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Alan Alda: "I think the guy who winds up at the end of the book would say, 'Destiny is just what happens." Alan Alda titled his new book Never Have Your Dog Stuffed -- and Other Things I've Learned. But rest assured he didn't write it as a guide for self-improvement. He doesn't aim to be your guru. "I tried to tell as good a story as I could," he sums up. The resulting narrative, at 224 pages, is as lean as its author, and as engaging, and as flush with ideas and observations. "There are things that were very, very difficult to put into words," says Alda, at 69 an entertainment veteran actor who had written numerous screenplays but never a book. "That was what I had the most fun with - the things that don't want to go into words...

Alan Alda titled his new book Never Have Your Dog Stuffed -- and Other Things I've Learned. But rest assured he didn't write it as a guide for self-improvement. He doesn't aim to be your guru. "I tried to tell as good a story as I could," he sums up. The resulting narrative, at 224 pages, is as lean as its author, and as engaging, and as flush with ideas and observations. "There are things that were very, very difficult to put into words," says Alda, at 69 an entertainment veteran actor who had written numerous screenplays but never a book. "That was what I had the most fun with - the things that don't want to go into words. "But the hardest part was how to take a life and make it one simple story, not just a bunch of anecdotes. I didn't like the idea of writing a memoir or an autobiography. I only put in stuff that moved the story forward." The story: One man's advancement toward accepting the uncertainties of life. Letting go, notes Alda, is a drawn-out process, "so you don't just decide to do it. You have to creep up on it. Practice it. Get used to it. "I think the guy who winds up at the end of the book would say, 'Destiny is just what happens. " Alda should know. A lot has happened for that guy this year. He got an Oscar nomination for his role in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, a Tony nomination for his Broadway performance in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, and an Emmy nomination for The West Wing, in which he plays flinty Republican presidential hopeful Arnold Vinick. He continues this season on the NBC political drama, and, for its Nov. 6 episode, Sen. Vinick will square off against the Democrat (Jimmy Smits) in a debate aired live. Which candidate will succeed President Bartlet (series star Martin Sheen) by season's end? " I wouldn't spoil the surprise even if I knew," Alda replies when pressed for details about his contractual commitment to the series. But then, flashing his incandescent grin, he pledges to remain "as long as necessary to turn this great country around." When he isn't shuttling to Los Angeles to shoot the series, Alda leaves his Long Island home to hit the campaign trail for Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. Its first sentence establishes the book's matter-of-fact, often darkly witty tone. "My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that," Alda writes. He was the son of a mentally ill mother and an actor father, Robert Alda, who was subject to the vagaries of show business during a career that ranged from the hardscrabble vaudeville circuit to Broadway in the original production of Guys and Dolls. All in all, it was a dizzying childhood for Alan. But by age nine, he had decided he would be an actor, too, setting the stage for his push-pull life of embracing make-believe while defiantly inquiring into how things really are. He is a man in love with facts and verifiable truth (his decade as the gung-ho host of Scientific American Frontiers makes that clear). But he has also studied what it means to yield control to forces beyond reason.

The Million-Dollar Man is small potatoes. Meet Canada's $110-million teenagers. One of the biggest business stories this year has been the skyrocketing sales of books in children's and young adult categories, which account for a full 14 per cent of the $785.5 million in annual sales at Indigo Books -- the country's largest book retailer. What you may not know is 10 teen bookworms help determine which authors get a piece of that nine-figure pie, empowered to make or break any would-be Harry Potter before it ever hits store shelves. Given exclusive access to pre-release books, the hand-picked members of Indigo's junior advisory board -- five of whom were announced this month, five of whom are "emeritus" advisers from 2004 -- liaise with the company's buyers throughout the year to help steer them toward the best bets in new youth titles. "Our picks and our opinions on books do influence not only how many copies are bought by the store, but also if they're (bought) at all," says Riley Tickles, a 14-year-old emeritus adviser from Calgary. "It has been one of the best experiences of my life so far." According to Heather Reisman, chief executive at Indigo, the company wouldn't snub a novel that deserved exposure. But if the junior advisory board members are all holding their noses, she says: "the difference in the amount of exposure and promotion (the book gets) can be quite significant." Last year, for example, Reisman says a particular title -- which came "highly, highly touted" by its publisher as the next big thing -- was only judged lukewarm by Indigo's senior reviewers. When the junior advisory board also gave it a collective thumbs-down, the book was taken off the fast track.

Iconic Shakespeare portrait likely not him

An Elizabethan portrait thought by many to depict the young William Shakespeare is not the bard, experts at the National Portrait Gallery have concluded.

The Grafton portrait, which shows a dark-haired, high-browed young man in a rich scarlet jacket, has appeared on the cover of books about the writer. Gallery experts dated the painting to 1588, when Shakespeare was 24 -- the age given by an inscription on the picture for its subject. But they said Friday that there was no other evidence to suggest the portrait, owned by the University of Manchester, was of the playwright. Curator Tarnya Cooper said it was unlikely Shakespeare, then a young actor and writer, would have been able to afford a garment as expensive as the one in the painting. "We believe that Shakespeare left Stratford-upon-Avon following the birth of twins in 1585," Cooper said. "One possibility is that he joined a travelling theatre troupe and it is very unlikely that in 1588, Shakespeare would have been able to afford a costume of this type." Cooper said the painting had helped nurture the image of a sensitive, brooding young poet popularized by the film Shakespeare in Love -- "a beautiful young man with a sensitive and passionate face, of a character with an incredible emotional range." Painted in oils on an oak panel by an anonymous artist, the Grafton Portrait is named for one of the Dukes of Grafton, who is said to have owned it. The gallery is restoring and authenticating three portraits purportedly of Shakespeare in preparation for its Searching for Shakespeare exhibition next year. Using x-rays, ultraviolet light, microphotography and paint sampling tests, scholars at the gallery concluded in April that one of the best-known Shakespeare portraits -- the so-called Flower portrait owned by the Royal Shakespeare Company -- was also a fake. Scientific analysis revealed the painting dated from the 19th century. Next, experts will examine the Chandos portrait, which is in the gallery's own collection. Only two likenesses of Shakespeare are widely accepted as authentic: a bust on his tomb in Stratford's Holy Trinity Church and an engraving used as a frontispiece to the Folio edition of his plays in 1623.

Internet search engine Google is being sued by a group of book publishers over plans to put millions of titles online. The Association of American Publishers, which includes firms such as Penguin, has filed a suit in New York claiming Google will infringe their copyrights. As part of its Print Library Project, Google plans to index and scan millions of books from five major libraries. Google countered that the lawsuit was "short sighted", claiming its idea will lift exposure and demand for books. The legal action came after months of talks failed to hammer out an agreement. "We spent so much time on this I think half of our board ended up having trouble with their families because of cancelling vacations," said Patricia Schroeder, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers. The group is not the only one to take exception to Google's literary aspirations. Last month, a US writers' group sued Google also claiming its plans to digitise the books infringed author copyright. Google said it has been taking into account the concerns of publishers and authors.

No damages: Once the texts are digitised, users would not be able to download or print the whole book, but would be able to view a few sentences from each. Copyright holders have until 1 November to contact Google and get their titles removed from the list of those books to be scanned. However, the publishers say that does not go far enough and want the whole process to stop and have called on the court to grant them an injunction claiming they are suffering "continuing, irreparable and imminent harm". The legal action has been brought by five companies in all, and along with Penguin Group USA, there are McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons. They are seeking legal costs, but no damages.

Publisher Bantam Dell has won a bidding war for a biography of 75-year-old billionaire investor Warren Buffett.

It is the first time a biography will have be written with his co-operation, and deal is worth $7m (£4m), AP says. Mr Buffett, known as the Sage of Omaha, is the world's second richest man, said by Forbes to be worth $40bn (£22.6bn). The book, which will focus on his investment strategy, is likely to be called The Snowball: How Warren Buffett Collected Friends, Wisdom and Wealth. The book will be written by Alice Schroeder, formerly an analyst at Morgan Stanley, where she first came into contact with Mr Buffett. Although it is claimed it will reveal the secrets of his successful investment strategy, the contract was negotiated with the writer, not with the investment star famous for his homespun style. "Our deal is with her. She is the author," Bantam president and publisher Irwyn Applebaum told AP through spokeswoman Barbara Burg. The returns Mr Buffett has generated have won him a loyal investor base and turned many of his followers into multi-millionaires. Had you given Mr Buffett $10,000 in 1965, by 1999 that nest egg would have been worth more than $50m. In 1956 Mr Buffett built a partnership of four relatives and three close friends - he now controls a holding company worth $100bn (£56.7bn). Shares in his investment firm Berkshire Hathaway - which owns insurance, soft drink, confectionery, furniture, restaurant and carpet firms - are currently trading at $83,000 each. Mr Buffett is not one for fads and has built his investment empire on the maxim that it is better to identify a good investment and hold it for a long time, rather than jump in and out of positions. The world's second-richest person behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates, he famously sat out the whole internet boom. Dell says the new book will be based on the "thousands of hours" the writer spent with Mr Buffett and on "unprecedented access to his files, friends and associates".

Warren Buffett  wears sweatshirts in spare time. He enjoys burgers, fries and cola. He plays bridge and ukulele. He is a former night school teacher.
 

 

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MAIMONIDES BY DR. ILIL ARBEL

 

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Beat goes on for Ginsberg's Howl

SAN FRANCISCO- In the years after he wrote Howl, Allen Ginsberg alternately described the poem as a song of spiritual liberation, a homage to art, an ode to gay love and a lament for his mentally ill mother. The Beat poet who defined his times with the salvo, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness," gave perhaps the most adroit explanation, however, upon publication of the original facsimile edition of the tour de force that had launched his career more than three decades earlier. Howl, he advised readers in his preface, was meant to be an "emotional time bomb that would continue exploding." With nearly one million copies in print, it is one of the most widely read poems of the 20th century. Still, critics disagree about the place Ginsberg's best-known work holds in American letters. But even its detractors acknowledge that his provocative assault on the Cold War and conformity roared across the cultural landscape in a way that continues to resonate a half-century after its storied debut at a San Francisco art gallery. Ginsberg first publicly read Howl as a work-in-progress at a wine-soaked gathering on Oct. 7, 1955 - a date that holds as much meaning for followers of the Beats as Bloomsday, June 16, does for fans of James Joyce's Ulysses. The Six Gallery reading, as it has since become known, preceded by a year the poem's publication and the moral outrage provoked by its defence of homosexuality and drug use. Admirers regard the reading as a turning point that took poetry out of the Ivory Tower - creating space for dissent and presaging the youthful rebellion that inspired folk music, sexually explicit performance art and more recently, poetry slams. "Poets now read all over the place, but at that time they didn't - if they were famous, they maybe read at the Museum of Modern Art," said Jonah Raskin, author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. At 29, relatively new to San Francisco and bearing the psychic scars that had landed him in two mental hospitals, Ginsberg was the last and least-known in the five-poet lineup. As legend has it, his raw, intensely personal evocation of desperate souls "who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts" stole the night. His friend, novelist Jack Kerouac, was in the audience of about 150 at the performance. "Scores of people stood around the darkened gallery straining to hear every word," Kerouac recalled afterward. "Everyone was yelling, 'Go! Go! Go!' " Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of San Francisco's City Lights bookstore, also heard Ginsberg read that night.

 

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The next day, he sent Ginsberg a telegram asking to see the manuscript of what was then Part 1 of what would grow to a three-part epic. "I greet you at the beginning of a great career," Ferlinghetti wrote, intentionally echoing a line Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Walt Whitman after reading Leaves of Grass. While Howl and Other Poems was being prepared for publication, Ginsberg and other Beat poets took their show on the road, performing up and down the West Coast. It wasn't until spring 1957, after San Francisco police arrested Ferlinghetti and the manager of City Lights, Shigeyoshi Murao, on charges of selling obscene material, that the book became a symbol of the social tensions Ginsberg sought to expose. With help from the American Civil Liberties Union, they were acquitted after a highly publicized trial, and the judge's ruling established a legal standard for publishing controversial books of "redeeming social importance." Judge Clayton Horn agreed with the defence that the section of the poem Ginsberg read at Six Gallery "presents a picture of a nightmare world." Members of the Academy of American Poets still debate whether Howl has only had legs because of its early notoriety, but there is no denying its "profound influence on the course of American poetry," said Tree Swenson, the academy's executive director. Last weekend, more than 400 people crowded into the San Francisco Public Library auditorium to hear actor Peter Coyote and seven poets recite Howl to the accompaniment of a jazz duo. Stanford University, home to Ginsberg's papers, is holding five Beat Mondays with lectures about the poem. City Lights will publish a fully annotated Golden Anniversary edition of Howl and Other Poems next year. Farrar Straus & Giroux is preparing a collection of essays by writers such as Andrei Codrescu, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Daphne Merkin, Rick Moody and Robert Pinsky called The Poem That Changed America. A feature-length documentary, Howl: The Movie, is also in the works.

Ginsberg died in 1997 at age 70, eight days after he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. A tireless promoter of his own work who enjoyed performing publicly until the end of his life, he would no doubt enjoy the attention Howl still generates and be the first to point out its continued relevance in an America struggling with terrorism and the war in Iraq. "We are in an era where censorship is creeping back in through the Patriot Act and where people are . . . being intimidated not to speak about what we should be speaking about," said Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. "If you substitute terrorism for communism, we are getting the same rhetoric." By Lisa Lef

 

Potter sales surpass 300 million: agent

LONDON- Global sales of Harry Potter books have surpassed 300 million, the agent for author J.K. Rowling said Tuesday. Agent Christopher Little said the series reached the milestone following the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth volume about the schoolboy wizard. Potter books have now been translated into 63 languages, most recently Farsi.

THE GODDARD RIVERSIDE NEW YORK BOOK FAIR

The 19^TH ANNUAL NEW YORK BOOK FAIR is Saturday, November 19^th, from 9AM-5PM and Sunday, November 20^th, from 11AM-6PM @ 593 Columbus Avenue @ 88th Street. The Book Fair brings together members of the publishing industry, local businesses and all New Yorkers for a weekend-long, fun-filled event that benefits the Goddard Riverside Community Center, the West Side's settlement house that has served the community for 110 years.  The Book Fair raises money for programs that help New York City youth, older adults, and the homeless. Thanks to volunteers and in-kind contributions, more than 85 cents out of every dollar raised goes directly into Goddard Riverside's 22 human service programs at 16 sites on the West Side of Manhattan and in Harlem. There are several exciting events that are part of the Goddard Riverside New York Book Fair:

"MEET THE AUTHOR" DINNERS KICK OFF THE BOOK FAIR ON NOVEMBER 11: Ved Mehta, Jeffrey Toobin, Donald E. Westlake, Jane E. Brody, David Baldacci, Mary Gordon, Rona Jaffe, Paul Krugman, Roy Blount, Jr. and many others dine in homes around the city to support Goddard's cause. On November 11th, leading up to the actual Book Fair, participants are offered the opportunity to attend dinners with their favorite authors. These casual and intimate dinners are held in private homes around the city on the 11th. For additional information on the Meet-the Author Dinners, please contact Annette Pousson at 212-873 6600.

THE BOOK BASH ON NOVEMBER 18: At the Book Bash, held on Friday, November 18th from 6:30-9:30 PM @ the Goddard Riverside Community Center (593 Columbus Avenue @ 88^th Street), nine famous West Side restaurants-Kitchen 82, Ono, Town, Ouest & 'Cesca, Fish, Butter, Park Avenue Café and Café Gray--will be serving up their signature dishes, along with platters from Ideal Cheese and savory pasties by Du Four. An auction will offer trips, dinners, tickets to cultural and sporting events, as well as professional services from private catering to massages and health club memberships. Those attending this event can shop for the best books at 50% off before the weekend crowd arrives. Tickets are $125 in advance and $150 at the door.  For more information, e-mail Ms. Coxe at  Elizabeth.Coxe@stmartins.com