Moying Li's SNOW FALLING IN SPRING Starred Review in PW

Children's Book Reviews
-- Publishers Weekly, 2/25/2008

Snow Falling in Spring: Coming of Age in China During the Cultural Revolution Moying Li. FSG/Kroupa, $16 (192p) ISBN 978-0-374-39922-1

Recalling 2007's Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party, a fictionalized autobiography by Ying Chang Compestine, this memoir also offers a highly personal look at China's Cultural Revolution. The author is four years old when Mao initiates the Great Leap Forward in 1958, and she describes the transformation of the family's shared, once lovely courtyard as the neighbors follow orders to erect a brick furnace and feed it all their metals in an attempt to produce iron and steel. Everyone, including the child narrator, willingly cooperates, but the instructions are flawed and everything is ruined. The episode prefigures what follows: diligence is repaid with destruction, obedience with chaos, loyalty with treachery. Li effectively builds the climate of fear that accompanies the rise of the Red Guard, while accounts of her headmaster's suicide and the pulping of her father's book collection give a harrowing, closeup view of the persecution. Sketches about her grandparents root the narrative within a broader context of Chinese traditions as well as her own family's values, establishing a basis for Li's later portrayal of the individuals around her who respond to oppression with hope and faith in knowledge and education. B&w family photos reinforce the intimate perspective. Ages 12-up. (Mar.)

For other reviews in this issue, click here.

Michael Kodas' HIGH CRIMES in LA Times Book Review

Discoveries
Books explore greed at Mt. Everest, finding tranquility in a world of chaos and life on a North Carolina reservation.
By Susan Salter Reynolds

LA Times BOOK REVIEW, February 17, 2008
High Crimes
The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed
Michael Kodas
Hyperion: 358 pp., $24.95

Con men, murderers and base-camp prostitutes are among the cast of characters journalist Michael Kodas encountered on his 2004 trip to Mt. Everest. In "High Crimes," he also tells us of climbers who are so eager to get to the top that they step over dying comrades, faulty oxygen tanks knowingly sold to climbers -- and of course drugs ("Virtually every banned, performance-enhancing substance that has driven sponsors and fans away from . . . cycling and baseball has made its way into mountaineering"). In this lawless arena, Kodas reports numerous instances of appalling cruelty. He quotes Sir Edmund Hillary's characteristically understated response to the 2006 death of David Sharp: "It was wrong, if there was a man suffering altitude problems and huddled under a rock, just to lift your hat, say 'good morning' and pass on by." One wonders if the ghost of George Mallory (who died on Everest in 1924) still haunts its ridges.

For the other books reviewed in this article, click here.

Michael Kodas High Crimes Reviewed by AP

Crimes Soar on Everest
By JOSHUA GOODMAN, Associated Press Writer

Associated Press Thursday, February 14, 2008
"High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed" (Hyperion Books. 357 pages. $24.95), by Michael Kodas: If you're going to Mt. Everest, don't forget to pack a gun.

A decade after Jon Krakauer's best seller "Into Thin Air" chronicled how crass commercialism was breeding tragedy on the world's tallest peak, little seems to have changed. And if we're to believe Michael Kodas, author of the new "High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed," things may actually be getting worse.

It's no longer just unscrupulous guides charging $65,000 to lead inexperienced, macho clients to the summit. Now, Kodas informs, an uncontrolled criminal element has assailed the mountain Tibetans reverently call Chomolungma — the Goddess mother of the World. Prostitution, narcotics, physical assault, extortion and theft of indispensable oxygen tanks — if its not the brutal wind and minus 30 degree Fahrenheit temperatures at the top of the world that gets you, hundreds of your fellow conniving climbers will.

Kodas has skillfully applied the investigative skills honed as a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Hartford Courant to recount in clear and unpretentious prose the tragic death of Nils Antezana.

Everything about the Washington, D.C., physician's 2004 climb seemed ill-conceived, from his choice of a dishonest and reckless guide widely denounced by the Everest community to the mere hubris of attempting the 29,035-foot peak at the advanced age of 69, with a limited climbing resume.

But none of those sins compare to the callous indifference shown by his guide, Gustavo Lisi, and the dozens of climbers who filed past the delirious Antezana on their descent through the oxygen-starved "Death Zone," leaving the good doctor to fall into a frigid coma with little more than an encouraging pat on the back.

Kodas interweaves this dramatic tale with the gripping account of his own struggle with summit fever.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Michael Kodas' HIGH CRIMES Reviewed by AP

Crimes Soar on Everest
By JOSHUA GOODMAN, Associated Press Writer

Associated Press Thursday, February 14, 2008
"High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed" (Hyperion Books. 357 pages. $24.95), by Michael Kodas: If you're going to Mt. Everest, don't forget to pack a gun.

A decade after Jon Krakauer's best seller "Into Thin Air" chronicled how crass commercialism was breeding tragedy on the world's tallest peak, little seems to have changed. And if we're to believe Michael Kodas, author of the new "High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed," things may actually be getting worse.

It's no longer just unscrupulous guides charging $65,000 to lead inexperienced, macho clients to the summit. Now, Kodas informs, an uncontrolled criminal element has assailed the mountain Tibetans reverently call Chomolungma — the Goddess mother of the World. Prostitution, narcotics, physical assault, extortion and theft of indispensable oxygen tanks — if its not the brutal wind and minus 30 degree Fahrenheit temperatures at the top of the world that gets you, hundreds of your fellow conniving climbers will.

Kodas has skillfully applied the investigative skills honed as a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Hartford Courant to recount in clear and unpretentious prose the tragic death of Nils Antezana.

Everything about the Washington, D.C., physician's 2004 climb seemed ill-conceived, from his choice of a dishonest and reckless guide widely denounced by the Everest community to the mere hubris of attempting the 29,035-foot peak at the advanced age of 69, with a limited climbing resume.

But none of those sins compare to the callous indifference shown by his guide, Gustavo Lisi, and the dozens of climbers who filed past the delirious Antezana on their descent through the oxygen-starved "Death Zone," leaving the good doctor to fall into a frigid coma with little more than an encouraging pat on the back.

Kodas interweaves this dramatic tale with the gripping account of his own struggle with summit fever.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Michael Kodas' HIGH CRIMES on Denver Post Bestseller List

Local Bestsellers
From The Denver Post: 02/12/2008

The Denver area's best-selling books, according to information from the Tattered Cover Book Store, Barnes & Noble in Greenwood Village, Boulder Book Store and Borders Books in Englewood.

NONFICTION

1. The Secret,

by Rhonda Byrne, $23.95

2. In Defense of Food:

An Eater's Manifesto,

by Michael Pollan, $21.95

3. Why Mars and Venus Collide,

by John Gray, $24.95

4. Cooking with Heart,

by Dr. Richard Collins, $24.95

5. The Greatest Gift: The

Courageous Life and Martyrdom of Sister Dorothy Stang,

by Binka Le Breton, $21.95

6. High Crimes: The Fate of

Everest in an Age of Greed,

by Michael Kodas, $24.95

7. Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?: An Easy Plan for Losing Weight and Living More,

by Peter Walsh, $25

8. Staying Young: The Owner's Manual for Extending Your Warranty,

by Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet Oz, $26

9. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

by John J. Ratey, $24.99

10. Reporting the War: Freedom of the Press from the American Revolution to the War on Terror,

by John Byrne Cooke, $24.95

Richard Thompson Ford, author of THE RACE CARD, on the Colbert Report

To see the Colbert interview, click here.

Richard Thompson Ford, author of THE RACE CARD, on the Colbert Report

To see the Colbert interview, click here.

Anthony Lewis' FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE Boston Globe Bestseller

Boston Globe Hardcover nonfiction bestsellers, week of Feb. 10
Posted by Jim Concannon February 7, 2008 11:43 AM

1. In Defense of Food
By Michael Pollan. Penguin.
2. This Republic of Suffering
By Drew Gilpin Faust. Knopf.
3. The Secret
By Rhonda Byrne. Atria.
4. The Food You Crave
By Ellie Krieger. Taunton.
5. The Nine
By Jeffrey Toobin. Doubleday.
6. Freedom for the Thought That We Hate
By Anthony Lewis. Basic.
7. Memo to the President Elect
By Madeleine Albright. Harper.
8. The Assist
By Neil Swidey. PublicAffairs.
9. Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington
By Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein. Abrams.
10. Jim Cramer’s Stay Mad for Life
By James J. Cramer. Simon & Schuster.

SOURCE: Boston area bookstores

William A. Link's RIGHTEOUS WARRIOR in NYT Sunday Book Review

Politics Issue
R, North Carolina
By DAVID GREENBERG
New York Times Book Review: February 10, 2008

RIGHTEOUS WARRIOR: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism.
By William A. Link.
Illustrated. 643 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $39.95.

Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said. With prodding from Novak, he added that he’d been spanked as a child for using the N-word and noted (with a delicious hint of uncertainty), “I don’t think I’ve used it since.” As for the caller’s main point — the virtue of keeping down blacks — it passed without comment.

William A. Link, a historian at the University of Florida, recounts this incident in “Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism,” his hefty life of the blunt, bullheaded, hard-right leader who — more than anyone besides Ronald Reagan — embodied conservatism in the 1980s and beyond. Summoning a measure of sympathy for his rather unsympathetic subject, Link can be overly diplomatic in discussing, as he calls it, Helms’s “racial insensitivity.” But it’s to his credit that even when engaging Helms’s more odious views, he shuns stridency while still managing to demonstrate the centrality of Dixie-bred racism to Helms’s career — and to the book’s larger tale of Southern-style conservatism’s ascent since the 1960s.

By the 1990s, to be sure, this racism was rarely articulated so starkly, or even manifested so consciously, as it was by the talk-show caller. But for more than four decades in public life — first as an influential journalist defending Jim Crow in the 1960s in North Carolina, then as “the most important conservative spokesman in the Senate” — Helms was obsessed with race; it was his political weapon of choice. In 1972, as a recent convert to the Republican Party, he won election to the Senate on school busing and kindred issues. In 1990, he aggressively played the race card — broadcasting a TV ad that showed white hands crumpling a job rejection letter — to repulse a challenge from Harvey Gantt, an African-American. And in his five Senate terms Helms led most of the major fights against racial change, opposing the creation of a Martin Luther King holiday in 1983 and the civil rights bill of 1991.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Richard Ford's THE RACE CARD in NYT Sunday Book Review

Politics Issue
The Big Blind
By ORLANDO PATTERSON
New York Times Sunday Book Review: February 10, 2008

THE RACE CARD: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse.
By Richard Thompson Ford.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.

A few years ago, an American lady showed up late at an exclusive Parisian store and was turned away. The outraged shopper was Oprah Winfrey, who charged racial bias; a companion said it was “one of the most humiliating moments of her life.” Oprah may have been denied a prerogative of elite status in our new gilded age — being waited on in luxury stores after hours — but had she been the victim of racism?

In “The Race Card,” a sharp, tightly argued and delightfully contentious work, Richard Thompson Ford flatly disagrees, finding “something Orwellian” about Winfrey’s “egalitarian demand for one’s rightful position as V.I.P. — a civil rights claim to a colorblind hierarchy of the rich and famous.” Winfrey’s complaint, Ford writes, is typical of a class of grievances that has created a crisis in the social and legal meaning of race: playing the race card, defined as making “false or exaggerated claims of bias” that “piggyback on real instances of victimization.”

The sleazy Tawana Brawley episode — in which a young black woman apparently falsely claimed to have been raped and smeared with excrement by racists, and which her lawyers and Al Sharpton egregiously exploited — is of a piece with Clarence Thomas’s shameless accusation of a “high-tech lynching,” Michael Jackson’s claim that the low sales of one of his albums were due to a “racist conspiracy” by his record company, and explanations of the Hurricane Katrina disaster that attributed it to racism. Worse, even some whites now play the race card — recently, and ignobly, demonstrated by former President Bill Clinton — which threatens to become what Ford calls a “national patois,” a dangerous and shortsighted way of crying wolf that has the long-term effect of undermining valid complaints from those who still suffer genuine racial injury.

With a daring disregard for ideological propriety, Ford vivisects every sacred cow in “post-racist” America. Inevitably he overreaches, and he is occasionally quite wrong; but the end result is a vigorous and long-overdue shake-up of the nation’s stale discourse on race.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Lou Ureneck Reads from BACKCAST on Boston.com

To hear Lou Ureneck read, click here.

Richard Ford's RACE CARD reviewed in San Francisco Chronicle

'The Race Card': Ford deplores the blame game
Reyhan Harmanci
The San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, February 7, 2008

You want to pick a fight? Call someone a racist. Few labels hit so hard or bring up so many deep feelings. It's a dark stain on someone's character. Then-Los Angeles police Detective Mark Fuhrman was accused at the O.J. Simpson trial of using racial epithets, and after Hurricane Katrina, rapper Kanye West said President Bush "hates black people."

According to Stanford law Professor Richard Thompson Ford of San Francisco, the national dialogue on race needs to change. In his recently published book "The Race Card," he argues that when people talk about race relations, they too quickly try to ferret out racism without looking at the larger issues. In doing so, they leave open the possibility that opportunists will unfairly paint someone as a racist to further their political ends, while de-legitimizing some very real problems.

"I decided to write the book out of dismay and frustration with the way questions of racial injustice are typically taken up," Ford says. "Right now, we tend to deal with questions of race and race relations in the context of scandal. There's not much conversation about the day-to-day issues with racial tensions and injustices."

Ford takes apart some of the more prominent recent scandals, such as the treatment of Hurricane Katrina victims and the dispute between hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and the makers of Cristal Champagne. He also digs into older ones, like the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill Supreme Court confirmation hearings and the O.J. Simpson trial, to show how complicated events got reduced to screaming headlines.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Richard Ford's THE RACE CARD Reviewed in NYT

Books of The Times
Colorblind Conclusions on Racism
By WILLIAM GRIMES
New York Times: February 6, 2008

THE RACE CARD
How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse
By Richard Thompson Ford
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 388 pages. $26.

A black man stands on a street corner in Manhattan and waves for a taxi, and the driver speeds by. Is this racism? The actor Danny Glover thought so, and he took his case to the public and city regulators, resulting in a citywide crackdown on wary cabbies in the late 1990s. But what if he got it wrong?

In “The Race Card” Richard Thompson Ford, a professor at Stanford Law School, offers the cabdriver problem as a classic illustration of why racial prejudice is so hard to identify and address in an era he defines as postracist, when the social and legal meaning of racism, he writes, “is in a state of crisis.”

Racism, Mr. Ford argues, has not disappeared, but the civil rights movement has made it contemptible in the eyes of most Americans. Changes in the law have introduced penalties for overt discrimination. Consequently, current racial conflicts tend to involve “ambiguous facts and inscrutable motives.” They also encourage playing the race card to achieve emotional satisfaction or tactical advantage.

In the cabdriver phenomenon, for example, many drivers who refuse to stop for black passengers are themselves black, Mr. Ford points out, and others are Asian or Middle Eastern. Some are motivated not by antipathy toward blacks but by a fear of being asked to drive into a dangerous neighborhood. Some are rushing to return their cabs to the depot.

Richard Ford, pictured left.

For the rest of the article, click here.

For the first chapter, click here.

Richard Ford's THE RACE CARD Reviewed by Associated Press

Book shows problems with the 'race card'

By THERESA BRADLEY,
Associated Press, Tue Feb 5, 2:53 PM ET

"The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 388 pages, $26), by Richard Thompson Ford: The fight against racism is nearing a crossroads, a "crisis of success" that's blurring definitions of discrimination and allowing insidious injustices to persist unaddressed.
ADVERTISEMENT

As the clearest cases of bigotry have faded with civil rights' progress, our old ways of fighting bias are dangerously outdated but inspiring a host of impostors to co-opt their methods nonetheless.

In his book "The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse," Stanford University law professor Richard Thompson Ford outlines this new ambiguity and one of its most unfortunate results: the race card.

Drawing irrelevant references to race, the race card magnifies minority status or seeks to blame problems on bias, oversimplifying serious social issues to advance self-interest in the name of justice, Ford says.

An example: O.J. Simpson cast the cops as racist and was cleared.

"The race card is symptomatic of a real crisis in the way we currently think and talk about race: a crisis born of our failure to keep up with a changing social world," Ford writes. Because we assume racial wrongs are the work of individual bigots, "when there's no one to blame, we find ourselves without relevant ideas."



For the rest of the article, click here.

Michael Kodas HIGH CRIMES in Mother Jones

Go Sell It on the Mountain
Arts: On Mt. Everest, climbers have more to worry about than the weather.

Book Review By Elizabeth Gettelman
Mother Jones, February 1, 2008

High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed, By Michael Kodas

That Everest is a dangerous place should surprise no one. Whisper-thin air, skyscraper-deep crevasses, and deadly storms that build in minutes have given Everest and its "Death Zone" an infamous reputation. But that the world's tallest mountain is host to thieves, frauds, and extortionists who wreak more mayhem than the elements is a less-trodden story. Enter High Crimes, Michael Kodas' new book, in which the writer and sometimes mountaineer (he's a reporter for the Hartford Courant who has attempted twice to summit Everest) whisks through dozens of horror stories; of hoodwinked climbers abandoned by inexperienced guides, desperate summiters whose lifesaving gear was stolen, and dying climbers stepped over and abandoned by dozens of peakbaggers. "Everest," explains one guide, "makes people grow horns."

In preparation for the Olympic Games this summer, China has paved a more than 65-mile stretch of road leading climbers straight to the mountain's door. This ease of access (reaching the Nepalese base camp, in contrast, involves a 35-mile, several day hike) coupled with Chinese climbing permits that cost a fraction of what they do in Nepal ($10,000 vs. up to $30,000) has given rise to a largely lawless mountain outpost. Kodas describes scores of mountaineers carrying large wads of cash spending weeks of idle time at base camp, spilling cash and killing time in makeshift brothels, bars, and gambling outfits. While the wait is often part of the mountaineering equation—the weather is only prime for summit bids on a handful of days each year—the atmosphere at base camp is less preparatory and more "Wild Wild East."

The mayhem continues on the mountain itself, where tents are regularly looted of basic yet vital equipment—stoves, tents, ropes, and once a high-end battery that powered a Discovery Channel production—leaving climbers stranded and vulnerable. Some of the most lethal scams involve the very technological advance that allows the hundreds of relatively novice climbers to attempt the mountain each year: bottled oxygen. That industry is cottage and largely unregulated, and at up to $600 per, Kodas explains, there are millions to be made. Sellers may promise top-quality systems fortified with dry Russian air, while instead selling recycled bottles filled with local (humid) air, so that the moisture causes the apparatuses to fail at high altitudes.

Other scams involve hucksters who claim to be making environmental summits to clean trash from Everest—the paths leading to the peak are notoriously littered with empty oxygen containers, discarded gear, and even frozen corpses—but are merely running cons in order earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in sponsorships. Kodas tells of one 1998 team that boasted of removing 157 oxygen bottles, only to admit later that they had brought 136 of the bottles for their own personal use. Even Sherpas—the unsung heroes of most every ascent on Everest since Hillary's summit in 1953—have become part of the corruption equation, demanding more money of strapped climbers mid-climb, stealing equipment or money at base camp, and essentially capitalizing on what has become a high-stakes, high-end gamble of an industry.

Kodas doesn't shy from citing specific bad actors, including an irresponsible (and under-skilled) guide who duped a wealthy American into a trip to the summit, only to abandon him in the end for his own summit bid. He also relates in intrepid detail the very personal story of his own second summit attempt, one wrought with its own guide shenanigans and hi-jinx. The book is as juicy as a gossip tabloid, and certainly the guides who are named by name will have a thing or two to say about it. But the work is philosophical at root, revealing how an endeavor as seemingly straightforward as a climb to the top of a mountain can devolve into a series of grueling human battles not unlike those one might encounter on the most harrowing of city streets.

For the article, click here.

Client Warren Goldstein on Huffington Post

Bucking the Conventional Wisdom: Why I Am Voting for Barack Obama, and Why I Bet on the New York Giants
Huffington Post, February 4, 2008

Forty-eight years ago, on the playground of Crown Elementary School, in Coronado, California, I knew that Richard Nixon should be the next President of the United States, and campaigned vigorously for him among my classmates. He'd been Vice-President for eight years, for goodness' sake, and John F. Kennedy hadn't run anything. I was nine years old, but I'd absorbed the conventional wisdom surrounding me in that Republican town, and, as it turned out, the state as well. Nixon took California in 1960. When I learned that my parents had voted for Kennedy, and as Democrats from Democratic families had never considered doing anything else, I felt betrayed.

The conventional wisdom is powerful stuff, based in experience, and it always assumes that the future will look much like yesterday and today. It's a useful guide to all kinds of things, from whom your parents are going to vote for, what your spouse would like for a birthday present, and what it takes to be a credible candidate for President. (Lots of experience, a substantial track record, and anointing by the party insiders.)

But every now and then the political calculus changes, and the conventional wisdom suddenly becomes as relevant as yesterday's stock closing prices. That's what happened during the civil rights movement beginning in Montgomery Alabama in 1955. Instead of the "slow, steady progress" on civil rights urged by proponents of the conventional wisdom, the movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. upended normal political life. Ordinary working African-Americans boycotted the Montgomery buses for 13 months, ultimately forcing a Supreme Court decision outlawing the city's segregated bus seating. While Hillary Clinton was right in pointing out the importance of Lyndon Johnson to passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, it's also true that any Democratic president, including John F. Kennedy, had he lived, could have signed them. The deeper truth is that no such bills would ever have gotten close to the President's desk without the movement sparked and led by Martin Luther King.

For 35 years, as she's fond of pointing out, Hillary Clinton has worked to improve the lot of American families. I believe her, and think she might even make a pretty good president--but only that. What's wrong with her campaign, in my view, and what hangs like an albatross around the neck of a potential Clinton presidency, is that it is almost entirely immersed in and nourished by conventional political wisdom: "experience matters most;" "she's paid her dues--she deserves it;" "Hispanics won't support a black candidate;" "incremental change is the most we can hope for;" "a female candidate has to look even more hawkish than male candidates on war and peace;" "moderation in all things."

Here's a true story. My wife, the Rev. Donna Schaper, Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York City, went to Washington DC to lobby for immigration reform last year. When she got a chance to ask Senator Clinton why even the Senate bill was so punitive and meager rather than truly comprehensive immigration reform, the Senator replied, with great condescending energy, emphasizing each word. "Politics is the art of the possible."--the all-purpose cliché defense for legislative failure--as though Donna, who has worked in the public arena as long as Hillary has, needed any reminding.

For the rest of the article, click here.

Strothman Agency Client Walter Lewin on Al Jazeera English's Riz Khan Show