BookOpinion

Amazon has released a short podcast from Tom Perrotta’s “The Abstinence Teacher.”

The New York Times calls it a “sad-funny-touching story that looks at the frustrations and perils of life in suburbia through darkly tinted, not rose-colored glasses.”

When a sex ed teacher goes too far, according to a local church, the school sides with the church to push an abstinence curriculum. Issues and sordid histories from those on both sides all boil to the surface.

Booklist adds: “As is evident from his previous novels Election (1998) and Little Children (2004), Perotta seems to enjoy putting characters with divergent belief systems together in a bag, as it were, and shaking it up. That is the technique he uses in his latest novel, to satiric effect…A finely wrought novel that will be in demand.”

Listen to the podcast here. Use the BookOpinion price comparison tool to find the best prices on “The Abstinence Teacher.”

Alibris has sent us a coupon code for BookOpinion users for the month of November.

This offers expire at midnight on Sunday, Nov. 25, 2007.

Save $3 off a purchase of $30 or more using Coupon Code: GARCIAMARQUEZ

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Patricia Cornwell’s 15th Kay Scarpetta novel, “Book of the Dead,” lands among the top of bestseller lists on its release. Despite trying to overhaul some key elements of her Scarpetta novels, the book has received some frosty reviews from critics. BookOpinion has compiled reviews, summaries and an excerpt from the novel.

Publishers Weekly writes that the book “delivers her trademark grisly crime scenes, but lacks the coherence and emotional resonance of earlier books…With her recent switch from first- to third-person narration, Cornwell loses what once made her series so compelling: a window into the mind of a strong, intelligent woman holding her own in a profession dominated by men. Here, the abrupt shifts in point of view slow the momentum, and the reader flounders in excessive forensic minutiae.”

Booklist summarizes the plot and also gives it a harsh review: “A lengthy, vivid scene during which a young tennis star is slowly and brutally tortured sets up the mystery, which unfolds in artless leaps, mostly through halting dialogue and occasional forays into the mind of the killer. Once again Cornwell trots out venal characters from previous Scarpetta books; prominent here is psycho-bitch teleshrink Dr. Self (Predator, 2005), who is hoarding information about what turns out to be a string of loosely related murders. Then there’s Scarpetta’s longtime investigator, Pete Marino, foulmouthed and crude but tolerated, who reveals true ugliness in what may be the best scene in the book. As to forensic detail, it seems right up to the minute, and Scarpetta uses it often in her search for the killer, all the while trying to preserve balance in her personal life. Only for diehard Cornwell fans, of whom there are still many, despite the author’s continued slump.”

The New York Post gives a more positive review: “Cornwell delivers exactly what her fans expect - plenty of human interest, enough gore and madness to produce the occasional shiver and the technological tools and expertise that can almost pass for magic.”

The New York Times discusses the changes made by Cornwell to help the series:

Cornwell has noted that “the interior world of forensic science and medicine was a dark and chilly secret” when she wrote her first book, based on her experiences in the office of Virginia’s chief medical examiner. Back then, it made sense for a crack pathologist like Scarpetta to plug away alone in the lab and conduct her fieldwork in the company of a blunt homicide cop like Pete Marino. Nowadays, though, a public educated by “C.S.I.” expects sexy scientists working in sleek crime labs with cool equipment.

Cornwell begins her upgrade on a case that starts in Rome, where a 16-year-old American tennis star is murdered by a psychopath with a macabre style of postmortem mutilation. But the plot doesn’t really take hold until it shifts to Charleston, S.C., where Scarpetta has opened a private practice. Once she and her computer-genius niece have the lab fully up and running, the facilities should knock your eye out. Meanwhile, Scarpetta’s grand ambitions are projected by her use of “the largest scanning electron microscope on the planet” to analyze the grains of sand the killer leaves in his victims’ bodies.

But enhancing Scarpetta’s scientific status is only one part of Cornwell’s remodeling job; she also sets her sights on characters who don’t carry the weight they once did. Marino, for one, really feels the pinch. (“I didn’t use to be like this,” he says, after a particularly appalling blunder.) She might consider that Benton Wesley, stuffy when he was an F.B.I. profiler and even stuffier now that he’s on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, also has the whiff of redundancy. And then there’s Dr. Marilyn Self, “the most famous psychiatrist in the world,” so jealous of Scarpetta she keeps shoving her way into cases that would be better off without her. In trying to reassert Scarpetta’s supremacy, Cornwell hasn’t exactly purged the series of tired formulas and worn-out cast members. But she has shaken things up a bit and produced one terrific new character, a bodyguard named Bull who’s helping Scarpetta tend her neglected garden. It will be interesting to see what grows there.

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The following is an excerpt from Cornwell’s Book of the Dead:

Rome

Water splashing. A gray mosaic tile tub sunk deep into a terra-cotta floor.

Water pours slowly from an old brass spout, and darkness pours through a window. On the other side of old, wavy glass is the piazza, and the fountain, and the night.

She sits quietly in water, and the water is very cold, with melting ice cubes in it, and there is little in her eyes—nothing much there anymore. At first, her eyes were like hands reaching out to him, begging him to save her. Now her eyes are the bruised blue of dusk. Whatever was in them has almost left. Soon she will sleep.

“Here,” he says, handing her a tumbler that was handblown in Murano and now is filled with vodka.

He is fascinated by parts of her that have never seen the sun. They are pale like limestone, and he turns the spigot almost off, and the water is a trickle now, and he watches her rapid breathing and hears the chattering of her teeth. Her white breasts float beneath the surface of the water, delicate like white flowers.
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Jeffrey Toobin visited the Google New York office recently to discuss his new book “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.” In this 45-minute video, he talks about a wide range of Supreme Court-related subjects.

“They are very cordial to each other,” Toobin says. “They are very correct, polite. They are not particularly close friends.”

Toobin mentions some of the interests of the Justices, as well. “Clarence Thomas has maybe the most interesting hobby of them all. Clarence Thomas, about six years ago, adopted a great nephew who was about eight years old at the time. For entertainment, he bought this gigantic RV which he calls ‘The Bus’. This huge RV. And he and his family tavel around the country, usually in the South, spending the night in WalMart parking lots.”

He also highlights what he said was the one decision that has impacted the court the most.

“They came away from Bush v. Gore rather shellshocked and disturbed about the place of the Court in public life and I think that worry was one factor that pushed Kennedy and O’Connor to the left,” he says.

To find the best prices on “The Nine,” use the BookOpinion price comparison search here.

Find out the hottest books selling right now at Buy.com with this quick run down of their top 10 books:

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Amazon has released a podcast excerpt from Michael Palin’s “Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years.”

“Told in Palin’s inimitable voice,” Amazon writes, “this is a wry, revelatory look at the comic brains behind the show, and Palin’s diary format results in a true day-in-the-life portrait of the troupe.”

In this podcast excerpt Palin reads through diary entries for the filming of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Palin says in the book, that a diary “becomes history, but quite unselfconsciously. What proves to be important over a long period is not always what a diarist will identify at the time. For the historians’ sake I should probably have noted every detail of the birth of Monty Python, but it seemed far more important to me to record the emergence of my new family than the faltering steps of a comedy series that would probably last no more than two years. And that, I feel, is as it should be. Legends are not created by diaries, though they can be destroyed by them.”

The Washington Post writes, “Palin provides insights into the group’s dynamics during the decade that brought the Monty Python troupe to international acclaim. This abridgment can be satiating and frustrating, often simultaneously. At face value, it provides many behind-the-scenes moments and explores how and why the comedy troupe went about its business. Yet the mere knowledge that it’s an abridgment will have listeners yearning to hear more—especially Python-quoting fans.”

Use the BookOpinion price comparison tool to find the best prices for: “Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years.”

Eric Clapton’s Autobiography has received strong reviews and climbed the bestseller charts. BookOpinion has compiled reviews, a video trailer and an excerpt.

“Eric Clapton is a rock legend. His story encompasses genius, fame, tragedy and triumph over adversity in equal measure,” says Richard Cable of Random House. “This will be the inside story of one of the greatest musical figures of our time - we are thrilled and privileged to be publishing this landmark book.”

Publishers Weekly summarizes the book: “As he retraces every step of his career, from the early stints with the Yardbirds and Cream to his solo successes, Clapton also devotes copious detail to his drug and alcohol addictions, particularly how they intersected with his romantic obsession with Pattie Boyd. His relationship with the woman for whom he wrote Layla culminated in a turbulent marriage he describes as drunken forays into the unknown. But he genuinely warms to the subject of his recovery, stressing its spiritual elements and eagerly discussing the fund-raising efforts for his Crossroads clinic in Antigua. His self-reckoning is filled with modesty, especially in the form of dissatisfaction with his early successes. He professes ambivalence about the famous Clapton is God graffiti, although he admits he was grateful for the recognition from fans. At times, he sounds more like landed gentry than a rock star: bragging about his collection of contemporary art, vigorously defending his hunting and fishing as leisure activities, and extolling the virtues of his quiet country living. But both the youthful excesses and the current calm state are narrated with an engaging tone that nudges Clapton’s story ahead of other rock ‘n’ roll memoirs.”

The L.A. Times writes: “Despite his fame, Clapton modeled himself after blues players Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters and the like, letting the music do his talking. As such, he’s still an enigma after more than four decades. Even the most casual fans likely know the basics — the hits, the virtuosity, the crippling addictions, the tragic death of his 4-year-old son — but Clapton fills in many gray areas, recounting his highs and lows with a thoughtfulness often lacking in rock memoirs. Methodically he whittles away at the larger-than-life rock god until a vulnerable, messed-up mortal emerges. When you strip away the expensive houses and art, the cars and boats, stacks of guitars, beautiful women and the applause of millions, what’s left is the humble man from the Surrey County village of Ripley in southern England. Two decades after walking out of a Minneapolis rehab clinic, a still-sober Clapton reflects on his past with dead-eyed clarity.”

The The Boston Herald’s article: “For fans of Clapton’s British blues heyday, including his brief tenurein the Yardbirds, Bluesbreakers, Cream and Blind Faith, the first hundred pages are a treasure. A big fish in a still small London rock scene, Clapton constantly rubbed up against the rock geniuses of the age.”

Clapton also discusses the devastating moment he learned that his 4-year-old son had fallen to his death:

Clapton writes in the book that he was enjoying his first father-son outing alone with Conor the night before the mishap.

He says that he was filled with confidence as a father when he took the little boy home, and had decided to spend more one-on-one time with his son whenever he was in New York.

“The following morning I was up early, ready to walk crosstown from my hotel to pick up (Conor’s mother) Lori (del Santo) and Conor to take them to the Central Park Zoo,” Contactmusic quoted him as writing in his autobiography.

“The phone rang and it was Lori. She was hysterical, screaming that Conor was dead. I thought to myself, ‘This is ridiculous. How can he be dead?’ and I asked her the silliest question, ‘Are you sure?’ “And then she told me that he’d fallen out of the window. She was beside herself. Screaming. I said, ‘I’ll be right there,’” he wrote.

Clapton also recalls the horror of having to identify Conor, who had fallen 49 storeys from a high-rise window, at the morgue.

“Whatever physical damage he had suffered in the fall, by the time I saw him they had restored his body to some normality. As I looked at his beautiful face in repose, I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t my son. It looks a bit like him, but he’s gone,’” he wrote.

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Here is a trailer for the book and CD:

BookOpinion has also found an excerpt from the book on Amazon:

Growing Up

Early in my childhood, when I was about six or seven, I began to get the feeling that there was something different about me. Maybe it was the way people talked about me as if I weren’t in the room. My family lived at 1, the Green, a tiny house in Ripley, Surrey, which opened directly onto the village Green. It was part of what had once been almshouses and was divided into four rooms; two poky bedrooms upstairs, and a small front room and kitchen downstairs. The toilet was outside, in a corrugated iron shed at the bottom of the garden, and we had no bathtub, just a big zinc basin that hung on the back door. I don’t remember ever using it.

Twice a week my mum used to fill a smaller tin tub with water and sponge me down, and on Sunday afternoons I used to go and have a bath at my Auntie Audrey’s, my dad’s sister, who lived in the new flats on the main road. I lived with Mum and Dad, who slept in the main bedroom overlooking the Green, and my brother, Adrian, who had a room at the back. I slept on a camp bed, sometimes with my parents, sometimes downstairs, depending on who was staying at the time. The house had no electricity, and the gas lamps made a constant hissing sound. It amazes me now to think that whole families lived in these little houses.

My mum had six sisters: Nell, Elsie, Renie, Flossie, Cath, and Phyllis, and two brothers, Joe and Jack. On a Sunday it wasn’t unusual for two or three of these families to show up, and they would pass the gossip and get up–to–date with what was happening with us and with them. In the smallness of this house, conversations were always being carried on in front of me as if I didn’t exist, with whispers exchanged between the sisters. It was a house full of secrets. But bit by bit, by carefully listening to these exchanges, I slowly began to put together a picture of what was going on and to understand that the secrets were usually to do with me. One day I heard one of my aunties ask, “Have you heard from his mum?” and the truth dawned on me, that when Uncle Adrian jokingly called me a little bastard, he was telling the truth.

The full impact of this realization upon me was traumatic, because at the time I was born, in March 1945—in spite of the fact that it had become so common because of the large number of overseas soldiers and airmen passing through England—an enormous stigma was still attached to illegitimacy. Though this was true across the class divide, it was particularly so among working–class families such as ours, who, living in a small village community, knew little of the luxury of privacy. Because of this, I became intensely confused about my position, and alongside my deep feelings of love for my family there existed a suspicion that in a tiny place like Ripley, I might be an embarrassment to them that they always had to explain.

The truth I eventually discovered was that Mum and Dad, Rose and Jack Clapp, were in fact my grandparents, Adrian was my uncle, and Rose’s daughter, Patricia, from an earlier marriage, was my real mother and had given me the name Clapton. In the mid–1920s, Rose Mitchell, as she was then, had met and fallen in love with Reginald Cecil Clapton, known as Rex, the dashing and handsome, Oxford–educated son of an Indian army officer. They had married in February 1927, much against the wishes of his parents, who considered that Rex was marrying beneath him. The wedding took place a few weeks after Rose had given birth to their first child, my uncle Adrian. They set up home in Woking, but sadly, it was a short–lived marriage, as Rex died of consumption in 1932, three years after the birth of their second child, Patricia.
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