May 10 marks the 75th anniversary of the most infamous book burning in history – on that date in 1933, over 20,000 books banned by Germany’s Nazi regime, including works by Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, and H.G. Wells, were set aflame in Berlin’s public square by Nazi youth groups.

To mark the anniversary, Abebooks.com has an overview of the various authors and books banned at the time, and has posted feature interviews with three experts on book-burning, including Australian author Matt Fishburn, whose debut non-fiction work Burning Books is due to be published this month. In the Q&A, Fishburn discusses why books are burned so often throughout history:

“People love a celebratory bonfire, especially when it can symbolize a letting go of the past: burning old photos, marking a graduation by burning a hated textbook, or the like. […] Tellingly, in the US (and no doubt in other countries) many universities had an impromptu tradition of turning a blind eye to their graduating class burning their textbooks at the end of semester in a great bonfire. Indeed, when the Nazi fires were first reported in 1933, this was one of the most common comparisons made - the fires in Germany were, after all, organized by students and took place relatively early in the new regime. Nor is it idle to point out that such burnings are always a great spectacle. In Berlin there were marching bands, torchlight processions, group singing and college songs, parades, movie cameras, and members of the cultural elite.

“This is not meant to trivialize the impact of any such bonfire. Most officially sanctioned fires are designed to control, and to announce what they stand for and what will be accepted under their rule. Burnings like those of the Nazis have something in common with the early modern burning of books in Europe. They announced what would be acceptable in future, and in the process shaped the new public sphere. The book burnings are the symbol; the repressive legislation that came in its wake was what enforced it.”

From the Toronto Star:

It’s a tell-all book about an elite military unit the Department of National Defence didn’t want published for reasons of national security, and now pointed questions are being raised over whether some of the incidents it chronicles actually happened.

The 261-page book, titled Nous étions invincibles (We Were Invincible), is billed as the first insider’s account by a former member of the Joint Task Force 2, a covert anti-terrorism unit stationed near Ottawa.

The unauthorized memoir, penned in French, went on sale in Quebec last Wednesday – a day after its Quebec City-based co-author, Denis Morisset, was arrested on charges he contacted two minors for the purposes of committing a sexual offence.

Some of the exploits Morisset recounts – like the unit’s role in taking out 17 Shining Path guerrillas during a Peruvian hostage-taking in 1996 – have been documented elsewhere. But others, such as claims that six of his fellow unit members have committed suicide, the tale of a botched mission in Afghanistan, or the account of a commando raid to “eliminate” hostage-takers during an Ottawa bank heist in 1994, can’t be independently verified. A spokesperson for the Ottawa Police Service told the Toronto Star “there was no such incident.”

We obviously have no idea who’s lying in this case – whether Morisset is at all credible, or whether the charges against him are legit – but is somebody to quash the book and undercut his allegations, having unnamed spokesmen deny them and having him arrested on a sleazy charge the day before the book is launched would be one way to do it. Speaking hypothetically, of course.

We knew comics were a source of distraction for kids everywhere, but who knew they could potentially divert youth from a life of terrorism?

In his column, Newsweek’s Middle East editor Christopher Dickey posits that Kuwaiti comics company Teshkeel’s ongoing comics series The 99 could inspire the impressionable eight-to-14-year-old set with its Marvel-esque group of Muslim superheroes.

[…]when [anthropologist Scott] Atran went back to Washington to brief National Security Council and Homeland Security staff in January this year, he went armed—with comic books. He wanted to show that nothing cooked up by the Bush administration’s warmongers and spinmeisters comes close to delivering the kind of positive messages you can find in a commercial action adventure series called The 99.

The comics are the creation of Kuwaiti psychologist and entrepreneur Naif Al-Mutawa, and—let me make a confession here—I’ve been reading them since my colleague Florence Villeminot first wrote about them early last year. My reasons for following the series are probably as atavistic as analytic. I grew up with Marvel and DC comics, spending my impressionable pubescence getting deep into the gothic drama of Batman, delighting in the athletic insolence of Spider-Man, savoring the unsublimated sexuality of the women in X-Men. And, yes, there’s something of all of that in The 99, with its hulking fighters and sultry enforcers.

Dickey ultimately concludes that a comic book with a run of only several thousand is unlikely to trump the jihadist messages that have far-reaching influence in the Mideast and beyond, but that it’s heartening to see The 99 and its ilk go head-to-head with the bad guys.

From Montreal’s The Gazette:

There are few commercial signs or posters in a recently opened Mile End bookstore, but one in particular appears to have upset a local resident.

That person formally complained to the Office québécois de la langue française, which dispatched an inspector Friday to check out and photograph signage at the Librairie Drawn & Quarterly on Bernard Ave. W. near de l’Esplanade Ave.

The complainant alleged there was too much English on signs, but on a visit yesterday, all a reporter could find in English only was an antique, hand-drawn paper clock on the door of the storefront.

The offending item, about 12 centimetres in diameter, says Open, Come In.

Who says booksellers are the last guardians of good taste in an ever-more tawdry world?

From AbeBooks:

Welcome to the Hooker Prize – in honor of Elliot Spitzer and his fall from grace in a New York minute, AbeBooks.com has compiled a list of 10 recommended non-fiction reads about hookers, madams, high-class callgirls and prostitutes. Prostitution, of course, is the oldest profession in the world and has fascinated readers for centuries. Since the 1970s, there has been a wealth of memoirs from ‘ladies of the night’ so here’s the literary lowdown on the callgirl culture.

Yes, The Happy Hooker by Xavier Hollander is #1.

The Salon du Livre, an international book fair in Paris, is being boycotted by a coalition of Islamic nations unhappy with the decision to award the ‘Pavilion of Honour’ to Israeli writers.

From The Guardian:

The Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Isesco) has urged its 50 members to boycott the fair, which starts on March 14. So far, Iran, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon and Tunisia have confirmed they are to pull out.

A statement issued by Isesco said that “the crimes against humanity Israel is perpetrating in the Palestinian territories” make it an unworthy recipient of the honour.

Christine de Mazières, speaking for the French Publishers’ Association who organise the Salon, said it was an unfortunate move. “What is happening in the Middle East is very sad, but it is not linked to our event.” Israel, she stressed, was not being honoured for its politics but for its writers, such as Amos Oz and David Grossman, both of whom are due to appear at the event. All of the countries now pulling out, Ms de Mazières said, were aware of the Israeli honour at the time they signed up.

Oz and Grossman are both outspoken peace activists and highly critical of Israeli aggression.

The upcoming biography of the late Chuck Cadman, the independent MP from B.C. who held the deciding vote on the 2005 Liberal government’s budget, contains a political bombshell in the form of accusations that Cadman was offered a $1-million life insurance policy by representatives of the Conservative Party to vote with them.

From The Globe and Mail:

The widow of former B.C. MP Chuck Cadman says two Conservative Party officials offered her husband a million-dollar life insurance policy in exchange for his vote to bring down the Liberal government in May of 2005.

The offer, which was summarily rejected by the dying man, is outlined in a biography of Mr. Cadman by Vancouver journalist Tom Zytaruk that is due to be released on March 14. A copy of the manuscript, including an introduction by former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin, has been obtained by The Globe and Mail.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is quoted in the book, Like a Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story, as confirming that a visit took place, and that officials were “legitimately” representing the Conservative Party. But he says any offer to Mr. Cadman was only to defray losses he might incur in an election.

Like a Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story is published by Harbour Publishing.

Canadian Press reports that the publisher of an American journalist’s account of espionage in the post-Cold War era has halted shipments of his book, which alleges a former Conservative MP from Calgary was a spy for the Russians.

Comrade J, by former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley, is based on the recollections of Sergei Tretyakov, who spied for Moscow in Ottawa and subsequently at the United Nations before defecting to the United States with his family in 2000.

Penguin U.S., the book’s publisher, cites “legal considerations” in halting Canadian shipments of the volume, though many copies are already available in Canadian bookstores.

In a statement Tuesday, legal counsel for publisher Penguin Group’s U.S. division said the company had temporarily suspended shipments to Canada “to allow time to evaluate the legal ramifications, under Canadian law, of speculations about the book that have arisen in the Canadian market.”

The book alleges Alex Kindy provided information that wound up in numerous spy cables in return for thousands of dollars in cash. It says Kindy, codenamed Grey, was recruited in 1992 by Vitali Domoratski, a vice consul actually working in counter-intelligence for the Russians from their embassy in Ottawa.

Comrade J has previously faced controversy, as many of Tretyakov’s allegations have been dismissed by various experts. Among others, the International Atomic Energy Agency has discounted Tretyakov’s claim that he enlisted the co-operation of a Canadian nuclear expert working with the group in Vienna.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s life has been threatened – not for the first time – by “an ultra-nationalist gang,” reports The Guardian.

According to reports in the Turkish press, the author of international bestsellers including My Name is Red was targeted as part of a campaign to sow chaos in preparation for a military coup, scheduled for 2009.

The suspects have now been remanded in custody, among them retired military officers and the lawyer Kemal Kerincisz. The latter has been instrumental in the pursuit of a series of writers and intellectuals through the courts, filing cases against Pamuk himself as well as the novelists Elif Shafak and Perihan Magden and the murdered journalist Hrant Dink.

A year ago, Pamuk cancelled a planned German book tour after he was publicly threatened by Yasin Hayal, the murderer of Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink. However, the report fails to mention whether Hayal is among – or connected to – the 13 men being prosecuted. In fact, not a whole lot is known about the case.

The charges brought against the suspects are not yet known. The investigation is being carried out under the terms of a law restricting media coverage.

“This could be a big development,” continued [Istanbul’s Free Expression Initiative spokesperson Sanar] Yurdatapan, suggesting that because figures very high in the military establishment have been connected with such groups it remains to be seen whether the cases will be brought to trial. “We are afraid to have hope.”

Hey, we didn’t say it – but Ruth Franklin does in The New Republic. That and more.

From the article:

If any reader still managed to pick up Suite Francaise without knowing that the book’s author died at Auschwitz, he or she would have learned it in the second sentence of the jacket copy. And the novel’s handsome editorial apparatus includes Némirovsky’s notes “on the situation in France” and a selection of correspondence, including her husband’s desperate letters to friends on her behalf after her arrest. The implication is clear: Suite Francaise, aside from its literary value, is to be regarded as an authentic, even numinous document miraculously salvaged from the ashes of the great catastrophe, as poignant and as prophetic as the diary of Anne Frank, to which it has been frequently, and nonsensically, compared. In the words of one reporter, the novel is “a classic Holocaust story by an author who would not live to see her work published.”

You just know there’s a “but” coming, don’t you?

The truth is, this was spin. Worse, it was a fraud. The fraud could be perpetrated because very few readers in our day know anything about Irène Némirovsky. Though she published more than a dozen novels between 1928 and 1942, only a few were translated into English. Even in France, where Némirovsky was extremely successful – so successful, as Jonathan Weiss reports in his immensely clarifying biography, that her income eventually outpaced that of her husband, a banker – her work was out of print until recently. Certainly very few readers would still remember David Golder, her first novel and, until Suite Francaise, her greatest success.

[…]

The real irony of the Suite Francaise sensation is not that a great work of literature was waiting unread in a notebook for sixty years before finally being brought to light. It is that this accomplished but unexceptional novel, having acquired the dark frame of Auschwitz, posthumously capped the career of a writer who made her name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes. As Weiss’s important and prodigiously researched biography makes clear, Némirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew. Does that sound too strong? Well, here is a Jewish writer who owed her success in France entre deux guerres in no small measure to her ability to pander to the forces of reaction, to the fascist right. Némirovsky’s stories of corrupt Jews – some of them even have hooked noses, no less! – appeared in right-wing periodicals and won her the friendship of her editors, many of whom held positions of power in extreme-right political circles.

From The Guardian:

A Burmese author known for his love poetry has been arrested after penning a Valentine’s Day verse carrying a hidden message about the leader of the country’s military junta, Senior General Than Shwe.

The poet, Saw Wai, was arrested on Tuesday, a day after his poem “February 14″ was published in the popular weekly entertainment magazine A Chit, according to friends and colleagues who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The eight-line poem in Burmese is about a man broken-hearted after falling for a fashion model, whom he thanks for having taught him the meaning of love. But if read vertically, the first word of each line forms the phrase: “Power crazy Senior General Than Shwe.” Than Shwe, 74, who has headed the junta since 1992, has little tolerance for criticism. He keeps himself sequestered in his remote, newly built capital, Naypyitaw, deep in the country’s interior.

We sincerely hope that Saw Wai is freed soon.

(We must note, however, that this is yet more proof that Oulipian constraints are nothing but trouble with a capital T+7.)

The National Post is reporting that a settlement between the Toronto Public Library and its labour union is essentially reversing the savings from the Sunday closure of 16 of the city’s libraries, announced earlier this year.

The deal was reached after an arbitrator ruled in October that the closures were contrary to the collective agreement and constituted an illegal layoff.

The settlement provides a total of $150,651 in retroactive pay to 286 library employees denied Sunday hours between Sept. 9 and Oct. 21, according to Ana-Maria Critchley, a spokeswoman for the library.

Sunday hours recommenced on Oct. 28.

The library board expected to save $400,000 had the 16 branches stayed shut on Sundays until the end of the year.

That breaks down to a savings of $23,529.41 per Sunday or $164,705.87 for the seven Sundays the libraries were locked before an arbitrator’s ruling reversed the board’s decision.

All told, that means the closures saved the city roughly $14,000 or about $125 per library per Sunday.

Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, a well-known thorn in the side of Mayor David Miller, was quick to scold city council for failing to cut costs effectively.

“This is really disappointing,” said Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, an opponent of the Mayor. “So many families and kids were hurt by these cuts for absolutely no need. There was no benefit.”

But the Post piece fails to mention that Minnan-Wong was one of the most vocal opponents of last summer’s proposed tax increase, which would have obviated the need for the library closures in the first place.

Still, Toronto’s problems appear to be pretty minor beside the funding crisis faced by the Windsor Public Library. The Windsor Star reports:

Taxpayers, library staff and management have reacted with dismay to news that city council has ordered the Windsor Public Library Board to make $800,000 more in budget cuts next year, without reducing hours or eliminating any of 10 local branches.

Brian Bell, chief executive officer of the library, said management is at a loss on how to achieve the goal, stating that the directive gives the cash-strapped institution next to no room to maneuver. He noted that a half million dollar cut had to be absorbed in 2005 even as the system grew from nine to 10 branches.

According to the Star, Windsor libraries are already woefully understaffed, and cuts are likely to be made to the library’s acquisitions budget.

[Bell] noted that the system averages about $1.3 million in purchases each year. Cutting back, he said may mean that rather than 100 copies of the latest Harry Potter novel, they may purchase only 28. He predicted that such resource cuts would double the number of orders on hold from 6,000 a month to 12,000. and further job-cuts would be impossible. The only viable cuts would be for acquisitions.

Maybe, according to the New York Post:

Karl Rove, the controversial and long-time senior adviser to President George W. Bush, is shopping a memoir in an auction that will kick off today and likely result in a seven-figure payday.

“It will sell for millions, but how many millions is the question,” said one publisher who is expected to bid.

“It’s going to be an interesting auction, he’s smart and he’s capable of moving beyond the cliches,” said the publisher, who predicted a $3 million sale.

Among those who have taken a pitch meeting with the man known in some quarters as “Bush’s Brain” were HarperCollins (which is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post), the Threshold Editions imprint of Simon & Schuster and the Random House imprint of Random House, Inc.

Rove is being represented by Robert Barnett. The famed Washington, DC attorney has fetched multi-million dollar advances for everyone from Alan Greenspan to Bill and Hillary Clinton to most recently Tony Blair and Ted Kennedy. Barnett declined to comment.

When your best justification for spending a few million dollars on the self-aggrandizing recollections of one of the most hated men in America is that “he’s capable of moving beyond the cliches,” you know things have gone terribly, terribly wrong somewhere.

From the Associated Press:

Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show.

The withdrawal came after a judge ruled the customers have a First Amendment right to keep their reading habits from the government.

As good as this news is, you can safely assume this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that millions of customer records are sitting in some government warehouse, like the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, just waiting to be pored over.

You have to love the language used by the judge in this case, however:

“The (subpoena’s) chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker wrote in a June ruling.

“Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon’s customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases,” the judge wrote in a ruling he unsealed last week.

Frosted keyboards? “Orwellian”? Since when are bloggers allowed to make judicial rulings?

Judith Regan, former president of HarperCollins’ ReganBooks division who was fired last year following her controversial plan to publish O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It, is suing HarperCollins’ parent company, News Corp., for $100 million for defamation.

Bloomberg Press reports that Regan’s complaint, filed yesterday, alleges that News Corp. made her a scapegoat for the O.J. Simpson fiasco, fired her without cause, and fabricated stories to discredit her.

Murdoch personally approved the Simpson book and suggested paying $1 million for the project, Regan claims in her suit. When the controversy erupted over the project, the defendants planted false stories in the press to discredit her, Regan said, including one allegation that she was fired because she made anti-Semitic comments and had claimed to be the victim of a “Jewish cabal” in the book industry.

Regan also claims that News Corp. “tried to destroy her reputation because she has information about former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik that would be harmful to ex-New York Mayor Giuliani and his presidential campaign.”

While not specifying what information she has about Kerik, who she claims had a “personal relationship” with her, Regan said that an unidentified News Corp. executive told her to withhold information and documents from investigators in their probe of the former police commissioner.

Kerik, who was appointed to the post by then-New York City Mayor Giuliani, was indicted Nov. 9 by a federal grand jury on charges of tax evasion, conspiracy and lying to the White House. He pleaded guilty last year to state charges that he accepted thousands of dollars in gifts while in office.

Kerik turned down a 2004 offer by President George W. Bush to run the Homeland Security Department, a post Giuliani recommended him for, after it was disclosed that Kerik failed to pay taxes for a nanny that worked for him.

It will be up to the court to determine what the truth is and if there are some innocent victims here, but the phrase ‘nest of vipers’ keeps coming to mind. Quillblog does not envy the judge in this case.

In an unusual move, Knopf Canada bought a quarter-page ad in Saturday’s Globe and Mail to dispute Peter C. Newman’s review of Jean Chretien’s recently published memoir, which ran in the Globe on Oct. 20. (The online version of the review has been put behind the Globe’s pay wall.)

The ad ran as an open letter from Knopf’s executive publisher, Louise Dennys. “Mr. Newman’s review was a lazy piece of work,” the ad states. “He has made no secret in his previous writings of his contempt for Mr. Chretien and in fact here recycles a significant number of lines from his own 2004 memoir.” (That would be Newman’s Here Be Dragons, which, interestingly enough, was published by McClelland & Stewart, which is partly owned by Random House of Canada*.)

No word on what the exact cost to Knopf was, but the standard rate for a full-page ad in the Globe is upwards of around $75,000.

The ad makes a number of claims of deficiency on Newman’s part. While these are necessarily subjective, the complaint that Newman ignored Chretien’s explanations of his role in the Peppergate, Shawinigate, and the sponsorship crisis comes closest to gaining traction. Newman wrote that Chretien gives “no explanations, no apologies” for these scandals. Though apologies are not always forthcoming, Chretien does give lengthy explanations of his role in each, and Newman notes this later on in his review, meaning that his earlier claim of “no explanations” was more of a rhetorical device than an exaggeration of the facts. Newman could certainly have been more careful with his wording, but the ad is equally slippery.

All in all, publishers and authors rarely come off looking good by responding to negative reviews, even when the book’s author is a former prime minister.

However, if you are a major Canadian publisher looking to take out a large ad in Q&Q disputing one of our reviews, please contact our advertising department. You’ll find our “rant rates” very reasonable.

*Even more interesting is the fact that Newman’s 2005 book, The Secret Mulroney Tapes, was published by… Random House Canada.

***

UPDATE: In response to a query from Q&Q about his thoughts on the ad – and its possible effect on future Newman-Random relations – Newman sent this e-mail:

I am always proud of publishers who defend their authors, as Cynthia Good when she was Chief Editor at Penguin and defended me against an unfair review. However, I do believe my comments were fair and in fact reflect most of the other reviews of the book that I’ve seen. My last book was with Random House Canada and I would be very happy to work with Anne Collins again.

The publishing industry is once again the unhappy poster child for the difference between U.S. and Canadian retail prices, but this time the complaint is coming not from consumers or booksellers but from federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty. The Globe and Mail reports that the minister used a copy of Hary Potter and the Deathly Hallows as a prop at a news conference on Tuesday. Flaherty says he paid 20% more at an Ottawa store than the price listed at a Washington D.C. store he visited last weekend.

The Potter prop flap capped a campaign by Mr. Flaherty to insert himself into the national debate about whether retailers are doing enough to cut prices now that the loonie is trading above par with the U.S. dollar.

Although he has sworn off any threat of government action, such as price controls, Mr. Flaherty met with retailers yesterday in hopes of persuading them to voluntarily cut prices.

Standing against a backdrop that proclaimed he was “Standing Up for Consumers,” he said prices are coming down, but not fast enough, and warned that Canadians will cross-border shop if domestic prices don’t reflect the stronger purchasing power of the loonie.

“There should not be large discrepancies between similar products just because they are sold on different sides of the border,” he said.

Retailers said they think they succeeded in convincing Mr. Flaherty that prices may not drop to the exact same level as U.S. prices because of higher costs faced in Canada.

The Globe story also pointed out that if Flaherty had shopped around he could have bought the book at Ottawa bookstore Collected Works, which is currently selling books at the U.S. sticker price. Costco and Amazon.ca’s prices (heavily discounted from the list) were even cheaper than the price in the Washington store.

The Montreal Gazette has also run a story on the issue which quoted Penguin Canada’s Yvonne Hunter about efforts by publishers to reduce prices, as well as Edmonton bookseller Steve Budnarchuk, representing the booksellers’ perspective. “Like Penguin, Budnarchuk said he and other retailers ‘are taking losses to show customers we’re not insensitive to them.’”

For more on the issue from Q&Q Omni, click here.

At a book signing in Toronto last night, Conrad Black appeared “relaxed and smiling” from his home in Palm Beach, where Black is spending time ahead of sentencing next month in Chicago. Sitting at the other end of one of Margaret Atwood’s famous LongPen devices, Black joked with reporters, signed books, and responded to reports that former prime minister Jean Chrétien’s leaked memoir impugns his good name.

[Black] said that, despite affirmations to the contrary in Chrétien’s new autobiography, it was Chrétien who suggested Black try to become a senator while attempting to become a member of Britain’s House of Lords.

Though the “he said/he said”-type dispute must seem academic to a man facing hard time, Black’s eagerness to engage with the Canadian public seems to confirm one thing: even cyborgs love the limelight.

Early reports of My Years as Prime Minister, Jean Chretien’s new memoir about his time in the top job, have it that he saves his best shots for his own successor.

According to The Globe and Mail:

Mr. Chrétien has little nice to say about his immediate successor at the Liberal helm, Paul Martin. He doesn’t even offer much praise for Mr. Martin’s performance as his finance minister, suggesting that it was he, as prime minister, who made all the really tough decisions while other ministers, particularly Marcel Masse in Treasury Board, did not get the credit they deserved for taming the national deficit.

Mr. Chrétien says he considered firing Mr. Martin and cancelling government contracts with his lobbyist friends in 2000, after the minister’s supporters met secretly at a Toronto airport hotel to stir the leadership pot. He was talked out of it by top advisers, Eddie Goldeberg and Jean Pelletier.

“Both were to regret their advice and I soon regretted my decision to keep him,” he writes.

Still, Mr. Chrétien says he’s thankful to Mr. Martin in one respect: the plotting to push him into early retirement so angered Mr. Chrétien’s wife, Aline, that she released him from an earlier pledge to serve only two terms as prime minister.

“To be very frank, now that Aline had removed the only impediment to my staying, I was damned if I was going to let myself by shoved out the door by a gang of self-serving goons.”

Goons!

To add insult to, well, insult, the article goes on to say that “Mr. Chrétien is surprisingly charitable about Mr. Mulroney.”

German journalist and author Gunter Wallraff has been trying to get permission to read from Salman Rushdie’s infamous novel The Satanic Verses in a mosque in Cologne, but has so far been denied permission.

From DW-World:

The request posed a dilemma for the Turkish-Islamic union DITIB, an Ankara-funded religious foundation: If the group members denied Wallraff’s request, they would be seen as not being liberal, but granting permission would anger a large number of their members.

DITIB officials said they had discussed the proposed reading with Wallraff until two weeks ago, but negotiations failed after he refused to compromise.

“He lacks understanding for the feelings and needs of members of our Muslim community,” said a spokesman, without specifying what DITIB had proposed to Wallraff.

Any sentence with the words “Muslim” and “Rushdie” in it tends to raise temperatures on all sides of an issue, and to be fair, it’s unlikely that one would easily get permission to read, say, The Da Vinci Code in a cathedral. Maybe, like so many of us, the DITIB officials just don’t care for literary readings?

Either way, Wallraff has vowed to keep trying.

(hat tip: The Literary Saloon)

An article in The Guardian describes how Indra Sinha, author of the Man Booker-shortlisted novel Animal’s People, came to write the novel, which is based on the experience of the people in Bhopal, India, where a chemical leak from a Union Carbide factory killed 8,000 people and caused long-term health problems and suffering in the community.

Sinha, who was a successful and wealthy advertising copywriter in England before becoming a novelist, has been campaigning for compensation for Bhopal since 1993, when an activist asked him to help raise money for a clinic.

Animal’s People is both novel and polemic, but Sinha is clear that it must work as fiction if it is to have any impact. “It has to be a work of art – if you will excuse me using that expression – first,” he says, “and if it can’t succeed as that, it could have no power to change things.”

The author says he had been working on a novel with intertwining stories of people in a Bhopal-like setting, but had trouble making the book live until he found the main character:

Animal, a 20-year-old whose spine was wrecked as a result of the leak and who has been reduced to walking on all fours. “I used to be human once. So I’m told,” he says at the outset. Animal curses, masturbates while spying on a naked woman from up a tree, and tries to poison the leader of the justice campaign. He is the anarchic centre of an angry, yet warm-hearted, book….

Sinha says it was finding Animal – and his violent, vibrant voice – that was the key to the book. “I had tried first person, third person, all sorts of things, and it just wouldn’t work,” he says. “It remained resolutely, totally dead, and then one day someone said to me, ‘I’ve met this young man in Bhopal who goes on all fours.’ I didn’t know anything more about it than that, and the fact that he was quite a feisty character with a chip on his shoulder but also a sense of humour. I thought: maybe that’s what this thing needs.”

The winner of the Man Booker Prize will be announced on Oct. 16.

Heather Reisman can take a bow today. The Indigo CEO appears to have shamed Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty into promising a major funding boost for the province’s cash-starved school library system.

As The Globe and Mail reports, Reisman has commissioned a short documentary on the crisis in school libraries, and after a press screening of the film this week, McGuinty appeared at a Toronto Indigo store and promised $120-million for Ontario school systems: $80-million to buy books, and $40-million to hire new librarians. The Globe story also notes that Indigo will be supplying the books at cost.

No word on where the documentary might be seen online, but according to the story,

The documentary, which profiles Ms. Reisman’s foundation and the trials of two Ontario schools that applied for grants, includes shots of battered books with broken spines and children forced to share aging texts.

There are interviews with students and children’s author Robert Munsch and tearful scenes with school principals describing the need for more and newer reading materials for their students.

Globe columnist Margaret Wente also writes about the issue in today’s paper. And here are some related stories from the Q&Q archives.

• “Indigo directs another $1.5-million to schools” (May 2007)
• “Ontario lieutenant-governor begins a new book drive for First Nations kids” (January 2007)
• “Indigo commits $250,000 for school literacy program” (December 2004)
• “Scenes from a school library” (February 2004)
• “Library coalition takes fight to provinces” (February 2004)
• “The crisis in school libraries” (February 2002)
• “Industry group fights for school libraries” (April 2002)

Wondering just who is buying O.J. Simpson’s controversial book If I Did It, now being published by the Goldman family? There was a clue to be found on Amazon.ca today. The website noted that “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” Memoirs: 1939-1993 by Brian Mulroney and 21 Pounds in 21 Days: The Martha’s Vineyard Diet Detox by Roni Deluz.

Clearly, these book-buyers are not the sort to shy away from the controversial. Any other parallels drawn might lead straight to libel suits, so Quillblog will just leave it at that. Though, this might be one case in which the prime minister who championed free trade will object to the workings of the invisible hand of the market.

Cherie Blair, wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair, has signed a deal with Little, Brown to publish a memoir, The Guardian reports. Cherie Blair: The Autobiography will be “a warm, intimate and often very funny portrait of a family living in extraordinary circumstances,” the publisher promised.

It said the book, to be issued in October next year, would contain “the full story of her life to date,” from Mrs Blair’s working-class Liverpool childhood to her parallel roles as a leading human rights barrister and the wife of Tony Blair during his 10 years as prime minister.
….
According to Little, Brown, Mrs Blair’s book would see her “speak for the first time about what it was like to combine life as a working mother with life married to the prime minister”.

The Guardian article observes that her account of the years at 10 Downing Street are such an important selling point for the book that the author is using her married name rather than Cherie Booth, which she uses in her professional life.

International diplomacy aside, this Quillblogger is hoping to read some entertaining anecdotes describing the conversations when George Bush came to dinner.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper had a rare and very apt gift to give to the Australian people yesterday during his official visit Down Under, The Globe and Mail reports. This spring, a rare books specialist at Library and Archives Canada found, tucked into a scrapbook compiled by an eccentric 19th-century British banker, a playbill advertising a performance of three plays staged in Sydney on July 30, 1796. Presenting it at a lunch hosted by Australian Prime Minister John Howard at Government House in Canberra, Harper said:

“Now a 200-year-old playbill I think is quite a find in its own right, but what makes this one even more exceptional is that it is also the sole surviving copy of the earliest known … document printed in Australia,” Harper told the official luncheon guests. “I’m proud to return it to its right owners on this auspicious historic day when we are renewing bonds of friendship, celebrating our mutual accomplishments and vowing to work together for a better world.”

Val Ross’s Globe article went on to offer this analysis:

This was no doubt music to the ears of Canadian arts activists who have been protesting against the Conservatives’ recent $11.8-million cut to Ottawa’s cultural diplomacy budget.

And indeed, Susan Swan, Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, told Q&Q that she thought this might bode well for the arts. “Harper deciding it’s cool to support culture in Australia is a good sign because we want to change the federal government’s attitude to the arts.”

This Quillblogger doesn’t want to rain on everyone’s optimism; I certainly hope it does mean Harper is truly supportive of the arts, but it will take something more than this gift to the Australians to convince me – more interest in or increased funding for arts and living artists in Canada, perhaps. Although, author Yann Martel did get a response from Harper’s assistant about the books he has been sending the prime minister every two weeks in a private campaign to increase Harper’s appreciation of literature.

Dear Mr. Martel:

On behalf of the Prime Minister, I would like to thank you for your recent letter and the copy of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. We appreciated reading your comments and suggestions regarding the novel.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to write.

Sincerely,

Susan I. Ross

Assistant to the Prime Minister

In case you haven’t noticed, Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine, tends to divide critics and political pundits into two camps: those who support her contentious thesis – basically, that Chicago School neoliberals capitalize on natural and social catastrophes – and those who don’t. That divide couldn’t be made more clear than by a spread in today’s National Post, which pairs an excerpt of the book’s opening pages with salty commentary by right-wing columnist Terence Corcoran, who not only counters Klein’s argument but claims its opposite, maintaining that Klein blames Chicago School guru Milton Friedman for what are really “socialism’s failures.” However, what makes the column good reading is Corcoran’s description of the book as a kind of surreal travelogue:

By the end of the book, the Klein shock theory is careening like an out-of-control Bolivian bus on the road to La Paz, Milton Friedman strapped to the hood as a symbolic ornament, her rhetoric and ideas flying off in all directions.

If that’s the case, I can’t wait to get to the end of The Shock Doctrine.

The Post will be running excerpts of the book until Friday, presumably with more accompanying commentary. For more tempered perspectives, see The Globe and Mail’s review (where Todd Gitlin essentially agrees with Klein, but won’t stomach her “tendentiousness” and left-wing romanticism), Q&Q’s review (where Dan Rowe compares the book to Dr. Seuss’s story “The Sneetches,” and lauds Klein for her timeliness), or the Toronto Star’s review (where James Grainger opens with this line: “The Shock Doctrine may be one of the most important non-fiction books aimed at the general reader published in the last decade”).

Alastair Campbell’s memoir The Blair Years, about his work as communications chief for former British prime minister Tony Blair, has topped a list he would probably rather it hadn’t. The hotel chain Travelodge reports that it is the book most frequently left behind in rooms by its hotel guests this year, according to a story in The Guardian. Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles came in at number six and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at number 10.

Over 6,500 books are left behind in Travelodge hotels throughout the year and are either returned to customers or donated to [the] local charity shop.

It is unclear whether the books are read before being abandoned or are simply discarded out of boredom. However, most of the books on the list are hardbacks and many are heavy tomes - in weight if not in tone - which may offer some clues as to why holidaymakers choose to discard them rather than carry them on their travels. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows comes in at nearly 800 pages while [Jilly Cooper’s] Wicked is pushing on 900. The reasons for the frequent abandonment in Travelodge hotels of Paul McKenna’s I Can Make You Thin can, however, only be a matter of speculation.

Quillblog wonders if Campbell, who resigned in 2003 after the storm of controversy over a “sexed-up” document about the weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein was thought to possess, believes in the adage “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

This week’s Maclean’s has an interview with Latin American author Mario Vargas Llosa, who has a new novel (The Bad Girl) out this fall. The article is an entertaining read, mostly because interviewer Isabel Vincent expends a considerable amount of effort trying (and failing) to get the author to call Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez the worst thing that ever happened to the region.

Llosa is reasonably chatty and forthcoming throughout, sharing his opinions on authoritarianism, Latin American politics, and the writing life, at least until Vincent’s final question:

What about Gabriel García Márquez, who is, like you, a literary giant in Latin America? You used to be good friends until you punched him out in a Mexican theatre in 1976. Neither you nor he have ever spoken about the feud, which has become one of the legendary battles of contemporary literature. Although you haven’t spoken for more than 30 years, you share the same agent [the legendary Carmen Balcells in Barcelona], and you recently agreed to allow part of your own book on García Márquez to be used as the introduction to a new edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is being re-released in Spain and throughout Latin America. Does this mean that there is a rapprochement with García Márquez on the horizon?

I don’t answer questions about that.

(Photo courtesy of the author’s official website, http://www.mvargasllosa.com/)

They’re doing it again: earlier this week, former Bush adviser Karl Rove compared himself to both Grendel and Beowulf. Before that, he was Moby Dick.

Now, Rove’s ex-boss, one George W. Bush, is doing it – in a speech defending America’s continued presence in Iraq, Bush cited – wait for it – Graham Greene’s The Quiet American:

“In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called The Quiet American. It was set in Saigon and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’”

Again, Bush was citing a book about the dangers of American overseas naïveté to support his argument in favour of staying in Iraq. The best part is, as can be seen here, Bush’s critics have often cited the character of Alden Pyle to criticize the president’s foreign policy.

What’s next? “My fellow Americans, there was once this guy named Chauncey Gardiner…”

Monday was the deadline for former students of native residential schools to opt out of a $2-billion compensation package offered by the federal government for abuses they suffered while attending the schools. (Accepting compensation means they agree not to sue the government or the churches that ran the schools.) The Tyee provides some related reading with a review of two books: Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast by Jan Hare and Jean Barman (UBC Press) and The Letters of Margaret Butcher: Missionary-Imperialism on the North Pacific Coast, edited by Mary-Ellen Kelm (University of Calgary).

Tyee reviewer Crawford Kilian says the books provide some insight into what those schools were like, the mindset of the people running them, and ways that the students suffered even when they weren’t subjected to the worst types of physical and sexual abuse that have been documented.

Apart from chronicling an almost forgotten era in B.C. history, these books introduce us to two remarkable women. Both were highly intelligent, immensely competent, and profoundly toxic to the people they were trying to save.
…
For modern readers, however, it’s striking to see that Emma expressed zero interest in the people the Crosbys were trying to convert. She never discusses the Tsimshians’ culture or history. (One photograph, from 1876, shows Thomas Crosby in Tsimshian regalia; he looks painfully embarrassed.) She refers in passing to the dirt and disease of the natives, but doesn’t even mention the catastrophic smallpox pandemic that a decade earlier had killed a third of the native population on the B.C. coast.

Margaret Butcher made similar remarks: “They are a slow, indolent, dirty people,” she writes, “bound very strongly by custom and superstition.” But Kilian makes particular note of her attitudes toward the Kitamaat people’s language.

“I suppose in a few years time Kitamaat speech will be extinct for the young folks learn to speak Eng. in the schools & one of our senior girls told me they cannot understand all the Kitamaat of the old folk.”

Butcher clearly considered this progress.

It’s very difficult to compensate for this kind of suffering and loss in dollars, but the costs to native people across the country are clearly evident and profound.

Last week, we told you about the literary pretensions of Karl Rove, U.S. president George Bush’s notorious senior adviser, who has just resigned his post. He’s at it again.

Previously, Rove compared himself to Moby Dick, and the Democratic Congress to Captain Ahab. This week, he digs even deeper for a comparison, coming up with this: “Let’s face it. I mean, I’m a myth, and they’re — you know, I’m Beowulf. You know, I’m Grendel. I don’t know who I am. But they’re after me.”

Here are some other literary things Rove could be:

• the Jabberwocky
• Voldemort
• the Pit and/or the Pendulum
• the most dangerous game
• Cthulhu
• Dr. Moreau
• Iago
• the hound of the Baskervilles
• Uriah Heep
• Lady MacBeth
• the Penguin
• one ring to rule them all
• Veruca Salt
• April (the cruelest month)
• the Wicked Witch of the West
• the Oobleck
• Raskolnikov
• the muffin man
• Galactus, the devourer of worlds
• the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem
• a creative non-victim (for fans of Atwood’s Survival)

The New York Times has posted an article about a new book being published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux this September: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. It seems that early excerpts from the book, which argues that the pro-Israel lobby wields too much influence in U.S. political circles, are setting off accusations of anti-Semitism. That’s not really all that surprising, of course, but what is surprising – or shameful, at any rate – is that several cultural and political institutions are canceling planned events with the authors.

The subject will certainly prompt furious debate, though not at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a Jewish cultural center in Washington, and three organizations in Chicago. They have all turned down or canceled events with the authors, mentioning unease with the controversy or the format.

The authors were particularly disturbed by the Chicago council’s decision, since plans for that event were complete and both authors have frequently spoken there before. The two sent a four-page letter to 94 members of the council’s board detailing what happened. “On July 24, Council President Marshall Bouton phoned one of us (Mearsheimer) and informed him that he was canceling the event,” and that his decision “was based on the need ‘to protect the institution.’ He said that he had a serious ‘political problem,’ because there were individuals who would be angry if he gave us a venue to speak, and that this would have serious negative consequences for the council. ‘This one is so hot,’ Marshall maintained.”

In Canada, the default distributor for Farrar, Straus & Giroux is Douglas & McIntyre, but D&M marketing manager Emiko Morita told us that they will not be selling the book here because it has not been made available to them by FSG. As she explained to us, this suggests that FSG is still looking to sell Canadian rights separately.

UPDATE: Q&Q has been informed that Penguin Canada holds Canadian rights and will be publishing the book on Sept. 4.

Yesterday’s cabinet shuffle in Stephen Harper’s government included moving Josee Verner into Bev Oda’s position as minister of Canadian Heritage. Verner, who was first elected in the Quebec City riding of Louis-Saint-Laurent in 2006, was previously minister of international co-operation and minister for la Francophonie and official languages.

Oda’s performance had been criticized on several fronts, but just what the change will mean in general and for the publishing industry specifically remains to be seen since, in trademark Harper style, none of the ministers were allowed to speak to the media about their new positions yesterday. Most analysts, particularly the Toronto Star’s Martin Knelman, point to the importance of Verner’s Quebec and francophone roots:

Enter Verner, the new minister of Canadian heritage, who took 58 per cent of the vote in her Quebec City riding in the last election. She works well in both languages. She is considered progressive and more likely to be embraced by the arts community.

Even more crucial is her popularity in Quebec City, where 2008 looms as a very big year, and where the heritage minister will be required to sparkle in a way that translates into votes.
Next July marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Samuel de Champlain, who established the first permanent settlement of Europeans in Canada.

That is going to be the occasion for a massive year-long party featuring the Cirque du Soleil, the Roman Catholic Church, an exhibit from the Louvre, world hockey championship games and the world’s francophonie summit, attended by leaders of 72 French-speaking governments.

Ottawa has promised to contribute $110 million, of which $40 million will come from the heritage ministry.

There can be no doubt that in 2008, the Conservatives have to sparkle in Quebec as never before if they hope to win a majority in the next election. As the new heritage minister, Verner is being given the job of making sure that amid the hoopla in Canada’s most historic city, nobody rains on Harper’s parade.

It all makes this Quillblogger think that publishers and writers looking for more funding should follow a bit of advice that comedian Shaun Majumder offered Canada’s perpetually under-funded aboriginal peoples in a This Hour Has 22 Minutes episode earlier this year: you might want to think about moving to Quebec.

The Bush administration has long been noted for the high literary tone maintained by its most powerful denizens. The president’s own voracious reading habits are well known, as is his fondness for employing complex Oulipian constraints in many of his public remarks, which some of his lesser-read critics have misinterpreted as mere malapropisms.

This tradition continues with the departure of Bush’s closest advisor, Karl Rove. In reference to Congress’s current subpoena-mad mindset, Rove had this to say: “I’m realistic enough to understand that the subpoenas are going to keep flying my way. I’m Moby Dick and we’ve got three or four members of Congress who are trying to cast themselves in the part of Captain Ahab — so they’re going to keep coming.”

Rove went on to compare the Washington press corps to Eliot’s The Hollow Men, “Leaning together/ Headpiece(s) filled with straw,” the controversy over warrantless wire-tapping to Kafka’s The Trial, and the situation in Iraq to the final act of Macbeth.

According to a story in The Globe and Mail, author Kevin Patterson (who is also a doctor) is under investigation by the Canadian military for an article he wrote for the July/August issue of Mother Jones magazine that includes, in part, a graphic description of Patterson’s attempts to save the life of a young Canadian soldier. Patterson served for six weeks as a doctor in Kandahar. At issue is the fact that, in the article, Patterson names the soldier, who died of his wounds. For his part, Patterson says that the soldier’s death was covered at the time in the Canadian media, and thus his identity would have been easily discovered.

Patterson’s account of his time in Afghanistan will be included in Outside the Wire, an anthology of essays and interviews on Canada’s involvement in that country, to be published this coming December by Random House Canada. Patterson co-edited the book with former McDermid Agency agent Jane Warren. (Random House publisher Anne Collins wrote a letter to The Globe in support of Patterson.)

Elsewhere, Toronto political blogger Jack Cunningham defends Patterson’s actions on his blog Whig, even going so far as to suggest that the military’s actions may be politically motivated. Commenters on Cunningham’s blog, however, say the issue is clearly patient-doctor confidentiality.