friends or acquaintances to open their houses to who ever might come, or to arrange for my visit to their church, union hall, bridge group, or Rotary Club. Sometimes, after several hours of driving, I would find just two or three people waiting for me around a kitchen table. I would have to assure the hosts that the turnout was fine and compliment them on the refreshments they’d prepared. Sometimes I would sit through a church service and the pastor would forget to recognize me, or the head of the union local would let me speak to his members just before announcing that the union had decided to endorse someone else.

But whether I was meeting with two people or fifty, whether I was in one of the well-shaded, stately homes of the North Shore, a walk-up apartment on the West Side, or a farmhouse outside Bloomington, whether people were friendly, indifferent, or occasionally hostile, I tried my best to keep my mouth shut and hear what they had to say. I listened to people talk about their jobs, their businesses, the local school; their anger at Bush and their anger at Democrats; their dogs, their back pain, their war service, and the things they remembered from childhood. Some had well-developed theories to explain the loss of manufacturing jobs or the high cost of health care. Some recited what they had heard on Rush Limbaugh or NPR. But most of them were too busy with work or their kids to pay much attention to politics, and they spoke instead of what they saw before them: a plant closed, a promotion, a high heating bill, a parent in a nursing home, a child’s first step.

No blinding insights emerged from these months of conversation. If anything, what struck me was just how modest people’s hopes were, and how much of what they believed seemed to hold constant across race, region, religion, and class. Most of them thought that anybody willing to work should be able to find a job that paid a living wage. They figured that people shouldn’t have to file for bankruptcy because they got sick. They believed that every child should have a genuinely good education–that it shouldn’t just be a bunch of talk–and that those same children should be able to go to college even if their parents weren’t rich. They wanted to be safe, from criminals and from terrorists; they wanted clean air, clean water, and time with their kids. And when they got old, they wanted to be able to retire with some dignity and respect.

That was about it. It wasn’t much. And although they understood that how they did in life depended mostly on their own efforts–although they didn’t expect government to solve all their problems, and certainly didn’t like seeing their tax dollars wasted–they figured that government should help.

I told them that they were right: government couldn’t solve all their problems. But with a slight change in priorities we could make sure every child had a decent shot at life and meet the challenges we faced as a nation. More often than not, folks would nod in agreement and ask how they could get involved. And by the time I was back on the road, with a map on the passenger’s seat, on my way to my next stop, I knew once again just why I’d gone into politics.

I felt like working harder than I’d ever worked in my life.

This book grows directly out of those conversations on the campaign trail. Not only did my encounters with voters confirm the fundamental decency of the American people, they also reminded me that at the core of the American experience are a set of ideals that continue to stir our collective conscience; a common set of values that bind us together despite our differences; a running thread of hope that makes our improbable experiment in democracy work. These values and ideals find expression not just in the marble slabs of monuments or in the recitation of history books. They remain alive in the hearts and minds of most Americans–and can inspire us to pride, duty, and sacrifice.

I recognize the risks of talking this way. In an era of globalization and dizzying technological change, cutthroat politics and unremitting culture wars, we don’t even seem to possess a shared language with which to discuss our ideals, much less the tools to arrive at some rough consensus about how, as a nation, we might work together to bring those ideals about. Most of us are wise to the ways of admen, pollsters, speechwriters, and pundits. We know how high-flying words can be deployed in the service of cynical aims, and how the noblest sentiments can be subverted in the name of power, expedience, greed, or intolerance. Even the standard high school history textbook notes the degree to which, from its very inception, the reality of American life has strayed from its myths. In such a climate, any assertion of shared ideals or common values might seem hopelessly naive, if not downright dangerous–an attempt to gloss over serious differences over policy and performance or, worse, a means of muffling the complaints of those who feel ill served by our current institutional arrangements.

My argument, however, is that we have no choice. You don’t need a poll to know that the vast majority of Americans–Republican, Democrat, and independent–are weary of the dead zone that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth. Whether we’re from red states or blue states, we feel in our gut the lack of honesty, rigor, and common sense in our policy debates, and dislike what appears to be a continuous menu of false or cramped choices. Religious or secular, black, white, or brown, we sense– correctly–that the nation’s most significant challenges are being ignored, and that if we don’t change course soon, we may be the first generation in a very long time that leaves behind a weaker and more fractured America than the one we inherited. Perhaps more than any other time in our recent history, we need a new kind of politics, one that can excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.

That’s the topic of this book: how we might begin the process of changing our politics and our civic life. This isn’t to say that I know exactly how to do it. I don’t. Although I discuss in each chapter a number of our most pressing policy challenges, and suggest in broad strokes the path I believe we should follow, my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete. I offer no unifying theory of American government, nor do these pages provide a manifesto for action, complete with charts and graphs, timetables and ten-point plans.

Instead what I offer is something more modest: personal reflections on those values and ideals that have led me to public life, some thoughts on the ways that our current political discourse unnecessarily divides us, and my own best assessment–based on my experience as a senator and lawyer, husband and father, Christian and skeptic–of the ways we can ground our politics in the notion of a common good.

Let me be more specific about how the book is organized. Chapter One takes stock of our recent political history and tries to explain some of the sources for today’s bitter partisanship. In Chapter Two, I discuss those common values that might serve as the foundation for a new political consensus. Chapter Three explores the Constitution not just as a source of individual rights, but also as a means of organizing a democratic conversation around our collective future. In Chapter Four, I try to convey some of the institutional forces–money, media, interest groups, and the legislative process–that stifle even the best-intentioned politician. And in the remaining five chapters, I suggest how we might move beyond our divisions to effectively tackle concrete problems: the growing economic insecurity of many American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats–from terrorism to pandemic–that gather beyond our shores.

I suspect that some readers may find my presentation of these issues to be insufficiently balanced. To this accusation, I stand guilty as charged. I am a Democrat, after all; my views on most topics correspond more closely to the editorial pages of the New York Times than those of the Wall Street Journal. I am angry about policies that consistently favor the wealthy and powerful over average Americans, and insist that government has an important role in opening up opportunity to all. I believe in evolution, scientific inquiry, and global warming; I believe in free speech, whether politically correct or politically incorrect, and I am suspicious of using government to impose anybody’s religious beliefs–including my own–on nonbelievers. Furthermore, I am a prisoner of my own biography: I can’t help but view the American experience through the lens of a black man of mixed heritage, forever mindful of how generations of people who looked like me were subjugated and stigmatized, and the subtle and not so subtle ways that race and class continue to shape our lives.

But that is not all that I am. I also think my party can be smug, detached, and dogmatic at times. I believe in the free market, competition, and entrepreneurship, and think no small number of government programs don’t work as advertised. I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers. I think America has more often been a force for good than for ill in the world; I carry few illusions about our enemies, and revere the courage and competence of our military. I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or victimhood generally. I think much of what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by money alone, and that our values and spiritual life matter at least as much as our GDP.

Undoubtedly, some of these views will get me in trouble. I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them. Which perhaps indicates a second, more intimate theme to this book–namely, how I, or anybody in public office, can avoid the pitfalls of fame, the hunger to please, the fear of loss, and thereby retain that kernel of truth, that singular voice within each of us that reminds us of our deepest commitments.

Recently, one of the reporters covering Capitol Hill stopped me on the way to my office and mentioned that she had enjoyed reading my first book. “I wonder,” she said, “if you can be that interesting in the next one you write.” By which she meant, I wonder if you can be honest now that you are a U.S. senator.

I wonder, too, sometimes. I hope writing this book helps me answer the question.

____________________________________________

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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Book Excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:35:00 +0000

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society | Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Book Excerpt)

Book price (Amazon)

8th January, 1946
Mr. Sidney Stark, Publisher
Stephens & Stark Ltd.
21 St. James's Place
London S.W.1
England

Dear Sidney,
Susan Scott is a wonder. We sold over forty copies of the book, which was very pleasant, but much more thrilling from my standpoint was the food. Susan managed to procure ration coupons for icing sugar and real eggs for the meringue. If all her literary luncheons are going to achieve these heights, I won't mind touring about the country. Do you suppose that a lavish bonus could spur her on to butter? Let's try it—you may deduct the money from my royalties.

Now for my grim news. You asked me how work on my new book is progressing. Sidney, it isn't.

English Foibles seemed so promising at first. After all, one should be able to write reams about the Society to Protest the Glorification of the English Bunny. I unearthed a photograph of the Vermin Exterminators' Trade Union, marching down an Oxford street with placards screaming "Down with Beatrix Potter!" But what is there to write about after a caption? Nothing, that's what.

I no longer want to write this book—my head and my heart just aren't in it. Dear as Izzy Bickerstaff is—and was—to me, I don't want to write anything else under that name. I don't want to be considered a light-hearted journalist anymore. I do acknowledge that making readers laugh—or at least chuckle—during the war was no mean feat, but I don't want to do it anymore. I can't seem to dredge up any sense of proportion or balance these days, and God knows one cannot write humor without them.
In the meantime, I am very happyStephens & Stark is making money on Izzy Bickerstaff Goes to War. It relieves my conscience over the debacle of my Anne Bront biography.

My thanks for everything and love,
Juliet

P.S. I am reading the collected correspondence of Mrs. Montagu. Do you know what that dismal woman wrote to Jane Carlyle? "My dear little Jane, everybody is born with a vocation, and yours is to write charming little notes." I hope Jane spat on her.

From Sidney to Juliet
10th January, 1946
Miss Juliet Ashton
23 Glebe Place
Chelsea
London S.W. 3

Dear Juliet:
Congratulations! Susan Scott said you took to the audience at the luncheon like a drunkard to rum—and they to you—so please stop worrying about your tour next week. I haven't a doubt of your success. Having witnessed your electrifying performance of "The Shepherd Boy Sings in the Valley of Humiliation" eighteen years ago, I know you will have every listener coiled around your little finger within moments. A hint: perhaps in this case, you should refrain from throwing the book at the audience when you finish.

Susan is looking forward to ushering you through bookshops from Bath to Yorkshire. And of course, Sophie is agitating for an extension of the tour into Scotland. I've told her in my most infuriating older-brother manner that It Remains To Be Seen. She misses you terribly, I know, but Stephens & Stark must be impervious to such considerations.

I've just received Izzy's sales figures from London and the Home Counties—they are excellent. Again, congratulations!

Don't fret about English Foibles; better that your enthusiasm died now than after six months spent writing about bunnies. The crass commercial possibilities of the idea were attractive, but I agree that the topic would soon grow horribly fey. Another subject—one you'll like—will occur to you.

Dinner one evening before you go? Say when.

Love,
Sidney

P.S. You write charming little notes.

From Juliet to Sidney
11th January, 1946

Dear Sidney,

Yes, lovely—can it be somewhere on the river? I want oysters and champagne and roast beef, if obtainable; if not, a chicken will do. I am very happy that Izzy's sales are good. Are they good enough that I don't have to pack a bag and leave London?

Since you and S&S have turned me into a moderately successful author, dinner must be my treat.

Love,
Juliet

P.S. I did not throw "The Shepherd Boy Sings in the Valley of Humiliation" at the audience. I threw it at the elocution mistress. I meant to cast it at her feet, but I missed.

From Juliet to Sophie Strachan
12th January, 1946
Mrs. Alexander Strachan
Feochan Farm
by Oban Argyll

Dear Sophie,
Of course I'd adore to see you, but I am a soul-less, will-less automaton. I have been ordered by Sidney to Bath, Colchester, Leeds, and several other garden spots I can't recall at the moment, and I can't just slither off to Scotland instead. Sidney's brow would lower—his eyes would narrow—he would stalk. You know how nerve-racking it is when Sidney stalks.

I wish I could sneak away to your farm and have you coddle me. You'd let me put my feet on the sofa, wouldn't you? And then you'd tuck blankets around me and bring me tea? Would Alexander mind a permanent resident on his sofa? You've told me he is a patient man, but perhaps he would find it annoying.

Why am I so melancholy? I should be delighted at the prospect of reading Izzy to an entranced audience. You know how I love talking about books, and you know how I adore receiving compliments. I should be thrilled. But the truth is that I'm gloomy—gloomier than I ever was during the war. Everything is so broken, Sophie: the roads, the buildings, the people. Especially the people.

This is probably the aftereffect of a horrid dinner party I went to last night. The food was ghastly, but that was to be expected. It was the guests who unnerved me—they were the most demoralizing collection of individuals I've ever encountered. The talk was of bombs and starvation. Do you remember Sarah Morecroft? She was there, all bones and gooseflesh and bloody lipstick. Didn't she use to be pretty? Wasn't she mad for that horse-riding fellow who went up to Cambridge? He was nowhere in evidence; she's married to a doctor with grey skin who clicks his tongue before he speaks. And he was a figure of wild romance compared to my dinner partner, who just happened to be a single man, presumably the last one on earth—oh Lord, how miserably mean-spirited I sound!

I swear, Sophie, I think there's something wrong with me. Every man I meet is intolerable. Perhaps I should set my sights lower—not so low as the grey doctor who clicks, but a bit lower. I can't even blame it on the war—I was never very good at men, was I?

Do you suppose the St. Swithin's furnace-man was my one true love? Since I never spoke to him, it seems unlikely, but at least it was a passion unscathed by disappointment. And he had that beautiful black hair. After that, you remember, came the Year of Poets. Sidney's quite snarky about those poets, though I don't see why, since he introduced me to them. Then poor Adrian. Oh, there's no need to recite the dread rolls to you, but Sophie—what is the matter with me? Am I too particular? I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.

What a dreadful, complaining letter. You see? I've succeeded in making you feel relieved that I won't be stopping in Scotland. But then again, I may—my fate rests with Sidney.

Kiss Dominic for me and tell him I saw a rat the size of a terrier the other day.

Love to Alexander and even more to you,
Juliet

From Dawsey Adams, Guernsey, Channel Islands, to Juliet
12th January, 1946
Miss Juliet Ashton
81 Oakley Street
Chelsea
London S.W. 3

Dear Miss Ashton,
My name is Dawsey Adams, and I live on my farm in St. Martin's Parish on Guernsey. I know of you because I have an old book that once belonged to you—the Selected Essays of Elia, by an author whose name in real life was Charles Lamb. Your name and address were written inside the front cover.

I will speak plain—I love Charles Lamb. My own book says Selected, so I wondered if that meant he had written other things to choose from? These are the pieces I want to read, and though the Germans are gone now, there aren't any bookshops left on Guernsey.

I want to ask a kindness of you. Could you send me the name and address of a bookshop in London? I would like to order more of Charles Lamb's writings by post. I would also like to ask if anyone has ever written his life story, and if they have, could a copy be found for me? For all his bright and turning mind, I think Mr. Lamb must have had a great sadness in his life.

Charles Lamb made me laugh during the German Occupation, especially when he wrote about the roast pig. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society came into being because of a roast pig we had to keep secret from the German soldiers, so I feel a kinship to Mr. Lamb.

I am sorry to bother you, but I would be sorrier still not to know about him, as his writings have made me his friend.

Hoping not to trouble you,
Dawsey Adams

P.S. My friend Mrs. Maugery bought a pamphlet that once belonged to you, too. It is called Was There a Burning Bush? A Defense of Moses and the Ten Commandments. She liked your margin note, "Word of God or crowd control???" Did you ever decide which?

From Juliet to Dawsey
15th January, 1946
Mr. Dawsey Adams
Les Vauxlarens
La Bouree
St. Martin's, Guernsey

Dear Mr. Adams,
I no longer live on Oakley Street, but I'm so glad that your letter found me and that my book found you. It was a sad wrench to part with the Selected Essays of Elia. I had two copies and a dire need of shelf-room, but I felt like a traitor selling it. You have soothed my conscience.

I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

Because there is nothing I would rather do than rummage through bookshops, I went at once to Hastings & Sons upon receiving your letter. I have gone to them for years, always finding the one book I wanted—and then three more I hadn't known I wanted. I told Mr. Hastings you would like a good, clean copy (and not a rare edition) of More Essays of Elia. He will send it to you by separate post (invoice enclosed) and was delighted to know you are also a lover of Charles Lamb. He said the best biography of Lamb was by E. V. Lucas, and he would hunt out a copy for you, though it may take a while.

In the meantime, will you accept this small gift from me? It is his Selected Letters. I think it will tell you more about him than any biography ever could. E. V. Lucas sounds too stately to include my favorite passage from Lamb: "Buz, buz, buz, bum, bum, bum, wheeze, wheeze, wheeze, fen, fen, fen, tinky, tinky, tinky, cr'annch! I shall certainly come to be condemned at last. I have been drinking too much for two days running. I find my moral sense in the last stage of a consumption and my religion getting faint." You'll find that in the Letters (it's on page 244). They were the first Lamb I ever read, and I'm ashamed to say I only bought the book because I'd read elsewhere that a man named Lamb had visited his friend Leigh Hunt, in prison for libeling the Prince of Wales.

While there, Lamb helped Hunt paint the ceiling of his cell sky blue with white clouds. Next they painted a rose trellis up one wall. Then, I further discovered, Lamb offered money to help Hunt's family outside the prison—though he himself was as poor as a man could be. Lamb also taught Hunt's youngest daughter to say the Lord's Prayer backward. You naturally want to learn everything you can about a man like that.

That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive—all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.

The red stain on the cover that looks like blood—is blood. I got careless with my paper knife. The enclosed postcard is a reproduction of a painting of Lamb by his friend William Hazlitt.

If you have time to correspond with me, could you answer several questions? Three, in fact. Why did a roast pig dinner have to be kept a secret? How could a pig cause you to begin a literary society? And, most pressing of all, what is a potato peel pie—and why is it included in your society's name?

I have sub-let a flat at 23 Glebe Place, Chelsea, London S.W.3. My Oakley Street flat was bombed in 1945 and I still miss it. Oakley Street was wonderful—I could see the Thames out of three of my windows. I know that I am fortunate to have any place at all to live in London, but I much prefer whining to counting my blessings. I am glad you thought of me to do your Elia hunting.

Yours sincerely,
Juliet Ashton

P.S. I never could make up my mind about Moses—it still bothers me.

From Juliet to Sidney
18th January, 1946

Dear Sidney,
This isn't a letter: it's an apology. Please forgive my moaning about the teas and luncheons you set up for Izzy. Did I call you a tyrant? I take it all back—I love Stephens & Stark for sending me out of London.

Bath is a glorious town: lovely crescents of white, upstanding houses instead of London's black, gloomy buildings or—worse still—piles of rubble that were once buildings. It is bliss to breathe in clean, fresh air with no coal smoke and no dust. The weather is cold, but it isn't London's dank chill. Even the people on the street look different—upstanding, like their houses, not grey and hunched like Londoners.

Susan said the guests at Abbot's book tea enjoyed themselves immensely—and I know I did. I was able to un-stick my tongue from the roof of my mouth after the first two minutes and began to have quite a good time.

Susan and I are off tomorrow for bookshops in Colchester, Norwich, King's Lynn, Bradford, and Leeds.

Love and thanks,
Juliet

From Juliet to Sidney
21st January, 1946
Dear Sidney,

Night-time train travel is wonderful again! No standing in the corridors for hours, no being shunted off for a troop train to pass, and above all, no black-out curtains. All the windows we passed were lighted, and I could snoop once more. I missed it so terribly during the war. I felt as if we had all turned into moles scuttling along in our separate tunnels. I don't consider myself a real peeper—they go in for bedrooms, but it's families in sitting rooms or kitchens that thrill me. I can imagine their entire lives from a glimpse of bookshelves, or desks, or lit candles, or bright sofa cushions.

____________________________________________

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The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life | Alice Schroeder (Book Excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:26:00 +0000

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life | Alice Schroeder (Book Excerpt)

Book price (Amazon)

Chapter One

The Less Flattering Version

Omaha, June 2003

Warren Buffett rocks back in his chair, long legs crossed at the knee behind his father Howard’s plain wooden desk. His expensive Zegna suit jacket bunches around his shoulders like an untailored version bought off the rack. The jacket stays on all day, every day, no matter how casually the other fifteen employees at Berkshire Hathaway headquarters are dressed. His predictable white shirt sits low on the neck, its undersize collar bulging away from his tie, looking left over from his days as a young businessman, as if he had forgotten to check his neck size for the last forty years.

His hands lace behind his head through strands of whitening hair. One particularly large and messy finger-combed chunk takes off over his skull like a ski jump, lofting upward at the knoll of his right ear. His shaggy right eyebrow wanders toward it above the tortoiseshell glasses. At various times this eyebrow gives him a skeptical, knowing, or beguiling look. Right now he wears a subtle smile, which lends the wayward eyebrow a captivating air. Nonetheless, his pale-blue eyes are focused and intent.

He sits surrounded by icons and mementos of fifty years. In the hallways outside his office, Nebraska Cornhuskers football photographs, his paycheck from an appearance on a soap opera, the offer letter (never accepted) to buy a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management, and Coca-Cola memorabilia everywhere. On the coffee table inside the office, a classic Coca-Cola bottle. A baseball glove encased in Lucite. Over the sofa, a certificate that he completed Dale Carnegie’s public-speakingcourse in January 1952. The Wells Fargo stagecoach, westbound atop a bookcase. A Pulitzer Prize, won in 1973 by the Sun Newspapers of Omaha, which his investment partnership owned. Scattered about the room are books and newspapers. Photographs of his family and friends cover the credenza and a side table, and sit under the hutch beside his desk in place of a computer. A large portrait of his father hangs above Buffett’s head on the wall behind his desk. It faces every visitor who enters the room.

Although a late-spring Omaha morning beckons outside the windows, the brown wooden shutters are closed to block the view. The television beaming toward his desk is tuned to CNBC. The sound is muted, but the crawl at the bottom of the screen feeds him news all day long. Over the years, to his pleasure, the news has often been about him.

Only a few people, however, actually know him well. I have been acquainted with him for six years, originally as a financial analyst covering Berkshire Hathaway stock. Over time our relationship has turned friendly, and now I will get to know him better still. We are sitting in Warren’s office because he is not going to write a book. The unruly eyebrows punctuate his words as he says repeatedly, “You’ll do a better job than I would, Alice. I’m glad you’re writing this book, not me.” Why he would say that is something that will eventually become clear. In the meantime, we start with the matter closest to his heart.

“Where did it come from, Warren? Caring so much about making money?”

His eyes go distant for a few seconds, thoughts traveling inward: flip flip flip through the mental files. Warren begins to tell his story: “Balzac said that behind every great fortune lies a crime. [1] That’s not true at Berkshire.”

He leaps out of his chair to bring home the thought, crossing the room in a couple of strides. Landing on a mustardy-gold brocade armchair, he leans forward, more like a teenager bragging about his first romance than a seventy-two-year-old financier. How to interpret the story, who else to interview, what to write: The book is up to me. He talks at length about human nature and memory’s frailty, then says, “Whenever my version is different from somebody else’s, Alice, use the less flattering version.”

Among the many lessons, some of the best come simply from observing him. Here is the first: Humility disarms.

In the end, there won’t be too many reasons to choose the less flattering version–but when I do, human nature, not memory’s frailty, is usually why. One of those occasions happened at Sun Valley in 1999.

----------

Chapter Two

Sun Valley

Idaho, July 1999

Warren Buffett stepped out of his car and pulled his suitcase from the trunk. He walked through the chain-link gate onto the airport’s tarmac, where a gleaming white Gulfstream IV jet–the size of a regional commercial airliner and the largest private aircraft in the world in 1999–waited for him and his family. One of the pilots grabbed the suitcase from him to stow in the cargo hold. Every new pilot who flew with Buffett was shocked to see him carrying his own luggage from a car he drove himself. Now, as he climbed the boarding stairs, he said hello to the flight attendant–somebody new–and headed to a seat next to a window, which he would not glance out of at any time during the flight. His mood was buoyant; he had been anticipating this trip for weeks.

His son Peter and daughter-in-law Jennifer, his daughter Susan and her boyfriend, and two of his grandchildren all settled into their own café au lait leather club chairs set around the forty-five-foot-long cabin. They swiveled their seats away from the curved wall panels to give themselves more space as the flight attendant brought drinks from the galley, which was stocked with the family’s favorite snacks and beverages. A pile of magazines lay nearby on the sofa: Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, Fortune, Yachting, the Robb Report, the Atlantic Monthly, the Economist, Vogue, Yoga Journal. She brought Buffett an armload of newspapers instead, along with a basket of potato chips and a Cherry Coke that matched his red Nebraska sweater. He complimented her, chatted for a few minutes to ease her nervousness at flying for the first time with her boss, and told her that she could let the copilot know that they were ready to take off. Then he buried his head in a newspaper as the plane rolled down the runway and ascended to forty thousand feet. For the next two hours, six people hummed around him, watching videos, talking, and making phone calls, while the flight attendant set out linens and bud vases filled with orchids on the bird’s-eye maple dining tables before returning to the galley to prepare lunch. Buffett never moved. He sat reading, hidden behind his newspapers, as if he were alone in his study at home.

They were flying in a $30 million airborne palace called a “fractional” jet. As many as eight owners shared it, but it served as part of a fleet, so all the owners could fly at once if they wished. The pilots in the cockpit, the crew that maintained it, the schedulers who got it to the gate on six hours’ notice, and the flight attendant who served their lunch all worked for NetJets, which belonged to Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway.

Sometime later, the G-IV crossed the Snake River Plain and approached the Sawtooth Mountains, a vast Cretaceous upheaval of dark and ancient granite mounds baking in the summer sun. It sailed through the bright clear air into the Wood River Valley, descending to eight thousand feet, where it started to buck on the mountain wave of turbulence thrown into the sky by the brown foothills beneath. Buffett read on, unperturbed, as the plane rocked and his family jerked about in their seats. Brush dotted higher altitudes of a second ridge of hills and rows of pines began their march up the ridges between ravines on the leeward side. The family grinned with anticipation. As the aircraft descended through the narrowing slot between the rising mountain peaks ahead, the midday sun cast the plane’s lengthening shadow over the old mining town of Hailey, Idaho.

A few seconds later, the wheels touched down on the Friedman Memorial Airport runway. By the time the Buffetts had bounded down the stairs onto the tarmac, squinting in the July sunshine, two SUVs had driven through the gate and pulled up alongside the jet, driven by men and women from Hertz. They all wore the company’s gold-and-black shirts. Instead of Hertz, however, the logo said “Allen & Co.”

The grandchildren bounced on their heels as the pilots unloaded the luggage, tennis rackets, and Buffett’s red-and-white Coca-Cola golf bag into the SUVs. Then he and the others shook hands with the pilots, said good-bye to the flight attendant, and climbed into the SUVs. Bypassing Sun Valley Aviation– a pocket-size trailer at the runway’s southern end–they swung through the chain-link gate onto the road that led to the peaks beyond. About two minutes had elapsed since the plane’s wheels first touched the runway.

Right on schedule, eight minutes later, another jet followed theirs, headed to its own runway parking spot.

Throughout the golden afternoon, jet after jet cruised into Idaho from the south and east or swung around the peaks from the west and descended into Hailey: workhorse Cessna Citations; glamorous, close-quartered Learjets; speedy Hawkers; luxurious Falcons; but mostly the awe-inspiring G-IVs. As the afternoon waned, dozens of huge, gleaming white aircraft lined the runway like a shop window full of tycoons’ toys.

The Buffetts followed the trail blazed by earlier SUVs a few miles onward from the airport to the tiny town of Ketchum on the edge of the Sawtooth National Forest, near the turnoff to the Elkhorn Pass. A few miles later, they rounded Dollar Mountain, where a green oasis appeared, nestled among the brown slopes. Here amid the lacy pines and shimmering aspens lay Sun Valley, the mountains’ most fabled resort, where Ernest Hemingway began writing For Whom the Bell Tolls, where Olympic skiers and skaters had long made their second home.

The tide of families they were joining this Tuesday afternoon all had some connection to Allen & Co., a boutique investment bank that specialized in the media and communications industries. Allen & Co. had put together some of the biggest mergers in Hollywood, and for more than a decade had been hosting an annual series of discussions and seminars mingled with outdoor recreation at Sun Valley for its clients and friends. Herbert Allen, the firm’s CEO, invited only people he liked, or those with whom he was at least willing to do business.

Thus the conference was always filled with faces both famous and rich: Hollywood producers and stars like Candice Bergen, Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, and Sydney Pollack; entertainment moguls like Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, Robert Iger, and Michael Eisner; socially pedigreed journalists like Tom Brokaw, Diane Sawyer, and Charlie Rose; and technology titans like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Andy Grove. A pack of reporters lay in wait for them every year outside the Sun Valley Lodge.

The reporters had traveled a day earlier to the Newark, New Jersey, airport or some similar embarkation point to board a commercial flight to Salt Lake City, then raced to Concourse E’s bullpen to sit amid a crush of people waiting for flights to places like Casper, Wyoming, and Sioux City, Iowa, until it was time to cram themselves into a prop plane for the one-hour bronco ride to Sun Valley. On arrival their plane was directed to the opposite end of the airport next to the tennis-court-size terminal, where they witnessed a crew of tanned young Allen & Co. employees dressed in pastel “SV99” polo shirts and white shorts welcoming the handful of Allen & Co. guests who were arriving early on commercial flights. These were instantly recognizable among the other passengers: men in Western boots and Paul Stuart shirts with jeans, women wearing goatskin-suede jackets and marble-size turquoise beads. The Allen staff had memorized the newcomers’ faces from photographs supplied in advance. They hugged people they had gotten to know in years past as if they were old friends, whisked away all the guests’ bags, and led their charges off to the SUVs lined up steps away in the parking lot.

The reporters went to the rental-car desk, then drove to the Lodge, by now acutely conscious of their lowly status. For the next few days, many areas of Sun Valley would be marked as “private,” blocked from prying eyes by closed doors, omnipresent security, hanging flower baskets, and large potted plants. The reporters would lurk around the fringes, excluded from the interesting things going on inside, noses pressed against the bushes. [1] Ever since Disney’s Michael Eisner and Capital Cities/ABC’s Tom Murphy had dreamed up a deal to merge their companies at Sun Valley ’95 (the way the conference was often referred to–as if it had engulfed the entire resort, which, in a way, it had), the press coverage had grown until it took on the artificially giddy atmosphere of a business version of Cannes. The mergers that splintered off from Sun Valley, however, were only occasional calves from an iceberg. Sun Valley was about more than making deals, though the deals garnered most of the press. Every year the rumors sizzled that this company or that was working on a deal at the mysterious conclave in the Idaho mountains. Thus, as the SUVs rolled one by one into the porte cochere, the reporters peered through the front windows to see who was inside. When someone newsworthy arrived, they chased their prey into the lodge, brandishing cameras and microphones.

The press quickly recognized Warren Buffett as he stepped out of his SUV. “The DNA of the conference had him built into it,” said his friend Don Keough, chairman of Allen & Co. [2] Most of the press people liked Buffett, who went out of his way not to be disliked by anyone. He also intrigued them. His public image was that of a simple man, and he seemed genuine. Yet he lived a complicated life. He owned five homes but occupied only two of them. Somehow he had wound up having, in effect, two wives. He spoke in homely aphorisms with a kindly twinkle in his eye and had a notably loyal group of friends, yet along the way he had earned a reputation as a tough, even icy dealmaker. He seemed to shun publicity yet managed to attract more of it than almost any other businessman on earth. [3] He jetted around the country in a G-IV, often attended celebrity events, and had many famous friends, yet said that he preferred Omaha, hamburgers, and thrift. He spoke of his success as being based on a few simple investing ideas and tap-dancing to work with enthusiasm every day, but if that was so, why had nobody else been able to replicate it?

Buffett, as always, gave the photographers a willing wave and a grandfatherly smile as he walked by. They captured him on film, then began peering at the next car.

The Buffetts drove around to their French-country-style condominium, one of the coveted Wildflower group next to the pool and tennis courts, where Herbert Allen housed his VIPs. Inside, the usual loot awaited them: a pile of Allen & Co. SV99 logo jackets, baseball caps, zip fleeces, polo shirts–every year a different color–and a zippered notebook. Despite his fortune of more than $30 billion–enough to buy a thousand of those G-IVs parked out at the airport–Buffett liked few things more than getting a free golf shirt from a friend. He took the time to look carefully through this year’s swag. Of even more interest to him, however, was the personal note that Herbert Allen sent to each guest–and the perfectly organized conference notebook that explained what Sun Valley had in store for him this year.

Timed to the second, organized to the hilt, crisp as Herbert Allen’s French cuffs, Buffett’s schedule was laid out hour by hour, day by day. The notebook spelled out the conference speakers and topics–until now a closely guarded secret–and the luncheons and dinners that he would attend. Unlike the other guests, Buffett knew much of this in advance, but he still wanted to see what the notebook had to say.

Herbert Allen, the so-called “Lord of Sun Valley” and the conference’s quiet choreographer, set the tone of casual luxury that pervaded the event. People always cited him for high principles, brilliance, good advice, and generosity. “You’d like to die with the respect of somebody like Herbert Allen,” a guest gushed. Afraid of being disinvited to the conference, those who voiced any criticism rarely went beyond vague hints that Herbert was “unusual,” restless, impatient, and possessed of an oversize personality. Standing in the shadow of his tall, wiry frame, one had to strain to keep up with the words that crackled forth like machine-gun fire. He barked questions, then cut off respondents mid-sentence, lest they waste a second of his time. He specialized in saying the unsayable. “Ultimately Wall Street will be eliminated,” he once told a reporter, although he ran a Wall Street bank. He referred to his competitors as “hot-dog vendors." [4]

Allen kept his firm small, and his bankers staked their own money on their deals. This unconventional approach made the firm a partner rather than a mere servant to its clients, who were the elite of Hollywood and the media world. Thus, when he played host, his guests felt privileged, rather than like captives pitched by salesmen at every turn. Allen & Co. arranged a detailed social agenda every year built around each guest’s personal network of relationships– which the firm understood–and the new people that Allen’s majordomos felt each should meet. Unspoken hierarchies dictated the distances of the guests’ condominiums from the Inn (where meetings were held), which meals the guests were invited to attend, and with whom they would be seated.

Buffett’s friend Tom Murphy referred to this kind of event as “elephantbumping.” “Anytime a bunch of big shots get together,” says Buffett, “you can get people to come, because it reassures them if they’re at an elephant-bumping that they’re an elephant too." [5]

Sun Valley was always very reassuring, because unlike most elephant bumps, one could not buy one’s way in. The result was a sort of faux democracy of the elite. Part of the thrill of coming was to see who was not invited, and, more thrilling still, who was disinvited. Yet within their stratum, people did develop genuine relationships. Allen & Co. fostered conviviality through lavish entertainment, beginning on the first evening, when the guests donned Western gear, climbed into old-fashioned horse-drawn wagons, and followed cowboys up a winding trail past a natural stone spire onto Trail Creek Cabin meadow. There, Herbert Allen or one of his two sons greeted the guests as the sun began to set. Cowboys entertained the children with rope tricks near a large white tent bedecked with urns of scarlet petunias and blue sage, while the Sun Valley old guard reunited and welcomed new guests as they stood side by side in line, plate in hand, for a buffet of steaks and salmon. The Buffetts usually ended the evening sitting with friends around the bonfire beneath the star-dappled western sky.

The frolicking continued on Wednesday afternoon with an optional and very mild white-water paddle down the Salmon River. On this trip relationships blossomed, for Allen & Co. orchestrated who sat where on the bus to the embarkation point as well as on the rafts. The river guides steered through the mountain valley in silence, lest they interrupt conversations and disturb budding alliances. Spotters hired from the local population and ambulances lined the route in case someone tumbled into the freezing water. The guests were handed warm towels as soon as they put down their paddles and stepped out of the rafts, then served plates of barbecue.

Those not rafting could be found fly-fishing, horseback riding, shooting trap and skeet, mountain biking, playing bridge, learning to knit, studying nature photography, playing Frisbee with the ubiquitous canine conference guests, ice-skating on the outdoor rink, playing tennis on perfect clay courts, lounging at the pool, or golfing on immaculate greens, where they rode in carts stuffed full of Allen & Co. sunscreen, snacks, and bug spray. [6] All the entertainment flowed quietly, seamlessly, whatever was needed appearing unasked, supplied by a seemingly inexhaustible staff of almost-invisible yet ever-present Allenites in SV99 polo shirts.

It was the babysitters, however, a hundred-some good-looking, mostly blond, deeply tanned teenagers in these same polo shirts and matching Allen & Co. backpacks, who were Herbert Allen’s secret weapon. As the parents and grandparents played, the sitters saw to it that each Joshua and Brittany was accompanied by his or her own playmate for whatever activity they chose–a tennis clinic, soccer, bicycling, kickball, a wagon ride, a horse show, ice-skating, relay races, rafting, fishing, an art project, or pizza and ice cream. Each babysitter was personally selected to ensure that every child always had such a wonderful time that they would beg to come back year after year–while at the same time delighting their parents with occasional glimpses of the very, very attractive young person who was allowing them to spend days of guilt-free time with other adults.

Buffett had always been one of the most appreciative of Allen’s beneficiaries. He loved Sun Valley as a family vacation, for left to his own devices at a mountain resort with his grandchildren, he would have been at a complete loss for what to do. He had no interest in outdoor activities other than golf. He never went skeet shooting or mountain biking, thought of water as “a prison of sorts,” and would rather go around handcuffed than ride on a raft. Instead, he slipped comfortably into the center of the elephant herd. He played a little golf and bridge, including a standing golf game with Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, for a dollar bet, and a bridge game with Meredith Brokaw, and otherwise spent his time socializing with people like Playboy CEO Christie Hefner and computer hardware CEO Michael Dell.

Often, however, he disappeared for long periods into his condo overlooking the golf course, where he read and watched business news in the living room seated next to an enormous stone fireplace. [7] He barely noticed the view of pine-covered Baldy, the mountain outside his window, or the bank of blossoms like a Persian palace rug: pastel lupines and sapphire delphiniums towering over poppies and Indian paintbrush, crisp blue salvia and veronica nestled among the stonecrop and hens-and-chicks. “The scenery is there, I guess,” he said. He came for the warm atmosphere Herbert Allen had created. [8] He liked being with his closest friends: Kay Graham and her son Don; Bill and Melinda Gates; Mickie and Don Keough; Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg; Andy Grove and his wife, Eva.

But above all, for Buffett, Sun Valley was about reuniting with his whole family during one of the rare times most of the family spent together. “He likes us all being in the same house,” says his daughter, Susie Buffett Jr. She lived in Omaha; her younger brother, Howie, and his wife, Devon–missing this year–lived in Decatur, Illinois; while their younger sibling, Peter, and his wife, Jennifer, lived in Milwaukee.

Buffett’s wife of forty-seven years, Susan, who lived apart from him, had flown in to meet them from her home in San Francisco. And Astrid Menks, his companion for more than twenty years, remained at their home in Omaha.

On Friday night, Warren donned a Hawaiian shirt and escorted his wife to the traditional Pool Party on the tennis courts next to their condo. Most of the guests knew and liked Susie. Always the star of the Pool Party, she sang old-fashioned standards by the light of tiki torches in front of the illuminated Olympic pool.

This year, as the cocktails and camaraderie flowed, the babble of a barely comprehensible new language–B2B, B2C, banner ads, bandwidth, broadband– competed with the sounds of Al Oehrle’s band. All week long a vague sense of unease had drifted through the lunches and dinners and cocktails like a silent fog amid the handshakes, kisses, and hugs. A new group of recently minted technology executives, filled with an unusual swagger, introduced themselves to people who had never heard of them a year before. [9] Some displayed a hubris that was at odds with Sun Valley’s usual atmosphere, where a determined informality reigned and Herbert Allen enforced a sort of unwritten rule against pomposity, on penalty of banishment.

The cloud of arrogance hung heaviest over the presentations that were the conference’s centerpiece. Heads of companies, high government officials, and other people of note gave talks unlike those they delivered anywhere else, because hardly a word of what was said was ever whispered beyond the flower boxes hanging by the doors of the Sun Valley Inn. Reporters were banned, and the celebrity journalists and the media barons who owned the television networks and newspapers sat in the audience but honored a code of silence. Thus freed to perform only for their peers, the speakers said important and often true things that could never be articulated in front of the press because they were too blunt, too nuanced, too alarming, too easily satirized, or too likely to be misinterpreted. The workaday journalists lurked outside, hoping for crumbs that were rarely thrown.

This year the new moguls of the Internet had been strutting, showing off their soaring expectations, trumpeting their latest mergers and looking to raise cash from the money managers sitting in the audience. The money people, who stewarded other people’s pensions and savings, together commanded so much wealth that it could hardly be comprehended: more than a trillion dollars. [10] With a trillion dollars in 1999, you could pay the income tax of every single individual in the United States. You could give a brand-new Bentley automobile to every household in more than nine states. [11] You could buy every single piece of real estate in Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles–combined. Some of the companies making presentations needed that money, and they wanted this audience to give it to them.

Early in the week, Tom Brokaw’s panel, called “The Internet and Our Lives,” had drum-majored a procession of presentations about how the Internet would reshape the communications business. Priceline’s Jay Walker took the audience through a dizzying vision of the Internet that compared the information superhighway to the advent of the railroad in 1869. One after another, executives laid out the glittering prospects for their companies, filling the room with the intoxicating vapor of a future unlimited by storage space and geography, so slick and visionary that while some were convinced that a whole new world was unfolding, others were reminded of snake-oil salesmen. The folks who ran technology companies saw themselves as Promethean geniuses bringing fire to lesser mortals. Other businesses that grubbed in the ashes to make the dull necessities of life–auto parts, lawn furniture–were now of interest mostly for how much technology they could buy. Some Internet stocks traded at infinite multiples of their nonexistent earnings, while “real companies” that made real things had declined in value. As technology stocks overtook the “old economy,” the Dow Jones Industrial Average [32] had burst through the once-distant 10,000-point barrier only four months before, doubling in less than three and a half years.

Many of the recently enriched congregated between speeches at a cordoned-off dining terrace by the Duck Pond, where a pair of captive swans paddled around a pool. There, any guest–but not a reporter–could edge through the masses of people in khaki pants and cashmere cable sweaters to ask a question of Bill Gates or Andy Grove. Meanwhile, the journalists chased after the Internet moguls as they moved between the Inn and their condos, amplifying the atmosphere of inflated self-importance that permeated Sun Valley this year.

Some of the new Internet czars spent Friday afternoon lobbying Herbert Allen to get them into celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz’s Saturday afternoon shoot of the Media All-Star Team for Vanity Fair. They felt they had been invited to Sun Valley because they were the people of the moment, and they had trouble believing that Leibovitz had made her own choices about who to photograph. Why, for example, would she include Buffett? His role in media had come mostly secondhand–through board memberships, a large network of personal influence, and a history of media investments large and small. Besides, he was old media. They found it hard to believe that his face in a photograph still sold magazines.

These would-be all-stars felt slighted because they knew perfectly well that the balance in media had shifted toward the Internet. That was so even though Herbert Allen himself thought the “new paradigm” for valuing technology and media stocks–based on clicks and eyeballs and projections of far-off growth rather than a company’s ability to earn cold hard cash–was bunk. “New paradigm,” he sniffed. “It’s like new sex. There just isn’t any such thing." [12]

The next morning, Buffett, emblem of the old paradigm, rose early, for he would be the closing speaker of the year. Invariably, he turned down requests to speak at conferences sponsored by other companies, but when Herbert Allen asked him to speak at Sun Valley, he always said yes. [13] The Saturday morning closing talk was the keynote event of the conference, so instead of heading straight to the golf course or grabbing a fishing rod, almost everyone went to the breakfast buffet at the Sun Valley Inn, then settled into a seat. Today Buffett would be talking about the stock market.

In private, he had been critical of the gunslinging, promoter-driven market that had sent technology stocks galloping toward delirious heights all year. The stock of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, languished in their dust, and his rigid rule of not buying technology stocks seemed outmoded. But the criticism had no influence on how he invested, and to date, the only statement he had made in public was that he never made market predictions. So his decision to get up at the podium in Sun Valley and do just that was unprecedented. Perhaps it was the times. Buffett had a firm conviction and an overwhelming urge to preach. [14]

He had spent weeks preparing for this speech. He understood that the market was not just people trading stocks as though they were chips in a casino. The chips represented businesses. Buffett thought about the total value of the chips. What were they worth? Next he reviewed history, pulling from an exhaustive mental file. This was not the first time that world-changing new technologies had come along and shaken up the stock market. Business history was replete with new technologies–railroads, telegraph, telephone, automobiles, airplanes, television: all revolutionary ways to connect things faster–but how many had made investors rich? He was about to explain.

After the breakfast buffet, Clarke Keough walked to the podium. Buffett had known the Keough family for many years; they had been neighbors back in Omaha. It was through Clarke’s father, Don, that Buffett had made the connections that led him to Sun Valley. Don Keough, now chairman of Allen & Co. and former president of Coca-Cola, had met Herbert Allen when he bought Columbia Pictures from Allen & Co. for Coca-Cola in 1982. Keough and his boss, Coca-Cola’s CEO, Roberto Goizueta, had been so impressed by Herbert Allen’s unsalesmanlike approach to selling that they had convinced him to join their board.

Keough, a Sioux City cattleman’s son and former altar boy, had now technically retired from Coca-Cola but he still lived and breathed the Real Thing, so powerful he was sometimes called the company’s shadow chief executive. [15]

When the Keoughs were his neighbors in Omaha in the 1950s, Warren had asked Don how he was going to pay for his kids’ college and suggested that he invest $10,000 in Buffett’s partnership. But Don was putting six kids through parochial school on $200 a week as a Butter-Nut coffee salesman. “We didn’t have the money,” his son Clarke now told the audience. “This is part of my family’s past that we will never forget.”

Buffett joined Clarke at the podium, wearing his favorite Nebraska red sweater over a plaid shirt. He finished the story. [16]

“The Keoughs were wonderful neighbors,” he said. “It’s true that occasionally Don would mention that, unlike me, he had a job, but the relationship was terrific.

One time my wife, Susie, went over and did the proverbial Midwestern bit of asking to borrow a cup of sugar, and Don’s wife, Mickie, gave her a whole sack. When I heard about that, I decided to go over to the Keoughs’ that night myself. I said to Don, ‘Why don’t you give me twenty-five thousand dollars for the partnership to invest?’ And the Keough family stiffened a little bit at that point, and I was rejected.

“I came back sometime later and asked for the ten thousand dollars Clarke referred to and got a similar result. But I wasn’t proud. So I returned at a later time and asked for five thousand dollars. And at that point, I got rejected again.

“So one night, in the summer of 1962, I started heading over to the Keough house. I don’t know whether I would have dropped it to twenty-five hundred dollars or not, but by the time I got to the Keough household, the whole place was dark, silent. There wasn’t a thing to see. But I knew what was going on. I knew that Don and Mickie were hiding upstairs, so I didn’t leave.

“I rang that doorbell. I knocked. Nothing happened. But Don and Mickie were upstairs, and it was pitch-black.

“Too dark to read, and too early to go to sleep. And I remember that day as if it were yesterday. That was June twenty-first, 1962.

“Clarke, when were you born?”

“March twenty-first, 1963.”

“It’s little things like that that history turns on. So you should be glad they didn’t give me the ten thousand dollars.”

Having charmed the audience with this little piece of give and take, Buffett turned to the matter at hand. “Now, I’m going to attempt to multitask today. Herb told me to include a few slides. ‘Show you’re with it,’ he said. When Herb says something, it’s practically an order in the Buffett household.” Speeding past exactly what comprised “the Buffett household”–for Buffett thought of his household as being like any other family’s–he launched into a joke about Allen. The secretary to the President of the U.S. rushed into the Oval Office, apologizing for accidentally scheduling two meetings at once. The President had to choose between seeing the Pope and seeing Herbert Allen. Buffett paused for effect. “ ‘Send in the Pope,’ said the President. ‘At least I only have to kiss his ring.’

“To all you fellow ring-kissers, I would like to talk today about the stock market,” he said. “I will be talking about pricing stocks, but I will not be talking about predicting their course of action next month or next year. Valuing is not the same as predicting.

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine. In the long run, it’s a weighing machine.

“Weight counts eventually. But votes count in the short term. And it’s a very undemocratic way of voting. Unfortunately, they have no literacy tests in terms of voting qualifications, as you’ve all learned.”

Buffett clicked a button, which illuminated a PowerPoint slide on a huge screen to his right. [17] Bill Gates, sitting in the audience, caught his breath for a second, until the notoriously fumble-fingered Buffett managed to get the first slide up. [18]

DOW JONES
INDUSTRIAL AVERAGE

December 31, 1964 — 874.12
December 31, 1981 — 875.00

He walked over to the screen and started explaining.

“During these seventeen years, the size of the economy grew fivefold. The sales of the Fortune five hundred companies grew more than fivefold. [33] Yet, during these seventeen years, the stock market went exactly nowhere.”

He backed up a step or two. “What you’re doing when you invest is deferring consumption and laying money out now to get more money back at a later time. And there are really only two questions. One is how much you’re going to get back, and the other is when.

“Now, Aesop was not much of a finance major, because he said something like, ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’ But he doesn’t say when.” Interest rates–the cost of borrowing–Buffett explained, are the price of “when.” They are to finance as gravity is to physics. As interest rates vary, the value of all financial assets–houses, stocks, bonds–changes, as if the price of birds had fluctuated. “And that’s why sometimes a bird in the hand is better than two birds in the bush and sometimes two in the bush are better than one in the hand.”

In his flat, breathy twang, the words coming so fast that they sometimes ran over one another, Buffett related Aesop to the great bull market of the 1990s, which he described as baloney. Profits had grown much less than in that previous period, but birds in the bush were expensive because interest rates were low.

Fewer people wanted cash–the bird in the hand–at such low rates. So investors were paying unheard-of prices for those birds in the bush. Casually, Buffett referred to this as the “greed factor.”

The audience, full of technology gurus who were changing the world while getting rich off the great bull market, sat silent. They were perched atop portfolios that were jam-packed with stocks trading at extravagant valuations. They felt terrific about that. It was a new paradigm, this dawning of the Internet age. Their attitude was that Buffett had no right to call them greedy. Warren–who’d hoarded his money for years and given very little away, who was so cheap his license plate said “Thrifty,” who spent most of his time thinking about how to make money, who had blown the technology boom and missed the boat–was spitting in their champagne.

Buffett continued. There were only three ways the stock market could keep rising at ten percent or more a year. One was if interest rates fell and remained below historic levels. The second was if the share of the economy that went to investors, as opposed to employees and government and other things, rose above its already historically high level. [19] Or, he said, the economy could start growing faster than normal. [20] He called it “wishful thinking” to use optimistic assumptions like these.

Some people, he said, were not thinking that the whole market would flourish. They just believed they could pick the winners from the rest. Swinging his arms like an orchestra conductor, he succeeded in putting up another slide while explaining that, although innovation might lift the world out of poverty, people who invest in innovation historically have not been glad afterward.

“This is half of a page which comes from a list seventy pages long of all the auto companies in the United States.” He waved the complete list in the air. “There were two thousand auto companies: the most important invention, probably, of the first half of the twentieth century. It had an enormous impact on people’s lives. If you had seen at the time of the first cars how this country would develop in connection with autos, you would have said, ‘This is the place I must be.’ But of the two thousand companies, as of a few years ago, only three car companies survived. [21] And, at one time or another, all three were selling for less than book value, which is the amount of money that had been put into the companies and left there. So autos had an enormous impact on America, but in the opposite direction on investors.”

He put down the list to shove his hand in his pocket. “Now, sometimes it’s much easier to figure out the losers. There was, I think, one obvious decision back then. And of course, the thing you should have been doing was shorting horses.” [34] Click. A slide about horses popped up.

U.S. HORSE POPULATION

1900 – 17 million
1998 – 5 million

“Frankly, I’m kind of disappointed that the Buffett family was not shorting horses throughout this entire period. There are always losers.”

Members of the audience chuckled, albeit faintly. Their companies might be losing money, but in their hearts beat a conviction that they were winners, supernovas blazing at the cusp of a momentous shift in the heavens. Undoubtedly their names would grace the pages of history books someday.

Click. Another slide appeared.

“Now the other great invention of the first half of the century was the airplane. In this period from 1919 to 1939, there were about two hundred companies. Imagine if you could have seen the future of the airline industry back there at Kitty Hawk. You would have seen a world undreamed of. But assume you had the insight, and you saw all of these people wishing to fly and to visit their relatives or run away from their relatives or whatever you do in an airplane, and you decided this was the place to be.

“As of a couple of years ago, there had been zero money made from the aggregate of all stock investments in the airline industry in history.

“So I submit to you: I really like to think that if I had been down there at Kitty Hawk, I would have been farsighted enough and public-spirited enough to have shot Orville down. I owed it to future capitalists.” [22]

Another light chuckle. Some were getting tired of these musty old examples. But out of respect, they let Buffett get on with it.

Now he was talking about their businesses. “It’s wonderful to promote new industries, because they are very promotable. It’s very hard to promote investment in a mundane product. It’s much easier to promote an esoteric product, even particularly one with losses, because there’s no quantitative guideline.” This was goring the audience directly, where it hurt. “But people will keep coming back to invest, you know. It reminds me a little of that story of the oil prospector who died and went to heaven. And St. Peter said, ‘Well, I checked you out, and you meet all of the qualifications. But there’s one problem.’ He said, ‘We have some tough zoning laws up here, and we keep all of the oil prospectors over in that pen. And as you can see, it is absolutely chock-full. There is no room for you.’

“And the prospector said, ‘Do you mind if I just say four words?’

“St. Peter said, ‘No harm in that.’

“So the prospector cupped his hands and yells out, ‘Oil discovered in hell!’

“And of course, the lock comes off the cage and all of the oil prospectors start heading right straight down.

“St. Peter said, ‘That’s a pretty slick trick. So,’ he says, ‘go on in, make yourself at home. All the room in the world.’

“The prospector paused for a minute, then said, ‘No, I think I’ll go along with the rest of the boys. There might be some truth to that rumor after all.’ [23]

“Well, that’s the way people feel with stocks. It’s very easy to believe that there’s some truth to that rumor after all.”

This got a mild laugh for a half second, which choked off as soon as the audience caught on to Buffett’s point, which was that, like the prospectors, they might be mindless enough to follow rumors and drill for oil in hell.

He closed by returning to the proverbial bird in the bush. There was no new paradigm, he said. Ultimately, the value of the stock market could only reflect the output of the economy.

He put up a slide to illustrate how, for several years, the market’s valuation had outstripped the economy’s growth by an enormous degree. This meant, Buffett said, that the next seventeen years might not look much better than that long stretch from 1964 to 1981 when the Dow had gone exactly nowhere– that is, unless the market plummeted. “If I had to pick the most probable return over that period,” he said, “it would probably be six percent.” [24] Yet a recent PaineWebber-Gallup poll had shown that investors expected stocks to return thirteen to twenty-two percent. [25]

He walked over to the screen. Waggling his bushy eyebrows, he gestured at the cartoon of a naked man and woman, taken from a legendary book on the stock market, Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? [26] “The man said to the woman, ‘There are certain things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin either by words or pictures.’ ” The audience took his point, which was that people who bought Internet stocks were about to get screwed. They sat in stony silence. Nobody laughed. Nobody chuckled or snickered or guffawed.

Seeming not to notice, Buffett moved back to the podium and told the audience about the goody bag he had brought for them from Berkshire Hathaway. “I just bought a company that sells fractional jets, NetJets,” he said. “I thought about giving each of you a quarter share of a Gulfstream IV. But when I went to the airport, I realized that’d be a step down for most of you.” At that, they laughed. So, he continued, he was giving each of them a jeweler’s loupe instead, which he said they should use to look at one another’s wives’ rings–the third wives’ especially.

That hit its mark. The audience laughed and applauded. Then they stopped. A resentful undercurrent was washing through the room. Sermonizing on the stock market’s excesses at Sun Valley in 1999 was like preaching chastity in a house of ill repute. The speech might rivet the audience to its chairs, but that didn’t mean that they would go forth and abstain.

Yet some thought they were hearing something important. “This is great; it’s the basic tutorial on the stock market, all in one lesson,” thought Gates. [27] The money managers, many of whom were hunting for cheaper stocks, found it comforting and even cathartic.

Buffett waved a book in the air. “This book was the intellectual underpinning of the 1929 stock-market mania. Edgar Lawrence Smith’s Common Stocks as Long Term Investments proved that stocks always yielded more than bonds. Smith identified five reasons, but the most novel of these was the fact that companies retained some of their earnings, which they could reinvest at the same rate of return. That was the plowback–a novel idea in 1924! But as my mentor, Ben Graham, always used to say, ‘You can get in way more trouble with a good idea than a bad idea,’ because you forget that the good idea has limits. Lord Keynes, in his preface to this book, said, ‘There is a danger of expecting the results of the future to be predicted from the past.’ ” [28]

He had worked his way back around to the same subject: that one couldn’t extrapolate from the past few years of accelerating stock prices. “Now, is there anyone I haven’t insulted?” [29] He paused. The question was rhetorical; nobody raised a hand.

“Thank you,” he said, and ended.

“Praise by name, criticize by category” was Buffett’s rule. The speech was meant to be provocative, not off-putting–for he cared a great deal what they thought of him. He had named no culprits, and he assumed they would get over his jokes. His argument was so powerful, almost unassailable, that he thought even those who didn’t like its message must acknowledge its force. And whatever unease the audience felt was not expressed aloud. He answered questions until the session ended. People began to stand, awarding him an ovation. No matter how they saw it–a masterful exposition on how to think about investing or the last roar of an old lion–the speech was by any standard a tour de force.

Buffett had stayed on top for forty-four years in a business where five years of good performance was a meaningful accomplishment. Still, as the record lengthened, the question always loomed: When would he falter? Would he declare an end to his reign, or would some seismic shift dethrone him? Now, it seemed to some, the time had come. It may have taken an invention as significant as the personal computer, coupled with a technology as pervasive as the Internet, to topple him, but he’d apparently overlooked information that was freely available and rejected the reality of the approaching millennium. As they muttered a polite “wonderful speech, Warren,” the young lions prowled, restive. And so, even in the ladies’ room at the break, sarcastic remarks were heard from the Silicon Valley wives. [30]

It was not just that Buffett was wrong, as some felt, but that even if he were eventually proved right–as others suspected he would be–his dour prediction of the investing future contrasted so sharply with Buffett’s own legendary past. For in his early glory days, stocks were cheap, and Buffett had scooped them up in handfuls, almost alone in noticing the golden apples lying untouched on the path. As the years passed, barriers grew up that made it harder to invest, to get an edge, to figure out what others didn’t know. So who was Buffett to preach at them, now that it was their turn? Who was he to say that they shouldn’t make money while they could off this wonderful market?

Throughout the rest of the lazy afternoon, Herbert Allen’s guests played one last game of tennis or golf or headed to the Duck Pond Lawn for a leisurely chat. Buffett spent his afternoon with old friends, who congratulated him on his triumph of a speech. He believed he had done a convincing job of swaying the audience. He had not given a speech full of such commanding evidence simply to go on the record.

Buffett, who wanted to be liked, had registered the standing ovation, not the mutterings. But the less flattering version was how many were not convinced. They believed that Buffett was rationalizing having missed the technology boom, and they were startled to see him make such specific predictions, prophecies that surely would turn out to be wrong. Beyond his earshot, the rumbling went on: “Good ol’ Warren. He missed the boat. How could he miss the tech boat? He’s a friend of Bill Gates." [31]

A few miles away at the River Run Lodge later that evening, with the guests at the closing dinner again arranged according to some invisible plan, Herbert Allen finally spoke, thanking various people and reflecting on the week. Then Susie Buffett took the stage beside the windows that overlooked the pebbly Big Wood River and once again sang the old standards. Later the guests returned to the Sun Valley Lodge terrace, where Olympic skaters axeled and arabesqued in the Saturday night ice show.

By the time fireworks exploded across the sky at evening’s end, Sun Valley ’99 had been declared another glorious five-day extravaganza. Yet what most people would remember was not the rafting or the skaters; it was Buffett’s talk about the stock market–the first forecast he had made in exactly thirty years.

Notes

Chapter 1

1. This quote, or its variation, “Behind every great fortune there is a great crime,” is cited endlessly without a specific source: for example, in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and in commentary on The Sopranos and on the Internet bubble. This pithier version condenses what Honoré de Balzac actually wrote in Father Goriot : “The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.”

Chapter 2

1. Herbert Allen made an exception for Ken Auletta, the first and only time a writer was allowed to attend and write about Sun Valley. “What I Did at Summer Camp” appeared in the New Yorker, July 26, 1999.
2. Interview with Don Keough. Other guests commented on Buffett’s role at Sun Valley as well.
3. Except Donald Trump, of course.
4. Dyan Machan, “Herbert Allen and His Merry Dealsters,” Forbes, July 1, 1996.
5. Elephant herds are matriarchal, and the females eject the males from the herd as soon as they are old enough to become dominant and aggressive. Then the solitary males approach herds of females, trying to mate. However, this isn’t exactly the way human elephant-bumping works.
6. Allen & Co. does not release the numbers, but the conference was said to cost around $10 million, more than $36,000 per invited family. Whether $5 or $15 million, that pays for a lot of flyfishing and golf over the course of a long weekend. Much of the money pays for the conference’s exhaustive security and logistics.
7. Buffett likes to tell a joke about having worked his way up to this exalted state: starting from a trailer, then the lodge, then a lesser condo, and so forth.
8. Herbert Allen’s son Herbert Jr. is usually referred to as “Herb.” However, Buffett refers to Herbert Sr. as “Herb” as a mark of their friendship, as do a few other people.
9. This portrait of Sun Valley and the impact of the dotcom billionaires is drawn from interviews with a number of people, including investment managers with no ax to grind. Most asked not to be named.
10. Allen & Co. and author estimate. This is the total assets under management of money managers who attend the conference, added to the personal fortunes of the guests. It represents their total economic power, not their consumption of wealth. By comparison, the capitalized value of the U.S. stock market at the time was about ten trillion dollars.
11. $340,000 per car in Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, both Dakotas, Vermont, Wyoming, and throw in Washington, D.C., to boot (since the District of Columbia is not a state).
12. Interview with Herbert Allen.
13. Buffett had spoken twice before at the Allen conference, in 1992 and 1995.
14. Buffett and Munger preached plenty to their shareholders at Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings, but this preaching to the choir doesn’t count.
15. Al Pagel, “Coca-Cola Turns to the Midlands for Leadership,” Omaha World-Herald, March 14, 1982.
16. Buffett’s remarks have been condensed for readability and length.
17. PowerPoint is the Microsoft program most often used to make the slide presentations so ubiquitous in corporate America.
18. Interview with Bill Gates.
19. Corporate profits at the time were more than 6% of GDP, compared to a long-term average of 4.88%. They have since risen to over 9%, far above historic standards.
20. Over long periods the U.S. economy has grown at a real rate of 3% and a nominal rate (after inflation) of 5%. Other than a postwar boom or recovery from severe recession, this level is rarely exceeded.
21. American Motors, smallest of the “Big Four” automakers, sold out to Chrysler in 1987.
22. Buffett is speaking metaphorically here. He admits to investing in things with wings a time or two, and not with good results.
23. Buffett first used this story in his 1985 chairman’s letter, citing Ben Graham, who told the story at his tenth lecture in the series Current Problems in Security Analysis at the New York Institute of Finance. The transcripts of these lectures, given between September 1946 and February 1947, can be found at http://www.wiley.com//legacy/products/subject/finance/bgraham/ or in Benjamin Graham and Janet Lowe, The Rediscovered Benjamin Graham: Selected Writings of the Wall Street Legend. New York: Wiley, 1999.
24. A condensed and edited version of this speech was published as “Mr. Buffett on the Stock Market,” Fortune, November 22, 1999.
25. PaineWebber-Gallup poll, July 1999.
26. Fred Schwed Jr., Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? or, A Good Hard Look at Wall Street. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1940.
27. Interview with Bill Gates.
28. Keynes wrote: “It is dangerous . . . to apply to the future inductive arguments based on past experience, unless one can distinguish the broad reasons why past experience was what it was,” in a book review for Smith’s Common Stocks as Long-Term Investments in Nation and Athenaeum in 1925 that later became the preface for Keynes, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. Vol.12, Economic Articles and Correspondence; Investment and Editorial. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
29. The comedian Mort Sahl used to end his routine by asking, “Is there anyone I haven’t offended?”
30. According to a source who overheard them and would rather remain nameless.
31. Interview with Don Keough.
32. A widely quoted U.S. stock measure.
33. Fortune magazine ranks the largest 500 companies based on sales and refers to them as the “Fortune 500.” This group of companies can be used as a rough proxy for U.S.-based business.
34. A short-seller borrows a stock and sells it, betting it will go down. If so, the “short-seller” profits from buying the stock back cheaper. He loses if the price rises. Short-selling is normally risky: you are betting against the long-term trend of the market.

____________________________________________

Older Post:

The Fire | Katherine Neville (Book Excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:02:00 +0000

The Fire | Katherine Neville (Book Excerpt)

Book price

Mesa Verde, Colorado Spring 2003

BEFORE I’D EVEN REACHED THE HOUSE, I KNEW SOMETHING was wrong. Very wrong. Even though on the surface, it all seemed picture-perfect.

The steep, sweeping curve of drive was blanketed deep in snow and lined with stately rows of towering Colorado blue spruce. Their snow-covered branches sparkled like rose quartz in the early morning light. Atop the hill, where the driveway flattened and spread out for parking, I pulled up my rented Land Rover in front of the lodge.

A lazy curl of blue-gray smoke rose from the moss rock chimney that formed the center of the building. The rich scent of pine smoke pervaded the air, which meant that–although I might not be warmly welcomed after all this time–at least I was expected.

To confirm this, I saw that my mother’s truck and jeep were both sitting side-by-side in the former horse stable at the edge of the parking area. I did find it odd, though, that the drive had not yet been plowed and there were no tracks. If I were expected, wouldn’t someone have cleared a path?

Now that I was here at last, in the only place I’d ever called home, you would think I could finally relax. But I couldn’t shake the sense that something was wrong.

Our family lodge had been built at about this same period in the prior century, by neighboring tribes, for my great-great-grandmother, a pioneering mountain lass. Constructed of hand-hewn rockand massive tree trunks chinked together, it was a huge log cabin that was shaped like an octagon–patterned after a hogan or sweat lodge–with many-paned windows facing in each cardinal direction, like a vast, architectural compass rose.

Each female descendant had lived here at one time or another, including my mother and me. . . . So what was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I ever come here without this sense of impending doom? I knew why, of course. And so did my mother. It was the thing we never spoke about. That’s why–when I had finally left home for good–my mother understood. She’d never insisted, like other mothers, that I come back for familial visits.

That is, not until today.

But then, my presence today hadn’t exactly been by invitation–it was more of a summons, a cryptic message that Mother had left on my home phone back in Washington D.C., when she knew very well I’d be off at work.

She was inviting me, she said, to her birthday party.

And that, of course, was a big part of the problem.

You see, my mother didn’t have birthdays. She’d never had birthdays.

I don’t mean she was concerned about her youth or appearance or wished to lie about her age–in fact, she looked more youthful each year.

But the strange truth was, she didn’t want anyone outside of our family even to know when her birthday was.

This secrecy, combined with a few other idiosyncracies–like the fact that she’d been in hermetic retreat up on top of this mountain for the past ten years, ever since . . . the thing we never spoke about–all went far to explain why there were those who may have perceived my mother, Catherine Velis, as a pretty eccentric duck.

The other part of my current problem was that I hadn’t been able to contact my mother for an explanation of her sudden revelation. She’d answered neither her phone nor the messages I’d left for her, here at the lodge. The alternate number she’d given me was clearly not right–it was missing some final digits.

With my first true inkling that something was really wrong, I’d taken a few days off work, bought a ticket, caught the last flight into Cortez, Colorado, in a blizzard, and rented the last four-wheel-drive vehicle in the airport lot.

Now I left the engine running as I sat here for a moment, letting my eyes graze over the breathtaking panoramic view. I hadn’t been home in more than four years. And each time I saw it afresh, it smacked the wind out of me.

I got out of the Rover in knee-deep snow and let the engine run.

From here on the mountaintop, fourteen thousand feet atop the Colorado Plateau, I could see the vast, billowing sea of three-mile-high mountain peaks, licked by the rosy morning light. On a clear day like this, I could see all the way to Mount Hesperus–which the Diné call Dibé Nitsaa: Black Mountain. One of the four sacred mountains created by First Man and First Woman.

Together with Sisnaajinii, white mountain (Mt. Blanca) in the east; Tsoodzil, blue mountain (Mt. Taylor) in the south, and Dook’o’osliid, yellow mountain (San Francisco Peaks) in the west, these four marked out the four corners of Dinétah–“Home of the Diné,” as the Navajo call themselves.

And they pointed as well to the high plateau I was standing on: Four Corners, the only place in the U.S. where four states–Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona–come together at right angles to form a cross.

Long before anyone ever thought to draw dotted lines on a map, this land was sacred to everyone who ever walked across it. If my mother was going to have her first-ever birthday party in the nearly twenty-two years I had known her, I could understand why she wanted to have it here. Regardless of how many years she had lived abroad or away, like all the women in our family she was part of this land.

For some reason, I knew that this connection with the land was somehow important. I knew that was why she had left a message strange enough to bring me to this spot.

And I knew something else, even if no one else did. I knew why she’d insisted I come here today. For today–April fourth–actually was my mother, Cat Velis’s, birthday.

I YANKED MY KEYS FROM THE IGNITION, GRABBED MY hastily packed duffle bag from the passenger seat, and plowed my way through the snow to our hundred-yearold front doors. These huge doors–two massive slabs of heart pine ten feet high, cut from ancient trees–were carved in bas-relief with two animals that seemed to be coming right at you. On the left, a golden eagle soared straight at your face. And from the right door burst an angry, upright female bear.

Despite the weathering of these carvings, they were pretty realistic–with glass eyes and real talons and claws. The early twentieth century had loved clever inventions, and this one was a doozy: If you pulled the bear’s paw, her jaw dropped open to reveal very real and frightening teeth. If you had the nerve to stick your hand into her mouth, you could twist the old-fashioned door chime, to alert those within.

I did both and waited. But even after a few moments, there was no response. Someone must have been inside–the chimney was active. And I knew from practice that stoking that fire pit took hours of tending and a Herculean effort to haul the wood. But with our hearth, which was capable of receiving a log of fifty caliper inches, a fire could have been laid days ago and still be burning.

My situation suddenly dawned on me: Having flown and driven a few thousand miles, I was standing in the snow on top of a mountain, trying to get access to my own house, desperate to know if anyone was inside. But I didn’t have a key.

My alternative–wading through acres of deep snow to peep through a window–seemed a poor idea. What would I do if I got wetter than I already was and still couldn’t get inside? What if I got inside and no one was there? There were no car tracks, ski tracks–even deer tracks–anywhere near the house.

So I did the only intelligent thing I could think of: I yanked my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Mother’s number, right here at the lodge. I was relieved when her message machine picked up after six rings, thinking she might have left some clue as to her whereabouts. But when her recorded voice came on, my heart sank: “I can be reached at . . . ” and she rattled off the same number she’d left on my D.C. phone–still missing the very last digits! I stood before the door, wet and cold, and fuming with confusion and frustration. Where did one go from here?

And then I remembered the game.

My favorite uncle, Slava, was famed throughout the world as the noted technocrat and author Ladislaus Nim. He’d been my best friend in my childhood, and though I hadn’t seen him in years, I felt he still was. Slava hated telephones. He vowed he would never have one in his house. Telephones, no–but Uncle Slava loved puzzles. He’d written several books on the topic. Through my childhood, if anyone received a message from Slava with a phone number where you could reach him, they always knew it wasn’t real–it must be some kind of encrypted message.

That was his delight.

It seemed unlikely, though, that my mother would use such a technique to communicate with me. For one thing, she wasn’t even good at deciphering such messages herself, and she couldn’t invent a puzzle if her life depended upon it.

More unlikely still, was the idea that Slava had created a message for her. As far as I knew, she hadn’t talked to my uncle in years, not since . . . the thing we never spoke about.

Yet I was sure, somehow, that this was a message.

I jumped back up into the Land Rover and switched on the engine. Decrypting puzzles to locate my mother sure beat all hell out of the alternatives: breaking into an abandoned house, or flying back to D.C. and never learning where she’d gone.

I called her machine again: I jotted down the phone number she’d left there, for all the world to hear. If she was in real trouble of some kind and trying to contact only me, I prayed that I would decipher it first. “I can be reached at 615-263-94 . . .” my mother’s recorded voice said.

My hand was shaking as I wrote out the numbers on a pad. I’d been provided eight numbers, rather than the ten numbers required to make a long-distance call. But as with Uncle Slava’s puzzles, I suspected this had nothing to do with phones. Here was a ten-digit code, of which the final two numbers were missing. Those two numbers themselves were my hidden message.

It took about ten minutes to figure it out–much longer than when I was running neck and neck with my crazy but wonderful uncle. If you divided the string of numbers into twos (hint: we were missing the last two digits), then you ended up with:

61-52-63-94

If you reversed those numbers, as I quickly saw, you ended up with two-digit square numbers, starting with the square of four. That is, the products of four, five, six, and seven when multiplied by themselves:

16-25-36-49

The next number in the sequence–and the missing number–was eight. So the missing last two digits of the series were the square of eight–that is, 64. In the real puzzle, of course, if you reversed the number, the answer would have been 46–but that wasn’t it.

I knew–and so did my mother–that 64 had another meaning for me. It was the number of squares on a chess board, with eight squares on each side.

In a nutshell: the thing we never talked about.

My distraught and intractable mother had refused ever to speak of the game of chess–even to permit it into her house. Since my father’s death (the other thing which we never talked about), I was forbidden ever to play the game–the only thing I’d ever known how to do, the only thing that helped me connect with the world around me. I might as well have been ordered, at the age of twelve, to become autistic.

My mother was opposed, in every way imaginable, to the idea of chess. Though I’d never been able to follow her logic–if indeed, it was logic–to my mother’s mind, chess would prove as dangerous to me as it had been to my father.

But now it seemed that by bringing me here on her birthday, by leaving that cryptic phrase with its encrypted message, she was welcoming me back to the game.

I TIMED IT: IT TOOK ME TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTES AND– since I’d left the engine running–a gallon of hog-guzzling gas, until I figured out how to get inside.

By now, anyone with half a brain would have guessed that those two-digit numbers were also combinations on a tumbler. But there were no locks on the house. Except there was one in the barn. On a lock box. The keys to the cars were kept there.

Would I be justified in saying “Duh”?

I switched off the Rover, plowed through the snow to the barn–and voilˆ!–a few tumblers dropped, the door to the lock box opened, and the door key appeared on a chain. Back at the house, it took a moment to recall that the key was inserted into the eagle’s left claw. Then the ancient doors groaned open a crack.

I scraped my boots on the rusty old fireplace grille we kept beside the entrance, shoved open the heavy front doors of the lodge, and slammed them shut behind me, causing a flurry of sparkling snowflakes to sift through the slanted morning light.

Within the dim interior of the mud room–an entry not much bigger than a confessional that kept the cold winds out–I kicked off my dripping boots and pulled on a pair of the fuzzy sheepskin aprŽs-ski booties that always sat there atop our frozen-food locker. When I’d hung up my parka, I opened the inner doors and stepped into the vast octagon, warmed by the giant log that was burning in the central hearth.

The octagon was a room perhaps one hundred feet across and thirty feet high. The fire pit took up the center, with a copper hood above it, hung with pots, rising to the moss stone chimney that pulled smoke upward to the sky. It was like an enormous teepee, except for the massive furniture scattered everywhere. My mother had always been averse to things one might actually sit on, but there was our ebony parlor grand piano, a sideboard, an assortment of desks, library tables, and revolving bookcases, and a billiard table that no one ever played on.

The upper floor was an octagonal balcony that overhung the room. There were small chambers there where people could sleep and even, sometimes, bathe.

Molten light poured through the lower windows at every side, glittering across the dust that draped the mahogany. From the ceiling skylights, rosy morning light sifted down, picking out the features of the colorfully painted heads of animal totems that were carved into the enormous beams supporting the balcony: bear, wolf, eagle, stag, buffalo, goat, cougar, ram. From their lofty perspective, nearly twenty feet high, they seemed to be floating timelessly in space. Everything seemed to be frozen in time. The only sound was the occasional cracking of fire from the log.

I walked around the perimeter, from one window to another, looking out at the snow: There was not one print to be seen, anywhere. I went up the spiral stairs to the balcony and checked each partitioned sleeping space. Not the slightest trace.

But how had she done it?

It appeared that my mother, Cat Velis, had vanished into thin air.

A jarring noise broke the silence: A telephone was ringing. I dashed down the steep, twisted stair and snatched the receiver from atop mother’s British campaign desk, just before the machine kicked in.

“Good Lord, what were you thinking, darling, choosing this god forsaken spot?” came the throaty voice, tinted with a bit of British accent, of a woman I knew only too well. “And for that matter, where on earth are you? We’ve been driving around this wilderness for what seems like days!” There was a pause, when she seemed to be speaking to someone else.

“Aunt Lily?” I said.

For it was surely she–my aunt, Lily Rad–my first chess mentor, and still one of the top women grandmasters in the game. Once, she’d been my mother’s best friend, though they hadn’t touched base in years. But what was she doing calling here now? And driving around–what on earth did that mean?

“Alexandra?” said Lily, confused. “I thought I was phoning your mother. What are you doing there? I thought you and she weren’t . . . on the best of terms.”

“We’ve reconciled,” I said hastily, not wanting to open that can of worms again. “But mother doesn’t seem to be here right now. And where exactly are you?”

“She’s not there?! You can’t be serious,” Lily said, fuming. “I’ve come all the way from London just to see her. She insisted! Something about a birthday party– God knows what that means. As for where I am right now, it is anyone’s guess! The satellite positioning system on my automobile keeps insisting that I’m in Purgatory–and I’m fully able to accept that judgment. We haven’t seen anything resembling civilization for hours.”

“You’re here? In Purgatory?” I said. “That’s a ski area; it’s less than an hour from here.” But it seemed crazy: The top female British-American chess champion came from London to Purgatory, Colorado, to attend a birthday party? “When did mother invite you?”

“It wasn’t so much an invitation as an edict,” Lily admitted. “She left the news on my cell phone, with no means to reply.” There was a pause, then Lily added, “I adore your mother–you know that, Alexandra. But I could never accept–”

“Neither could I,” I agreed. “Let’s drop it. So how did you know how to find her?”

“I didn’t! Good God, I still don’t! My car’s by the road someplace near a town that promotes itself as the next stop from Hell; there’s no edible food; my driver refuses to budge without being given a pint of vodka; my dog has disappeared into some . . . dune of snow, chasing some local rodent . . . and–I might add–I have had more trouble locating your mother by phone, this past week, than the Mossad had in tracking down Doctor Mengele in South America!”

She was hyperventillating. I considered it was time to intervene.

“It’s okay, Aunt Lily,” I told her. “We’ll get you here. As for food, you know I can whip something up. There’s always plenty of tinned food here and vodka for your driver–we can put him up, too, if you like. I’m too far away; it would take me too long to reach you. But if you’ll give me your satellite coordinates, I’ve a friend quite near there who can escort you here to the lodge.”

“Whomever he may be, bless him,” said my aunt Lily, not a person normally given to gratitude.

“It’s a she,” I said. “And her name is Key. She’ll be there in half an hour.” I took down Lily’s cell phone number and left a message at the airstrip to arrange for Key to pick her up. Key had been my best friend since childhood, but she’d be more than surprised to learn that I’d turned up here with no warning after all this time.

As I hung up the phone, I saw something across the room that I hadn’t noticed before. The top of Mother’s parlor grand piano–which was always raised, in case she got the urge to play–had been lowered flat. Atop was a piece of paper with a round, dark weight set upon it. I went over to look, and I felt the blood flooding into my brain.

The paperweight was overt enough: Propped on a metal key ring, to keep it from rolling, was the eight ball from our billiard table. The note itself was definitely from my mother; the code was so simplistic that no one else could have invented it. I saw how hard she’d worked to communicate cryptically, clearly with no help.

The note, in large print, read:

–Washington
–Luxury Car
–Virgin Isles
–Elvis Lives
–As Above So Below

The Elvis part was simple: My mother’s last name– Velis–was spelled two different ways to show it was from her. As if I needed that helpful clue. The rest was a lot more upsetting. And not because of the code.

Washington was, of course, “DC”; Luxury Car was “LX”; Virgin Isles was “VI.” Together, in Roman numerals (as they clearly were), their numeric value was:

D = 500
C = 100
L = 50
X = 10
V = 5
I = 1

Tally them up, and it’s 666–the Number of the Beast from the apocalypse.

I wasn’t worried about that Beast–we had plenty of those protecting us, scattered about the lodge as our animal totems. But for the first time, I was truly worried about my mother. Why had she used this hackneyed pseudomillennial ruse to grab my attention? What about the paperweight on top–another standard bunkum, “Behind the eight ball”–what on earth did that mean?

And what should one make of that old alchemical drivel, “As Above, So Below”?

Then, of course, I got it. I removed the eight ball and the bit of paper, setting them on the keyboard music stand, and I opened the piano. Before I could set the strut in place, I nearly dropped the lid.

There, inside the hollow body of the instrument, I saw something I thought I would never, ever see again inside my mother’s house as long as she lived.

A chess set.

Not just a chess set–but a chess set with a game set up, a game that was partially in play. There were pieces that had been removed from the field of play and set out upon the keyboard strings at either side–black or white.

The first thing I noticed was that the Black Queen was missing. I glanced over at the billiard table–good heavens, Mother, really!–and saw that the missing queen had been placed in the rack where the eight ball was supposed to be.

It was something like being drawn into a vortex. I began to feel the game in play. Good Lord, how I had missed this. How had I been able to leave it behind? It was nothing like a drug at all, as people sometimes said. It was an infusion of life.

I forgot the pieces that were off the board or behind the eight ball; I could reconstruct everything from the patterns that were still there. For several long moments, I forgot my missing mother, my aunt Lily lost in Purgatory with her chauffeur, her dog, and her car. I forgot what I’d sacrificed–what my life had become against my will. I forgot everything except the game before me–the game cached away like a dark secret, in the belly of that piano.

But as I reconstructed the moves, dawn arose through the high glass windows–just as a sobering realization dawned within my mind. I could not stop the horror of this game. How could I stop it, when I had replayed it over and over again in my mind, these past ten years?

For I knew this game quite well.

It was the game that had killed my father.

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The Story of Edgar Sawtelle | David Wroblewski (Book Excerpt)

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 04:29:00 +0000

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle | David Wroblewski (Book Excerpt)

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In the year 1919, Edgar’s grandfather, who was born with an extra share of whimsy, bought their land and all the buildings on it from a man he’d never met, a man named Schultz, who in his turn had walked away from a logging team half a decade earlier after seeing the chains on a fully loaded timber sled let go. Twenty tons of rolling maple buried a man where Schultz had stood the moment before. As he helped unpile logs to extract the wretched man’s remains, Schultz remembered a pretty parcel of land he’d spied north and west of Mellen. The morning he signed the papers he rode one of his ponies along the logging road to his new property and picked out a spot in a clearing below a hill and by nightfall a workable pole stable stood on that ground. The next day he fetched the other pony and filled a yoked cart with supplies and the three of them walked back to his crude homestead, Schultz on foot, reins in hand, and the ponies in harness behind as they drew the cart along and listened to the creak of the dry axle. For the first few months he and the ponies slept side by side in the pole shed and quite often in his dreams Schultz heard the snap when the chains on that load of maple broke.

He tried his best to make a living there as a dairy farmer. In the five years he worked the land, he cleared one twenty-five-acre field and drained another, and he used the lumber from the trees he cut to build an outhouse, a barn, and a house, in that order. So that he wouldn’t need to go outside to tote water, he dug his well in the hole that would become the basement of the house. He helped raise barns all the way from Tannery Town to Park Falls so there’d be plenty of help when his time came. And day and night he pulled stumps. That first year he raked and harrowed the south field a dozen times until even his ponies seemed tired of it. He stacked rocks at the edges of the fields in long humped piles and burned stumps in bonfires that could be seen all the way from Popcorn Corners—the closest town, if you called that a town—and even Mellen. He managed to build a small stone-and-concrete silo taller than the barn, but he never got around to capping it. He mixed milk and linseed oil and rust and blood and used the concoction to paint the barn and outhouse red. In the south field he planted hay, and in the west, corn, because the west field was wet and the corn would grow faster there. During his last summer on the farm he even hired two men from town. But when autumn was on the horizon, something happened—no one knew just what—and he took a meager early harvest, auctioned off his livestock and farm implements, and moved away, all in the space of a few weeks.

At the time, John Sawtelle was traveling up north with no thought or intention of buying a farm. In fact, he’d put his fishing tackle into the Kissel and told Mary, his wife, he was delivering a puppy to a man he’d met on his last trip. Which was true, as far as it went. What he didn’t mention was that he carried a spare collar in his pocket.

THAT SPRING THEIR DOG, Violet, who was good but wild-hearted, had dug a hole under the fence when she was in heat and run the streets with romance on her mind. They’d ended up chasing a litter of seven around the backyard. He could have given all the pups away to strangers, and he suspected he was going to have to, but the thing was, he liked having those pups around. Liked it in a primal, obsessive way. Violet was the first dog he’d ever owned, and the pups were the first pups he’d ever spent time with, and they yapped and chewed on his shoelaces and looked him in the eye. At night he found himself listening to records and sitting on the grass behind the house and teaching the pups odd little tricks they soon forgot while he and Mary talked. They were newlyweds, or almost. They sat there for hours and hours, and it was the finest time so far in his life. On those nights, he felt connected to something ancient and important that he couldn’t name.

But he didn’t like the idea of a stranger neglecting one of Vi’s pups. The best thing would be if he could place them all in the neighborhood so he could keep tabs on them, watch them grow up, even if from a distance. Surely there were half a dozen kids within an easy walk who wanted a dog. People might think it peculiar, but they wouldn’t mind if he asked to see the pups once in while.

Then he and a buddy had gone up to the Chequamegon, a long drive but worth it for the fishing. Plus, the Anti-Saloon League hadn’t yet penetrated the north woods, and wasn’t likely to, which was another thing he admired about the area. They’d stopped at The Hollow, in Mellen, and ordered a beer, and as they talked a man walked in followed by a dog, a big dog, gray and white with brown patches, some mix of husky and shepherd or something of that kind, a deep-chested beast with a regal bearing and a joyful, jaunty carriage. Every person in the bar seemed to know the dog, who trotted around greeting the patrons.

“That’s a fine looking animal,” John Sawtelle remarked, watching it work the crowd for peanuts and jerky. He offered to buy the dog’s owner a beer for the pleasure of an introduction.

“Name’s Captain,” the man said, flagging down the bartender to collect. With beer in hand he gave a quick whistle and the dog trotted over.

“Cappy, say hello to the man.”

Captain looked up. He lifted a paw to shake.

That he was a massive dog was the first thing that impressed Edgar’s grandfather. The second thing was less tangible—something about his eyes, the way the dog met his gaze. And, gripping Captain’s paw, John Sawtelle was visited by an idea. A vision. He’d spent so much time with pups lately he imagined Captain himself as a pup. Then he thought about Vi—who was the best dog he’d ever known until then—and about Captain and Vi combined into one dog, one pup, which was a crazy thought because he had far too many dogs on his hands already. He released Captain’s paw and the dog trotted off and he turned back to the bar and tried to put that vision out of his mind by asking where to find muskie. They weren’t hitting out on Clam Lake. And there were so many little lakes around.

The next morning, they drove back into town for breakfast. The diner was situated across the street from the Mellen town hall, a large squarish building with an unlikely looking cupola facing the road. In front stood a white, three-tiered drinking fountain with one bowl at person height, another lower, for horses, and a small dish near the ground whose purpose was not immediately clear. They were about to walk into the diner when a dog rounded the corner and trotted nonchalantly past. It was Captain. He was moving in a strangely light-footed way for such a solidly constructed dog, lifting and dropping his paws as if suspended by invisible strings and merely paddling along for steering. Edgar’s grandfather stopped in the diner’s doorway and watched. When Captain reached the front of the town hall, he veered to the fountain and lapped from the bowl nearest the ground.

“Come on,” his buddy said. “I’m starving.”

From along the alley beside the town hall came another dog, trailing a half-dozen pups behind. She and Captain performed an elaborate sashay, sniffing backsides and pressing noses into ruffs, while the pups bumbled about their feet. Captain bent to the little ones and shoved his nose under their bellies and one by one rolled them. Then he dashed down the street and turned and barked. The pups scrambled after him. In a few minutes, he’d coaxed them back to the fountain, spinning around in circles with the youngsters in hot pursuit while the mother dog stretched out on the lawn and watched, panting.

A woman in an apron walked out the door of the diner, squeezed past the two men, and looked on.

“That’s Captain and his lady,” she said. “They’ve been meeting there with the kids every morning for the last week. Ever since Violet’s babies got old enough to get around.”

“Whose babies?” Edgar’s grandfather said.

“Why, Violet’s.” The woman looked at him as if he were an idiot. “The mama dog. That dog right there.”

“I’ve got a dog named Violet,” he said. “And she has a litter about that age right this moment back home.”

“Well, what do you know,” the woman said, without the slightest note of interest.

“I mean, don’t you think that’s sort of a coincidence? That I’d run into a dog with my own dog’s name, and with a litter the same age?”

“I couldn’t say. Could be that sort of thing happens all the time.”

“Here’s a coincidence happens every morning,” his buddy interjected. “I wake up, I get hungry, I eat breakfast. Amazing.”

“You go ahead,” John Sawtelle said. “I’m not all that hungry anyway.” And with that, he stepped into the dusty street and crossed to the town hall.

WHEN HE FINALLY SAT DOWN for breakfast, the waitress appeared at their table with coffee. “If you’re so interested in those pups, Billy might sell you one,” she said. “He can’t hardly give ’em away, there’s so many dogs around here.”

“Who’s Billy?”

She turned and gestured in the direction of the sit-down counter. There, on one of the stools, sat Captain’s owner, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the Sentinel. Edgar’s grandfather invited the man to join them. When they were seated, he asked Billy if the pups were indeed his.

“Some of them,” Billy said. “Cappy got old Violet in a fix. I’ve got to find a place for half the litter. But what I really think I’ll do is keep ’em. Cap dotes on ’em, and ever since my Scout ran off last summer I’ve only had the one dog. He gets lonely.”

Edgar’s grandfather explained about his own litter, and about Vi, ex- panding on her qualities, and then he offered to trade a pup for a pup. He told Billy he could have the pick of Vi’s litter, and furthermore could pick which of Captain’s litter he’d trade for, though a male was preferable if it was all the same. Then he thought for a moment and revised his equest: he’d take the smartest pup Billy was willing to part with, and he didn’t care if it was male or female.

“Isn’t the idea to reduce the total number of dogs at your place?” his buddy said.

“I said I’d find the pups a home. That’s not exactly the same thing.”

“I don’t think Mary is going to see it that way. Just a guess there.”

Billy sipped his coffee and suggested that, while interested, he had reservations about traveling practically the length of Wisconsin just to pick out a pup. Their table was near the big front window and, from there, John Sawtelle could see Captain and his offspring rolling around on the grass. He watched them awhile, then turned to Billy and promised he’d pick out the best of Vi’s litter and drive it up—male or female, Billy’s choice. And if Billy didn’t like it, then no trade, and that was a fair deal.

Which was how John Sawtelle found himself driving to Mellen that September with a pup in a box and a fishing rod in the back seat, whistling “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” He’d already decided to name the new pup Gus if the name fit.

Billy and Captain took to Vi’s pup at once. The two men walked into Billy’s backyard to discuss the merits of each of the pups in Captain’s litter and after a while one came bumbling over and that decided things. John Sawtelle put the spare collar on the pup and they spent the afternoon parked by a lake, shore fishing. Gus ate bits of sunfish roasted on a stick and they slept there in front of a fire, tethered collar to belt by a length of string.

The next day, before heading home, Edgar’s grandfather thought he’d drive around a bit. The area was an interesting mix: the logged-off parts were ugly as sin, but the pretty parts were especially pretty. Like the falls. And some of the farm country to the west. Most especially, the hilly woods north of town. Besides, there were few things he liked better than steering the Kissel along those old back roads.

Late in the morning he found himself navigating along a heavily washboarded dirt road. The limbs of the trees meshed overhead. Left and right, thick underbrush obscured everything farther than twenty yards into the woods. When the road finally topped out at a clearing, he was presented with a view of the Penokee range rolling out to the west, and an unbroken emerald forest stretching to the north—all the way, it seemed, to the granite rim of Lake Superior. At the bottom of the hill stood a little white farmhouse and a gigantic red barn. A milk house was huddled up near the front of the barn. An untopped stone silo stood behind. By the road, a crudely lettered sign read, “For Sale.”

He pulled into the rutted drive. He parked and got out and peered through the living room windows. No one was home. The house looked barely finished inside. He stomped through the fields with Gus in his arms and when he got back he plunked himself down on the running board of the Kissel and watched the autumn clouds soar above.

John Sawtelle was a tremendous reader and letter writer. He especially loved newspapers from faraway cities. He’d recently happened across an article describing a man named Gregor Mendel—a Czechoslovakian monk, of all things—who had done some very interesting experiments with peas. Had demonstrated, for starters, that he could predict how the offspring of his plants would look—the colors of their flowers and so on. Mendelism, this was being called: the scientific study of heredity.

The article had dwelt upon the stupendous implications for the breeding of livestock. Edgar’s grandfather had been so fascinated that he’d gone to the library and located a book on Mendel and read it cover to cover. What he’d learned occupied his mind in odd moments. He thought back on the vision (if he could call it that) that had descended upon him as he shook Captain’s paw at The Hollow. It was one of those rare days when everything in a person’s life feels connected. He was twenty-five years old, but over the course of the last year his hair had turned steely gray. The same thing had happened to his grandfather, yet his father was edging up on seventy with a jet black mane. Nothing of the kind had happened to either of his elder brothers, though one was bald as an egg. Nowadays when John Sawtelle looked into the mirror he felt a little like a Mendelian pea himself.

He sat in the sun and watched Gus, thick-legged and clumsy, pin a grasshopper to the ground, mouth it, then shake his head with disgust and lick his chops. He’d begun smothering the hopper with the side of his neck when he suddenly noticed Edgar’s grandfather looking on, heels set in the dirt driveway, toes pointed skyward. The pup bucked in mock surprise, as if he’d never seen this man before. He scrambled forward to investigate, twice going tail over teakettle as he closed the gap.

It was, John Sawtelle thought, a lovely little place.

Explaining Gus to his wife was going to be the least of his worries.

IN FACT, IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for the fuss to die down. When he wanted to, Edgar’s grandfather could radiate a charming enthusiasm, one of the reasons Mary had been attracted to him in the first place. He could tell a good story about the way things were going to be. Besides, they had been living in her parents’ house for over a year and she was as eager as he to get out on her own. They completed the purchase of the land by mail and telegram.

This the boy Edgar would come to know because his parents kept their most important documents in an ammunition box at the back of their bedroom closet. The box was military gray, with a big clasp on the side, and it was metal, and therefore mouseproof. When they weren’t around he’d sneak it out and dig through the contents. Their birth certificates were in there, along with a marriage certificate and the deed and history of ownership of their land. But the telegram was what interested him most—a thick, yellowing sheet of paper with a Western Union legend across the top, its message consisting of just six words, glued to the backing in strips: OFFER ACCEPTED SEE ADAMSKI RE PAPERS. Adamski was Mr. Schultz’s lawyer; his signature appeared on several documents in the box. The glue holding those words to the telegram had dried over the years, and each time Edgar snuck it out, another word dropped off. The first to go was papers, then re, then see. Eventually Edgar stopped taking the telegram out at all, fearing that when accepted fluttered into his lap, his family’s claim to the land would be reversed.

He didn’t know what to do with the liberated words. It seemed wrong to throw them away, so he dropped them into the ammo box and hoped no one would notice.

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Book Excerpt: Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana | Anne Rice

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 03:37:00 +0000

Book Excerpt: Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana | Anne Rice

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Who is Christ the Lord?

Angels sang at his birth. Magi from the East brought gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They gave these gifts to him, and to his mother, Mary, and the man, Joseph, who claimed to be his father.

In the Temple, an old man gathered the babe in his arms. The old man said to the Lord, as he held the babe, “A light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel.”

My mother told me those stories.

That was years and years ago.

Is it possible that Christ the Lord is a carpenter in the town of Nazareth, a man past thirty years of age, and one of a family of carpenters, a family of men and women and children that fill ten rooms of an ancient house, and, that in this winter of no rain, of endless dust, of talk of trouble in Judea, Christ the Lord sleeps in a worn woolen robe, in a room with other men, beside a smoking brazier? Is it possible that in that room, asleep, he dreams?

Yes. I know it’s possible. I am Christ the Lord. I know. What I must know, I know. And what I must learn, I learn.

And in this skin, I live and sweat and breathe and groan. My shoulders ache. My eyes are dry from these dreadful rainless days–from the long walks to Sepphoris through the gray fields in which the seeds burn under the dim winter sun because the rains don’t come.

I am Christ the Lord. I know. Others know, but what they know they often forget. My mother hasn’t spoken a word on it for years. My foster father, Joseph, is old now, white haired, and given to dreaming.

I never forget.

And as I fall asleep, sometimes I’m afraid–because my dreams are notmy friends. My dreams are wild like bracken or sudden hot winds that sweep down into the parched valleys of Galilee.

But I do dream, as all men dream.

And so this night, beside the brazier, hands and feet cold, under my cloak, I dreamed.

I dreamed of a woman, close, a woman, mine, a woman who became a maiden who became in the easy tumult of dreams my Avigail.

I woke. I sat up in the dark. All the others lay sleeping still, with open mouths, and the coals in the brazier were ashes.

Go away, beloved girl. This is not for me to know, and Christ the Lord will not know what he does not want to know–or what he would know only by the shape of its absence.

She wouldn’t go–not this, the Avigail of dreams with hair tumbled down loose over my hands, as if the Lord had made her for me in the Garden of Eden.

No. Perhaps the Lord made dreams for such knowing– or so it seemed for Christ the Lord.

I climbed up off the mat, and quietly as I could, I put more coals into the brazier. My brothers and my nephews didn’t stir. James was off with his wife tonight in the room they shared. Little Judas and Little Joseph, fathers both, slept here tonight away from little ones huddled around their wives. And there lay the sons of James–Menachim, Isaac, and Shabi, tumbled together like puppies.

I stepped over one after another and took a clean robe from the chest, the wool smelling of the sunshine in which it had been dried. Everything in that chest was clean.

I took the robe and went out of the house. Blast of cold air in the empty courtyard. Crunch of broken leaves.

And for a moment in the hard pebbly street I stopped and looked up at the great sweep of glittering stars beyond the huddled rooftops.

Cloudless, this cold sky, and so filled with these infinitesimal lights, it seemed for a moment beautiful. My heart hurt. It seemed to be looking at me, enfolding me–a thing of kindness and witness–an immense web flung out by a single hand–rather than the vast inevitable hollow of the night above the tiny slumbering town that spilled like a hundred others down a slope between distant caves of bones and thirsting fields, and groves of olive trees.

I was alone.

Somewhere far down the hill, near the sometime marketplace, a man sang in a low drunken voice and a spark of light shone there, in the doorway of the sometime tavern. Echo of laughter.

But all the rest was quiet, without a torch to light the way.

The house of Avigail across from ours was shut up like any other. Inside, Avigail, my young kinswoman, slept with Silent Hannah, her sweet companion, and the two old women who served her and the bitter man, Shemayah, who was her father.

Nazareth did not always have a beauty. I’d seen generations of young maidens grow up, each fresh and lovely to behold as any flower in the wild. Fathers did not want their daughters to be beauties. But Nazareth had a beauty now, and it was Avigail. She’d refused two suitors of late, or so her father had done on her behalf, and there was a real question in the minds of the women of our house as to whether Avigail herself even knew the suitors had come calling.

It fell hard on me suddenly that I would sometime very soon be standing among the torchbearers at her wedding. Avigail was fifteen. She might have been married a year ago, but Shemayah kept her close. Shemayah was a rich man who had but one thing and one thing alone that made him happy, and that was his daughter, Avigail.

I walked up the hill and over the top. I knew every family behind every door. I knew the few strangers who came and went, one huddled in a courtyard outside the Rabbi’s house, and the other on the roof above where so many slept, even in winter. It was a town of day-to-day quiet, and seemingly not a single secret.

I walked down the other side of the slope until I came to the spring, the dust rising with every step I took, until I was coughing from it.

Dust and dust and dust.

Thank You, Father of the Universe, that this night is not so cold, no, not as cold as it might be, and send us the rain in Your own good time because You know that we need it.

Passing the synagogue, I could hear the spring before I saw it.

The spring was drying up, but for now it still ran, and it filled the two large rock-cut basins in the side of the hill, and spilled down in glistening streaks to the rocky bed it followed off and away into the distant forest.

The grass grew soft here and fragrant.

I knew that in less than an hour, the women would be coming, some to fill jugs, others, the poorer women, to wash their clothes here as best they could and beat them on the rocks.

But for now the spring was mine.

I stripped off the old robe and flung it down into the creek bed where the water soon filled it up and darkened it to where I couldn’t see it. I set the clean robe aside and approached the basin. With my cupped hands I bathed in the cold water, drenching my hair, my face, my chest, letting it run down my back and my legs. Yes, cast away the dreams like the old robe, and bathe them away. The dream woman has no name now and no voice, and what it was, that painful flicker when she laughed or reached out, well, that was gone, fading, like the night itself was fading, and gone too was the dust for this moment, the suffocating dust. There was only cold. There was only water.

I lay down on the far bank, opposite the synagogue. The birds had begun, and as always I’d missed the exact moment. It was a game I played, trying to hear the very first of the birds, the birds that knew the sun was coming when no one else did.

I could see the big thick palm trees around the synagogue emerging from the clump of shapeless shadows. Palms could grow in a drought. Palms didn’t care if the dust coated every branch. Palms went on as if made for all seasons.

The cold was outside me. I think my beating heart kept me warm. Then the first light seeped up over the distant bluff, and I picked up the fresh robe, and slipped it over my head. So good, this, this luxuriously clean cloth, this fresh-smelling cloth.

I lay back down again and my thoughts drifted. I felt the breeze before I heard the trees sigh with it.

Far up the hill was an old olive grove to which I loved to go at times to be alone. I thought of it now. How good it would be to lie in that soft bed of dead leaf and sleep the day away.

But there was no chance of it, not now with the tasks that had to be done, and with the village charged with new worries and new talk over a new Roman Governor come to Judea, who, until he settled in as every other Governor had done, would trouble the land from one end to the other.

The land. When I say the land, I mean Judea and Galilee as well. I mean the Holy Land, the Land of Israel, the Land of God. It was no matter that this man didn’t govern us. He governed Judea and the Holy City where the Temple stood, and so he might as well have been our King instead of Herod Antipas. They worked together, these two, Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, and this new man, Pontius Pilate, whom men feared, and beyond Jordan Herod Philip ruled and worked with them as well. And so the land had been carved up for a long, long time, and Antipas and Philip we knew, but Pontius Pilate we didn’t know and the reports were already evil.

What could a carpenter in Nazareth do about it? Nothing, but when there was no rain, when men were restive and angry and full of fear, when people spoke of the curse of Heaven on the withering grass, and Roman slights, and an anxious Emperor gone into exile in mourning for a son poisoned, when all the world seemed filled with the pressure to put one’s shoulder to it and push, well, in such a time, I didn’t go off to the grove of trees to sleep the day away.

It was getting light.

A figure broke from the dark shapes of the houses of the village, hurrying downhill towards me, one hand upraised.

My brother James. Older brother–son of Joseph and Joseph’s first wife who died before Joseph married my mother. No mistaking James, for his long hair, knotted at the back of his neck and streaming down his back, and his narrow anxious shoulders and the speed with which he came, James the Nazirite, James, the captain of our band of workers, James, who now in Joseph’s old age was head of the family.

He stopped at the far side of the little spring, mostly a broad swatch of dry stones now with the glittering ribbon of water gurgling through the center of it, and I could plainly make out his face as he stared at me.

He stepped on one big stone after another as he came across the creek to me. I had sat up and now I climbed to my feet, a common enough courtesy for my older brother.

“What are you doing out here?” he demanded. “What’s the matter with you? Why do you always worry me?”

I didn’t say anything.

He threw up his hands and looked to the trees and the fields for an explanation.

“When will you take a wife?” he asked. “No, don’t stop me, don’t put up your hand to me to silence me. I will not be silenced. When will you take a wife? Are you wed to this miserable creek, to this cold water? What will you do when it runs dry, and it will this year, you know.”

I laughed under my breath.

He went right on.

“There are two men as old as you in this town who’ve never married. One is crippled. The other’s an idiot, and everyone knows this.”

He was right. I was past thirty and not married.

“How many times have we talked about this, James?” I asked.

It was a beautiful thing to watch the growing light, to see the color coming to the palms clustered around the synagogue. I thought I heard shouting in the distance. But perhaps it was just the usual noises of a town tearing off its blankets.

“Tell me what’s really eating at you this morning?” I asked. I picked up the wet robe from the stream and spread it out on the grass where it would dry. “Every year you come to look more like your father,” I said, “but you never have your father’s face really. You never have his peace of mind.”

“I was born worried,” he confessed with a shrug. He was looking anxiously towards the village. “Do you hear that?”

“I hear something,” I said.

“This is the worst dry spell we’ve ever had,” he said, glancing up at the sky. “And cold as it is, it’s not cold enough. You know the cisterns are almost empty. The mikvah’s almost empty. And you, you are a constant worry to me, Yeshua, a constant worry. You come out here in the dark to the creek. You go off to that grove where no one dares to go. . . .”

“They’re wrong about that grove,” I said. “Those old stones mean nothing.” That was a village superstition, that something pagan and dreadful had once taken place in that grove. But it was the mere ruins of an old olive press in there, stones that went way back to the years before Nazareth had been Nazareth. “I tell you this once a year, don’t I? But I don’t want to worry you, James.”

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Book Excerpt: The Instinct to Heal | Dr. David Servan-Schreiber

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:39:00 +0000

Book Excerpt: The Instinct to Heal | Dr. David Servan-Schreiber

At the hospital where I practiced in Pittsburgh, other physicians often asked my advice before discharging a depressed elderly patient after bypass surgery or hospitalization for a fractured hip. Usually, I was the last person they consulted. The colleagues preceding me had already prescribed a long list of medicines: antiarrhythmic, antihypertensive, anti-inflammatory, antacid. They expected me to carry the ball and add my own "anti" to the list - an antidepressant or anxiolytic (anti-anxiety medication).

Often, however, the cause of depression was clear. The old man or woman had been living alone for years, and was no longer going out very much because of frail health. No longer playing bingo with friends. No longer being visited by their children or grandchildren, who had left for California, Boston, or New York. These men and women were idling away the hours in front of television screens. Would these patients honestly feel like looking after themselves? Even if antidepressants could have done them good, would they have taken them every day? Probably no more than those other pills, already so hard to distinguish from each other and to take as prescribed.

I really did not feel like adding my two-cents' worth to that confusion. Medicines are not "limbic regulators." So, summoning up all my courage, I would add my recommendation to the patient's medical record: "As far as her depression is concerned, the best thing for this patient would be to get a dog (a small one, obviously, to minimize the risk of a fall). If the patient considers that would be too much work, a cat would do, since it does not need to be taken out. And if a cat still seems too much, a bird or a fish. Finally, if the patient still refuses, then a houseplant."

At the beginning of this campaign, I received slightly irritated calls from the residents in orthopedic or cardiovascular surgery: "We asked you to recommend an antidepressant, not a zoo. What are we going to write on the discharge prescription? There aren't any household pets at the pharmacy."

However I answered, my explanations seemed convincing only to myself. My colleagues invariably ended up prescribing an antidepressant themselves, mumbling about how useless psychiatrists really were. They were undoubtedly convinced that they were defending the cause of modern scientific medicine against the ever-threatening, obscuring specter of "old-wives' remedies."

I soon realized that my approach was not working and that I was doing damage to my reputation as chief of the psychiatry division of the hospital. Instead of backing down, I prepared a document summing up various scientific studies on the question. From that point on, I attached the document to my recommendations in the patient's record.

I hoped to inform my colleagues of certain remarkable results with which they didn't seem to be familiar, such as one study from the American Journal of Cardiology about men and women whose infarctions had been accompanied by dangerous arrhythmias. The patients were tracked for more than a year, and those who had had a household pet faced only one-sixth the likelihood of dying during the year compared to all the others. Or yet another study, in which older people with household pets had much better psychological resistance to life's difficulties and went a lot less often to the doctor's. I also called their attention to a study from a group at Harvard showing that simply looking after a plant lowered the mortality rate of residents in a retirement home by 50 percent. I cited research on AIDS patients showing that cat or dog owners were better protected from depression. Finally, I referred to the font of all knowledge in my colleagues' eyes - the Journal of the American Medical Association. In 1996, it published a study about handicapped people who were virtually unable to move around unaided, very similar to the elderly patients I had been asked to see. This study showed that these people were happier and had greater self-esteem and a distinctly larger network of friends and relations if they had the companionship of a dog. In fact, another study found that the mere presence of an animal by your side makes you "more attractive" to others.

Even stockbrokers feel better if they have a household pet. With one of the most stressful professions imaginable, they are constant victims of market ups and downs over which they have no control, yet they still have to meet their sales targets. It is hardly surprising that a good many of them suffer early from high blood pressure. Karen Allen, Ph.D., from the University of Buffalo, conducted an unconventional study on a group of brokers in her city. Antihypertensive medications brought their blood pressure down below the initial alarming average of 160/100. However, in moments of stress, they still showed sudden peaks of blood pressure above those numbers.

To a randomly selected half of the stockbrokers, Dr. Allen allocated either a dog or a cat. (They had the opportunity to choose one or the other.) Six months later, the results spoke for themselves: Those who had received household pets were no longer reacting to stress in the same way. Not only had their blood pressure stabilized, even in periods of stress, but their performance on stress-inducing tasks - such as rapid mental arithmetic and public speaking - was significantly better. They made fewer mistakes, suggesting that they had more control over their emotions and thus over their concentration. In another study, Dr. Allen was able to show that older women (over 70) who lived alone but with pets had the same blood pressure as women of 25 with active social lives.

My "enclosure" turned out to be effective. After that, nobody ever made the slightest comment. I no longer heard interns snicker behind my back when I left one of my "zoological" recommendations in their patient's file. On the other hand, alas, I do not think that a single patient ever went home with a cat or without his or her prescription for Prozac. The idea that a loving relationship is in itself a physiological remedy, comparable to taking medication, rests on sound scientific ground - but it simply has not yet taken hold in the medical establishment.

____________________________________________

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Book Excerpt: Marked | P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

Books - Sample Excerpt: Marked (House of Night - 1) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:00:00 +0000

Books - Sample Excerpt: Marked (House of Night - 1) by P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast

Book: Marked

Just when I thought my day couldn’t get any worse I saw the dead guy standing next to my locker. Kayla was talking nonstop in her usual K-babble, and she didn’t even notice him. At first. Actually, now that I think about it, no one else noticed him until he spoke, which is, tragically, more evidence of my freakish inability to fit in.

“No, but Zoey, I swear to God Heath didn’t get that drunk after the game. You really shouldn’t be so hard on him.”

“Yeah,” I said absently. “Sure.” Then I coughed. Again. I felt like crap. I must be coming down with what Mr. Wise, my more-than-slightly-insane AP biology teacher, called the Teenage Plague.

If I died, would it get me out of my geometry test tomorrow? One could only hope.

“Zoey, please. Are you even listening? I think he only had like four—I dunno—maybe six beers, and maybe like three shots. But that’s totally beside the point. He probably wouldn’t even have had hardly any if your stupid parents hadn’t made you go home right after the game.”

We shared a long-suffering look, in total agreement about the latest injustice committed against me by my mom and the Step-Loser she’d married three really long years ago. Then, after barely half a breath break, K was back with the babbling.

“Plus, he was celebrating. I mean we beat Union!” K shook my shoulder and put her face close to mine. “Hello! Your boyfriend—”

“My almost-boyfriend,” I corrected her, trying my best not to cough on her.

“Whatever. Heath is ourquarterback so of course he’s going to celebrate. It’s been like a million years since Broken Arrow beat Union.”

“Sixteen.” I’m crappy at math, but K’s math impairment makes me look like a genius.

“Again, whatever. The point is, he was happy. You should give the boy a break.”

“The point is that he was wasted for like the fifth time this week. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to go out with a guy whose main focus in life has changed from trying to play college football to trying to chug a six-pack without puking. Not to mention the fact that he’s going to get fat from all that beer.” I had to pause to cough. I was feeling a little dizzy and forced myself to take slow, deep breaths when the coughing fit was over. Not that K-babble noticed.

“Eww! Heath, fat! Not a visual I want.”

I managed to ignore another urge to cough. “And kissing him is like sucking on alcohol-soaked feet.”

K scrunched up her face. “Okay, sick. Too bad he’s so hot.”

I rolled my eyes, not bothering to try to hide my annoyance at her typical shallowness.

“You’re so grumpy when you’re sick. Anyway, you have no idea how lost-puppy-like Heath looked after you ignored him at lunch. He couldn’t even . . .”

Then I saw him. The dead guy. Okay, I realized pretty quick that he wasn’t technically “dead.” He was undead. Or un-human. Whatever. Scientists said one thing, people said another, but the end result was the same. There was no mistaking what he was and even if I hadn’t felt the power and darkness that radiated from him, there was no frickin’ way I could miss his Mark, the sapphire-blue crescent moon on his forehead and the additional tattooing of entwining knot work that framed his equally blue eyes. He was a vampyre, and worse. He was a Tracker.

Well, crap! He was standing by my locker.

“Zoey, you’re so not listening to me!”

Then the vampyre spoke and his ceremonial words slicked across the space between us, dangerous and seductive, like blood mixed with melted chocolate.

“Zoey Montgomery! Night has chosen thee; thy death will be thy birth. Night calls to thee; hearken to Her sweet voice. Your destiny awaits you at the House of Night!”

He lifted one long, white finger and pointed at me. As my forehead exploded in pain Kayla opened her mouth and screamed.

When the bright splotches finally cleared from my eyes I looked up to see K’s colorless face staring down at me.

As usual, I said the first ridiculous thing that came to mind. “K, your eyes are popping out of your head like a fish.”

“He Marked you. Oh, Zoey! You have the outline of that thing on your forehead!” Then she pressed a shaking hand against her white lips, unsuccessfully trying to hold back a sob.

I sat up and coughed. I had a killer headache, and I rubbed at the spot right between my eyebrows. It stung as if a wasp had bit me and radiated pain down around my eyes, all the way across my cheekbones. I felt like I might puke.

“Zoey!” K was really crying now and had to speak between wet little hiccups. “Oh. My. God. That guy was a Tracker—a vampyre Tracker!”

“K.” I blinked hard, trying to clear the pain from my head. “Stop crying. You know I hate it when you cry.” I reached out to attempt a comforting pat on her shoulders.

And she automatically cringed, and moved away from me.

I couldn’t believe it. She actually cringed, like she was afraid of me. She must have seen the hurt in my eyes because she instantly started a string of breathless K-babble.

“Oh, God, Zoey! What are you going to do? You can’t go to that place. You can’t be one of those things. This can’t be happening! Who am I supposed to go to all of our football games with?”

I noticed that all during her tirade she didn’t once move any closer to me. I clamped down on the sick, hurt feeling inside that threatened to make me burst into tears. My eyes dried instantly. I was good at hiding tears. I should be; I’d had three years to get good at it.

“It’s okay. I’ll figure this out. It’s probably some . . . some bizarre mistake,” I lied.

I wasn’t really talking; I was just making words come out of my mouth. Still grimacing at the pain in my head, I stood up. Looking around I felt a small measure of relief that K and I were the only ones in the math hall, and then I had to choke back what I knew was hysterical laughter. Had I not been totally psycho about the geometry test from hell scheduled for tomorrow, and had run back to my locker to get my book so I could attempt to obsessively (and pointlessly) study tonight, the Tracker would have found me standing outside in front of the school with the majority of the 1,300 kids who went to Broken Arrow’s South Intermediate High School waiting for what my stupid Barbie-clone sister liked to smugly call “the big yellow limos.” I have a car, but standing around with the less fortunate who have to ride the buses is a time-honored tradition, not to mention an excellent way to check out who’s hitting on who. As it was, there was only one other kid in the math hall—a tall thin dork with messed-up teeth, which I could, unfortunately, see too much of because he was standing there with his mouth flapping open staring at me like I’d just given birth to a litter of flying pigs.

I coughed again, this time a really wet, disgusting cough. The dork made a squeaky little sound and scuttled down the hall to Mrs. Day’s room clutching a flat board to his bony chest. Guess the chess club had changed its meeting time to Mondays after school.

Do vampyres play chess? Were there vampyre dorks? How about Barbie-like vampyre cheerleaders? Did any vampyres play in the band? Were there vampyre Emos with their guy-wearing-girl’s-pants weirdness and those awful bangs that cover half their faces? Or were they all those freaky Goth kids who didn’t like to bathe much? Was I going to turn into a Goth kid? Or worse, an Emo? I didn’t particularly like wearing black, at least not exclusively, and I wasn’t feeling a sudden and unfortunate aversion to soap and water, nor did I have an obsessive desire to change my hairstyle and wear too much eyeliner.

All this whirled through my mind while I felt another little hysterical bubble of laughter try to escape from my throat, and was almost thankful when it came out as a cough instead.

“Zoey? Are you okay?” Kayla’s voice sounded too high, like someone was pinching her, and she’d taken another step away from me.

I sighed and felt my first sliver of anger. It wasn’t like I’d asked for this. K and I had been best friends since third grade, and now she was looking at me like I had turned into a monster.

“Kayla, it’s just me. The same me I was two seconds ago and two hours ago and two days ago.” I made a frustrated gesture toward my throbbing head. “This doesn’t change who I am!”

K’s eyes teared up again, but, thankfully, her cell phone started singing Madonna’s “Material Girl.” Automatically, she glanced at the caller ID. I could tell by her rabbit-in-the-headlights expression that it was her boyfriend, Jared.

“Go on,” I said in a flat, tired voice. “Ride home with him.”

Her look of relief was like a slap in my face.

“Call me later?” she threw over her shoulder as she beat a hasty retreat out the side door.

I watched her rush across the east lawn to the parking lot. I could see that she had her cell phone smashed to her ear and was talking in animated little bursts to Jared. I’m sure she was already telling him I was turning into a monster.

The problem, of course, was that turning into a monster was the brighter of my two choices. Choice Number 1: I turn into a vampyre, which equals a monster in just about any human’s mind. Choice Number 2: My body rejects the Change and I die. Forever.

So the good news is that I wouldn’t have to take the geometry test tomorrow.

The bad news was that I’d have to move into the House of Night, a private boarding school in Tulsa’s Midtown, known by all my friends as the Vampyre Finishing School, where I would spend the next four years going through bizarre and unnameable physical changes, as well as a total and permanent life shake-up. And that’s only if the whole process didn’t kill me.

Great. I didn’t want to do either. I just wanted to attempt to be normal, despite the burden of my mega-conservative parents, my troll-like younger brother, and my oh-so-perfect older sister. I wanted to pass geometry. I wanted to keep my grades up so that I could get accepted into the veterinary college at OSU and get out of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. But most of all, I wanted to fit in—at least at school. Home had become hopeless, so all I was left with were my friends and my life away from my family.

Now that was being taken away from me, too.

I rubbed my forehead and then messed with my hair until it semi-covered my eyes, and, with any luck, the mark that had appeared above them. Keeping my head ducked down, like I was fascinated with the goo that had somehow formed in my purse, I hurried toward the door that led to the student parking lot.

But I stopped short of going outside. Through the side-by-side windows in the institutional-looking doors I could see Heath. Girls flocked around him, posing and flipping their hair, while guys revved ridiculously big pickup trucks and tried (but mostly failed) to look cool. Doesn’t it figure that I would choose that to be attracted to? No, to be fair to myself I should remember that Heath used to be incredibly sweet, and even now he had his moments. Mostly when he bothered to be sober.

High-pitched girl giggles flitted to me from the parking lot. Great. Kathy Richter, the biggest ho in school, was pretending to smack Heath. Even from where I was standing it was obvious she thought hitting him was some kind of mating ritual. As usual, clueless Heath was just standing there grinning. Well, hell, my day just wasn’t going to get any better. And there sat my robin’s egg–blue 1966 VW Bug right in the middle of them. No. I couldn’t go out there. I couldn’t walk into the middle of all of them with this thing on my forehead. I’d never be able to be part of them again. I already knew too well what they’d do. I remembered the last kid a Tracker had Chosen at SIHS.

It happened at the beginning of the school year last year. The Tracker had come before school started and had targeted the kid as he was walking to his first hour. I didn’t see the Tracker, but I did see the kid afterward, for just a second, after he dropped his books and ran out of the building, his new Mark glowing on his pale forehead and tears washing down his too white cheeks. I never forgot how crowded the halls had been that morning, and how everyone had backed away from him like he had the plague as he rushed to escape out the front doors of the school. I had been one of those kids who had backed out of his way and stared, even though I’d felt really sorry for him. I just hadn’t wanted to be labeled as that-one-girl-who’s-friends-with-those-freaks. Sort of ironic now, isn’t it?

Instead of going to my car I headed for the nearest restroom, which was, thankfully, empty. There were three stalls—yes, I double-checked each for feet. On one wall were two sinks, over which hung two medium-sized mirrors. Across from the sinks the opposite wall was covered with a huge mirror that had a ledge below it for holding brushes and makeup and whatnot. I put my purse and my geometry book on the ledge, took a deep breath, and in one motion lifted my head and brushed back my hair.

It was like staring into the face of a familiar stranger. You know, that person you see in a crowd and swear you know, but you really don’t? Now she was me - the familiar stranger.

She had my eyes. They were the same hazel color that could never decide whether it wanted to be green or brown, but my eyes had never been that big and round. Or had they? She had my hair—long and straight and almost as dark as my grandma’s had been before hers had begun to turn silver. The stranger had my high cheekbones, long, strong nose, and wide mouth—more features from my grandma and her Cherokee ancestors. But my face had never been that pale. I’d always been olive-ish, much darker skinned than anyone else in my family. But maybe it wasn’t that my skin was suddenly so white . . . maybe it just looked pale in comparison to the dark blue outline of the crescent moon that was perfectly positioned in the middle of my forehead. Or maybe it was the horrid fluorescent lighting. I hoped it was the lighting.

I stared at the exotic-looking tattoo. Mixed with my strong Cherokee features it seemed to brand me with a mark of wildness . . . as if I belonged to ancient times when the world was bigger . . . more barbaric.

From this day on my life would never be the same. And for a moment—just an instant—I forgot about the horror of not belonging and felt a shocking burst of pleasure, while deep inside of me the blood of my grandmother’s people rejoiced.

* * *

+ Books - Sample Excerpt: Vamps by Nancy Collins

Books - Sample Excerpt: Vamps by Nancy Collins

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:06:00 +0000

Books - Sample Excerpt: Vamps by Nancy Collins

Book: Vamps

"You can drop me off here, Bruno," Lilith Todd said as she slid a Christian Louboutin heel onto her right foot.

The chauffeur quickly glanced over his shoulder at her as he piloted the vintage Rolls along Sixth Avenue. Bruno had been driving the Todd family to and from their various destinations since the days of cobblestones and coach-and-fours. Before that he'd been an officer in some European army.

He asked, "Are you sure, Miss Lilith? I can drive around the block one more time if you like."

Lilith checked to make sure her backless emerald-green Dior dress was zipped to the waist and glanced at her Patek Philippe watch. She was secretly pleased to see she had broken her personal best for changing from her school uniform into her party clothes in the back of the limo.

"I said now, Bruno."

"Yes, Miss Lilith."

As the driver stopped at the club in the section cordoned off for valet service, a young man dressed in the Belfry's standard-issue black designer pants, T-shirt, and dinner jacket hurried up to open the car door.

The Belfry was once an Episcopal church built by robber barons. More than 125 years later, the rich and famous still streamed through its ornate double doors; only now they came to minister to the flesh and drink the spirit.

Even though it was after two in the morning, there were plenty of wannabes hanging around, grumbling among themselves and eyeing the beefy bouncers guarding the entrance to the club. As Lilith extended a shapely leg onto the curb, the throng on the wrong side of the velvet ropes turned toward her, hungry for a glimpse,no matter how fleeting, of celebrity glamour.

With a toss of her head, Lilith moved up the stairs to the door, her long, honey-blond hair floating behind her like a bridal veil. One of the bridge-and-tunnel rats elbowed her companion in the ribs and pointed at Lilith as she breezed by.

"Look! There's someone famous! Isn't she . . . ?"

"I don't think so," her friend said, squinting like a jewel appraiser trying to tell the difference between a precious and semiprecious stone. "Too young. But I'm pretty sure she's someone famous. Or she's rich. Maybe both."

Lilith brought her hand to her mouth so that no one could see her laugh. Oh, she was rich and famous, all right. Just not in the way the wannabes were thinking.

As she reached the front door of the club, a new bouncer stretched out a bulging arm, blocking her way.

"You look the part, lady," he said, his eyes travel-ing up and down her svelte body. "But I need to see some ID."

Suddenly the valet ran up and tapped the bouncer on the shoulder. The huge mountain of man-muscle lowered his head so the valet could whisper into his ear. Lilith smiled as she saw the panic cross his face.

"Sorry, my mistake," the bouncer rumbled, exposing his throat in deference as he stepped out of her way. "Enjoy your night, Miss Todd."

Lilith crossed the glowing entryway and headed toward the massive main dance floor that filled what had once been the church sanctuary. She looked up at the DJ booth housed in the old pulpit and waved at the young man spinning trance at deafening levels.

She spotted Sebastian, the club's party promoter and appointed guardian of the VIP lounge on the second floor. He rushed toward her as fast as his custom-made blue leather shoes could carry him. As always, he was ecstatic to see her.

"Lilith! Baby! You look positively ravishing! It's so good to see you!" he shouted over the throbbing punch of the club's sound system.

"Hello, Seb," she yelled back. "Are the others here?"

"Jules just arrived. Go on up to the Loft; I have your favorite vintage warmed and ready for you."

"You're my favorite, Seb!" she said, kissing the air to either side of his thin cheeks.

"I'm sure you say that to all the devilishly hand-some club promoters who let you drink for free!" He winked.

As she entered the former choir loft that served as the VIP lounge for the club, Lilith spotted her promised, Jules de Laval, sprawled on one of the divans. He was dressed in an Armani polo T-shirt, the sleeves rolled up to give his biceps maximum reveal, chatting with Tanith Graves, one of her best friends. With his tousled, collar-length strawberry-blond hair, green eyes, perfectly straight nose, and strong masculine jaw, Jules looked like a movie star and loved to act the part.

Tanith and Lilith enjoyed passing for sisters, and since both girls had blond hair, oval faces, fake tans, and the same taste in high-end fashion, it was an easy con to pull off.

Sitting next to Tanith was her boyfriend, Sergei Savanovic, one of Jules's classmates from Ruthven's. With his dark, shoulder-length hair, black eyes, and penchant for turtleneck sweaters and leather jeans, Sergei could easily be mistaken for a Russian poet, but he was actually from Serbia, as he was quick to point out to anyone who bothered to ask.

Carmen Duivel and Oliver Drake were sprawled on the opposite sofa. Carmen's baby-doll face and coppery tresses perfectly complemented Oliver's dirty blond hair and bad-boyish good looks. Like most vampire couples, Oliver and Carmen were seeing each other simply because they knew they looked good together.

"There she is," Jules said, smiling as he got to his feet. "I was beginning to think Teacher kept you after school."

"Thank the Founders it's Thursday!" Lilith laughed as they embraced. "I don't see how clots can stand going to school five days out of the week!" She gave the room a cursory glance as she kissed him on the cheek. "Who's not here yet?"

"Melinda," Carmen replied.

"Big surprise there," Lilith said with a roll of her eyes. "She's always late." "Like you have room to talk! You're not exactly the most punctual," Jules chided.

* * *

+ Books - Sample Excerpt: X-Files Book of the Unexplained by Jane Goldman

Books - Sample Excerpt: X-Files Book of the Unexplained by Jane Goldman

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:37:00 +0000

Books - Sample Excerpt: X-Files Book of the Unexplained by Jane Goldman

Book: X-Files Book of the Unexplained

Unfinished Business

Shadows is The X-Files take on the classic camp-fire ghost-story format: a chain of weird events, followed by the revelation of a restless soul with a motive, making everything slip tenebrously into place.

According to co-writer Glen Morgan, who has reservations about the episode, its birth was utilitarian. 'The Network was saying: we want Mulder and Scully to help people and we want a ghost story. We took it upon ourselves to do this topic to get them off our back, which is a bad way to go about it.'

Morgan does not believe in ghosts, but finds poltergeist phenomena intriguing. 'That there could somehow be energy in the body that could cause you to throw something across the room without even knowing it, and then it's interpreted as being a ghost. . .' But Morgan resisted the temptation to make the heroine of Shadows, Lauren Kyte, responsible for the spooky goings-on. 'Romantically, in my mind, it was her boss,' he confirms. And so Shadows got its tormented soul: murder victim Howard Graves.

Of course, a ghost story's primary purpose is to chill us, spook us, gross us out, and the horrible-untimely-death element serves that end deliciously.

But it is interesting to consider it as a crossover with another timeless literary theme: triumph over adversity. In ghost stories, the adversity is death, and the triumph is that the wronged person refuses to allow the small matter of being six feet under to get in the way of pursuing their goal—whether it be attaining justice or just hanging out scaringthe pants off people. Even when we throw in lines about being 'condemned to walk this earth for eternity . . .', you can bet that, if only subconsciously, we still figure it as an option that beats oblivion hands down.

So here in Shadows we have that element too. Howard Graves is essentially the little guy, the disadvantaged hero (and you can't get much more disadvantaged than being dead) fighting against the towering evil—in this case corporate treachery and violent political terrorism. He watches over his beloved surrogate daughter, taking her tormentors in hand and meting out justice fairly and squarely: the crotchety domineering co-worker gets hot coffee in her lap; the parade of morally bereft hit-men get their larynxes crushed. He makes it known that his suicide was murder, exposes his company's terrorist liaison, and makes damn sure his duplicitous colleague pays. His unfinished business settled, he is, it is hinted, rewarded with eternal peace.

Just as most ghost stories are essentially chronicles of somebody's life after death, most real-life 'ghost' encounters get pegged with the same interpretation.

But, before we can even begin to ask whether the existence of ghosts proves that death is a doorway rather than a brick wall, we have to ask whether ghosts exist.

Henry Habberley Price, a respected Oxford don and former president of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) described the question 'Do you believe in ghosts?' as 'one of the most ambiguous which can be asked'. He felt that one should ask instead, 'Do you believe that people sometimes experience apparitions?' To which his own answer was a resounding affirmative. He asserts: 'No one who examines the evidence can come to any other conclusion. Instead of disputing the facts, we must try to explain them.'

John Spencer, along with his wife Anne Spencer, is one of Britain's leading researchers in this field. Together they work with the SPR and the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP), investigating claims, logging data and hoping for the breakthrough that might begin to bring explanations to light.

Spencer feels that, like UFO sightings, a high percentage of 'ghost' phenomena have a logical explanation. 'I think we can be pretty sure that there are some genuine mysteries out there,' he asserts. 'But right now, we have no answers, only questions.'

One major problem is that the data itself suggests many, many different phenomena which may not even be related to one another, and provides little insight into understanding any of them, let alone into understanding the mystery of death itself.

Even if we choose to study only the manifestations which seem to suggest a clear connection to the dead which means leaving out other 'ghost' phenomena such as apparitions of the living, ambiguous 'presences' and poltergeists (unseen forces which appear to manipulate their environment)—we are still left with a truck-load of categories.

Crisis Apparitions

Scully's experience at the start of the episode Beyond the Sea—seeing an image of her father moments before receiving news of his death—is a classic representation of a crisis apparition. The surprise appearance of a loved one or friend which later turns out to have roughly coincided with the moment of their death may well be the most common kind of 'ghost' experience reported. Because these apparitions are usually seen by a single Witness, it is impossible to discount the possibility that they are merely subjective experiences, perhaps triggered by some obscure function of the human mind, as opposed to being physically present. However, because these apparitions are so time-specific, it is quite impossible to study them in any kind of scientific way.

'Recordings' Ghosts

A ghost which is repeatedly seen by multiple witnesses in a specific place, and sometimes on specific occasions, obviously provides much better scope for investigation. It is likely, then, that this phenomenon will be the first to be fully understood.

A typical 'recordings ghost appears to have no relationship with its surroundings (it passes through solid matter, sits where there is nothing to sit on etc.). Its behaviour is repetitive and limited, and it appears to have no interest in those who witness it. These forms are generally attached to specific locations, and most 'historical' ghosts fall into this category. For instance, an apparition of President Lincoln has been seen at The White House on numerous occasions, by the most level-headed of witnesses, including Winston Churchill and John Kennedy.

* * *

+ Books - Sample Excerpt: New Moon by Stephenie Meyer

Books - Sample Excerpt: New Moon by Stephenie Meyer

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:42:00 +0000

Books - Sample Excerpt: New Moon by Stephenie Meyer

Book: New Moon

Party

I was ninety-nine point nine percent sure I was dreaming.

The reasons I was so certain were that, first, I was standing in a bright shaft of sunlight-the kind of blinding clear sun that never shone on my drizzly new hometown in Forks, Washington-and second, I was looking at my Grandma Marie. Gran had been dead for six years now, so that was solid evidence toward the dream theory.

Gran hadn't changed much; her face looked just the same as I remembered it. The skin was soft and withered, bent into a thousand tiny creases that clung gently to the bone underneath. Like a dried apricot, but with a puff of thick white hair standing out in a cloud around it.

Our mouths-hers a wizened pucker-spread into the same surprised half-smile at just the same time. Apparently, she hadn't been expecting to see me, either.

I was about to ask her a question; I had so many-What was she doing here in my dream? What had she been up to in the past six years? Was Pop okay, and had they found each other, wherever they were?-but she opened her mouth when I did, so I stopped to let her go first. She paused, too, and then we both smiled at the little awkwardness.

"Bella?"

It wasn't Gran who called my name, and we both turned to see the addition to our small reunion. Ididn't have to look to know who it was; this was a voice I would know anywhere-know, and respond to, whether I was awake or asleep ... or even dead, I'd bet. The voice I'd walk through fire for-or, less dramatically, slosh every day through the cold and endless rain for.

Edward.

Even though I was always thrilled to see him-conscious or otherwise-and even though I was almost positive that I was dreaming, I panicked as Edward walked toward us through the glaring sunlight.

I panicked because Gran didn't know that I was in love with a vampire-nobody knew that-so how was I supposed to explain the fact that the brilliant sunbeams were shattering off his skin into a thousand rainbow shards like he was made of crystal or diamond?

Well, Gran, you might have noticed that my boyfriend glitters. It's just something he does in the sun. Don't worry about it ...

What was he doing? The whole reason he lived in Forks, the rainiest place in the world, was so that he could be outside in the daytime without exposing his family's secret. Yet here he was, strolling gracefully toward me-with the most beautiful smile on his angel's face-as if I were the only one here.

In that second, I wished that I was not the one exception to his mysterious talent; I usually felt grateful that I was the only person whose thoughts he couldn't hear just as clearly as if they were spoken aloud. But now I wished he could hear me, too, so that he could hear the warning I was screaming in my head.

I shot a panicked glance back at Gran, and saw that it was too late. She was just turning to stare back at me, her eyes as alarmed as mine.

Edward-still smiling so beautifully that my heart felt like it was going to swell up and burst through my chest-put his arm around my shoulder and turned to face my grandmother.

Gran's expression surprised me. Instead of looking horrified, she was staring at me sheepishly, as if waiting for a scolding. And she was standing in such a strange position-one arm held awkwardly away from her body, stretched out and then curled around the air. Like she had her arm around someone I couldn't see, someone invisible ...

Only then, as I looked at the bigger picture, did I notice the huge gilt frame that enclosed my grandmother's form. Uncomprehending, I raised the hand that wasn't wrapped around Edward's waist and reached out to touch her. She mimicked the movement exactly, mirrored it. But where our fingers should have met, there was nothing but cold glass ...

With a dizzying jolt, my dream abruptly became a nightmare.

There was no Gran.

That was me. Me in a mirror. Me-ancient, creased, and withered.

Edward stood beside me, casting no reflection, excruciatingly lovely and forever seventeen.

He pressed his icy, perfect lips against my wasted cheek.

"Happy birthday," he whispered.

I woke with a start-my eyelids popping open wide-and gasped. Dull gray light, the familiar light of an overcast morning, took the place of the blinding sun in my dream.

Just a dream, I told myself. It was only a dream. I took a deep breath, and then jumped again when my alarm went off. The little calendar in the corner of the clock's display informed me that today was September thirteenth.

Only a dream, but prophetic enough in one way, at least. Today was my birthday. I was officially eighteen years old.

I'd been dreading this day for months.

All through the perfect summer-the happiest summer I had ever had, the happiest summer anyone anywhere had ever had, and the rainiest summer in the history of the Olympic Peninsula-this bleak date had lurked in ambush, waiting to spring.

And now that it had hit, it was even worse than I'd feared it would be. I could feel it-I was older. Every day I got older, but this was different, worse, quantifiable. I was eighteen.

And Edward never would be.

When I went to brush my teeth, I was almost surprised that the face in the mirror hadn't changed. I stared at myself, looking for some sign of impending wrinkles in my ivory skin. The only creases were the ones on my forehead, though, and I knew that if I could manage to relax, they would disappear. I couldn't. My eyebrows stayed lodged in a worried line over my anxious brown eyes.

It was just a dream, I reminded myself again. Just a dream ... but also my worst nightmare.

I skipped breakfast, in a hurry to get out of the house as quickly as possible. I wasn't entirely able to avoid my dad, and so I had to spend a few minutes acting cheerful. I honestly tried to be excited about the gifts I'd asked him not to get me, but every time I had to smile, it felt like I might start crying.

I struggled to get a grip on myself as I drove to school. The vision of Gran-I would not think of it as me-was hard to get out of my head. I couldn't feel anything but despair until I pulled into the familiar parking lot behind Forks High School and spotted Edward leaning motionlessly against his polished silver Volvo, like a marble tribute to some forgotten pagan god of beauty. The dream had not done him justice. And he was waiting there for me, just the same as every other day.

Despair momentarily vanished; wonder took its place. Even after half a year with him, I still couldn't believe that I deserved this degree of good fortune.

His sister Alice was standing by his side, waiting for me, too.

Of course Edward and Alice weren't really related (in Forks the story was that all the Cullen siblings were adopted by Dr. Carlisle Cullen and his wife, Esme, both plainly too young to have teenage children), but their skin was precisely the same pale shade, their eyes had the same strange golden tint, with the same deep, bruise-like shadows beneath them. Her face, like his, was also startlingly beautiful. To someone in the know-someone like me-these similarities marked them for what they were.

The sight of Alice waiting there-her tawny eyes brilliant with excitement, and a small silver-wrapped square in her hands-made me frown. I'd told Alice I didn't want anything, anything, not gifts or even attention, for my birthday. Obviously, my wishes were being ignored.

I slammed the door of my '53 Chevy truck-a shower of rust specks fluttered down to the wet blacktop-and walked slowly toward where they waited. Alice skipped forward to meet me, her pixie face glowing under her spiky black hair.

"Happy birthday, Bella!"

"Shh!" I hissed, glancing around the lot to make sure no one had heard her. The last thing I wanted was some kind of celebration of the black event.

She ignored me. "Do you want to open your present now or later?" she asked eagerly as we made our way to where Edward still waited.

"No presents," I protested in a mumble.

She finally seemed to process my mood. "Okay ... later, then. Did you like the scrapbook your mom sent you? And the camera from Charlie?"

I sighed. Of course she would know what my birthday presents were. Edward wasn't the only member of his family with unusual skills. Alice would have "seen" what my parents were planning as soon as they'd decided that themselves.

"Yeah. They're great."

"I think it's a nice idea. You're only a senior once. Might as well document the experience."

"How many times have you been a senior?"

"That's different."

We reached Edward then, and he held out his hand for mine. I took it eagerly, forgetting, for a moment, my glum mood. His skin was, as always, smooth, hard, and very cold. He gave my fingers a gentle squeeze. I looked into his liquid topaz eyes, and my heart gave a not-quite-so-gentle squeeze of its own. Hearing the stutter in my heartbeats, he smiled again.

He lifted his free hand and traced one cool fingertip around the outside of my lips as he spoke. "So, as discussed, I am not allowed to wish you a happy birthday, is that correct?"

"Yes. That is correct." I could never quite mimic the flow of his perfect, formal articulation. It was something that could only be picked up in an earlier century.

"Just checking." He ran his hand through his tousled bronze hair. "You might have changed your mind. Most people seem to enjoy things like birthdays and gifts."

Alice laughed, and the sound was all silver, a wind chime. "Of course you'll enjoy it. Everyone is supposed to be nice to you today and give you your way, Bella. What's the worst that could happen?" She meant it as a rhetorical question.

"Getting older," I answered anyway, and my voice was not as steady as I wanted it to be.

Beside me, Edward's smile tightened into a hard line.

"Eighteen isn't very old," Alice said. "Don't women usually wait till they're twenty-nine to get upset over birthdays?"

"It's older than Edward," I mumbled.

He sighed.

"Technically," she said, keeping her tone light. "Just by one little year, though."

And I supposed ... if I could be sure of the future I wanted, sure that I would get to spend forever with Edward, and Alice and the rest of the Cullens (preferably not as a wrinkled little old lady) ... then a year or two one direction or the other wouldn't matter to me so much. But Edward was dead set against any future that changed me. Any future that made me like him-that made me immortal, too.

An impasse, he called it.

I couldn't really see Edward's point, to be honest. What was so great about mortality? Being a vampire didn't look like such a terrible thing-not the way the Cullens did it, anyway.

"What time will you be at the house?" Alice continued, changing the subject. From her expression, she was up to exactly the kind of thing I'd been hoping to avoid.

"I didn't know I had plans to be there."

"Oh, be fair, Bella!" she complained. "You aren't going to ruin all our fun like that, are you?"

"I thought my birthday was about what I want."

"I'll get her from Charlie's right after school," Edward told her, ignoring me altogether.

"I have to work," I protested.

"You don't, actually," Alice told me smugly. "I already spoke to Mrs. Newton about it. She's trading you shifts. She said to tell you 'Happy Birthday.'"

"I-I still can't come over," I stammered, scrambling for an excuse. "I, well, I haven't watched Romeo and Juliet yet for English."

Alice snorted. "You have Romeo and Juliet memorized."

"But Mr. Berty said we needed to see it performed to fully appreciate it-that's how Shakespeare intended it to be presented."

Edward rolled his eyes.

"You've already seen the movie," Alice accused.

"But not the nineteen-sixties version. Mr. Berty said it was the best."

Finally, Alice lost the smug smile and glared at me. "This can be easy, or this can be hard, Bella, but one way or the other-"

Edward interrupted her threat. "Relax, Alice. If Bella wants to watch a movie, then she can. It's her birthday."

"So there," I added.

"I'll bring her over around seven," he continued. "That will give you more time to set up."

Alice's laughter chimed again. "Sounds good. See you tonight, Bella! It'll be fun, you'll see." She grinned-the wide smile exposed all her perfect, glistening teeth-then pecked me on the cheek and danced off toward her first class before I could respond.

"Edward, please-" I started to beg, but he pressed one cool finger to my lips.

"Let's discuss it later. We're going to be late for class."

No one bothered to stare at us as we took our usual seats in the back of the classroom (we had almost every class together now-it was amazing the favors Edward could get the female administrators to do for him). Edward and I had been together too long now to be an object of gossip any more. Even Mike Newton didn't bother to give me the glum stare that used to make me feel a little guilty. He smiled now instead, and I was glad he seemed to have accepted that we could only be friends. Mike had changed over the summer-his face had lost some of the roundness, making his cheekbones more prominent, and he was wearing his pale blond hair a new way; instead of bristly, it was longer and gelled into a carefully casual disarray. It was easy to see where his inspiration came from-but Edward's look wasn't something that could be achieved through imitation.

As the day progressed, I considered ways to get out of whatever was going down at the Cullen house tonight. It would be bad enough to have to celebrate when I was in the mood to mourn. But, worse than that, this was sure to involve attention and gifts.

Attention is never a good thing, as any other accident-prone klutz would agree. No one wants a spotlight when they're likely to fall on their face.

And I'd very pointedly asked-well, ordered really-that no one give me any presents this year. It looked like Charlie and Renee weren't the only ones who had decided to overlook that.

I'd never had much money, and that had never bothered me. Renee had raised me on a kindergarten teacher's salary. Charlie wasn't getting rich at his job, either-he was the police chief here in the tiny town of Forks. My only personal income came from the three days a week I worked at the local sporting goods store. In a town this small, I was lucky to have a job. Every penny I made went into my microscopic college fund. (College was Plan B. I was still hoping for Plan A, but Edward was just so stubborn about leaving me human ...)

Edward had a lot of money-I didn't even want to think about how much. Money meant next to nothing to Edward or the rest of the Cullens. It was just something that accumulated when you had unlimited time on your hands and a sister who had an uncanny ability to predict trends in the stock market. Edward didn't seem to understand why I objected to him spending money on me-why it made me uncomfortable if he took me to an expensive restaurant in Seattle, why he wasn't allowed to buy me a car that could reach speeds over fifty-five miles an hour, or why I wouldn't let him pay my college tuition (he was ridiculously enthusiastic about Plan B). Edward thought I was being unnecessarily difficult.

But how could I let him give me things when I had nothing to reciprocate with? He, for some unfathomable reason, wanted to be with me. Anything he gave me on top of that just threw us more out of balance.

As the day went on, neither Edward or Alice brought my birthday up again, and I began to relax a little.

We sat at our usual table for lunch.

A strange kind of truce existed at that table. The three of us-Edward, Alice, and I-sat on the extreme southern end of the table. Now that the "older" and somewhat scarier (in Emmett's case, certainly) Cullen siblings had graduated, Alice and Edward did not seem quite so intimidating, and we did not sit here alone. My other friends, Mike and Jessica (who were in the awkward post-breakup friendship phase), Angela and Ben (whose relationship had survived the summer), Eric, Conner, Tyler, and Lauren (though that last one didn't really count in the friend category) all sat at the same table, on the other side of an invisible line. That line dissolved on sunny days when Edward and Alice always skipped school, and then the conversation would swell out effortlessly to include me.

Edward and Alice didn't find this minor ostracism odd or hurtful the way I would have. They barely noticed it. People always felt strangely ill at ease with the Cullens, almost afraid for some reason they couldn't explain to themselves. I was a rare exception to that rule. Sometimes it bothered Edward how very comfortable I was with being close to him. He thought he was hazardous to my health-an opinion I rejected vehemently whenever he voiced it.

* * *

+ Books - Sample Excerpt: Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Books - Sample Excerpt: Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 01:09:00 +0000

Books - Sample Excerpt: Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Book: Twilight

Forks High School had a frightening total of only three hundred and fifty-seven - now fifty-eight - students; there were more than seven hundred people in my junior class alone back home. All of the kids here had grown up together-their grandparents had been toddlers together. I would be the new girl from the big city, a curiosity, a freak.

Maybe, if I looked like a girl from Phoenix should, I could work this to my advantage. But physically, I'd never fit in anywhere. I should be tan, sporty, blond - a volleyball player, or a cheerleader, perhaps - all the things that go with living in the valley of the sun.

Instead, I was ivory-skinned, without even the excuse of blue eyes or red hair, despite the constant sunshine. I had always been slender, but soft somehow, obviously not an athlete; I didn't have the necessary hand-eye coordination to play sports without humiliating myself - and harming both myself and anyone else who stood too close.

When I finished putting my clothes in the old pine dresser, I took my bag of bathroom necessities and went to the communal bathroom to clean myself up after the day of travel. I looked at my face in the mirror as I brushed through my tangled, damp hair. Maybe it was the light, but already I looked sallower, unhealthy. My skin could be pretty - it was very clear, almost translucent- looking - but it all depended on color. I had no color here.

Facing my pallid reflection in the mirror, I was forced to admit that I was lying to myself. It wasn't just physically that I'd never fit in. And if I couldn't find a niche in a school with three thousand people, what were my chances here?

I didn't relate well to people my age. Maybe the truth was that I didn't relate well to people, period. Even my mother, who I was closer to than anyone else on the planet, was never in harmony with me, never on exactly the same page. Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs. Maybe there was a glitch in my brain. But the cause didn't matter. All that mattered was the effect. And tomorrow would be just the beginning.

I didn't sleep well that night, even after I was done crying. The constant whooshing of the rain and wind across the roof wouldn't fade into the background. I pulled the faded old quilt over my head, and later added the pillow, too. But I couldn't fall asleep until after midnight, when the rain finally settled into a quieter drizzle.

Thick fog was all I could see out my window in the morning, and I could feel the claustrophobia creeping up on me. You could never see the sky here; it was like a cage.

Breakfast with Charlie was a quiet event. He wished me good luck at school. I thanked him, knowing his hope was wasted. Good luck tended to avoid me. Charlie left first, off to the police station that was his wife and family. After he left, I sat at the old square oak table in one of the three unmatching chairs and examined his small kitchen, with its dark paneled walls, bright yellow cabinets, and white linoleum floor. Nothing was changed. My mother had painted the cabinets eighteen years ago in an attempt to bring some sunshine into the house. Over the small fireplace in the adjoining handkerchief-sized family room was a row of pictures. First a wedding picture of Charlie and my mom in Las Vegas, then one of the three of us in the hospital after I was born, taken by a helpful nurse, followed by the procession of my school pictures up to last year's. Those were embarrassing to look at - I would have to see what I could do to get Charlie to put them somewhere else, at least while I was living here.

It was impossible, being in this house, not to realize that Charlie had never gotten over my mom. It made me uncomfortable.

I didn't want to be too early to school, but I couldn't stay in the house anymore. I donned my jacket - which had the feel of a biohazard suit - and headed out into the rain.

It was just drizzling still, not enough to soak me through immediately as I reached for the house key that was always hidden under the eaves by the door, and locked up. The sloshing of my new waterproof boots was unnerving. I missed the normal crunch of gravel as I walked. I couldn't pause and admire my truck again as I wanted; I was in a hurry to get out of the misty wet that swirled around my head and clung to my hair under my hood.

Inside the truck, it was nice and dry. Either Billy or Charlie had obviously cleaned it up, but the tan upholstered seats still smelled faintly of tobacco, gasoline, and peppermint. The engine started quickly, to my relief, but loudly, roaring to life and then idling at top volume. Well, a truck this old was bound to have a flaw. The antique radio worked, a plus that I hadn't expected.

Finding the school wasn't difficult, though I'd never been there before. The school was, like most other things, just off the highway. It was not obvious that it was a school; only the sign, which declared it to be the Forks High School, made me stop. It looked like a collection of matching houses, built with maroon-colored bricks. There were so many trees and shrubs I couldn't see its size at first. Where was the feel of the institution? I wondered nostalgically. Where were the chain-link fences, the metal detectors?

I parked in front of the first building, which had a small sign over the door reading FRONT OFFICE. No one else was parked there, so I was sure it was off limits, but I decided I would get directions inside instead of circling around in the rain like an idiot. I stepped unwillingly out of the toasty truck cab and walked down a little stone path lined with dark hedges. I took a deep breath before opening the door.

Inside, it was brightly lit, and warmer than I'd hoped. The office was small; a little waiting area with padded folding chairs, orange-flecked commercial carpet, notices and awards cluttering the walls, a big clock ticking loudly. Plants grew everywhere in large plastic pots, as if there wasn't enough greenery outside. The room was cut in half by a long counter, cluttered with wire baskets full of papers and brightly colored flyers taped to its front. There were three desks behind the counter, one of which was manned by a large, red-haired woman wearing glasses. She was wearing a purple t-shirt, which immediately made me feel overdressed.

The red-haired woman looked up. "Can I help you?"

"I'm Isabella Swan," I informed her, and saw the immediate awareness light her eyes. I was expected, a topic of gossip no doubt. Daughter of the Chief's flighty ex-wife, come home at last.

"Of course," she said. She dug through a precariously stacked pile of documents on her desk till she found the ones she was looking for. "I have your schedule right here, and a map of the school." She brought several sheets to the counter to show me.

She went through my classes for me, highlighting the best route to each on the map, and gave me a slip to have each teacher sign, which I was to bring back at the end of the day. She smiled at me and hoped, like Charlie, that I would like it here in Forks. I smiled back as convincingly as I could.

When I went back out to my truck, other students were starting to arrive. I drove around the school, following the line of traffic. I was glad to see that most of the cars were older like mine, nothing flashy. At home I'd lived in one of the few lower-income neighborhoods that were included in the Paradise Valley District. It was a common thing to see a new Mercedes or Porsche in the student lot. The nicest car here was a shiny Volvo, and it stood out. Still, I cut the engine as soon as I was in a spot, so that the thunderous volume wouldn't draw attention to me. I looked at the map in the truck, trying to memorize it now; hopefully I wouldn't have to walk around with it stuck in front of my nose all day. I stuffed everything in my bag, slung the strap over my shoulder, and sucked in a huge breath. I can do this, I lied to myself feebly. No one was going to bite me. I finally exhaled and stepped out of the truck.

I kept my face pulled back into my hood as I walked to the sidewalk, crowded with teenagers. My plain black jacket didn't stand out, I noticed with relief.

Once I got around the cafeteria, building three was easy to spot. A large black "3" was painted on a white square on the east corner. I felt my breathing gradually creeping toward hyperventilation as I approached the door. I tried holding my breath as I followed two unisex raincoats through the door.

The classroom was small. The people in front of me stopped just inside the door to hang up their coats on a long row of hooks. I copied them. They were two girls, one a porcelain-colored blonde, the other also pale, with light brown hair. At least my skin wouldn't be a standout here.

I took the slip up to the teacher, a tall, balding man whose desk had a nameplate identifying him as Mr. Mason. He gawked at me when he saw my name - not an encouraging response - and of course I flushed tomato red. But at least he sent me to an empty desk at the back without introducing me to the class. It was harder for my new classmates to stare at me in the back, but somehow, they managed. I kept my eyes down on the reading list the teacher had given me. It was fairly basic: Bront?, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Faulkner. I'd already read everything. That was comforting ... and boring. I wondered if my mom would send me my folder of old essays, or if she would think that was cheating. I went through different arguments with her in my head while the teacher droned on.

When the bell rang, a nasal buzzing sound, a gangly boy with skin problems and hair black as an oil slick leaned across the aisle to talk to me.

"You're Isabella Swan, aren't you?" He looked like the overly helpful, chess club type.

"Bella," I corrected. Everyone within a three-seat radius turned to look at me.

"Where's your next class?" he asked.

I had to check in my bag. "Um, Government, with Jefferson, in building six."

There was nowhere to look without meeting curious eyes.

"I'm headed toward building four, I could show you the way...." Definitely over- helpful. "I'm Eric," he added. I smiled tentatively. "Thanks."

We got our jackets and headed out into the rain, which had picked up. I could have sworn several people behind us were walking close enough to eavesdrop. I hoped I wasn't getting paranoid.

"So, this is a lot different than Phoenix, huh?" he asked.

"Very."

"It doesn't rain much there, does it?"

"Three or four times a year."

"Wow, what must that be like?" he wondered.

"Sunny," I told him.

"You don't look very tan."

"My mother is part albino."

He studied my face apprehensively, and I sighed. It looked like clouds and a sense of humor didn't mix. A few months of this and I'd forget how to use sarcasm.

We walked back around the cafeteria, to the south buildings by the gym. Eric walked me right to the door, though it was clearly marked.

"Well, good luck," he said as I touched the handle. "Maybe we'll have some other classes together." He sounded hopeful.

I smiled at him vaguely and went inside.

The rest of the morning passed in about the same fashion. My Trigonometry teacher, Mr. Varner, who I would have hated anyway just because of the subject he taught, was the only one who made me stand in front of the class and introduce myself. I stammered, blushed, and tripped over my own boots on the way to my seat.

After two classes, I started to recognize several of the faces in each class. There was always someone braver than the others who would introduce themselves and ask me questions about how I was liking Forks. I tried to be diplomatic, but mostly I just lied a lot. At least I never needed the map.

One girl sat next to me in both Trig and Spanish, and she walked with me to the cafeteria for lunch. She was tiny, several inches shorter than my five feet four inches, but her wildly curly dark hair made up a lot of the difference between our heights. I couldn't remember her name, so I smiled and nodded as she prattled about teachers and classes. I didn't try to keep up.

We sat at the end of a full table with several of her friends, who she introduced to me. I forgot all their names as soon as she spoke them. They seemed impressed by her bravery in speaking to me. The boy from English, Eric, waved at me from across the room. It was there, sitting in the lunchroom, trying to make conversation with seven curious strangers, that I first saw them.

They were sitting in the corner of the cafeteria, as far away from where I sat as possible in the long room. There were five of them. They weren't talking, and they weren't eating, though they each had a tray of untouched food in front of them. They weren't gawking at me, unlike most of the other students, so it was safe to stare at them without fear of meeting an excessively interested pair of eyes. But it was none of these things that caught, and held, my attention.

They didn't look anything alike. Of the three boys, one was big - muscled like a serious weight lifter, with dark, curly hair. Another was taller, leaner, but still muscular, and honey blond. The last was lanky, less bulky, with untidy, bronze-colored hair. He was more boyish than the others, who looked like they could be in college, or even teachers here rather than students.

The girls were opposites. The tall one was statuesque. She had a beautiful figure, the kind you saw on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the kind that made every girl around her take a hit on her self-esteem just by being in the same room. Her hair was golden, gently waving to the middle of her back. The short girl was pixielike, thin in the extreme, with small features. Her hair was a deep black, cropped short and pointing in every direction.

And yet, they were all exactly alike. Every one of them was chalky pale, the palest of all the students living in this sunless town. Paler than me, the albino. They all had very dark eyes despite the range in hair tones. They also had dark shadows under those eyes - purplish, bruiselike shadows. As if they were all suffering from a sleepless night, or almost done recovering from a broken nose. Though their noses, all their features, were straight, perfect, angular.

But all this is not why I couldn't look away.

I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel. It was hard to decide who was the most beautiful - maybe the perfect blond girl, or the bronze-haired boy.

They were all looking away - away from each other, away from the other students, away from anything in particular as far as I could tell. As I watched, the small girl rose with her tray - unopened soda, unbitten apple - and walked away with a quick, graceful lope that belonged on a runway. I watched, amazed at her lithe dancer's step, till she dumped her tray and glided through the back door, faster than I would have thought possible. My eyes darted back to the others, who sat unchanging.

"Who are they?" I asked the girl from my Spanish class, whose name I'd forgotten.

As she looked up to see who I meant - though already knowing, probably, from my tone - suddenly he looked at her, the thinner one, the boyish one, the youngest, perhaps. He looked at my neighbor for just a fraction of a second, and then his dark eyes flickered to mine.

He looked away quickly, more quickly than I could, though in a flush of embarrassment I dropped my eyes at once. In that brief flash of a glance, his face held nothing of interest - it was as if she had called his name, and he'd looked up in involuntary response, already having decided not to answer.

My neighbor giggled in embarrassment, looking at the table like I did. "That's Edward and Emmett Cullen, and Rosalie and Jasper Hale. The one who left was Alice Cullen; they all live together with Dr. Cullen and his wife." She said this under her breath.

I glanced sideways at the beautiful boy, who was looking at his tray now, picking a bagel to pieces with long, pale fingers. His mouth was moving very quickly, his perfect lips barely opening. The other three still looked away, and yet I felt he was speaking quietly to them.

Strange, unpopular names, I thought. The kinds of names grandparents had. But maybe that was in vogue here - small town names? I finally remembered that my neighbor was called Jessica, a perfectly common name. There were two girls named Jessica in my History class back home.

"They are ... very nice-looking." I struggled with the conspicuous understatement.

"Yes!" Jessica agreed with another giggle. "They're all together though - Emmett and Rosalie, and Jasper and Alice, I mean. And they live together." Her voice held all the shock and condemnation of the small town, I thought critically. But, if I was being honest, I had to admit that even in Phoenix, it would cause gossip.

* * *

+ Bibliography: The Books of Stephen King

Best-Seller Books | The New York Times | June 22, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:38:00 +0000

The New York Times
Best Seller Books
Jun 22, 2008

Fiction (Hardcover)

1. SAIL
James Patterson
Amazon Books

2. NOTHING TO LOSE
Lee Child
Amazon Books

3. THE HOST
Stephenie Meyer
Amazon Books

4. PLAGUE SHIP
Clive Cussler & Jack Du Bru
Amazon Books

5. LOVE THE ONE YOU’RE WITH
Emily Giffin
Amazon Books

NonFiction (Hardcover)

1. WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES
David Sedaris
Amazon Books

2. WHAT HAPPENED
Scott McClellan
Amazon Books

3. ALWAYS BY MY SIDE
Jim Nantz & Eli Spielman
Amazon Books

4. THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE
Douglas Preston & Mario Spezi
Amazon Books

5. THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD
Fareed Zakaria
Amazon Books

Advice (Hardcover)

1. THE LAST LECTURE
Randy Pausch & Jeffrey Zaslow
Amazon Books

2. THE SECRET
Rhonda Byrne
Amazon Books

3. BOBBY FLAY’S GRILL IT!
Bobby Flay & Stephanie Banyas
Amazon Books

4. QUANTUM WELLNESS
Kathy Freston
Amazon Books

5. JUST WHO WILL YOU BE?
Maria Shriver
Amazon Books

Best-Seller Books | The New York Times | June 15, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:17:00 +0000

The New York Times

Best Seller Books

Jun 15, 2008

Fiction (Hardcover)

1. NOTHING TO LOSE
Lee Child
Amazon Books

2. THE HOST
Stephenie Meyer
Amazon Books

3. PLAGUE SHIP
Clive Cussler & Jack Du Bru
Amazon Books

4. LOVE THE ONE YOU’RE WITH
Emily Giffin
Amazon Books

5. BLOOD NOIR
Laurell K. Hamilton
Amazon Books

NonFiction (Hardcover)

1. WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES
David Sedaris
Amazon Books

2. WHAT HAPPENED
Scott McClellan
Amazon Books

3. THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD
Fareed Zakaria
Amazon Books

4. AUDITION
Barbara Walters
Amazon Books

5. ARE YOU THERE, VODKA? IT’S ME, CHELSEA
Chelsea Handler
Amazon Books

Advice (Hardcover)

1. THE LAST LECTURE
Randy Pausch & Jeffrey Zaslow
Amazon Books

2. THE SECRET
Rhonda Byrne
Amazon Books

3. QUANTUM WELLNESS
Kathy Freston
Amazon Books

4. JUST WHO WILL YOU BE?
Maria Shriver
Amazon Books

5. LETTERS TO A YOUNG SISTER
Hill Harper
Amazon Books

Best-Seller Books | The New York Times | June 01, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 01:42:00 +0000

The New York Times

Best Seller Books

Jun 01, 2008

Fiction (Hardcover)

1. ODD HOURS
Dean Koontz
Amazon Books

2. THE HOST
Stephenie Meyer
Amazon Books

3. LOVE THE ONE YOU’RE WITH
Emily Giffin
Amazon Books

4. THE FRONT
Patricia Cornwell
Amazon Books

5. SNUFF
Chuck Palahniuk
Amazon Books

NonFiction (Hardcover)

1. AUDITION
Barbara Walters
Amazon Books

2. ARE YOU THERE, VODKA? IT’S ME, CHELSEA
Chelsea Handler
Amazon Books

3. THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD
Fareed Zakaria
Amazon Books

4. STOLEN INNOCENCE
Elissa Wall & Lisa Pulitzer
Amazon Books

5. THE REVOLUTION: A MANIFESTO
Ron Paul
Amazon Books

Advice (Hardcover)

1. THE LAST LECTURE
Randy Pausch & Jeffrey Zaslow
Amazon Books

2. QUANTUM WELLNESS
Kathy Freston
Amazon Books

3. THE SECRET
Rhonda Byrne
Amazon Books

4. JUST WHO WILL YOU BE?
Maria Shriver
Amazon Books

5. GHOSTS AMONG US
James Van Praagh
Amazon Books

Best-Seller Books | The New York Times | May 04, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:40:00 +0000

The New York Times

Best Seller Books

May 04, 2008

Fiction (Hardcover)

1. THE WHOLE TRUTH
David Baldacci
Amazon Books

2. HOLD TIGHT
Harlan Coben
Amazon Books

3. THE MIRACLE AT SPEEDY MOTORS
Alexander McCall Smith
Amazon Books

4. UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
Jhumpa Lahiri
Amazon Books

5. WHERE ARE YOU NOW?
Mary Higgins Clark
Amazon Books

NonFiction (Hardcover)

1. ARE YOU THERE, VODKA? IT’S ME, CHELSEA
Chelsea Handler
Amazon Books

2. ESCAPE
Carolyn Jessop & Laura Palmer
Amazon Books

3. HOME
Julie Andrews
Amazon Books

4. BEAUTIFUL BOY
David Sheff
Amazon Books

5. MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Don & Susie Van Ryn & Whitney Cerak
Amazon Books

Advice (Hardcover)

1. THE LAST LECTURE
Randy Pausch & Jeffrey Zaslow
Amazon Books

2. JUST WHO WILL YOU BE?
Maria Shriver
Amazon Books

3. THE SECRET
Rhonda Byrne
Amazon Books

4. THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK
Timothy Ferriss
Amazon Books

5. HARMONIC WEALTH
James Arthur Ray & Linda Sivertsen
Amazon Books

Best-Seller Books | The New York Times | Apr 27, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:11:00 +0000

The New York Times
Best Seller Books
Apr 27, 2008

Fiction (Hardcover)

1. HOLD TIGHT
Harlan Coben
Amazon Books

2. WHERE ARE YOU NOW?
Mary Higgins Clark
Amazon Books

3. THE MIRACLE AT SPEEDY MOTORS
Alexander McCall Smith
Amazon Books

4. UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
Jhumpa Lahiri
Amazon Books

5. CERTAIN GIRLS
Jennifer Weiner
Amazon Books

NonFiction (Hardcover)

1. BEAUTIFUL BOY
David Sheff
Amazon Books

2. HOME
Julie Andrews
Amazon Books

3. MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Don & Susie Van Ryn & Whitney Cerak
Amazon Books

4. LADIES OF LIBERTY
Cokie Roberts
Amazon Books

5. ESCAPE
Carolyn Jessop & Laura Palmer
Amazon Books

Advice (Hardcover)

1. THE LAST LECTURE
Randy Pausch & Jeffrey Zaslow
Amazon Books

2. JUST WHO WILL YOU BE?
Maria Shriver
Amazon Books

3. THE SECRET
Rhonda Byrne
Amazon Books

4. GEORGIA COOKING IN AN OKLAHOMA KITCHEN
Trisha Yearwood
Amazon Books

5. THE 4-HOUR WORKWEEK
Timothy Ferriss
Amazon Books

Best-Seller Books | The New York Times | Apr 13, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Tigre de Fogo) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:54:00 +0000

The New York Times
Best Seller Books
Apr 13, 2008

Fiction (Hardcover)

1. UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
Jhumpa Lahiri
Amazon Books

2. SMALL FAVOR
Jim Butcher
Amazon Books

3. COMPULSION
Jonathan Kellerman
Amazon Books

4. THE APPEAL
John Grisham
Amazon Books

5. BELONG TO ME
Marisa de los Santos
Amazon Books

NonFiction (Hardcover)

1. MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Don & Susie Van Ryn & Whitney Cerak
Amazon Books

2. HOME
Julie Andrews
Amazon Books

3. BEAUTIFUL BOY
David Sheff
Amazon Books

4. ARMAGEDDON IN RETROSPECT
Kurt Vonnegut
Amazon Books

5. VINDICATED
Jose Canseco
Amazon Books

Advice (Hardcover)

1. THE SECRET
Rhonda Byrne
Amazon Books

2. A CIVILIZATION OF LOVE
Carl Anderson
Amazon Books

3. WOMEN AND MONEY
Suze Orman
Amazon Books

4. STOP WHINING, START LIVING
Dr. Laura Schlessinger
Amazon Books

5. BECOME A BETTER YOU
Joel Osteen
Amazon Books