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Guest Blogging: James Frey
2008-05-05 23:00:00
As you may have noticed, our May guest blogging has already begun, with an author who has been out of the limelight for a while but is back with a big novel this month, James Frey . Or, as he may feel his nickname is by now, "Yes, That James Frey" (not to be confused, old Cubs and Earl Weaver fans, with this James Frey). You don't need me to fill you in on the backstory, or to supply you with an opinion on it, since you most likely have one already. But I should note that, despite all the hoo-ha, A Million Little Pieces still sells at a very healthy clip on our site, and still gets enthusiastic new customer reviews (for instance, JazzDroid's "poo poo on the naysayers") from readers who came to the book after it had started being packaged with a giant grain of salt. (Also of note: we picked it as our top book of the year back in those quiet, pre-Oprah days of 2003.) And now, to cut through all the noise, we have James himself, sitting in for a month here. With ...
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I Saw a Genius Last Night
2008-05-04 23:38:00
Went to a small club on Lafayette St. in New York. Pianist named Eric Lewis. He used to play in Wynton Marsalis' Band. Now he's playing rock covers and originals. Calls it hardcore piano. Never seen anything like it. Never seen anyone as good at anything as he is on his piano. Was absolutely unbelievable. There's no record yet. Hopefully soon. For now check him out if he's ever in your area, or go to his Myspace.
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New Anthologies: The Starry Rift and The Del Rey Book of SF and Fantasy
2008-05-04 20:07:00
                    The prolific anthologists Ellen Datlow and Jonathan Strahan have been up to their usual creative antics again, bringing to fruition yet more unique fiction projects for hungry genre readers. Datlow's The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction & Fantasy is an unthemed collection of stories by the likes of Margo Lanagan, Elizabeth Bear, Maureen McHugh, Nathan Ballingrud, Jeffrey Ford, and eleven others. Locus wrote about the anthology, "....Datlow's ambitious volume could easily be [the now defunct online fiction site] Scifiction resurrected in trade paperback. Much the same authors, much the same sensibility--edgy contemporary or near-future stories, full of good prose and suspense, with a touch of horror often evident. ...a feast of good short fiction..." Although not as focused as Datlow's previous anthology, Inferno, genre enthusiasts should enjoy this interesting selection of tales. Datlo...

Friday Night Videos: Plummer as Nabokov Lecturing on Kafka versus Headless
2008-05-03 07:19:00
Welcome back to Friday Night Videos , where we aim to give you the kind of match-ups you deserve for hanging out here on the weekend. Our first video, in honor of Dmitri Nabokov's decision to release The Original of Laura, is a curious cultural remnant of a time when novelists had more importance than they do today. It's a television re-creation of a Nabokov lecture on Kafka featuring Christopher Plummer as Nabokov. (I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.) Nabokov's opponent tonight is Diana Holquist's promo video for Sexiest Man Alive from Warner Books. This video features excellent use of a cat. Enjoy!
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Down River wins the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Novel
2008-05-03 03:02:00
Last night, at an awards banquet in New York City, the Mystery Writers of America announced their 2008 Edgar Award winners. We were thrilled to see that John Hart took home the award for Best Novel for Down River , which made our Top 100 list of editors' picks for the Best Books of 2007. Among the other terrific reads (and in-house Amazon favorites) in the winners' circle are Tana French's remarkable debut In the Woods and Katherine Marsh's The Night Tourist. Check out the full list of winners and finalists below. --Anne Best Novel: · Christine Falls by Benjamin Black· Priest by Ken Bruen · The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon· Soul Patch by Reed Farrel Coleman · Down River by John Hart -- Winner! Best First Novel by an American Author:· Missing Witness by Gordon Campbell · In the Woods by Tana French -- Winner!· Snitch Jacket by Christopher Goffard · Head Games by Craig McDonald · Pyres by Derek Nikitas Best Paperback Origina...
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Guest Blogger: James Frey
2008-05-02 23:03:00
May is here. Two big things for me this month. One is that I am guest-blogging on Amazon all month. The other is that my new novel, Bright Shiny Morning, comes out on May 13th. Will check in now and then with updates, stories, impressions. I'll be doing some press, and will be on tour for a couple weeks. If you can, come check out the shows. Things are going to vary from venue to venue, but I'll have other writers reading with me, projected images, music, lights, live bands in LA and San Francisco. The band in LA is called Black Tide, and they're one of the best metal bands in the country, they played te main stage on OzzFest last summer. The band is SF is called 3rdrail, and has a big local following. They both rock. That's it for now. Here's to Amazon for inviting me to do this all month. James Frey
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Now It's Time for the Group Hug (Author One-on-One: Tim Harford)
2008-05-02 20:20:00
Like Dan, I have enjoyed this discussion very much, and I hope that's true of Omnivoracious readers. It has been hard work--in a good way--and forced me to think carefully. Let me finish by writing a bit about a subject I've been thinking about recently--it might help us find a bit of common ground and show why this discussion is important. Let's think about the problem of climate change, which is widely believed to require us to cut back a lot on our emissions of carbon dioxide. So what should we do? Standard economics has a solution: a carbon tax, or a tradable permit scheme, to raise the cost of emitting carbon. We'd all have an incentive to cut down by driving less and turning down the heating or air conditioning, and also by insulating our homes and finding more efficient cars and fridges. Businesses would also cut back, and would have an incentive to develop new technologies. Behavioral economics draws attention to different considerations. For example, we're not as s...
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Graphic Novel Friday Spotlight: Superspy by Matt Kindt
2008-05-02 16:59:00
Every Friday , Omnivoracious will turn the spotlight on one or more graphic novels, with future installments also including news, relevant links, and interviews. You can let me know who or what you'd like to see featured by commenting on this post. Superspy by Matt Kindt seems the perfect way to launch this new feature. It's innovative, adult, exciting, horrifying, brilliant, and one of my favorites from last year. Alas, it also seemed to go unnoticed by many outside of comics, until the Eisner nominations last month. Superspy's interlocking and stand-alone spy stories, told in a variety of art styles, gives readers an unromanticized version of spy life--the danger, the boredom, the subterfuge, the violence. Anyone who likes the structure of noir fiction or complex narratives in the novel form will find much to love about Superspy. Shadows, odd angles, cryptic messages, sudden brutality all play a role in the sobering success of the book. Also check out Kindt's blog for all thi...
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Guest Bookshelf: Mae Sander
2008-05-02 03:09:00
Our new bookshelf banner atop Omnivoracious is courtesy of reader Mae Sander, who has these words of introduction:In front of the books on this shelf is evidence of one of my reading interests: Shakespeare, represented by a bobble-head and a couple of small figures. The books behind Shakespeare reflect my interest in food history, Jewish history, and all varieties of ethnic cooking. You can guess from this selection that I enjoy a variety of approaches to writing about food. I like collections of authentic recipes such as Roden's Book of Jewish Food or Collin's The New Orleans Cookbook. I'm fond of portraits of families and their food, such as Koerner's A Taste of the Past or Rossant's Apricots on the Nile. And I appreciate scholarship like Jacob's Six Thousand Years of Bread or Gitlitz's A Drizzle of Honey -- a reconstruction of recipes of the secret Jews based on their testimony to the Inquisition. I write about my thoughts on food history, food books, and cookin...
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Sloane Crosley, Why Are You So Funny?
2008-05-01 18:27:00
I picked up Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake because of the dioramas. Following a link on Critical Mass, I found that Crosley had not only created Plexiglas-encased diorama sets for her essays, she had also narrated video tours of them. (The full story of The Diorama Diaries is on her website, including a trip with her dad to a place called PlasticWorks.) And, there's more. The book has a video trailer with paper pony stand-ups, a Hot Wheels ambulance, and a bit with fingers wearing pants that I can't really write about on this blog. Every book should have a video trailer. Though Crosley has been widely published, with essays in the Village Voice, Playboy, Salon, and The New York Times, I Was Told There'd Be Cake is her first book. I read the book. It was hilarious. I had questions, and she was kind enough to answer them. --Heidi Amazon.com: People have compared you to David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Dorothy Parker, even a post-modern Mary Tyler Moore. Do you re...
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1984 in 2008: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother
2008-05-01 14:39:00
This week marks the publication of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother , which as we reported here last month is a young adult novel that functions in part as a correction and update of such dystopic novels as 1984 and Brave New World. Except here the hero is Marcus, a smart seventeen year old caught in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in San Francisco. Picked up by homeland security, interrogated brutally, and then released, Marcus finds himself in a world where fear rules and every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. Marcus has a choice to make--and he decides to fight back. Doctorow has wedded his fascination with cutting-edge technology and the choices we make about technology to a riveting suspense plot in this potentially controversial novel. Reviews and previews are all over the internet, of course. Ed Park in the LA Times writes that Doctorow is "terrific at finding the human aura shimmering around technology." SFF World believes the novel will "only further reinfo...
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Breaking News: Richard Morgan Wins Arthur C. Clarke Award
2008-05-01 00:02:00
As reported here via text message, Richard Morgan has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Thirteen (published as Black Man in England). Thirteen made Amazon's best SF/Fantasy list last year. Now Morgan has one more reason for readers to pick up the book. Last year in an exclusive Amazon interview, we asked him to tell us what made Thirteen special. His response then? "It is, by all critical accounts, the best thing I’ve written so far. It’s stuffed full of contentious material that, whether you agree with it or not, will give you conversational ammunition at dinner parties for months to come. Shock and Awe your guests with Provocative Genetic Science! It’s my first conscious attempt at a world that is not dystopian--roll up and see a cheery(ish) future society, one you might not actually mind living in for a change. It has a very unpredictable storyline--I know this because I had no idea where my characters were going half the time, and if I couldn’t guess, it’s unlikely ...
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"When You're Born Into It": Margaret B. Jones's Unearthed Video
2008-04-30 23:18:00
Pardon me for piling on but, well, I find it riveting to watch somebody just flat-out lie. Harry Allen at Media Assassin (yes, that "media assassin / Harry Allen") has obtained what appears to be a promo video shot with Margaret B. Jones--er, Peggy Seltzer's faux South Central memoir, Love and Consequences. Have at it (and read Allen's blow-by-blow critique): (Via GalleyCat. Meanwhile, Ron at GalleyCat has been running an excellent series of posts about the endless trend toward using photos of women facing away from the camera on the covers of women's fiction, but, surprisingly, this now-notorious cover has not come up. Even if "Jones"'s story had been true I wouldn't have expected the cover photo to actually be of Jones and her adoptive "Big Mom," but does it strike anyone else as odd to be using stock photos on the cover of a memoir?) --Tom
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Suffering Succotash, Why You Little Bleep!
2008-04-30 14:42:00
You could burn your ears several times over reading aloud from Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages, edited by R.V. Branham (and brought to you by the ever-cheeky Soft Skull Press). It's so filthy and rife with controversy, I can't possibly quote from the book itself, except, possibly, from the introduction, in which Branham raises a series of questions, then answered in footnotes so the easily offended won't jump out of their chairs: "What insult has the most time zones, and what is the language of this insult? And what is the most common insult south of the Kush, in south Asia? What was Vladimir Lenin's favorite word?" No, it was not "hushpuppy," "whimsical," or "contented." Instead, it was something that would sear your grandma's eyebrows right off. I should probably leave it there, though, and let the more adventurous @#&*%! Amazon readers discover more on their own.
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Designing for the Real, Irrational World (Author One-on-One: Dan Ariely)
2008-04-29 20:29:00
Dear Reader, If you have examined the debate between Tim and myself over the past few weeks, you must have realized that, in fact, Tim and I agree on many things. Particularly, that our respective perspectives are not the only useful ones (although we each believe that our individual perspective is more useful than the other's). However, one major disagreement that Tim and I do have is about the weight of the evidence that supports the other's position. In general, Tim doesn't see how the results from lab experiments translate to the "real world." In essence, he does not believe that these lab-based irrationalities become full-fledged irrationalities outside of the lab. I, on the other hand don't see how the results from many of the statistical analyses he and others report necessarily demonstrate that people are rational. I do see how these studies show that people react to incentives in a way that is compatible with economic theory, and that they are sensitive to the general...
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Tom Piccirilli: Award-winning Master of Suspense Pens an Instant Classic
2008-04-29 15:30:00
Tom Piccirilli is one of the hardest working writers out there, selling his first book while in college and never looking back. Over the last twenty years, he's created keen psychological portraits of people in extreme situations, mysteries as noir as they come, and suspense-thrillers that'll keep you, as they say, on the edge of your seat. Some of the most recent of his books include The Midnight Road, The Fever Kill, and, in another week, the amazing The Cold Spot, of which suspense superstar Ken Bruen says, ""[the book] is truly dazzling. Piccirilli has taken the mystery to a whole other level."  Publishers Weekly calls The Cold Spot, "a violent and dark tale in an appealingly noirish narrative style, highly economical yet bracingly intimate." As ever, Piccirilli approaches his work with honesty, humanity, and a keen sense of the traditions he's working in and with--highly recommended for anyone who loves mystery and suspense. This may just be th...
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Catching Up with Rebecca Woolf in Seattle
2008-04-29 10:59:00
After I had my son, I went in search of all these DIY, irreverent mommy blogs that I just knew were out there. All I found were tips and tricks, ways to pamper myself or get organized, or cool gadgets I had to buy. I quickly gave up, and now I realize that I missed at least one irreverent mommy, who, thankfully, has now turned her blogs into a book. Rockabye: from Wild to Child is Rebecca Woolf's first book, and it's more than just a compilation of entries from her blogs. (She writes Girl's Gone Child and Babble.com's Straight from the Bottle.) It's a fully formed book of essays about her experience of motherhood. Woolf had always planned to become a writer, and she had been freelancing since she was 16. She was living in L.A., collaborating with a guy on a script, then they started dating, then she was pregnant. She was 23. She decided to have the baby, marry the guy, and keep writing. After her son, Archer, was born, she not only worked two jobs, she kept blogging and fre...
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Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers
2008-04-29 09:37:00
New York Times: Sunday Book Review cover: Leon Wieseltier on The Second Plane by Martin "Chucklehead" Amis: "Amis seems to regard his little curses as almost military contributions to the struggle. He has a hot, heroic view of himself. He writes as if he, with his wrinkled copies of Bernard Lewis and Philip Larkin, is what stands between us and the restoration of the caliphate.... Pity the writer who wants to be Bellow but is only Mailer.... You get the feeling, reading these pages, that for his side Amis will say almost anything, because being noticed is as important to him as being right. The complication is that there is considerable justice on Amis’s side.... I have never before assented to so many of the principles of a book and found it so awful." [Sorry for all the ellipses, but I had to squeeze in some of the best lines in this classic of vitriol.] Kakutani on The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich: "Writing in prose that combines the magical slei...
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Pop Culture Report #3: James and Kathryn Morrow's European SF Anthology
2008-04-27 23:15:00
Earlier this month, Tor Books released the trade paperback edition of James and Kathryn Morrow's The SFWA European Hall of Fame, a collection of sixteen stories translated from a variety of European countries. Contributors include Jean-Claude Dunyach, Panagiotis Koustas, Joao Barreiros, Andreas Eschbach, and many more. Most of these writers are well-known in their own countries but have had very little work translated into English. Our Pop Culture Report #3 (above) gives you more information on this intriguing, some would say essential, anthology. I conducted the interviews with the editors and Greek contributor Koustas in Nantes, France, last year, at Utopiales, a wonderful speculative fiction festival. From Publishers Weekly's starred review: Wondrous worlds await U.S. SF fans in this sensitively chosen, impeccably translated anthology of Continental European science fiction stories, ranging from 1987 to 2005. Offering "emotional satisfaction and cerebral excitement," as James ...
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Nebula Award Winners Announced
2008-04-27 22:53:00
Breaking News: Michael Chabon wins the Nebula Award for best novel. The Yiddish Policemen's Union was announced the winner last night at the Nebula Award banquet in Austin, Texas. Michael Moorcock was awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. For the full list of winners, visit Locus Online.
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Book Preview: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, Coming in May
2008-04-04 07:02:00
(Author photo by Bart Nagel) Author and Boing Boing contributor Cory Doctorow makes his YA debut in May with Little Brother , a novel Doctorow told Amazon is "enormously" influenced by dystopian/fascist regime classics. "The genre fascinates me; the novel 1984 is one of my favorite and most re-read. Adolescents are the perfect protagonists for these stories, too--hence Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Jack Womack's Random Acts of Senseless Kindness." In the novel, Doctorow's teenage protagonist, Marcus, finds himself caught up in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on San Francisco, with civil liberties suspended and the Department of Homeland Security conducting merciless interrogations. "Marcus...is a smart-alecky, brainy kid who loves showing off what he knows (I was that kid)." Some of these same qualities lead Marcus to try to take down the DHS. Little Brother comes with glowing praise from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Scott Westerfeld, and Brian K. Vaughn. And the ...
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IMPAC Impact?
2008-04-03 23:02:00
The shortlist for the--[deep breath]--2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was announced yesterday. In typical IMPAC fashion (they begin their process by announcing a reallylonglist of 137 nominees), the shortlist is pretty long at eight books: The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas (Spain) The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne (Sri Lanka) De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage (Lebanon/Canada) Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones (Australia) Let It Be Morning by Sayed Kashua (Israel) The Attack by Yasmina Khadra (Algeria) The Woman Who Waited by Andrei Makine (Russia) Winterwood by Patrick McCabe (Ireland) As I've mentioned before, the IMPAC is one of the more idiosyncratic awards around notable for, along with its infinite longlist, a) its giant (100,000-euro) prize, which, with current exchange rates, dwarfs any US prize; b) its lengthy nomination process, which results in a shortlist of often fairly old books--many of this year's, you may notice, were published in ...

Pump Six: A Conversation with Paolo Bacigalupi, a Next-Generation SF Writer
2008-04-03 19:21:00
                     Paolo Bacigalupi isn't the most prolific writer, but like another talented SF creator, Ted Chiang, he makes each story count. His fiction has appeared in High Country News, Salon.com, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It has been anthologized in various “Year’s Best” collections of short science fiction and fantasy, been nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best SF short story of the year. Bacigalupi's new (and first) collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, contains all of his short fiction (as well as "Pump Six," original to the book) and is getting raves, including a starred review in Publishers Weekly. PW wrote in part "Deeply thought provoking, Bacigalupi’s collected visions of the future are equal parts cautionary tale, social and political commentary and poignant...
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Guest Bookshelf: Shannon Roudebush
2008-04-03 00:19:00
A few words from Shannon Roudebush, the Omnivoracious reader whose bookshelf photo tops Omni this week (see the full photo with links and share your own by mailing a .jpg to omnivoracious at amazon.com):My husband and I live in IN with our two little girls, ages 7 and 5 1/2. We own and operate a family erosion control business. When I'm not busy with family or work, I love to read. I'm in a reading group on Shelfari and we're all attempting to read 100 books in 2008. My shelf shows some of the books in my to-be-read pile for the challenge. As of the end of March, I've read 34 books, so I'm keeping pace pretty well. Hopefully, by the end of the year, I will have met the challenge. The best book I've read so far this year, in my opinion, is definitely The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.--Tom
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Pop-Up Minimalism
2008-04-02 09:10:00
Has the Rinehart/Sabuda-led pop-up-book moment peaked? It's been one of the most fun trends to watch in bookmaking (the legal kind) the past few years, and perhaps it's a sign of maturity that, along with the increasingly baroque constructions from the masters, some artists are stepping back toward simple elegance. Via Paper Cuts, you can see (read?) the complete three-dimensional text of Marion Bataille's ABC3D, which despite a release date still half a year away has already made an appearance in our Top 100 (at least according to Paper Cuts: it's at the still-respectable #1,257 as I write). The pleasure and the playfulness of the demonstration speak for itself: --Tom

Bravo TV's Top Writer, Flying Penguins, Vollman's New Children Book: It Mus
2008-04-01 22:42:00
                  (Squidpunk--a new genre? And the cover of William Vollman's new children's book...) Ah, April. The full flush of spring, fields overburdened with wildflowers, birds singing, trees a thousand shades of green, and, of course, a sudden seasonal outpouring of very creative nonfiction on the internet. Even Information Week is reporting on it this year. So, here's a short selection of the weird and the silly, all of it as true as you want it to be... Ed Rants reports on a number of fascinating news items, including William Vollman's new children's book and the creation of a new "pretentious fiction" category in the bookstore. Locus Online gives us an inside look at Bravo TV's new Top Writer series, tells us that Cory Doctorow is releasing himself under Creative Commons, reveals that George R.R. Martin turning in his final manuscript has caused mass suicides at Bantam Book s, and much else. Meanwhile, th...
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Where to Begin? (Guest Blogger: Lisa Lutz)
2008-04-01 22:27:00
When my editor first mentioned to me that Amazon had invited me to guest blog for Omnivoracious, she explained it like this: Michael Pollan was their first-ever guest blogger and now they want you! She sounded both incredulous and pleased and maybe a little bit concerned about the folks at Amazon central. Sure, this makes sense. We'll invite an Oxford-educated professor with several critically acclaimed bestsellers in his wake and just when we've raised the bar of expectation, we bring in Lisa Lutz . Why thank you, Amazon. I admire your sense of variety. My problem is that I have no idea what to blog about. See, I write fiction, which for me means that whatever I have to say, I like to put in the form of a story. The story I'm going to tell you about today is my struggle with blogging and self-promotion. The following is a fictionalized version of my conversation with my editor when she told me about Amazon's blog invitation: Me: Oh that's great. Editor: It's fabu...
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Our Second Guest Blogger: Lisa Lutz
2008-04-01 21:56:00
The first installment of Lisa Lutz 's bestselling debut novel, The Spellman Files was a hot read around the office last spring.  Described as "the love child of Dirty Harry and Harriet the Spy," Lutz's irresistible heroine Isabel "Izzy" Spellman, P.I.is a young-ish San Francisco investigator with a flair for zingers, ex-boyfriends, and screw-ups. Izzy--like any independent and privacy seeking gal--just wants out of the family biz (and home!), but just can't seem to break free from her nosy family of fellow spies, including her hilarious teenage sister, a matchmaker of yenta-like proportions.  With the lightning-fast pace of a Federer v. Nadal Wimbledon final, the zingers fly back and forth between mom and daughter, brother and sister,  P.I. and suspect. The banter is priceless.  Yet, Lutz--an aspiring screenwriter for more than a decade--makes it look easy, way too easy. Lucky for the growing legion of "nutz for Lutz" fans, the s...
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Are You Infected? A Comprehensive Interview with Author Scott Sigler
2008-04-01 19:48:00
Scott Sigler, author of Infected , released today by Crown, is known by some as the world's most successful podcaster, with more than 30,000 fanatically devoted subscribers per book. He's also been profiled in The New York Times, among others. Sigler's background is as a reporter, marketer, and project manager, although he was "writing the whole time." Infected is pulse-pounding suspense fiction with horror and SF elements, involving radical personality shifts and parasites. The novel has already received NPR coverage and an enthusiastic endorsement in Entertainment Weekly. When I asked Sigler if the book had a soundtrack, since he seems to bring a very punk feel to his fiction, he told me: "It runs from metalcore to Frank Sinatra to the blues to AC/DC and The Donnas. Killswitch Engage can pop up next to the Bee Gees then Evanescence. Lately I'm really into American melodic metal influenced by the 'Sweeds' (Killswitch Engage, Trivium, Bullet for my Valentine, etc...
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Old Media Monday: Reviewing the Reviewers
2008-04-01 10:36:00
New York Times: Sunday Book Review cover: Steven Brill on The Appeal by John Grisham: "There’s lots of other intrigue worthy of a Grisham novel — missing witnesses, destroyed evidence, insider stock trading. It’s a shame, though, that Grisham’s grace in constructing a sophisticated story is so poorly matched by his writing.... Still, Grisham keeps his story moving. And he not only moves to a surprising ending but makes a real point about how judicial elections undermine the integrity of any justice system." Kakutani on The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll: "It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, 'Ghost Wars....
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