Remember the pirate hostage situation in 2009? If not, your memory will have plenty of opportunity to be refreshed this week.

The captain of the boat that was seized, Richard Phillips, has written a book about the ordeal. He was interviewed by Matt Lauer on Dateline last night and on the Today show this morning.

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The book, which releases tomorrow, is reviewed in today’s USA Today.

The author will also appear on Larry King Live tonight, as well as the following shows tomorrow,

• NPR, Fresh Air
• CNN, American Morning
• FNC, Fox & Friends
• Comedy Central, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea Richard Phillips, Stephan Talty Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Hyperion – (2010-04-06) ISBN / EAN: 1401323804 / 9781401323806

Tantor Audio; UNABR

On Sale Date: 04/26/2010
Trade 9781400116867 8 Audio CDs $29.99
Library 9781400146864 8 Audio CDs $59.99
MP3 9781400166862 1 MP3-CD $19.99

Adobe EPUB eBook available from OverDrive

Coming to theaters April 9th (debuting in a limited number of theaters on March 19) is The Runaways, a movie based on Cherie Curry’s 1989 memoir, Neon Angel, recently updated as a tie-in.

The movie was previewed in the NYT this weekend,

…a new film about the trailblazing bad-girl rock band from the 1970s that spawned Joan Jett, is how authentic it feels…One reason may be that the movie partly based on Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (Harper Collins), a newly revamped autobiography by the group’s lead singer Cherie Currie, whose chillingly quick self-destruction is relived through Dakota Fanning.

Official Web site: RunawaysMovie.com

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Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway Cherie Currie, Tony O’neill Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 368 pages Publisher: It Books – (2010-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061961353 / 9780061961359

As Terry Gross says in her interview with Melissa Febos on NPR’s Fresh Air last night, “this may be the first memoir by a dominatrix who grew up listening to NPR,” a reflection of her obvious intelligence which is behind the book’s clever title, Whip Smart (listen to the interview here).

Why did she become a dominatrix? She couldn’t get a job in publishing.

The book rose to #77 (from 10,630) on Amazon.

Whip Smart: A Memoir Melissa Febos Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books – (2010-03-02) ISBN / EAN: 0312561024 / 9780312561024

This Thursday, Oprah spends the show’s full hour with the only survivor of a tragic boating accident. Personal trainer Nick Schuyler set out for a deep-sea fishing trip one year ago with four friends. The boat capsized in unexpected bad weather. Clinging to the boat in rough seas, the friends helped each other as much as they could, but after 40 hours only Nick was left.

Schuyler writes about the frightening story in his memoir, Not Without Hope. It was not reviewed prepub, so many libraries have not ordered it.

Schuyler will also make appearances on the Today Show and Larry King Live. The book will be featured in People magazine and in USA Today (in the Sports section; two of the friends played for the NFL).

Not Without Hope Nick Schuyler, Jere Longman Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: William Morrow – (2010-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061993999 / 9780061993992

HarperCollins Audio: UNABR; 9780061999413; $18.99
Audio and ebook available from OverDrive

Coming next week, Jennifer Mascia’s debut memoir Never Tell Our Business to Strangers promises to be, like Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle, the kind of memoir that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. It begins with her father’s arrest by the FBI when she was five – and her odyssey to reconcile her love for her parents with the discovery in her twenties that her father had been a mafia hitman, her mother had covered up for him for years, and she’d unwittingly spent her childhood on the lam.  But the story ends well: Mascia now works at the New York Times, writing for the City Room blog.

Only one library we checked has copies on order, with modest holds – probably because there have not been any advance reviews. But if the knock-out essay she wrote for the New York Times “Modern Love” column is any indication, the book should be a winner.

Never Tell Our Business to Strangers: A Memoir Jennifer Mascia Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Villard – (2010-02-23) ISBN / EAN: 0345505352 / 9780345505354

Other Nonfiction Titles on Sale Next Week

My Footprint: Carrying the Weight of the World by Jeff Garlin (Simon Spotlight) is a memoir by a star of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm about his efforts to reduce his waistline and carbon footprint. ABC News will interview him on Friday night, February 19, and in the meantime has posted an excerpt. Three out of four libraries we checked had the book, with modest holds.

Everyday Food: Fresh Flavor Fast by Martha Stewart Living Magazine (Crown) is the latest cookbook based on the popular magazine – but three of the four libraries we checked don’t have it.

One nonfiction title going on sale next week has been getting some buzz in the library world: journalist Roger Rosenblatt‘s memoir Making Toast, about helping to raise his grandchildren after his daughter’s sudden death at age 38.

So far, holds are modest at libraries we checked, but this title was highlighted at a buzz panel at ALA and is a favorite of Harper’s library marketing maven Virigina Stanley. It was also excerpted in the New Yorker, and is an Indie Next Pick for March.

PW says: “Rosenblatt draws sharply etched portraits of his grandchildren; his stoic, gentle son-in-law; his wife, who feels slightly guilty that she is living her daughter’s life; and Amy [the daughter] emerges as a smart, prickly, selfless figure whose significance the author never registered until her death.”

UPDATE: Rosenblatt was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered by Melissa Block, who called it an “exquisite, restrained little memoir filled with both hurt and humor.” Listen here. The book rose to #173 on Amazon.

Making Toast Roger Rosenblatt Retail Price: $21.99 Hardcover: 176 pages Publisher: Ecco – (2010-03-01) ISBN / EAN: 006182593X / 9780061825934

Available from Blackstone Audiobooks

3 Tape LIBRARY 1-4417-2133-4 $44.95

1 Playaway LIBRARY 1-4417-2140-2 $54.99

1 MP3CD LIBRARY 1-4417-2137-2 $29.95 $

3 CD LIBRARY 1-4417-2134-1 $55.00

E-book and audio available from OverDrive

Other Major Nonfiction Titles On Sale Next Week

• Chip and Dan Heath‘s Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Random House) follows their bestseller Make To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Library Journal calls praises its “fresh ideas and a breezy style that will work equally well for company executives, undergraduates, and average joes.” Holds are as high as 4:1 in libraries we checked.
• Daniel Amen‘s Change Your Brain, Change Your Body: To Get and Keep the Body You Have Always Wanted (Harmony) applies the insights of brain imaging technology to weight loss.

Inevitably, any memoir of growing up in another country and then immigrating to the U.S. will be compared to Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, but A Mountain of Crumbs by Elena Gorokhova, has a special connection. The author was actually one of  Frank McCourt’s students.

This memoir of life in Leningrad in the ’60’s and ’70’s was just enthusiastically reviewed in the NYT BR, which describes it as an “exquisitely wrought, tender memoir.” It climbed to #259 on Amazon, from #576, and is showing heavy holds in libraries; as high as 250 on 23 copies.

The author was interviewed on NPR’s The Leonard Lopate Show on January 13, 2010 (listen here) and the book has been reviewed widely, in publications from USA Today to The New Yorker.

As part of her book tour, Gorokhova will do a reading at the Princeton Public Library on Feb. 18.

A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir Elena Gorokhova Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2010-01-12) ISBN / EAN: 1439125678 / 9781439125670

Patti Smith can now sing “I’m on the cover of the New York Times Book Review.”

Well, maybe it doesn’t scan as well, or have the cache of “on the Cover of The Rolling Stone,” but she’s already achieved that milestone.

And, perhaps it doesn’t mean as much as the fact that her book, Just Kids, about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe debuts at #7 on the new NYT nonfiction best seller list, or that holds are heavy in libraries and building fast.

The review says that  Just Kids,

…is the most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s that any alumnus has committed to print. The tone is at once flinty and hilarious, which figures: she’s always been both tough and funny, two real saving graces in an artist this prone to excess. What’s sure to make her account a cornucopia for cultural historians, however, is that the atmosphere, personalities and mores of the time are so astutely observed.

The Washington Post was equally laudatory, in a review that makes you regret the book isn’t on your nightstand right now.

As part of her book tour, she appears at the Chicago Public Library on February 21.

Just Kids Patti Smith Retail Price: $27.00 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Ecco – (2010-01-01) ISBN / EAN: 006621131X / 9780066211312

Next week’s most-anticipated nonfiction book is bestselling business guru Seth Godin‘s guide to mastering the new economy, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?  Three of the four libraries we checked had it, with holds of close to 2:1 on orders of 8-15 copies

Though the reserves aren’t huge, they appear to be a positive effect of Godin’s gamble on Internet-only publicity campaign, in which he bypassed the traditional media, giving away books at his own expense to the first 3,000 readers who agreed to make a minium $30 donation to the Acumen Fund.

So far, Godin has a page of positive blog reviews and tweets to show for his efforts, and the Acumen Fund has raised more than $100,000.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Seth Godin Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover – (2010-01-26) ISBN / EAN: 1591843162 / 9781591843160

Audio available from Random House on 2/09/10:

• CD: $15; ISBN 9780307704078

Other Major Titles Going on Sale Next Week:

Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging by Greg Critser (Harmony) is a journalist’s irreverent look at the anti-aging industry. Kirkus found it “a delightful, politically incorrect view of the life-extension movement, accompanied by the disappointing news that aging is reversible but not in the near future.”

I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne (Grand Central) is the legendary rocker and reality show star’s memoir, which Kirkus deemed “as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.”

Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in My Darkest Hour by Gayle Haggard (Tyndale) is a memoir by the wife of evangelical Christian leader Tim Haggard who had liaisons with a male prostitute.

Tea with Hezbollah: Sitting at the Enemies Table, Our Journey Through the Middle East by Ted Dekker and Middle East expert Carl Medearis  (Doubleday Religion) is an account of the Christian novelist’s effort to love his enemies.

The wife of Appalachian Trail fan, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, will appear on national shows to promote her forthcoming book, Staying True, originally announced for a May publication date, but recently moved up to February 5.

Some of her scheduled appearances and coverage include:

February 5th — Barbara Walters interview on ABC’s 20/20

February 8th

• Good Morning America: first of a two-part interview
• The View
• Larry King Live
• The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
• NPR Morning Edition
• People Magazine: excerpt

Little information has leaked about this embargoed title, but Sanford is also scheduled appear on the Christian Broadcasting Networks’ The 700 Club, indicating it will be short on salacious details. As Politics Daily puts it, “With other stories rapidly feeding the public appetite for scandal, is there still interest in Jenny Sanford’s tale before, during and after a South American trip made her famous?”

Libraries we checked are currently showing light reserves on light to moderate ordering.

Staying True Jenny Sanford Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 240 pages Publisher: Ballantine Books – (2010-02-05) ISBN / EAN: 0345522397 / 9780345522399

Random House Audio; UNABR; simultaneous; 9780307736284; $25

Elizabeth Gilbert became a household name largely because Oprah fell in love with Eat, Pray Love. Tomorrow, she appears on Oprah’s Marriage Around the World show, to talk about the sequel, Committed.

This time around, the book has been covered nearly everywhere, including the cover of the NYT Book Review this week:

NYT BR — Curtis Sittenfeld, who knows a thing or two about sudden success after her novel American Wife took off last year, like most of the book’s reviewers, is sympathetic to the fact  that Eat, Pray, Love is a tough act to follow, a problem Gilbert herself addresses in the  preface, saying that, after the previous book’s success, she feared she’d ever “write unself-consciously again.”

Sittenfeld sounds regretful when she says Gilbert hasn’t managed to pull it off; “the book is rather chatty and personal to be so heavy on research, but it’s rather researched to be so chatty and personal. Gilbert is equally likely to quote Plato or her friend Ann…”

Washington Post — Carolyn See is much more forgiving, “It’s a charming narrative that ends, Shakespearean-fashion, with a happy-hearted wedding. What’s not to like?”

Time —  compares Committed to another sequel to a popular memoir, Julie Powell’s Cleaving, the followup to Julie & Julia, making this vivid comparison: Cleaving is a “ghastly work of revelation without enough self-reflection,” but it’s “a much livelier book than Committed, in the way that your narcissistic pal is more riveting than your earnest, loyal girlfriend.”

Entertainment Weekly — “The deeper that Gilbert agonizes about marriage — the more she luxuriates in her dithering on What It Is All About — the more Committed loses its brightness, sharpness, and sense of welcome.” Rating: C

New Yorker — typical of many New Yorker reviews, this one uses the book as a pretext for  an exploration of the book’s subject, without actually reviewing the book, like an intelligent and fascinating Cliff’s Notes.

For links to dozens of other reviews, check the Bookmarks site.

Most of the reviews refer to the movie of Eat, Pray, Love, starring Julia Roberts, which is scheduled to debut August 13. No trailer yet, but the first photos have just begun appearing:

The first big memoirs of the year arrive – with bestseller Elizabeth Gilbert at the forefront.

Gilbert‘s much anticipated Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage arrives after some delay. PW found her voice “clear and winning,” but declared that her hybrid of her own travelogue and the history of marriage “doesn’t work.” It’s a big year for Gilbert: in August, the film version of her international bestseller Eat, Pray, Love arrives, directed by Glee creator and producer Ryan Murphy, and starring Julia Roberts, Javier Bardem, James Franco and Billy Crudup.

NOTE: Gilbert is the MidWinter Sunrise Speaker on Sat., Jan. 17, 8–9 a.m.

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage Elizabeth Gilbert Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Viking Adult – (2010-01-05) ISBN / EAN: 0670021652 / 9780670021659

Audio from Penguin Audiobooks

• CD: $29.95; ISBN 9780143145752

Audio also available from OverDrive

• OverDrive WMA Audiobook

Large Print from Thorndike Press

• $34.95; ISBN: 9781410422767

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Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him by Alanna Nash was reviewed recently by Janet Maslin in the New York Times – who called it “long, repetitive and dirt-digging” and also “embarrassingly tempting.”

Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him Alanna Nash Retail Price: $27.99 Hardcover: 704 pages Publisher: It Books – (2010-01-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061699845 / 9780061699849

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Two memoirs by media-genic authors are also starting to pick up some online buzz. Mika Brzezinski‘s All Things at Once is an account by the co-host on CNBC’s “Morning Joe” about the difficulty of balancing her career and being the mother of two young daughters.

All Things at Once Mika Brzezinski Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Weinstein Books – (2010-01-05) ISBN / EAN: 1602861110 / 9781602861114

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Andrea Lyon‘s Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer is a lawyer’s story of how she helped 19 clients found guilty of capital murder avoid the death penalty, and also an Indie Next pick for January.

Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer Andrea Lyon Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Kaplan Publishing – (2010-01-05) ISBN / EAN: 1607144344 / 9781607144342

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Also to be released next week:

• Suze Orman’s Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny (Spiegel & Grau)

An appearance on the Today Show this morning propelled Kevin Michael Connolly’s Double Take from #67,933 on Amazon sales rankings to #197.

Connolly was born without legs, but became a competitive skier and photographer. The title of the book refers to the fact that, wherever he goes, he’s stared at.

Kirkus called it “a courageous, immensely rewarding chronicle expressed in arresting words and pictures.”

(Thanks to Marin Younker at Sno-Isle P.L. for pointing this out on the library’s Collection Developments @ Sno-Isle blog. Check it out, if only for the falling snow! How DO they do that?)

UPDATE, Ed. Note —  I guess the above comment was too much for the EarlyWord Web guys (that’s adcStudio, in case you’re curious). A few minutes after this post, it began snowing on EarlyWord! Thanks for the laugh you guys — you’re the best!

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Double Take: A Memoir Kevin Michael Connolly Retail Price: $19.99 Hardcover: 240 pages Publisher: HarperStudio – (2009-10-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061791539 / 9780061791536

HarperAudio; UNAB CD; 9780061981562; $16.99

Book and Audio downloadable from OverDrive

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is a “surprise success,” according to Publishers Weekly. It began life as a “small title,” and now has 40,000 copies in print.

What PW doesn’t note is that librarians spotted it early, highlighting it at the Librarian’s “Shout ‘n’ Share” program at BEA in May.

Author Rhoda Janzen is publishing another memoir, Backslide, currently scheduled for March, 2012.

HighBridge released an audio version in October. Libraries are showing heavy holds on both versions.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home Rhoda Janzen Retail Price: $22.00 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. – (2009-10-13) ISBN / EAN: 080508925X / 9780805089257

Also in audio from HighBridge:

• CD: 9781598879070; $29/95; 10/13

Downloadable audio from OverDrive

Mary Karr’s new memoir Lit is a hit with critics, ranging from the New York Times’ notoriously hard-to-please Michiko Kakutani to Entertainment Weekly, which gave it an undiluted A. It’s currently at #76 on Amazon, after a week in the top 100, and rising. Library holds are growing.

Not only iss Karr getting high critical praise, but reviewers also express the sheer pleasure they found in reading the book.

The often churlish Michiko Kakutani, perhaps inspired by Karr’s Texas roots, says that the book “lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go.”

Melanie Gideon in the S.F. Chronicle says,

Mary Karr owes me. Because of  Lit, her new memoir, my week was a disaster. Laundry piled up, the dishes went unwashed, my son went without his flu shot, and our puppy peed on the couch – all because I spent every spare moment with my nose buried in Lit, a harrowing account of Karr’s descent into alcoholism and her eventual conversion to Catholicism.

Valerie Sayers in the Washington Post begins by describing herself as a “memoirphobe,” who dreads

…the depiction of yet another horrific (if colorful) childhood, drug-addled adolescence, young adult breakdown and especially — most especially — blissful spiritual recovery. It’s not that the lives revealed in so many memoirs are unworthy of examination; it’s not even that they’re necessarily Too Much Information, that bane of our hyper-therapized culture. It is, rather, that the pronoun “I” can function as a semiautomatic weapon in the hands of a memoirist: Whoever has possession controls the conversation.

Nonetheless, she says, “Karr’s sharp and funny sensibility won me over to her previous two volumes, but what wins me over to Lit is…her acute self-awareness.”

Samantha Dunn in the Los Angeles Times says,

Karr could tell you what’s on her grocery list, and its humor would make you bust a gut, its unexpected insights would make you think and her pitch-perfect command of our American vernacular might even take your breath away.

In the introduction to his interview with Karr in the Huffington Post, former publisher Steve Ross noted that PW, which caught flak for not including a single woman in its Top Ten Best Books of 2009, made an even more egregious oversight by not including Lit.

Unfortunately, it goes beyond that; not only is Lit not in the PW Top Ten, it’s not in their Top 100, nor is it on Amazon’s Top 100. It’s also not a National Book Award finalist.

You can read an excerpt here:

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Lit: A Memoir Mary Karr Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: Harper – (2009-11-01) ISBN / EAN: 0060596988 / 9780060596989

HarperAudio, UNAB, 9780061939006

HarperLuxe,9780061885471, pbk, $25.99

Audio and eBook downloadable from OverDrive.