Press TV
Brutal austerity measures paint disturbing picture of US economy
Press TV
A total of 173 airport control towers are closing in places such as Detroit, San Francisco, St. Petersburg, Florida, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Any airline disasters will henceforth be the responsibility of the austerity ghouls. The ...

Derek Raymond has been called the father of British noir. But author A.L. Kennedy says He Died With His Eyes Open is a crime novel so far beyond noir that there isn't even a word for that kind of darkness. Is there a book you find deeply disturbing but still love? Tell us in the comments.

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New Zealand v England – day five as it happened!
The Guardian (blog)
Dan MacDonald writes: "Have you checked to see whether the NY cricket team in "Netherland" exists, or is it, like the book, just a forgettable work of fiction?" A forgettable work of fiction? ... Really pretty cricket ground on the banks of the river ...

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Hi, it's me — Christine. I can't believe you still have this number. That I still remember it. But there's your voice on the machine ... like no time has passed. I'm so sorry for your loss, Nick, for your mom. Can anyone else hear this? [PRESS # TO ERASE AND RERECORD YOUR MESSAGE]

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Did you leave a message after our prompt? For Round 10 of Three-Minute Fiction, we asked you to submit a short story in the form of a voice mail message.

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Dameron was a composer and pianist who fused the sophisticated arrangements of the Big Band era with bebop's complex harmonies. A new biography shines a light on the too-brief life of the man known as "The Architect of Bop."

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Finished Population: 485 just now. Even read the extra stuff at the end where Michael Perry talks about himself in the third person but you can totally tell that it’s him writing it because who else would care about not being able to polka or have the nerve to write ‘bad hair trifecta’ about anybody else’s person in the biography at the end of their own damn book. And then the excerpts from books that I now must read and am really kind of down that I haven’t before as he was in the storenot all that long ago and maybe I could have fangirl’d over him a bit. And I like fangirl-ing a bit.
Thing is, I read this book because I picked for my reading group this month. The one where we read travel-writing. And while we will go back to the ladies driving cars places theme for April (which is a theme that I’m so totally into that I almost think we oughta just go ahead and read all of those that we can find because I love being a lady driving a car places and I love reading about ladies driving cars places. (I grew up in a family that traveled a lot in cars, well, usually one car, but sometimes there were funerals and we would go and then there were lots of cars cuz no one puts the cemetery in the town – that’s just lazy hygiene. There are trips that I’ve taken that lasted 7 days that are more meaningful than entire months of chaotic living without one wheeled trip anywhere.) Car travel makes sense to me; I understand the speed. If I could get to and maintain that speed without fossil fuels I would feel better. And trains – I love the train. It is even better than driving because of no pulling off the road to open the doors and pee in private (note: if you can’t pee in a field you are missing out on a fundamental human experience, and I recommend that you fix that missing element in your life. Because it is elemental and if it is not there then it is definitely absent.) and I’m hoping that the next time I spend the night on a train I am not groggy from too much travel and also not motion sick in the morning. I’d really like to be as awesome at train travel as I am at car travel. I wonder how many books there are that are ladies driving cars places. But not stupid ones about coming to terms with road sweat and dust complexion and air conditioning cotton mouth and all the newbie stuff. There’s gotta be more out there than by Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Edith Wharton. Well, if there’s not, those books are good for some re-reading. All of my travel-writing is built in notes about mileage and gas and what food was eaten and there are leaves and brochures and unlabeled photographs. It is hardly the stuff of legend, only the stuff that makes me who I am.) this month we read Michael Perry’s book about not traveling anywhere and I have to admit that I’m hoping my reading group will be understanding.
It’s not like he doesn’t travel anywhere, it’s just that it’s almost all in service of being on the volunteer fire department and having a pretty strong stomach is a good thing for this book. Which is wonderful. I have mentioned that, haven’t I? It is wonderful. It is funny and unflinching and kind of not aw-shucks and kind of exactly aw-shucks and the balance he finds is just right for talking about actively living in a small town.
Thing is, City is where I belong. There are two ex-Mr. Jonesey’s who can attest to this. Small town living is not for me. I love to be in the Sandhills of Nebraska on top of a bluff with the wind full in my face whipping the shape of my heart back into itself, but do not think to find me living there. Respect there is, and that keeps me to my own and my own are alleys and trash trucks and subways and bustle and gratings and everything that goes with them. And respect is what Perry has for his family and his friends and his fellow fire fighters and the world in which they all live and that comes through like a cold clear sky.
The writing is controlled and impossible, his language is like a patchwork quilt of phrases and idiom and rhythm. The man is a poet and it shows.
I have been reading kind of a lot of late, you may have noticed, and I know that everything comes back to Les Miserables, and I’m okay with that, but here is a thing that I find every single time I dip into that book and that hums through Perry’s book as well – there is a difference between alone and isolated, and it is in the narrow space of that difference that the track of a life is seen.
Alone is not without love or pain or joy or laughter or tears. Isolated is without everything. It is right to be alone in a place, and equally right to be connected to everyone in it. Solitude is no crime against community or living, but self-imprisonment can very well be. Toward the end of the book, Perry recounts a conversation he had with a neighbor. The conversation takes about 8 lines on the page, probably about 2 minutes in real time (depending on the speed of speech) and when it’s over, he tells us that he never spoke to the man again.
Not isolated. Just alone.
Also, I totally cried.

Marquette Group has evolved with technology into new marketing world
Peoria Journal Star
"Unfortunately, people don't know who we are, but they know who our clients are," he said of the marketing firm that deals with companies like Sherwin Williams, U-Haul and Bank of America. "A good portion of our business is still in ... For years, the ...

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Book events for week beginning March 10
STLtoday.com
Ed Kovacs • St. Louis native Ed Kovacs returns with “Good Junk.” 7 p.m. at Left Bank Books CWE, 399 Euclid Avenue. 314-367-6731, left-bank.com. WEDNESDAY. Kekla Magoon • Young adult author will discuss “The Rock and the River.” 6 p.m. at St. Louis ...

Journalist Susan Spencer-Wendel was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease in 2011. In her new memoir, Until I Say Good-Bye, she describes a year spent living with the disease but devoted to joy: traveling, visiting friends and family, and accepting her fate with grace.

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Saks reels in shoe lovers to 'Make Your Own Manolos'
St. Louis Business Journal (blog)
Hosted by Susan Sherman and KSDK's Leisa Zigman, the event had all the trappings of a fun girls' night: champagne and canapes, a DJ spinning, reflexology courtesy of Clean Spa and express manicures at the Yves Saint Laurent counter. Scenes from ... I ...

The Cybil Awards are a children's and young adult literary award given out by bloggers in the field.  In instances where I've read the book, I've offered my thoughts.  Visit the Cybils website to hear more from them.

Fiction Picture Book
A Home for Bird by Philip C. Stead
Such an odd little book, but I'm glad to see it here.











Nonfiction Picture Book
Mrs. Harkness and the Panda by Alicia Potter, illustrated by Melissa Sweet
A very engaging look at an amazing woman and a story that isn't well-known enough.












Easy Reader
A Trip to the Bottom of the World with Mouse by Frank Viva
Frank Viva's illustration are always a favorite.  It seems you really can't go wrong by picking up a Toon Book.










Early Chapter Book
Sadie and Ratz by Sonya Hartnett, illustrated by Ann James












Poetry
Bookspeak!: Poems About Books by Laura Purdie Salas, illustrated by Josee Bisaillon












Middle Grade Graphic Novel
Giants Beware! by Jorge Aguirre and Rafael Rosado













Middle Grade Fantasy and Science Fiction
The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen












Middle Grade Fiction
Wonder by R.J. Palacio
Finally some awards love for Wonder!  It was about time.












Young Adult Nonfiction Book
Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin











Young Adult Graphic Novel
Friends with Boys by Faith Erin Hicks













Young Adult Fantasy and Science Fiction
Seraphina by Rachel Hartman













Young Adult Fiction
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
If you don't know how much I love this book, welcome, because you obviously just found this blog.  Needless to say, I'm thrilled.

New picture books include a look at baseball in Japan and biographies of Willie Mays and Babe Ruth.

Redemption is a complex thing.  We like to pretend it’s straightforward.  Do this, forgiveness, atonement, compensation can be made.  The greater the need, the larger the act required.

There are two things wrong with this.  The first is that we can know everything about what we have done (or not done) that requires an act of contrition.  The second is that contrition—forgiveness, atonement, compensation—is the same as redemption.

Khaled Hosseini shows how this is a mistake in his deceptively simple storytelling in The Kite Runner.  He understands that redemption is not about atoning for something you did wrong.  It is about changing what it is that allowed you to do something wrong in the first place.  It is about becoming.  One is redeemed by taking the responsibility—and the risk—for who one is and making that consistent with what one can and should be.

He also understands that part of the journey to that new state is learning the truth of our life.

Sometimes that may be simply impossible.  Things disappear, memories fade, people die.  The components that comprise our Self can be lost or overlooked, the connections broken or never made, and without a sufficiency of such information we may simply be unable to know what we need to do.  This fact has been central to tragedy since Sophocles, probably even before him, and has never become untrue.

In the absence of knowledge, choice is necessarily limited.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but sometimes it means we live with a sense of guilt difficult if not impossible to explain—usually because we did something for which atonement is necessary.  Where redemption comes in is when we know we must atone, but in order to do so we must become something else, someone else.

The elements of young Amir’s life in Kabul, son of a local hero, a wealthy man larger than life who has done much good for those around him, combine in a negative way to render him not the person his father wants him to be.  He senses it in so many ways, from the belief that he is at fault for killing his mother (in childbirth) to the disappointment he feels from his father because he is not athletic, to the jealousy he feels for the affection his father shows to Hassan, the son of their servant, who is also Amir’s best friend.  Amir cannot be wholly himself because there is a conflict between who he seems to be and what he wishes to be in his father’s eyes.

Here, then, is where Hosseini  displays the depth of our complications.  The faults Amir senses in himself react with the faults his father clearly sees in himself.  The only genuinely unconflicted person among them is Hassan, but even he is not wholly unalloyed.  There are layers upon layers, ethnic divisions, class divisions, history itself seems bent on distorting the clean emotions among them.  Amir comes to resent his friend, not for anything his friend has done, for Amir’s failure in his own mind to be what he should be for Hassan, and ends up driving Hassan and his father away, an event that breaks Amir’s father’s heart.  The need for redemption here is thwarted because the truth of the situation is not shared, not even admitted.

And then the Russians invade Afghanistan, forcing Amir and his father to flee, first to Pakistan and then to America, where they start over.

Here, in a new place, with new rules, Amir grabs a chance to leave all those uglinesses behind.  No one knows, no one sees, he can live up to altered expectations, take on a new life, be someone his father can respect. He falls in love, he marries, he begins a career as a writer.

During all this, his father passes away.  Baba dies proud of his son.  And yet it is not enough.

Then Afghanistan reaches out for him and brings him back for one more chance at a redemption Amir thought—hoped—was no longer necessary.

His father’s best friend calls him in 2001 and asks him to come to Pakistan to see him. There is a way to be good again.

That is the key to Hosseini’s understanding of redemption.  A way to be good again—but one which requires Amir to finally become who he had never been able to be before.  In order to fully achieve it, though, he must learn things he never knew, could not know, things kept from him which nevertheless contoured his life, forced him into certain channels, directed him, and stunted his potential.  He fights it, of course, but inevitably he sees that he simply can’t avoid becoming the person he always needed to become.

That is redemption.  Transformative.  Atonement and forgiveness, he suggests, are pointless if they are only rituals, acts that leave the essential person unchanged.  Redemption is in the change, in the new life, in recognition and response that remake us.

As J. Edgar Hoover became increasingly worried about communist threats against America, he instructed the bureau to conduct secret intelligence operations against anyone deemed "subversive." Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner is now out in paperback.

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Debuting at No. 5, Michael Moss' Salt Sugar Fat analyzes and critiques the processed food industry.

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Matthew Quick's The Silver Linings Playbook, a debut novel that inspired a film, appears at No. 15.

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The lists are compiled from weekly surveys of close to 500 independent bookstores nationwide.

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At No. 3, Ben Carson's America the Beautiful prescribes changes for future national prosperity.

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Jodi Picoult's The Storyteller, about the difference between murder and justice, debuts at No. 3.

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