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[EDITOR NOTE: Latest Barnes and Noble Coupon is listed at this link.]

Barnes and Noble has released a rare coupon code for this weekend. Save 15% off one item. Hurry, this offer won’t last long. Here are the details:

Offer: 15% off one item.
Start date: 11/30/07 at 10:00 AM EST
End date: 12/3/07 at 2:59 AM EST
Coupon code: E9H7R9E

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Amazon has released a podcast excerpt for the audiobook “Rhett Butler’s People” by Donald McCaig. The book has received solid reviews, and the excerpt runs just more than 6 minutes.

“In the capable hands of narrator John Bedford Lloyd, Donald McCaig’s Rhett displays just the right mix of pride and swagger,” writes Amazon. “Listen now and get a taste of one of the most eagerly anticipated novels of the season!”

Publishers Weekly says: “Was it strictly necessary to our understanding of Gone With the Wind’s dashing hero to flesh out his backstory, replay famous GWTW scenes from his perspective, and crank the plot past the original’s astringent denouement? Perhaps not, but it’s still a fun ride. In this authorized reimagining, Rhett, disowned son of a cruel South Carolina planter, is still a jauntily worldwise charmer, roguish but kind; Scarlett is still feisty, manipulative and neurotic; and the air of besieged decorum is slightly racier. (Rhett: “My dear, you have jam at the corner of your mouth.” Scarlett: “Lick it off.”) But it says much about the author’s sure feel for Margaret Mitchell’s magnetic protagonists that they still beguile us. McCaig (Jacob’s Ladder) broadens the canvas, giving Rhett new dueling and blockade-running adventures and adding intriguing characters like Confederate cavalier-turned-Klansman Andrew Ravanel, a rancid version of Ashley Wilkes who romances Rhett’s sister Rosemary. He paints a richer, darker panorama of a Civil War-era South where poor whites seethe with resentment and slavery and racism are brutal facts of life that an instinctive gentleman like Rhett can work around but not openly challenge. McCaig thus imparts a Faulknerian tone to the saga that sharpens Mitchell’s critique of Southern nostalgia without losing the epic sweep and romantic pathos. The result is an engrossing update of GWTW that fans of the original will definitely give a damn about.”

Click here to listen to Amazon’s podcast excerpt of Rhett Butler’s People.

Below is a a very short trailer for the book:

Barnes and Noble has put together lists of their top 10 gifts for books and DVD. Here they are in no particular order:

Top 10 Gift Books
I am America (and so Can You!) - Stephen Colbert
1776: The Illustrated Edition
The Daring Book for Girls
Mad’s Greatest Artists: The Completely Mad Don Martin
A Family Christmas - Caroline Kennedy
The Star Wars Vault
Cartographia
War: An Intimate History - Ken Burns
A Lifetime of Secrets - Frank Warren
Rolling Stone Cover To Cover: The First 40 Years

To find these Top 10 Gift Books - Click Here.

Top 10 DVD Gifts
Seinfeld – The Complete Series
The War – A Ken Burns Film
Ratatouille
A Christmas Story
Audrey Hepburn 5-pack
Harry Potter DVD Collection – Years 1-5
Planet Earth – The Complete Series
Peanuts Classic Holiday Collection
Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End
High School Musical 2

To find these Top 10 DVD Gifts - Click Here.

Alibris has sent us another coupon code for BookOpinion users for the next couple weeks.

Offer: Save $1 off any purchase
Coupon Code: VROOM
Expiration: Dec. 5, 2007.

Offer: Save $3 off a purchase of $30 or more using
Coupon Code: GARCIAMARQUEZ
Expiration: Nov. 25, 2007.

Click here to go!

Ready for consumption like a mocha frappuccino, “Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture” by Taylor Clark hit bookstores this past week. BookOpinion has compiled reviews from several media outlets.

Clark, a Portland-based journalist, has felt this topic brewing (last pun from us, we promise) since the Starbucks chain opened three branches in his small Oregon hometown. Hundreds of interviews and countless hours later, “Starbucked” was crafted into a “witty and often biting book,” according to the New York Post.

Publishers Weekly summarizes the book: “His coverage begins with a Seattle trio who set out to emulate the high-quality coffee of the California-based Peet’s chain, before Howard Schultz took over the company and laid plans for its massive expansion. While Clark grudgingly admires Starbucks’ ability to repackage coffee as beverage entertainment for a hyperprosperous society in search of emotional soothing, there’s a lot he doesn’t like about the company. He’s convinced that Starbucks diminishes the world’s diversity by ruthlessly outmaneuvering local competition on a global scale, and dubs the baristas’ work as a textbook McJob. Even the quality of the coffee, he says, has gone downhill.”

The San Francisco Chronicle gave the book a good review, “Entertaining, illuminating and reflective are not qualities usually associated with corporate histories. But Taylor Clark, former Willamette Week alt-weekly journalist, Dartmouth College graduate and Portland resident, has written a story about one business that’s all of these… Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture‘ is the eminently readable result. Clark explains that his purpose in writing the book was ‘to tell the story of how a major corporation, peddling a simple, age-old commodity, influences the daily life and culture of the world.’”

The New York Post digs into the topic further:

October 28, 2007 — In 2004, residents in Portland, Oregon, tried to firebomb a new Starbucks store that had opened in the face of intense community opposition. The Molotov cocktail bounced off the reinforced glass, burning harmlessly. Starbucks, a corporation with a worldwide reach of 13,000 stores from Seattle to Paris, Beijing to Saudi Arabia (where there are separate seats for men and women), has long fortified itself against local enemies. Despite the disgruntled neighbors in Portland, the new Starbucks stayed open.

Starting in 1971 as a storefront selling fresh-roasted gourmet coffee beans to coffee fanatics in Seattle, Starbucks has evolved into a ubiquitous player in the American cultural landscape, making us into caffeine addicts and connoisseurs of expensive coffee. In “Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture,“ journalist Taylor Clark has written a rollicking account of the social phenomenon, which has become our national meeting place, filling the void left by the churches and marketplaces of the past…

…Clark has many funny asides. Using Internet map searches, he found that the farthest place from a Starbucks in America is the hamlet of Saco, Montana, which is almost 200 miles away from any of the pervasive green coffee shops. The derogatory nickname of “Charbucks” comes from the burned nature of the beans of the Starbucks dark roast. Clark briefly muses over the possibility that burned beans may encourage people to buy expensive milk-based drinks like venti lattes.

The Starbucks’ juggernaut continues unabated worldwide, with the company opening as many as six stores a day and serving 40 million customers. Starbucks penetrated the horrified British, French and Japanese markets and made new coffee drinkers in droves. Like McDonald’s, Starbucks is reaching its saturation point. The coffee giant’s prestige is evaporating. “Starbucks is just going to lose appeal as it grows,” pop-culture analyst Robert Thompson told Clark. “Anyone can get Starbucks now. There’s no exclusivity anymore. They’ve moved into volume, volume, volume.”

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The Wall Street Journal writes about how the book delves into the success of Starbucks:

A major part of the Starbucks story has to do with real estate, since the company obviously favors a kind of neighborhood saturation. “Through a combination of cunning store-placement strategy and ruthlessness with competitors,” Mr. Clark writes, “the company attempted to make it so customers couldn’t help but go to Starbucks.” One Starbucks real-estate dealmaker, who was turned down for an attractive commercial space, discovered that the refusing landlord was a doctor. She made an appointment to see him, pretending to be a patient, and repeated her pitch at his office. He caved in, and Starbucks got the space. As for what space is best, Starbucks prefers to be near dry cleaners and video stores, because they require two visits — for dropping off and picking up.

The company has been no less relentless about its image. The high prices signal not just quality but luxury, and the specialized vocabulary (”venti,” “doppio” and the like) elevates a mundane form of consumption into the realm of cosmopolitan taste. In the same vein, Mr. Schultz strives to make each Starbucks a “third place” between work and home. “We’re not in the coffee business serving people,” he likes to say, “we’re in the people business serving coffee.”
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BOOKOPINION REVIEW: Let’s assume the following scenario: you’re a fairly ordinary person, two kids, soccer mom … you volunteer for political fundraising in your spare time, live in an average neighborhood, have an average income. You live well but not opulently. And then one day, you are assaulted by the most powerful person in the world … and no one believes you, except the “bad guys”. They know you’re telling the truth and are determined no one else will ever find out.

This is the predicament that Kathleen Willey states she was in when she was accosted and assaulted by the President of the United States, Bill Clinton.

After the story was leaked by Drudge, Willey states, “I had aroused the ire of the Clinton administration and was about to bear the full force of its fury. Through their henchmen and minions, Bill and Hillary Clinton would wage nothing less than a media war to undercut my credibility and the credibility of any woman who dared tell the truth about Bill’s sexual advances. That war would reveal the chronic hypocrisy of those who advocate for women’s rights, as none of them -– not Democrats nor feminists nor Hillary Clinton, an alleged promoter of women’s rights -– would come to the aid of the women he had assaulted. It was me versus the machine and I was scared.” Thus speaks Kathleen Willey, a committed Democrat, fundraiser and White House volunteer.

She further states, “After we got caught in Bill Clinton’s trap, we were raked over the coals. All of us –- Juanita, Gennifer, Paula, Monica, me -– we have all been through a lot. We were regular women trying to get by when our paths crossed his. Through no fault of our own, we were smeared in the media, terrorized by thugs, audited by the IRS, followed by strangers, victimized by threats. Our homes were broken into and our pets were killed. And we know that Hillary and her minions were behind the terror.”

Kathleen Willey adds, “I think Bill routinely confesses his infidelities to Hillary. Certainly, he skews the stories. I doubt he admitted that he raped Juanita, assaulted me and abused probably dozens or hundreds of others. But I think he told Hillary that he’d done something with us and it’s likely he said we seduced him. I believe that, as part of their dysfunctional dynamic of addict and enabler, in their ugly, twisted cycle, he tells her some story to relieve his guilt. He screws up, he confesses, he asks forgiveness, she throws lamps, and then they make up and he gives her something –- appoints a woman to the Supreme Court, lets Hillary spearhead the grand health care debacle or campaigns for her presidency. I think it’s been like that since the beginning. To Hillary, it is tightly wound up with her political aspirations. She came out ahead. We lost. Women lost. And feminism lost.” Why would any wife, especially someone as much in the media’s eye as Hillary, behave in such a bizarre manner?

Kathleen also quotes Bernie Nussbaum who states that “he and Hillary shared the view that ‘you should do harm to your enemies…’” as well as Dave Shippers, who spent years investigating the Clintons, who states regarding Hillary, “Nothing is beneath her.” And Dick Morris summed up this insane state of affairs by saying, “If you’re going to be a sexual predator, be pro-choice.”

The first dozen pages or so of the beginning of “Target: Caught in the Crosshairs of Bill and Hillary Clinton” made me whistle in disbelief. If true, I thought, how could any woman be so naïve? We are asked to judge not just her story but her character as well as the characters of the people about whom she writes. I will say, as a political animal, I was astounded by some of the revelations she revealed. Even a hardened truth seeker will tend to be disbelieving of some of the volatile and wholly unacceptable traits exhibited in the White House during this turbulent time.

“Target” is very detailed and extremely explicit. Comments by the other people involved are documented … thus verification of their involvement or observations is possible.

Is this book founded on the truth? Is there a middle ground somewhere? Two sides to every story, right? I don’t know. Kathleen Willey did appear to be utterly sincere and incredibly courageous with no ulterior motives. I do know that this was a fascinating read, although somewhat repetitive at times. I occasionally had to backtrack to recall exactly about whom she was referring. The writing was okay, not great, but well worth the time I spent reading “Target.”

In spite of the flaws of the book, I do highly recommend this book. It was an eye-opener to say the least and will prove to introduce you to the inner workings of a government hopelessly swimming in complete disarray. If this story is true, how very sad … for Kathleen Willey and her family, the other victims, those afraid to speak out and the American people.

– Elizabeth Channery