BookOpinion

The best good and bad quotes last forever or at least until the end of the year … for example, making your “Don’t Tase Me, Bro!” T-shirt still a worthy Christmas present.

While a delicious quote on a T-shirt might bleach out in the wash, a book of memorable quotes lasts a lot longer. Fred R. Shapiro, an associate librarian and lecturer at the Yale Law School, is the editor of “The Yale Book of Quotations,” released earlier this year after six years of research. It contains about 13,000 quotes, each extensively researched to verify its origin. He expects to add about 1,000 more quotes — mostly modern — for the next edition of his book in about five years.

More recently, Shapiro released a list of the 10 most memorable quotes of 2007. With help from the Associated Press, here’s the list from bottom to top:

10. “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.”

Former President Jimmy Carter, referring to the Bush administration in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper

9. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Sen. Joseph Biden, referring to rival Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama

8. “(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom.”

Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig, explaining why his foot touched the foot of an undercover police officer in an airport men’s room

7. “I’m not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody who has a 9 percent approval rating.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, referring to Republican Vice President Dick Cheney

6. “There’s only three things he (Republican presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani) mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.”

Sen. Joseph Biden, speaking during a debate for Democratic presidential candidates

5. “I don’t recall.”

Former U.S. Attorney Alberto Gonzales’ repeated response to questions from members of Congress about the firing of U.S. attorneys

4. “That’s some nappy-headed hos there.”

Radio personality Don Imus, referring to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team

3. “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, during a speaking engagement at Columbia University in New York

2. “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq and everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us.”

Lauren Upton, the South Carolina contestant in the Miss Teen America contest, when asked why one-fifth of Americans cannot find the U.S on a map

1. “Don’t tase me, bro.”

Andrew Meyer, a senior at the University of Florida, after being hauled away by campus police during a speech made by Sen. John Kerry.

Don’t Tase Me, Bro! The Video

Now that I’ve refreshed your memory on some top unforgettable quotes of 2007, I recommend getting your hands on an extensive list found in “The Yale Book of Quotations.”

This from Booklist’s Carolyn Mulac:

To paraphrase Ira Gershwin, “on every [page] that you turn you meet a notable with a statement that is eminently quotable” in this collection. According to editor Shapiro, this is “the first quotation book to be compiled using state-of-the-art research methods to seek out quotations and to trace quotation sources.” He compares his approach with that of the Oxford English Dictionary: he, too, traces words back to their earliest possible usages. Using a variety of electronic sources, such as JSTOR, LexisNexis, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, andTimes Digital Archive, scores of quotations were verified, and in many cases reverified. The more than 12,000 quotations collected here span a wide array of subjects, from literature, philosophy, and history to science, business, and politics.

Quotations are presented alphabetically by the name of the author or speaker. Shakespeare and the Bible, the mother lodes of quotations, are amply represented, but emphasis is on “modern and American materials.” Children’s authors, who are often ignored in other dictionaries, are quoted here. There are a number of special sections devoted to particular types of quotations, among them advertising slogans, ballads, film lines, political slogans, and radio and television catchphrases. Song lyrics are entered by the name of the composer, and film lines appear either under the film title in the special section devoted to movie lines or, if they originated in a book or play upon which the film was based, under the author of that literary source. Proverbs span the centuries and often include evidence of a saying’s first print appearance. A keyword index, an essential element of any quotation dictionary, rounds out the text.

Don’t disappoint me, bro…go check out “The Yale Book of Quotations” now!

- Alexander

Cormac McCarthy, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Road“, has granted only two other interviews in his 40 years. Yesterday, he sat down with Oprah for his first television interview. BookOpinion has pulled together various media coverage of this rare interview.

The Washington Post:

Oprah Winfrey got Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy to do the one thing he hates most: talk about his work.

“You probably shouldn’t be talking about it, you probably should be doing it,” the 73-year-old author told Winfrey in a rare TV interview, which aired Tuesday on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”…

…During the interview, taped at the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy said that while typically he doesn’t know what generates the ideas for his books, he can trace “The Road,” this year’s winner of the Pulitzer for fiction, to a trip he took with his young son to El Paso about four years ago. Standing at the window of a hotel in the middle of the night, his son asleep nearby, he started to imagine what El Paso might look like 50 or 100 years in the future.

“I just had this image of these fires up on the hill . . . and I thought a lot about my little boy,” he said. He wrote some of his thoughts down and didn’t really think about it again until he was in Ireland a few years later and the novel, about a man and his son as they wander through a barren post-nuclear landscape, came to him.

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The Cleveland Plain Dealer:

…”You have a child when you are older, and it wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things fresh,” McCarthy said, smiling, his head propped in his left hand. “It forces the world on you, and I think it’s a good thing.”…

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The Baltimore Sun:

…”This country’s been very lucky, like me,” McCarthy said today on Oprah. In his 40-year writing career, he’s granted only two other interviews, both to print publications. Oprah Winfrey said she got the interview by calling up and asking. But it doesn’t mean the author will do many, if any, more interviews.

“I don’t think it’s good for your head,” he said. “If you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You should just do it.”…

…He said he writes because he’s never wanted to work for someone else, that he doesn’t care about the fame he’s achieved, and that The Road is a love letter to his 8-year-old son…

…The thrice-married McCarthy admitted that “women are tough” for him to understand, which is why they don’t figure prominently in his work. He said writing is difficult, but he still likes it.

“You always have that hope that today I’m going to do something better than I’ve ever done,” he said.”

McCarthy, who was poor for much of his life, said he has never wanted much in the way of material things, and that he knew he never wanted to work.

“It was my No. 1 priority,” he said. “Life is brief, and to have to spend every day of it doing what someone else wants you to do is no way to live it.”…

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The Associated Press:

…Winfrey was clearly fascinated with McCarthy’s life, particularly the time when he was so poor that he once was tossed out of a $40-a-month hotel because he couldn’t pay his bill.

He told a story of living in a “shack in Tennessee,” having so little money that he could not afford to buy toothpaste when he ran out, only to discover a free sample of toothpaste in his mailbox.

“Just when things were really, really bleak something would happen,” he said.

Many authors jump or weep for joy upon receiving the word from Winfrey, publishing’s swiftest and surest path to the top of best seller lists. But McCarthy’s apparent indifference to having hundreds of thousands of new readers baffled and charmed the talk show host.

“You are a different kind of author, let me tell you,” she said, chuckling.

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Chicago Tribune television critic Maureen Ryan and staff writer Patrick T. Reardon blog about the event here.

The 27th Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were named, kicking off this year’s L.A. Times Book Festival. The award ceremony was hosted by PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer.

“The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes honor the year’s great writers and great literary works,” said Publisher David D. Hiller. “Celebrating the diverse literary universe is a longstanding Book Prizes’ tradition and the 2006 honorees well represent a rich tapestry of writing.”

Fiction:
Winner: "A Woman in Jerusalem" by A.B. Yehoshua translated from Hebrew by Hillel Halkin (Harcourt)
Finalists: “Black Swan Green” by David Mitchell (Random House)
“The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo” by Peter Orner (Little, Brown)
“A Million Nightingales” by Susan Straight (Pantheon Books)
“Winter’s Bone” by Daniel Woodrell (Little, Brown)

Biography:
Winner: "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination" by Neal Gabler (Alfred A. Knopf)
Finalists: “The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher” by Debby Applegate (Doubleday)
“The Librettist of Venice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s Poet, Casanova’s Friend, and Italian Opera’s Impresario in America” by Rodney Bolt (Bloomsbury USA)
“Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide” by Jeffrey Goldberg (Knopf)
“The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million” by Daniel Mendelsohn (HarperCollins)

History:
Winner: "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)
Finalists: “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68″ by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster)
“The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West” by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press)
“Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War” by ; Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking)
“The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai” by John Tayman (Lisa Drew/Scribner)

Other winners included:

Current Interest:
“Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance” by Ian Buruma (Penguin)

Mystery/Thriller:
“Echo Park” by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)

The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction:
“White Ghost Girls” by Alice Greenway (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic)

Young Adult Fiction:
“Tyrell” by Coe Booth (Push/Scholastic)

Science and Technology:
“In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind” by Eric R. Kandel (W.W. Norton)

Poetry:
“Ooga-Booga” by Frederick Seidel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Author Jodi Picoult left for a book tour to promote her new novel, Nineteen Minutes — a story about bullying in high schools and horrific revenge — when news about the tragic mass murder at Virginia Tech took place.

Picoult's 14th novel was already on the New York Times bestsellers list at the time the tragedy struck. Now, an already sensitive topic seems to have found itself cast in a profoundly different emotional light.

She released the following statement on her web site, "As a parent, my deepest sympathy goes out to the victims and families of the Virginia Tech community. Although shootings on college campuses are often motivated by different factors than the ones I researched for high school shootings in 19 Minutes, any time something like this happens it is tragic and raises questions. However, the one we should be asking right now is: How can we help this community heal?”

With the release of Picoult's novel last month, Borders Book Club sat down with the author to discuss the book. Even though this Borders Book Club was filmed prior to the Virginia Tech shootings, it was an emotional discussion, nonetheless — particulary as Picoult recalls the research she did for the novel at Columbine. "A lot of the details that you saw in the book came right out of the mouths of those sheriffs that I spoke to."

The Chicago Tribune writes about the intersection between fiction and reality:

Yet reading "Nineteen Minutes" in the immediate wake of the Blacksburg massacre reveals many aspects in common, too: Peter Houghton, the shooter in the novel, is a sullen, disaffected loner who is bullied or ignored by his classmates, much as Cho seems to have been. The adults in "Nineteen Minutes" ask themselves the same questions that Cho's family members must be asking privately. "There was the finest line between unique and odd," one of Picoult's characters muses, "between what made a child grow up to be as well-adjusted as Thomas versus unstable, like Peter. Did every teenager have the capacity to fall on one side or the other of that tightrope, and could you identify a single moment that tipped the balance?"

Peter's thoughts, too, seem chillingly close to what Cho's might have been: "You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like."

…The timing of Picoult's novel, published within weeks of Cho's vicious rampage, was accidental. But in its depiction of a serene, ordinary world blown apart by the rage of a single individual, her story — all too tragically — is timeless.

Here is the collection of videos with Picoult as she discusses her novel last month with the Borders Book Club cast, who discuss their perspectives as not only readers, but parents. The first video is shown below, the others are linked afterward, followed by book cub questions from Picoult's web site. "I would never have written about this right after Columbine. I actually think that is such a raw piece of American history," Picoult said at the time of this filming:

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 2 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 3 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 4 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 5 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 6 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 7 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 8 )

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes ( Part 9 )

The following are book club questions provided by Picoult's web site for those who have read the novel Nineteen Minutes:

Book club discussion questions for Nineteen Minutes

1. Alex and Lacy’s friendship comes to an end when they discover Peter and Josie playing with guns in the Houghton house. Why does Alex decide that it’s in Josie’s best interest to keep her daughter away from Peter? What significance is there to the fact that Alex is the first one to prevent Josie from being friends with Peter?

2. Alex often has trouble separating her roles as a judge and a mother. How does this affect her relationship with Josie? Discuss whether or not Alex’s job is more important to her than being a mother.

3. A theme throughout the novel is the idea of masks and personas, and pretending to be someone you’re not. To which characters does this apply, and why?

4. At one point defense attorney Jordan McAfee refers to himself as a “spin doctor,” and he believes that at the end of Peter’s trial he “will be either reviled or canonized” (250). What is your view of Jordan? As you were reading the book, did you find it difficult or not to remain objective about the judicial system’s standing that every defendant (no matter how heinous his or her crime) has the right to a fair trial?

5. Peter was a victim of bullying for twelve years at the hands of certain classmates, many of whom repeatedly tormented him. But he also shot and killed students he had never met or who had never done anything wrong to him. What empathy, if any, did you have for Peter both before and after the shooting?

6. Josie and Peter were friends until the sixth grade. Is it understandable that Josie decided not to hang out with Peter in favor of the popular crowd? Why or why not? How accurate and believable did you find the author’s depiction of high school peer pressure and the quest for popularity? Do you believe, as Picoult suggests, that even the popular kids are afraid that their own friends will turn on them?

7. Josie admits she often witnessed Matt’s cruelty toward other students. Why then does it come as such a surprise to Josie when Matt abuses her verbally and physically? How much did you empathize with Josie?

8. Regarding Lacy, Patrick notes that “in a different way, this woman was a victim of her son’s actions, too” (53). How much responsibility do Lewis and Lacy bear for Peter’s actions? How about Lewis in particular, who taught his son how to handle guns and hunt?

9. At one point during Peter’s bullying, Lacy is encouraged by an elementary school teacher to force Peter to stand up for himself. She threatens to cancel his playdates with Josie if he doesn’t fight back. How did you feel, when you read that scene? Do you blame Lacy for Peter’s future actions because of it? Do you agree or disagree with the idea that it a parent’s job to teach a child the skills necessary to defend himself?

10. Discuss the novel’s structure. In what ways do the alternating narratives between past and present enhance the story? How do the scenes in the past give you further insight into the characters and their actions, particularly Peter and Josie?

11. When Patrick arrives at Sterling High after the shooting, “his entire body began to shake, knowing that for so many students and parents and citizens today, he had once again been too late” (24). Why does Patrick blame himself for not preventing an incident he had no way of knowing was going to happen?

12. Dr. King, an expert witness for the defense, states that Peter was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of chronic victimization. “But a big part of it, too,” he adds, “is the society that created both Peter and those bullies” (409). What reasons does Dr. King give to support his assertion that society is partly to blame for Peter’s actions as well as those of the bullies? Do you agree with this? Why or why not?

13. Why does Josie choose to shoot Matt instead of shooting Peter? Why does Peter remain silent about Josie’s role in the shooting? In the end, has justice been satisfactorily dealt to Peter and to Josie?

14. Discuss the very ending of the novel, which concludes on the one-year anniversary of the Sterling High shooting. Why do you suppose the author chose to leave readers with an image of Patrick and Alex, who is pregnant? In what way does the final image of the book predict the future?

15. Shootings have occurred at a number of high schools across the country over the last several years. Did Nineteen Minutes make you think about these incidents in a more immediate way than reading about them in the newspaper or seeing coverage on television? How so? In what ways did the novel impact your opinion of the parties generally involved in school shootings—perpetrators, victims, fellow students, teachers, parents, attorneys, and law enforcement officials?
What do you think the author is proposing as the root of the problem of school violence? What have you heard, in the media and in political forums, as solutions? Do you think they will work? Why or why not?