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On Monday, we wondered whether any of Sarah Palin's folksy phrasings would make it into her new memoir, Going Rogue. In particular, how many times would "You betcha!" appear in print?
Fellow Slate staffer Christopher Beam went through the whole book yesterday, and reports just one instance of the famous phrase. On page 309, the author reminisces about the anxious hours before her appearance on Saturday Night Live in the fall of 2008. Not having seen the script for the show, she and her entourage decided to make their own comedy pitches:
"What about a skit where I pretended to be a journalist and asked Tina condescending questions: ‘What do you use for newspapers up in Alaska—tree bark?' ‘What happens if the moose were given guns? It wouldn't be so easy then, eh?' ‘Is "you betcha" your state motto?' We sent our ideas up the line, and somebody smacked ‘em down."
You'll recall that a group of linguists recently studied the transcript of Palin's vice-presidential debate and concluded that she uses the words heck and darn at least 20 times more often than other people in comparable settings. Do those figures hold up in the new book? A bit of noodling with Amazon's "Look Inside" feature reveals at least four uses of darn (e.g., "He agreed to give up chew for a day. That was a big darn deal") and six of heck (e.g., "I felt guilty as heck").
Given that the book contains about 130,000 words, the darn and heck rates are, respectively, 30.8 and 46.1 per million words. The linguists cite comparable standard rates of 3.2 and 7.4. Even in print, Palin applies these folksy expressions far more often than other people.
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Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, finally hits bookstores on Tuesday, long after preorders on Amazon.com made it a best-seller. According to the AP, the new book is "folksy in tone and homespun," suggesting that Palin has translated her distinctive speaking style to the printed page.
What, exactly, is the former governor's style? In a new study for the Journal of English Linguistics, a team of linguists from University of Wisconsin-Madison found that she uses the words heck and darn at least 20 times more often than her contemporary Americans. Using transcripts from the 2008 vice-presidential debate, they also found that she engaged in "g-dropping" (e.g. "people are hurtin'" or "takin' personal responsibility") at an unusually high rate of 12 percent. Then, of course, there's her signature phrase: You betcha!
Now we're wondering whether Palin's verbal tics will make their way past the copy editors at HarperCollins and into the typeset pages of the memoir. How many times will You betcha! appear in the 432-page, published book? At least one of my colleagues believes it won't show up at all; I'm guessing she'll drop the phrase at least 10 times. I'd be shocked if it doesn't turn out to be the last sentence of the introduction—something like, "Do I love America? You betcha!"
We'll report back on our findings later in the week.
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Next month would have been James Agee's 100th birthday, and although he came nowhere close to seeing it, he might have liked the peace and retrospection old age brought. Agee was a Deep Southern romantic tempered by the harder climes of New York literary life; he was also self-destructive, manic, and overwrought, dying in a taxi from his second heart attack at 45. To commemorate his anniversary, Penguin recently reissued his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Death in the Family, first published posthumously in 1957. Set in the mid-1910s, Death follows the family of Rufus Follett, a 6-year-old in Knoxville, Tenn., through the crisis of his father's fatal car accident. But the book's real achievement is to give voice to subtler relationships among the people left behind.
When people speak of Agee, they tend to speak first about the prose, and with good reason. Reading an Agee sentence is like settling into a water bed: The language comes in waves, throbbing and doubling back till you feel weightless and a little tight around the stomach—
These realizations moved clearly through the senses, the memory, the feelings, the mere feeling of the place they paused at, about a quarter of a mile from home, on a rock under a stray tree that had grown in the city, their feet on undomesticated clay, facing north through the night over the Southern Railway tracks and over North Knoxville, towards the deeply folded small mountains and the Powell River Valley, and above them, the trembling lanterns of the universe, seeming so near, so intimate, that when the air stirred the leaves and their hair, it seemed to be the breathing, the whispering of the stars.
But churning virtuosity only goes so far. Death is a masterpiece because of its unidealized portrait of the Folletts' behavior under pressure. Agee inhabits the consciousness of every major character—Rufus' 3-year-old sister and drunkard uncle alike—to build a narrative mosaic of family manners and miscommunication. Within hours of his fathers' death, Rufus' grown-up relatives fall into passive-aggressive discussion about what should go on the gravestone. His mother struggles with the politics of who should manage what. His grandfather and uncle despair for the religious "hocus-pocus" that she turns to for support. Piece by piece, Agee teases out the weave of affection, self-interest, and petty judgment that holds the family together.
The novel's authenticity was forged out of experience. Agee went by "Rufus" in childhood, and his father, also eponymous in the book, indeed died in a car accident en route to Knoxville. The loss changed Agee's trajectory, setting into motion the events that led him to New England, then Harvard, then New York. It may have made a writer of him, too. Whether in Death or in the 1938 prose poem that serves as its prologue (set to music by Samuel Barber as the exquisite Knoxville: Summer of 1915), Agee kept returning in fiction to the childhood landscape he'd lost in life. "[N]ostalgia for much that I remembered very accurately," he called it. More than half a century after his death, that accuracy still shines through on the page.
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Four trade magazines, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal, offer short reviews of many thousands of books. Of particular interest to editors are those that receive a "star" for unusual merit. This regular feature highlights new titles with stars from at least three of the four publications.
Our third When Stars Align includes several debut works—a nice development given that our last list was populated entirely by old hands.
Harry Dolan's debut novel, Bad Things Happen, takes place on the "mean streets" of Ann Arbor, Mich. When the head honcho of a mystery magazine gets pushed out of a window and falls to his death, new hire David Loogan gets pinned for the crime. To prove his innocence, he has to figure out who among the editors, writers, and interns is guilty. Booklist says "rarely have suspects been so archly articulate," and Publisher's Weekly predicts that Dolan "has a bright future." Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
James Lasdun's second short story collection, It's Beginning to Hurt, concerns middle-aged characters experiencing existential crises. The protagonist of the title story is a businessman who attends the funeral of his former lover and then falls back into the habit of lying to his wife. Kirkus says the collection merits comparison to William Trevor and Graham Swift. Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire is the second title in the Hunger Games trilogy. In this installment, teen protagonist Katniss Everdeen sorts out her love life and avoids the evil President Snow. Booklist says Collins' "crystalline, unadorned prose provides an open window to perfect pacing and electrifying world building." Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly.
Christ Barton and Tony Persiani's first picture book, The Day-Glo Brothers, tells the story of Bob and Joy Switzer, who invented a brand of fluorescent paint visible in daylight. Publisher's Weekly raves about the "exuberantly retro 1960s drawings," and Kirkus says "these two putty-limbed brothers shine even more brightly than the paints and dyes they created." Kirkus, School Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
In Ulysses & Us: The Art of the Everyday in Joyce's Masterpiece, Declan Kiberd tries to make James Joyce's notoriously difficult masterpiece accessible to those who couldn't get past the first page. He argues that although the book is now largely read by "more snobbish modernists," Joyce wanted to deliver "usable wisdom" to ordinary people. Publisher's Weekly says that this book "should be on every undergraduate syllabus" and Booklist hopes that this "daring work" might put Ulysses "in the hands of its rightful readers." Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
In The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World, NPR correspondent Paul Collins explains how the first collection of Shakespeare's plays became the most sought after book collector's item in the world. Booklist says Collins' history is one of "the most enjoyable examples" of "book biography" ever. Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly.
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Four trade magazines, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal, offer short reviews of many thousands of books. Of particular interest to editors are those that receive a "star" for unusual merit. This regular feature highlights new titles with stars from at least three of the four publications.
Our second When Stars Align includes two mysteries, a children's book, a short story collection, a love story, and a nonfiction chronicle of life in Montana. None of these authors is new to the book world: Not only have they all published books before, but almost all of them have previously garnered starred reviews.
The only book to receive four stars this time around is Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, a science-fiction book aimed at 'tweens. When 12-year-old Miranda receives a cryptic postcard that says "I'm coming to save your friend's life, and my own," she doesn't know what to think—until she realizes the note is from the future. Booklist warns that "if this book makes your head hurt, you're not alone" but Kirkus promises that "teen readers will circle back to the beginning and say, ‘Wow ... cool.'" Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
2008 Man Booker Prize Winner Adiga Aravind's collection of short stories, Between the Assassinations, received great press when it was released in mid-June (just after our first roundup). The stories are set in Kittur, India between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Ghandi in 1991. Publisher's Weekly says that "the small epiphanies" in the stories "hit like bricks from heaven." Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
In Reggie Nadelson's Londongrad: An Artie Cohen Mystery, a New York City police detective attempts to avenge the gruesome murder of his love, Valentina Sverdloff. Kirkus says this is the story that Nadelson was "born to tell." Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
The recently deceased Donald E. Westlake's 15th and final book, Get Real, takes its title from a reality-show production company that tries to stage a televised robbery. Publisher's Weekly promises that the book will "rouse chuckles from even jaded readers" and Booklist toasts "Here's to crime: how sweet it is!" Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
Dai Sijie's Once on a Moonless Night, received rave reviews from Britain and France, where it has already been released. An unnamed Western student in China falls in love with a greengrocer, Tumchooq, who tells her the story of a lost Buddhist sutra written in a forgotten language. The novel, according to Booklist, proves "that language is transcendent; books are precious; translation is a noble art; stories are the key to freedom; and truth prevails." Booklist, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
Rich Bass' The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana records his seasonal observations of nature in a remote corner of Montana. Library Journal calls it "a walk through the author's soul." Kirkus, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly.
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Every film that receives theatrical release can expect some kind of mainstream media attention—at the very least a capsule review. But the situation is different for books. Publishers in the United States release on the order of 170,000 new titles annually—including about 23,000 just from large general trade houses—making it simply impossible for critics to review everything. To narrow the field, assignment editors rely on four trade magazines: Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal, each of which offers short reviews of many thousands of titles. Of particular interest to editors are books that receive a “star” for unusual merit.
It stands to reason that titles receiving stars from multiple trades have a better shot at success than those that don’t. Certainly it’s of great interest to publicists, who—on such occasions—send out e-mail blitzes proclaiming a “trifecta.” To give Slate readers a behind-the-scenes look at what’s going on in the world of books, we’re launching a regular blog feature that will highlight new titles with at least three stars. The books you see listed here are likely to do well in sales or receive major review attention, or both.
Our inaugural list includes two mysteries, a debut novel, and a nonfiction account of the 1969 moon landing.
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First among victors is Craig Johnson’s The Dark Horse—the only new title we came across to receive stars from all four trades. When Wade Barsad locked his wife’s horses in a barn and burned them alive, she retaliated by shooting him in the head six times. Or did she? Sheriff Walt Longmire investigates. Booklist warns that Longmire’s friend Henry Standing Bear “feels like a tag-along” but assures readers that “Longmire’s shoulders are more than broad enough to carry a book.”
Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly
Peter Murphy’s John the Revelator. John Devine’s stuck in small-town Southeast Ireland with his single, chain-smoking, bible-quoting mom. Everything changes when a “Rimbaudian” boy comes to town. Kirkus promises “lascivious anecdotes” from said boy.
Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly
Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Missing Servant. A fancy lawyer who asks New Delhi detective Vish Puri to find his missing servant is subsequently arrested for her murder. Library Journal notes that there’s an “expletives-included” glossary.
Booklist, Kirkus, Library Journal
Craig Nelson’s Rocket Men. Story of Apollo 11. Nelson, says Publishers Weekly, “moves seamlessly between Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, their nervous families and the equally nervous NASA ground crew.”
Booklist, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly