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bookfan

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  1. The Kindle is a reader for books and newspapers in electronic format. Amazon has a Kindle Store where you can buy downloads. For example....on the Kindle store homepage: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, #125 on the Kindle bestsellers list, for $9.99. (Cynique gave it three out of four stars) Some of Atlantic Library's Kindle offerings are only $1. Most of the cover art is pretty skanky, so send the kids out of the room before you click the link.
  2. Penny porn is my term for the $1 sex stories on Kindle.
  3. This is one I definitely want to read. The title refers to the place black slaves believed the dead went to find peace. Haitian slaveowners deliberately worked their slaves to death because it was cheaper to replace them than to give them enough rest and food to survive. Allende says Haitian slave women would kill the children they bore -- sending them to the "island beneath the sea" -- to spare them the agonies their parents were experiencing. NPR: Allende talks about why she chose to write about slavery in Haiti.
  4. Xeon had it right, Chris. This is a black-on-black phenomenon. Haiti is 95 percent black. Whites and mixed-race people combined make up the other 5 percent. For generations, poor black people (which encompasses the majority of the Haitian population) have put their children in a form of indentured servitude called "restavec." They send their children to "stay with" (rest avec in Creole) families that are better off. The children serve as domestic servants and are not regarded as family members (they are typically not allowed to eat with the family, for example). In return, the family is expected to pay for the child's schooling. As shown by the experience of the one former restavec Soledad O'Brien interviewed, some children don't get even that. The family that bought him for $12 and forced him to work as a beggar is also poor and black. A comprehensive study of child trafficking in Haiti, published last fall, estimated that 22 percent of the children in Haiti are restavecs. That's a staggering number that cannot be accounted for by the tiny fraction of white Haitians. Other findings: two-thirds of restavecs are girls; and one out of every nine families that takes in a restavec servant also sends one or more of its own children to be restavec with some other family. This state of affairs is the result of pervasive poverty, and its proximate cause is the behavior of blacks -- not whites.
  5. O'Brien and husband Brad Raymond Their kids O'Brien and mom Estela
  6. Interesting. I can't recall ever hearing a white person in my area refer to anyone as mixed.
  7. It's the American mindset: one drop. That's why the media calls Obama black instead of white or mixed-race. That's why Tiger Woods, with just one black grandparent, is a black man in the eyes of the public. Puerto Rican activist Rosa Clemente has embraced a personal version of the "one drop" idea -- but for unconventional reasons. Why she identifies herself as a "Black Rican": I am so tired of having to prove to others that I am Black, that my peoples are from the Motherland, that Puerto Rico, along with Cuba, Panama and the Dominican Republic, are part of the African Diaspora. Do we forget that the slave ships dropped off our people all over the world, hence the word Diaspora? The Atlantic slave trade brought Africans to Puerto Rico in the early 1500s. Some of the first slave rebellions took place on the island of Puerto Rico. Until 1846, Africanos on the island had to carry a libreta to move around the island, like the passbook system in apartheid South Africa. In Puerto Rico, you will find large communities of descendants of the Yoruba, Bambara, Wolof and Mandingo people. Puerto Rican culture is inherently African culture. She says she chooses to claim black identity as a political statement. Read the whole essay. Clemente was former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's vice presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket in the 2008 presidential election.
  8. María de la Soledad Teresa O'Brien has an interesting background: her father is a white man from Australia, of Scottish and Irish descent; her mother is Afro-Cuban. Although her parents gave her a classic Spanish-Catholic name, her mother never taught her to speak Spanish. Her mom did teach her, though, "Don't let them tell you you're not black." By the way, Kam used Troy's census question in an interview published Monday (There you go, Chris). More often, Kam asks his interviewees what he calls "the bookworm Troy Johnson question": What is the last book you read? Kam's style is to use lots of questions furnished by other people. In some of his interviews, those make up the majority of his questions. Kam was on the committee that gave O'Brien the NAACP President's Award in 2007. He subsequently panned her CNN series "Black in America," but she kept on giving him interviews. O'Brien's answer to Kam's "Troy Johnson question" in 2009 was The Soloist by Steve Lopez. This past January, it was Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.
  9. She has a severe personality disorder. She's never acted in any movies. It is true, however, that her entire public persona is an act. As I said before, I consider her more of a performance artist than a writer. Her primary manuscript is not the printed pages between her book covers, but the Internet tale of Kola Boof.
  10. Well, there is a duplicity of possible meanings. Thanks for your concern.
  11. Excess compassion and sympathy -- the scourge of the 21st century. Why "creatures," Cynique? She's not from a different species.
  12. Cynique, I'm sure some people who write books with better intentions feel frustrated that Kola makes any money telling lies and peddling porn. But you can't change the banality of human nature. McDonalds and "The A Team" and gangsta rap make money not because they're good but because there are people who like dreck. If Kola were a healthy person, I would be more judgmental about the bad things she does. But considering the alternative, I think it's great if she can pay her rent this way. Better that she participate in the sex trade through the written word now than in the flesh, like she used to. Better that she shred the DTP support techs than slit her wrists again. Can you imagine how hard it is to be that unbalanced and make any kind of living? Remember two years ago, when Troy met her in person and posted some snapshots of her? Normal people would have welcomed that kind of publicity. She dissolved into a paranoid rage and read him out of her church because those photos portrayed a reality she cannot bear. Do you suppose for one minute that any normal job she's ever held hasn't ended with the same kind of meltdown? Do you remember what she said recently about how hard it is to be "different"? Being "Kola Boof" is something she can do from the safety and solitude of her bedroom. Being Kola Boof at least allows her to have a bedroom, I hope. You don't like my approach to Kola, but like you said, if that's the worst of your problems you've got no business complaining. P.S. Don't forget that this forum exists for people to talk about writers and the publishing business. Whether you like it or not, this is how this particular writer is engaging in the publishing business.
  13. The story about how Figes was uncovered prompted me to dig a little deeper into Kola's Amazon sock puppets. Here's what I found out about "Lolly," whose 17 Amazon reviews all tout books sold by Kola's Potemkin publishing houses, "Door of Kush" and "Atlantic Library." Lolly's Amazon Profile says her nickname is "pambi100." That led to posts under that nickname on Amazon's community support bulletin board for Kindle publishers. There, pambi100 identifies herself not only as the reviewer "Lolly" but also as the owner of Atlantic Library. She says she's a black woman and "a bestselling mainstream author who always wanted to start a publishing company." Kola said a year ago in this thread that she was setting up Atlantic Library. Troy take note: she says her two best-selling Atlantic Library stories were selling "7-10 copies a day each" during the first half of 2009. At $1.00 each, that's $400-600 a month gross. That's even more than I had estimated based on the sales rankings. That's practically rent money. And that doesn't include her Mobipocket sales, where she markets her "Kola Boof" stuff as imprints of "Atlantic Library Digital."
  14. The Rule of Three asserts itself with phony Amazon reviews: Jill Zarin, Kola Boof, and now Orlando Figes. I heard this last night on "As It Happens," a great current-events show from CBC Radio on NPR. The career of one British historian is in critical condition -- because of his critical condition. The historian is named Orlando Figes. He's the author of several critically celebrated books about Russian history, including "The People's Tragedy", "Natasha's Dance", and "The Whisperers". Furthermore, his works have garnered praise on the bookselling website Amazon, where "The Whisperers" was described as "a rich and deeply moving history, which leaves the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted." That same review concluded, "I hope he writes for ever." That review was posted by someone with the username "Historian". But "Historian" was no pushover when it came to other books on Russian history. On the Amazon site, he or she called "Comrades" by Robert Service "an awful book." And of a book called "Molotov's Magic Lantern", by Rachel Polonsky, "Historian" wrote: "This is the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published." Well, that was the sort of review that made Rachel Polonsky wonder who might have written it. So she did a little research and found that Amazon user "Historian" had trashed several writers of Russian history -- and spared only Orlando Figes' work. So she clicked on "Historian"'s online profile, and found that "Historian" had also posted under the name "orlando-birkbeck". You know how people are always warning you about lame passwords and usernames? This is what they're talking about. Because Orlando Figes is a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London. Rachel Polonsky contacted Robert Service -- another recipient of a bad review by "Historian". Mr. Service was livid, and sent an email to a group of other historians, exposing Mr. Figes. Thus exposed, Mr. Figes apologized and admitted he was a creep. Just kidding. What he actually did was have his lawyer threaten legal action. Then he changed all his usernames and pleaded ignorance. And then he announced that his wife had written the reviews. And now, a week after the kerfuffle began, Orlando Figes has admitted that in fact he wrote all the negative reviews himself. In a statement released to the Daily Mail, he wrote, "I have made some foolish errors and apologize wholeheartedly to all concerned." He specifically apologized to Mr. Service, Ms. Polonsky, and his wife. And now, according to the University of London, he's on sick leave. And presumably, his future -- like his past -- is under review. Reading further about Figes led me to a very interesting 2004 New York Times story about how even prominent writers like David Eggers surreptitiously review their friends' books on Amazon using pseudonyms. It mentions a few Amazon hacks I hadn't heard of before, like authors listing their books as alternate recommendations for other people's books.
  15. Her writing will never live up to the "classic," "masterpiece," and "literary" billing she gives it in her sock-puppet reviews, but she's definitely not "just another wanna-be." Like I said before, hers is one of the weirdest stories in American publishing. Kola may have actually found her market niche with penny porn. One of her "Jackie Christian" stories, After the Club, has a current Kindle sales rank of 9,561. It only sells for $1, which probably translates to about $75 a month in income -- but pretty good for Kindle. Virtually all the top downloads are free, so to be making any money at all is an achievement. People just don't seem to want to pay for many ebooks. Kola's bound books don't sell anywhere near as well as her eporn. For example, Mother Goddamn, her new poetry collection that is available for pre-order, has a regular books sales rank of 8,525,613. The fact that it has a ranking means that at least one book has been ordered, but the high number suggests it's been only one so far. And even the hard copy version of Birthday Sex, a $26 collection of the exact same "Jackie Christian" stories that are moving on Kindle, has a regular books sales rank of 1,622,568 -- which means virtually no sales ever. So, in Kindle terms, I think you have to concede that Kola has found a decent measure of success (excuse the pun).
  16. The entertainment gossip sites Zap2It and Gawker report that "Real Housewives" cast member Jill Zarin appears to have used a sock puppet on Amazon to attack a reviewer who criticized her advice book and to give a positive review of a download of her show. It's no surprise that some authors do this, but it prompts an observation that will be of some interest to readers here. Zarin has nothing on our favorite sock puppeteer -- who appears to have created more fake identities on Amazon than she has on this board. Take a look through the list of Amazon reviews that mention Kola Boof and you'll see an odd phenomenon: there are lots of "reviews" of popular books that are merely pretexts for saying Kola's books are better. And the dozens of reviewers who engage in this practice share a distinctive trait: 100 percent of their reviews mention Kola Boof, no matter what book they're ostensibly "reviewing." For example, a reviewer called "Lolly" touts Kola and her books in all 17 of her or her reviews. This is an extreme example of an intriguing marketing technique, but again, no surprise to people here that a severely disturbed, compulsive liar would do this. What's news to me, and I imagine to everyone else here, is that some of these fake reviewers are touting books and short stories Kola has published on Kindle under two additional pen names: "Tweet" and "Jackie Christian." The Tweet book, Love Is the Drug, is one she said she tried to sell to Viking years ago. There's a full-length book under each of those two new names, and a bunch of porn stories that sell for a couple of bucks each. The titles and descriptions of the short stories make it clear they're straight-out porn, but so does the fact that even someone as raunchy and anonymous as Kola doesn't want her main fake name on them. These Kindle offerings, along with the "Kola Boof" books, are presented as imprints of a non-existent Virgin Islands publishing house Kola calls Atlantic Library. This is crazy, but she's got her stuff out there and it's selling. One of the short stories, "Story of a Jealous Birthday Girl," has a Kindle sales rank of 24,182. That means she's moving several copies a week.
  17. For crying out loud, turn off the caps lock. That makes text harder to read. It's also akin to waving a flag that says, "This is hype." Give people the link if you want them to look at a Web site. Take two minutes and make it easy for people to do what you want them to. Vinegar vs. honey, you know?
  18. Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk once said the test of good literature is simple — you want more of it when you’re done. Song Yet Sung meets that test for me. McBride tells an engrossing tale of suffering, redemption, and the enduring imprint of slavery on the souls of both blacks and whites. The story takes place over a short span of weeks in the spring of 1850 on the remote and relatively lawless Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, where hardened watermen eke out an existence by farming and dredging oysters. Fourteen blacks have broken out of their confinement at the home of notorious slave dealer Patty Cannon, whose gang steals slaves and rounds up runaways to sell in Baltimore. Cannon and her men pursue the escapees through the creeks and swamps, trying to outrace Denwood Long, a legendary but now broken-down slave catcher who has been lured out of retirement by a big reward offered by the owner of one of the fugitive slaves. Their common hunt focuses on Liz, a beautiful, abused woman who has begun to see the future in dreams after suffering a head injury at the hands of Cannon’s men. Word of her gift spreads when she escapes, and she becomes known among the local blacks as the Dreamer. As the white hunters pursue Liz, the slaves and free blacks of the region work in secret to protect the Dreamer and get her onto the “gospel train” that will smuggle her the eighty miles north to freedom in Pennsylvania. The future Liz dreams is specifically that of the black race in America, and it is not a happy one. She sees — but does not comprehend — the violent and misogynistic messages of rap music, men who shoot each other while “dressing as boys their entire lives,” overweight children who “run from books like they were poison,” and firehoses used against marchers. Before Liz’ escape, an elderly slave woman imparts to her the cryptic basics of “the code” by which the operators and passengers of the underground railroad recognize and communicate with each other. Particularly vexing for Liz — and for readers — is the code’s riddle of a “song [not] yet sung” and the role of the unknown singer who is "the true Dreamer." The revelation of the singer and the meaning of the song is the biggest surprise in the book — or at it was least for me. I didn’t know the unidentified lyrics that are repeated throughout the story, but readers who are more familiar with negro spirituals or who know the deep background of a certain iconic moment in modern history may guess the answer to the mystery. That answer seems somewhat contrived when it comes, but not enough to spoil the sharply-paced and strongly-plotted story. I found it particularly satisfying how McBride ties together plot lines and characters as the story progresses. Cannon is evil through and through, but Denwood is tormented by a flickering humanity that grows inside him as events unfold. Liz eventually realizes she has been given the gift of foresight to protect Amber Sullivan, a slave who is planning his escape to freedom and who must be saved so the singer can sing the future song. The story’s sense of magical realism is enhanced by a character called the Woolman, an escaped slave who lives in hiding in the deepest reaches of the swamps. He moves through the thickets like a wild animal, using supernatural physical abilities to carry out a guerrilla war of vengence against the whites. McBride richly portrays the culture of the watermen of the Eastern Shore and the peculiar nature of antebellum Maryland, where free blacks lived alongside slaves and their owners at the hub of the national slave trade. Geography looms large in the story, which physically compresses a number of locations in the Eastern Shore’s Talbot and Dorchester Counties. Reviewing a map of the southern border of the Choptank River region will help readers appreciate references to the “necks” of land divided by a multitude of long creeks. McBride also compresses time for his purposes: Cannon and her son-in-law Joe Johnson were real-life slave stealers and murderers on the Eastern Shore in the 1820s. Their story is recounted in George Alfred Townsend’s 1884 book The Entailed Hat. In his afterword to the novel, McBride says his Liz was inspired by Harriet Tubman, who suffered a head injury that caused her to fall into random dreams that she said forewarned her of danger. McBride has a weakness for repetition. This becomes quite obvious with his most unusual metaphors and idioms, such as references to “the Devil keeping score,” characters so trigger-happy they will “tell the hammer [of the gun] to hurry,” and concealed weapons that are “sleeping” in their owners’ pockets. Overall, though, the writing is rewarding. His descriptions are lush, and he reveals the inner turmoil and motivations of his characters with grace and fulness. It worked for me: I want to read more McBride.
  19. I can't help thinking this was just the reaction Badu was gunning for: cheap publicity through titillation. Her high-minded explanation for why she did it is ridiculous: "John F. Kennedy was a revolutionary; he was not afraid to butt heads with America, and I was not afraid to show America my butt-naked truth." What "truth" did she communicate by parading naked? Her claim that showing her pixelation-obscured body to the world is the moral equivalent of the Civil Rights Act is stupid and offensive. Selling a product with sex is hardly revolutionary. Female singers have been trading on their sexuality since the beginning of time. There's little difference between what Badu did and what Madonna and Britney did when they French-kissed on TV in their underwear. Consider the similarity to Kola's publicity grubbing: 1) get naked in public (check), 2) appropriate the image of a famous person with whom you have no connection (check), 3) claim 1 & 2 constitute "art" and "truth" (check). Calling Kennedy a "revolutionary" is a stretch, too. Yes, he butted heads with the most reactionary white Southern racists, but he was hardly out in front of popular opinion on civil rights. When it came to actual revolutionary politics in Asia, Latin American and Europe, he proved to be one of history's biggest counter-revolutionaries.
  20. You are right: chick lit is not my genre. But please note I said I was surprised at the amount of sex -- not disappointed.
  21. ...did not impress me. I went to Borders on Friday. Given recent events here, I had to check out the African American section. Neat as a pin - not a hint of racist disorder. I noticed right away that there were more titles by Zane and Noire than by any of the high-brow authors. I had never gotten a look at a Zane book before, so my curiosity was piqued. I passed over Purple Panties - there was no way I was going to risk someone I knew seeing me holding that one - and settled on Addicted (if I remember correctly). That seemed like a title you could explain later as long as your friend didn't get close enough to know better. I thumbed through the book quickly, and was left with two impressions. The first was that there was virtually no sex. Given what I'd read about Zane, I expected every chapter to have at least one sex scene. I skimmed about a third of the book, and came across just two passages that could be described as sex scenes - and one of those was merely an abbreviated conversation between two women about a man one of them had slept with. I was surprised by how little sex there actually was. The other thing that impressed me was how unsexy the sex was. The first of the two scenes I came across was a bachelorette party that had a hired male stripper interacting with a bar full of drunken women. That's a sad situation to begin with, but the stopper was Zane's description of one very horny and very obese bar patron with a revolting hygiene problem. It was the absolute opposite of sexy. I have to say the same of the other "sex scene," such as it was. One of the two female friends was describing her unhappy hook-up with a man who had what I will just refer to as a down-low fetish. A five-minute thumb-through is not much of a trial, but it was enough to see that there was nothing I wanted more of. That stuff is about as low-brow as it gets. This is erotica for people who are guests on Jerry Springer. But judging from the fact that Zane was the best-represented author in the section, it seems it sells really well. I just looked up Addicted on Amazon: it came out in 2001, it's still in print, and its sales rank is currently 76,000. The fact that there's that strong a market for that kind of product is the thing that impresses me most. More happily, I picked up a copy of James McBride's Song Yet Sung, which had intrigued me when I read up on him. I'll review it here when I've finished it, and I fully expect to have more and better things to say about it.
  22. I have a strong dislike for hackneyed stereotypes that demonize entire ethnicities. That's how. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a czarist hoax. Get with the 21st century. Those few lines were probably the most honest she's ever written here. You shouldn't discourage that.
  23. In news of profound emotional significance for the world's first black republic, the only known original print of Hayti's declaration of independence from France has been discovered in an archive. The pamphlet is titled Liberty or Death. Although transcriptions of the text survived, no copy of the declaration itself had ever been found by modern historians. For context, watch this video of Raymond Alcide Joseph, Haitian Ambassador to the United States, speaking the day after January's catastrophic earthquake. He starts off by rebuking Pat Robertson for his infamous claim that the black republic was created by Satan, and then (and more to the present point) talks about what the United States and the nations of South America owe to the slaves who liberated themselves in 1804. For those unfamiliar with South American history, Simón Bolivar only succeeded in freeing the continent because he was supplied and re-supplied in the beginning with arms and men from FREE HAITI.
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