The Help - New York Times Article

Since it came out in February 2009, "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett has been embraced by book clubs and bloggers who can't stop recommending it to their friends.  Below is the link for November 2009 New York Times article written by Motoko Rich ....


A Southern Mirrored Window

“The Help,” a novel about the relationships between African-American maids and their white employers in 1960s Mississippi, has the classic elements of a crowd pleaser: it features several feisty women enmeshed in a page-turning plot, clear villains and a bit of a history lesson.
The book, a debut novel by Kathryn Stockett, also comes with a back story that is a publishing dream come true: at first rejected by nearly 50 agents, the manuscript was scooped up by an imprint of Penguin and pushed aggressively to booksellers, who fell in love with it...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/books/03help.html


Note: I purchased my copy of "The Help" last week and glanced at the numbered print run (my copy is part of the 44th print run). Curious, I did a quick Internet search ... this book is a first novel that was rejected over and over. Lesson for aspiring writers, write a good book and keep it out there. Dreams do come true.

While I haven't finished the book I am hooked. Have you read this one?

John Updike Dies

Read Michiko Kakutani's New York Times Article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28appr.html?emc=eta1

There is also "A Conversation with John Updike" from October 2008 where he talks about the craft of fiction and the art of writing.

From Books New President Found Voice

From an article by Michiko Kakutani published January 18, 2009 in the New York Times:

Mr. Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father” (which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others — as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame. He recalls that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity and that later, during an ascetic phase in college, he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St. Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed.
-As a boy growing up in Indonesia, Mr. Obama learned about the American civil rights movement through books his mother gave him. Later, as a fledgling community organizer in Chicago, he found inspiration in “Parting the Waters,” the first installment of Taylor Branch’s multivolume biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
-More recently, books have supplied Mr. Obama with some concrete ideas about governance: it’s been widely reported that “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. In other cases, books about F. D. R.’s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,“ about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.
-Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/books/19read.html