Terry Pratchett, U.K. author of the wildly popular Discworld series, says that special “tribunals” should be set up to allow people suffering serious medical conditions to seek help in terminating their own lives. Assisted suicide is currently illegal in the U.K., but Pratchett, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, has offered himself as a “test case” for the kind of tribunal he is proposing, which Sky News says “would include a legal expert in family affairs and a doctor who had dealt with serious, long-term illness.”

Pratchett is to deliver the Richard Dimbleby Lecture tonight, in which he will argue that being granted permission to end his life would make each day more precious. The Telegraph quotes Pratchett:

If I knew that I could die at any time I wanted, then suddenly every day would be as precious as a million pounds.

I certainly do not expect or assume that every GP or hospital practitioner would be prepared to assist death by arrangement, even in the face of overwhelming medical evidence. That is their choice. Choice is very important in this matter.

But there will be some probably older, probably wiser, who will understand.

Pratchett may be right about that. According to the same Telegraph article, 75% of those surveyed in a recent poll approved of making assisted suicide legal.

ThinkProgress has been excerpting juicy bits from Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor, a memoir by former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer. The most recent concerns the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which, though always political to some degree, was made nakedly so during the Bush years. (Another Bush speechwriter apparently objected to the idea of awarding the medal to the cancer-stricken Ted Kennedy on the grounds that the longtime senator was “a liberal.”)

But it wasn’t always politics that animated medal discussions: sometimes, the objections to potential candidates were a little more… medieval.  According to Latimer’s book, some people in the White House did not like the idea of giving one to J.K. Rowling “because the Harry Potter books encouraged witchcraft.”

There’s a lot that could be said about this, but perhaps we should give the last word to a man who was awarded the medal in 1985:

In the Israel-Palestine conflict, symbolism is everything. And there is a small tussle going on right now that is so heavy with symbolism, it might as well be an Ingmar Bergman film. At issue is a set of Jewish holy books that were allegedly burned by a group of Arabs. The books were being studied by Homesh Tehila (“Homesh First”), an Israeli group looking to re-establish a settlement that had been dismantled by the Israeli government. They had been maintaining an ad hoc yeshiva (a kind of school) on the site of the former settlement.

Unfiltered information about this kind of thing is difficult to come by (hence our hedging in the title of this post), but Homesh Tehila alleges that Arabs raided the yeshiva and burned the books a few weeks ago, and plans were afoot to bury the texts as part of a, well, highly symbolic ceremony.

From the The Jerusalem Post:

According to David Ha’ivri, a spokesman for the Samaria Regional Council, one night when there was no guard, local Arabs broke into the yeshiva and “burned to ashes” the holy books studied by the students.

In a press release, Ha’ivri juxtaposed the fire created by the burned holy books with the spiritual fire kindled by the yeshiva students’ learning.

(The ceremony, by the way, appears to have been postponed after some of its leaders were threatened with arrest.)

Well, she sure does know her target audience. In a profile in the August 2009 of Vanity Fair, Alaska governor Sarah Palin revealed that her forthcoming memoir will be published both by HarperCollins (as previously announced), and also by HarperCollins’ Christian publishing imprint Zondervan in a separate, special edition. From the Vanity Fair profile:

Soon Palin will take a crack at her own story: she has signed a book contract for an undisclosed but presumably substantial sum, and has chosen Lynn Vincent, a senior writer at the Christian-conservative World magazine, as co-author of the memoir, which is to be published next year not only by HarperCollins but also in a special edition by Zondervan, the Bible-publishing house, that may include supplemental material on faith.

(Thanks to Publishers Weekly for the tip.)

In a similar vein to Yann Martel’s book barrage on Harper, Lesley Choyce, author and publisher of Pottersfield Press, plans to hand-deliver copies of his new book Nova Scotia: Visions of the Future to all provincial MHAs and federal MPs in the province. According to Choyce, the purpose of the book, which was released in May, is to set in motion an action plan to help improve Nova Scotia. From the Pottersfield Press web site:

In the summer of 2008, Pottersfield publisher Lesley Choyce sent a letter to a select and varied list of Nova Scotians asking them to contribute to a book about this province’s future. … He invited many Nova Scotians to write anything they wanted to, hoping contributors would cover environment, technology, immigration, social aspects, urban life, rural life, energy, politics, government, family, economics, forests, the ocean and much more. The bolder the vision, the better. Stories and personal aspects were okay. Controversial ideas were fine. Which future? Anything beyond ten years and up to a thousand.

The initiative will also coincide with Pottersfield’s 30th anniversary. Choyce intends to personally confront his province’s leaders in the second week of July.

You knew this was coming, didn’t you?

From The New York Times:

With his sustained blitz of television appearances and speeches, former Vice President Dick Cheney has established himself as perhaps the leading Republican voice against President Obama.

Not a bad time, then, to be in the market for a multimillion-dollar book contract.

Mr. Cheney is actively shopping a memoir about his life in politics and service in four presidential administrations, a work that would add to what is already an unusually dense collection of post-Bush-presidency memoirs that will offer a collective rebuttal to the many harshly critical works released while the writers were in office and beyond.

The article says that Cheney is looking for more than $2 million for the book, but will likely get a lower amount, given that most of the American public rate him just behind scabies in terms of appeal. Let’s hope that one day he will have to put this advance toward lawyer’s fees.

Bonus punchline! One of the book’s big revelations: Satan is shorter than you’d think.

One of the most tragic aspects of the publishing industry is recognizing the years of labour, research, networking, and luck that go into getting something onto shelves – and then watching an idiot like this get handed a publishing contract.

That’s right – ousted Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, recently impeached for allegedly selling Barack Obama’s vacant senate seat, has signed a six-figure book deal.

Well now you can!

For real?

Yes you can.

Oh, and there’s also this: Barack Obama and Spider-Man appear in comic book together

According to The Wall Street Journal, outgoing U.S. First Lady Laura Bush has just signed a deal with Scribner for a memoir of her time in the White House, which should hit the streets sometime in 2010.

Publishing executives estimated the price for Mrs. Bush’s memoir at $3.5-million to $5-million. During a strong economy, Sen. Hillary Clinton received an $8-million advance for her 2003 White House memoir, Living History, which was published by Simon & Schuster. That book … was a hit, earning back its advance after only one week.

Memoirs by First Ladies are a dime a dozen, but this one has the potential to be a bit more interesting than most. Before Laura met George, she was generally known as a left-leaning type, and throughout her husband’s time in office she mostly kept her thoughts and feelings to herself. Who knows, maybe she’ll reveal that she was a mole for the ACLU all along.

It emerged this week that Judith Regan – fired from HarperCollins a couple years ago, following the O.J. confessional tome debacle – won $10.75-million in damages in a subsequent lawsuit over her dismissal. Why did this emerge? Because she allegedly didn’t want to pay her lawyers. According to Bloomberg writer Patricia Hurtado:

In its complaint filed in New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, the Dreier law firm alleged Regan retained it to represent her in February 2007 and agreed to pay 25 percent of any money she recovered as a result of a judgment or settlement.

“Regan terminated petitioners for the single purpose of attempting to avoid the contingency fee,” Dreier alleged in its complaint. “Upon finalizing the settlement, Regan terminated” the law firm “and has since failed and refused to pay them the fees and disbursements to which they are entitled.”

Don’t feel too bad for them, though. Late in the piece, Hurtado notes that the head of the law firm in question, Marc Dreier, was just charged with “cheating hedge funds out of more than $100 million.”