When David Foster Wallace climbed aboard John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” media caravan in the early days of the 2000 presidential primary season, he hoped to understand why McCain generated so much excitement, so much attention, so much hope. In fact, Wallace was amazed by “the enormous hopes and enthusiasm [McCain’s] generating in press and voters alike.”

Much has changed in the past eight years. McCain, the maverick “anticandidate” who peddled change and hope, who raged against the Washington establishment, now is the Washington establishment. As the 2008 republican nominees, his current campaign lacks the spontaneity and access of his first bid for the White House, and “Straight Talk” has been replaced by on-message scripts written by political marketers. The hope is gone.

And Wallace is dead, victim of an apparent suicide earlier this month. Full Story »

Running and writing may be polar opposite activities.

Writing requires long sedentary hours of deep thought; running, by its very nature, typifies motion, yet most runners don’t spend their time thinking about much of anything in particular as they run.

Both activities require solitude, although a runner may race with hundreds of other entrants and a writer requires an audience.

So perhaps running and writing seem like odd bedfellows for a book, but then again, Haruki Murakami has made his reputation by stretching boundaries and asking readers to look at the world in different ways.

His latest book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, takes a different approach than his usual fiction. Running is a memoir about the two things in Murakami’s life that best define him. Murakami tries to get inside his own head to explain the appeal, and the importance, of running and how that impacts his work as a writer. “For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor,” Murakami explains. Full Story »

The Battle of Gettysburg certainly ranks as one of America’s great stories—but how it became such a great story is a story unto itself.

That’s the focus of Thomas Desjardin’s book These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory.

Does the world need one more book about the battle of Gettysburg? (Well, there will always be a market for one, so maybe that’s a moot question….) In the case of These Honored Dead, published in 2003, the answer was—and is—yes. Desjardin’s book is a must-have for anyone who seriously considers him/herself a Civil War buff. But perhaps more important, it’s an indispensable case-study for anyone interested in understanding the forces that shape public opinion as it evolves into historical record.

And with everything that’s gone on in the last eight or so years, that kind of insight could be particularly useful. Full Story »

Today we visit Vincent Bugliosi’s book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. Tomorrow we visit Vincent Bugliosi himself as he talks about his appearance before the House Judiciary Committee appearance and his book.

As you may have heard by now, the mainstream media has been giving Vincent Bugliosi’s latest book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, the cold shoulder. Never mind that he authored what was, at the time, the bestselling crime book in history, Helter Skelter, about his successful prosecution of the Manson family. Nor that he’s written numerous bestsellers since. His 2007 book, Reclaiming History, a 1,600-page attempt to dispel alternative histories of the Kennedy assassination, is being made into a mini-series by HBO and Tom Hanks. Full Story »

It comes as little surprise that Joe Slowinski, the central figure in The Snake Charmer, gets bitten by a deadly snake and dies.

Don’t worry: I haven’t spoiled anything. The book’s dust jacket reveals Slowinski’s fate, so readers know up-front what to expect.

But readers who read Jamie James’s real-life account will quickly realize that Slowinski, one of the world’s most renowned snake experts, is a herpetological accident waiting to happen.

The Snake Charmer: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge is part biography, part quest, and part scientific exploration. There are a lot of snakes, too. Reader beware. Full Story »

In 1999, Scott McClellan accepted a job working for Texas Governor George W. Bush, who was getting ready to make a run for the White House. McClellan was an idealistic thirty-year-old Republican loyalist attracted to Bush’s candidacy because of the governor’s “compassionate Conservatism” and his charisma.

By July 2003, McClellan was a member of the Bush inner circle and was promoted to White House press secretary.

In April 2005, McClellan was gone, disillusioned and disappointed in an administration he said had gone terribly off-course. “What happened?” he wondered. Full Story »

James Bond is back in print, and the new novel, Devil May Care, reads just like the old ones.

That’s both good and bad.

British author Sebastian Faulks is the scribe behind this latest literary relaunch of the world’s most famous spy. Other authors who’ve penned Bond adventures, most notably John Gardner and Raymond Benson, have carried Bond into modern times while pretending that he really isn’t aging.

Faulks, “writing as Ian Fleming,” Bond’s creator, takes a different approach. He picks up 007’s adventures right where Fleming left off. Full Story »

God as an atheist is like a novelist who doesn’t believe in novels.

So perhaps it’s fitting that N. Nosirrah’s highly amusing and deeply thoughtful God is an Atheist is a novella. Specifically, it’s “a novella for those who have run out of time.”

“This is a story without plot, characters, structure, or obvious purpose,” Nosirrah writes. “If a thousand monkeys typing endlessly would eventually produce all the great works of literature, then this is their first draft.” Full Story »

One of my main interests is how we know what we know about the Civil War. My fascination in the topic stems not only from my work doing public history on the front lines at the battlefields in Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville but also from a public relations perspective. “The Lost Cause,” as a concept, was a basically huge public relations campaign to influence the way Americans remembered the war–or, as Robert E. Lee said, “to transmit, if possible the truth to posterity, and do justice to our brave soldiers.”

In that context, Gary Gallagher’s Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood & Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War proved to be a fascinating and fun book to read. Full Story »

In an attempt to capture his grandfather’s memories from the besieged Russian city of Leningrad during World War Two, David Benioff stumbled upon something especially liberating: creative license.

“I questioned [my grandfather] about various details—names, locations, weather conditions on certain days,” Benioff recalls, explaining his quest for accuracy.

But his grandfather told him to stop. “It was a long time ago,” he admitted. “I don’t remember what I was wearing. I don’t remember if the sun came out.”

Benioff stammered that he wanted to get it right.

“You’re a writer,” his grandfather said to him. “Make it up.”

And so he did. Full Story »

Most Democrats in the two houses of Congress balk at initiating impeachment proceedings against President Bush. We assume it’s because, like a woman living with a rageaholic husband, they prefer to let their Republican colleagues lie as if they were sleeping dogs.

Is there something else that Democratic senators and members of the House of Representatives are afraid of? Perhaps they fear that impeaching the president might stir up buried shame on the part of many who voted for Bush. Americans already brought down their wrath on the administration in the 2006 election, as well as in polls. Rub any shame on their part about being “low-information voters” in their face and they just might kill the messengers. Full Story »

by Douglas J. Belcher

In the absence of a grand technological theory that can explain the Universe, such as a Unified Field Theory (nerds can hope), or resolution of the questions raised by more dialectical interpretations of history, many scholars opt for media theory because the items such theory discusses are more accessible in our day-to-day lives. The science-fictional proliferation of portable gizmos and the ubiquity of the silicon chip can give the ordinary citizen pause, and books about media theory are frequently written to answer the somewhat vexing questions that arise.

Media professor and popular blogger Siva Vaidhyanathan investigates with 2004’s The Anarchist in the Library. Mr. Vaidhyanathan, hereafter referred to as V, notes in the inlet of the book that “battle lines are being drawn,” between Freedom and Control, and that the real world has begun to resemble the virtual world. (Or is it, the other way around?) On the one side, he writes, are corporations, judges, the military etc, and on the other are “liberators”, hackers, libertarians, artists and dissidents.

Full Story »

One of the names floated as a possible vice-presidential candidate—floated, interestingly enough, by both parties—is Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel.

Hagel was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996 and established himself as a middle-of-the-road Republican with a reputation for working across the aisle. Hagel announced last year that he would not seek reelection, so when he wraps up his second term this fall, he’ll be looking for a job.

One of Hagel’s closest friends on Capital Hill is Arizona Senator John McCain. They walk to a drumbeat closer to each other than the one set by the Republican Party bosses. Yet Democrats also have much to like in Hagel’s centrist, bipartisan style, and Hagel’s vehement opposition to the Iraq war fits well with their base. It has also put him at odds with McCain lately.

What kind of vice president might Hagel be? Full Story »