Sondheim Leads NYT BR
“After reading Finishing the Hat, I felt as if I had taken a master class in how to write a musical. A class given by the theater’s finest living songwriter,” says Paul Simon (yes, THAT Paul Simon) in the 10/30 NYT BR cover review of Stephen Sondheim’s collection of lyrics and commentary. The book is already riding high on Amazon sales rankings (now at #19 and rising) after Terry Gross’s interview with Sondheim on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday (listen here).
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Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia has received several admiring reviews (San Francisco Chronicle, Minneapolis Star Tribune. Boston Globe, among others). Here it gets the full treatment; a review as well as an inteview with Frazier by NYT Book Review editor Sam Tannenhaus (listen to the Book Review Podcast on the site).
Libraries are showing holds; ratios are high where ordering is light.
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Macmillan Audio; UNABR CD; 9781427210531
An EarlyWord favorite, Bruce Machart’s debut The Wake of Forgiveness, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Oct. 21) is hailed by Philip Caputo, who describes it this way,
Spanning some 30 years from the twilight of the frontier to the 1920s, The Wake of Forgiveness is a mesmerizing, mythic saga of four motherless brothers at war with one another and with their stern father, driven to establish himself as the biggest landowner in Lavaca County, Tex. Above all, as its title promises, it’s a story about forgiveness and a hard-won redemption.
Best Sellers
No surprise, Lee Child’s Worth Dying For (Delacorte Press, Oct, 19), lands at #1 on the 11/7 Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list, followed by Jan Karon’s In the Company of Others,(Viking, Oct. 19) at #2. Child was profiled by CBS Sunday Morning last week.
The Autobiography of Mark Twain (U. of California Press and on audio from Blackstone), which has been high on Amazon (currently at #12, it’s been in the Top 100 for 23 days), arrives at #2 on Hardcover Nonfiction. The bio. of Mickey Mantle, The Last Boy (Harper, Oct. 1) continues at #4 after 2 weeks.