A selection of Steven Levingston’s reporting on book news.
How powerful is a Jon Stewart book plug? Ask his wife.
(WP 8/6/2016)
Oh, to be a writer married to Jon Stewart.
Writers unattached to Jon Stewart dream of appearing on “The Daily Show.” A short segment can turn anonymity into immortality and bottom-of-the-list Amazon sales into a bolt to the top.
Before departing this week, Stewart gave one final plug to a book close to his heart. At the close of his show on Tuesday, he turned to the camera and said: “One of the great pleasures of this show is having a pulpit to introduce an audience to books I care about – books I love. I’m going to miss that. And so before I go, I’m going to do it one more time. I have found this book by this incredible young author. Her name is my wife.”
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Harper Lee objects to new book about her by Marja Mills
(WP 7/15/2014)
Call in Atticus Finch.
Only the scrupulously fair lawyer at the center of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” could get at the truth in the latest conflict over the reclusive author’s privacy.
The clash erupted again with Tuesday’s release of “The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee,” by former Chicago Tribune reporter Marja Mills. To gather material for her intimate portrait, Mills rented a house in Monroeville, Ala., next door to the 88-year-old author and her older sister, Alice, and gradually got to know them. In the book, Mills claims she had “the trust, support, and encouragement” of both sisters.
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Jane Goodall’s ‘Seeds of Hope’ reissued a year after being pulled from shelves
(WP 4/2/2014)
Primatologist Jane Goodall acknowledged she was “not methodical enough” in her note-taking for the first edition of her book “Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants,” which was reissued on Tuesday a year after the publisher pulled it from the shelves.
Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, decided to publish the new version after evidence emerged last year that numerous passages in the book had been used from other published sources without attribution.
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Jane Goodall’s ‘Seeds of Hope’ contains borrowed passages without attribution
(WP 3/19/2013)
Jane Goodall, the primatologist celebrated for her meticulous studies of chimps in the wild, is releasing a book next month on the plant world that contains at least a dozen passages borrowed without attribution, or footnotes, from a variety of Web sites.
The borrowings in “Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From the World of Plants” range from phrases to an entire paragraph from Web sites such as Wikipedia and others that focus on astrology, tobacco, beer, nature and organic tea.
Goodall wrote “Seeds of Hope” with Gail Hudson, who has contributed to two other books by the 78-year-old naturalist. Hudson is described on literati.net as a newspaper and magazine editor, freelance writer, former spirituality editor for Amazon.com and longtime devotee of organic foods and holistic living.
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O’Reilly’s book not for sale at Ford’s Theatre museum bookstore
(WP 11/12/2011)
Of all the places you’d expect to find Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever,” Ford’s Theatre, the site of the dreadful act, should rank at the top. But you’d do better to search for the history bestseller on Amazon.com, because you won’t find it at the theater’s store.
For a history of the assassination — an “unsanitized and uncompromising . . . no spin American story,” as O’Reilly and coauthor Martin Dugard put it, “Killing Lincoln” suffers from factual errors and a lack of documentation, according to a study conducted by Rae Emerson, the deputy superintendent of Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, which is a unit of the National Park Service. Emerson’s review recommended that the book not be sold at Ford Theatre’s store.
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Putin biography raises risk for author
(WP 10/20/2011)
Masha Gessen was in Moscow while her agent Elyse Cheney was at the fair selling foreign rights to Gessen’s forthcoming book, “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.”
Publishers Weekly reports that Gessen’s publisher, Riverhead, said the book, which is scheduled for release in March, contains “explosive” details about Putin, the Russian prime minister. “And that,” PW adds, “could be a hazard for Gessen, especially in a country that is notoriously dangerous for journalists.”
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Steven Levingston 