The great-great grandchildren of Henry H. Holmes, the serial killer featured in the best seller, The Devil in the White City, have received permission to exhume his body to confirm whether he was indeed hanged in Philadelphia in 1896.

The investigation aims to determine the truth of the legend that he faked his own death, reports the Chicago Tribune, by bribing “jail guards to hang a cadaver in his place.”

Meanwhile, the film version of Eric Larson’s true crime title, The Devil in the White City (RH/Crown, 2003), has been in the works ever since it was published. As recently as last month, Deadline Hollywood wrote that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are still developing the project.

Scorsese told the Toronto Sun in December, “Right now, there is a script being worked on … One of the things that I had to stop for the past six months [to complete Silence] was my meetings on that script. They want me to start again in January and see if we can find a way because it’s an extraordinary story.”

Finding a way has proved difficult thus far. Tom Cruise acquired the rights in 2003 but the project stalled. We wrote about the last wave of hopes for it in April 2016. Even earlier, in 2015, we posted about the film’s long gestation period. DiCaprio has owned the rights since 2010.

The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story by Hyeonseo Lee and David John (HC/William Collins; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample) published in 2015 got a sudden boost on Amazon’s sales from a FOX news feature headlined “North Korea defector hails Trump’s tough stance on hostile country.” It is also building a holds list at most libraries we checked.

In 2015 the NYT Book Review included the memoir in a “The Shortlist” feature on North Korean defection books, but did not rate it as highly as other titles, citing an “emptiness at the heart of her story.” StarTribune was more positive, saying “Lee shows the terrible treatment of its people by North Korea’s authoritarian dictatorship. She also shows the price the regime pays for being awful: the loss of people like her who have enormous drive, intelligence and will.” Kirkus summed it up as “Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.”

The British press were more generous. The BBC said, “First-hand accounts of perilous defections from brutal dictatorships aren’t supposed to be funny. But Hyeonseo Lee’s pioneering memoir The Girl With Seven Names contains great humour alongside its shocking evocation of the North Korean regime’s surveillance, torture, privation and propaganda.” The Scotsman wrote “This is a stirring and brave story.” The Guardian featured a long excerpt with photos.

Her TED Talk was hailed by Oprah in O magazine as “The most riveting TED Talk ever.”

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Richard Ford was featured on Fresh Air yesterday, discussing his new memoir, Between Them: Remembering My Parents (HC/Ecco; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample) with host Terry Gross.

In a long, gentle and revealing interview Ford talks about his parents’ lives and how their love for each other shaped his. He tells Gross that his somewhat wild childhood, breaking into houses and stealing guns, may indicate that he is missing the gene for guilt.

And, yet, as an adult, he has regrets. One of the biggest is that, as his mother was dying, he invited her to move in with him, but then told her not to make plans yet. He says he could see the light of hope in her eyes bloom and then die as he spoke to her.

Cheryl Strayed, reviewing it for the upcoming  NYT Book Review, writes that it offers “a master class in character development and narrative economy” and that “In this slim beauty of a memoir, he has given us — the same way he has given us many times in his fiction — a remarkable story about two unremarkable people we would have never known, but for him. Which he couldn’t have written, but for them.”

In the Washington Post author William Giraldi is less enthusiastic, “At just 175 pages, spattered with ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I’m not sure,’ Between Them is a wisp of a book.” However, he ends the review by saying, “[Ford] has attempted a gentle reckoning here, his own exertion of mercy and mourning — his parents breathe in him still — and the attempt alone makes a loving homage.”

PW, Kirkus, and Booklist all starred it, PW says it is vivid and graceful and writes “Every page of this little remembrance teems with Ford’s luxuriant prose.”

A forthcoming book by Jackie Kennedy’s longtime assistant is getting wide media coverage, Jackie’s Girl: My Life with the Kennedy Family by Kathy McKeon (S&S/Gallery; S&S Audio; out May 9). The book’s title is how Rose Kennedy referred to her. The book arrives next week.

McKeon lived in Kennedy’s Fifth Avenue apartment from 1964 to 1977 and had a front row seat to history, caring for both children and helping Mrs. Kennedy. People says “McKeon’s position gave her a close-up view of the real lives behind the headlines — from Jackie’s romance with Greek shipping billionaire Aristotle Onassis and their controversial marriage, to the shattering news of RFK’s assassination in 1968.”

She was interviewed on the Today Show yesterday:

The family clearly loved her. Refinery29 says “McKeon, an Irish immigrant, began working for Kennedy at the young age of 19 … [when she left] to get married and start her own family, Kennedy and her children, Caroline and John Jr., attended the wedding. McKeon and her children were invited to Kennedy’s summer home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, every year.”

People ran an excerpt and the news media is doing their best to mine it for unknown details. The most “salacious” is that John John once had a play date with “Robert Chambers, who went on to become the infamous ‘Preppy Killer.'” Others have to do with fashion: Jackie wore a quarter-inch lift in one of her shoes to make up for a slight difference in leg length and liked her closet arranged by color. Other insider details reveal that Carolyn Bessette Kennedy was terrified of the paparazzi and John F. Kennedy Jr. “was a ‘scrawny kid’ who shied away from ‘rough-and-tumble sports.’”

The book is selling well, and holds are high, on generally cautious ordering.

The 2017 James Beard Media Awards have been announced.

The Book of the Year, as well as the winner in the American Cooking category, is Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, with Recipes by Ronni Lundy (PRH/Clarkson Potter; OverDrive Sample).

Several notable books on Southern cooking were published this year, but Lundy’s guide to the foodways of the Mountain South won out over all the others. A book rich in essays and history and as much about sharing a sense of the culture as providing recipes, it already won the IACP Award for best American cookbook, and could be called “the Hillbilly Elegy of the food world.”

Dorie Greenspan wins the Baking and Dessert category for Dorie’s Cookies (Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; OverDrive Sample), her first all-cookie cookbook made critics drool.

Dessert fans will want to follow Greenspan in her new column for NYT Magazine. which kicks off this week with Buttermilk-Biscuit Shortcakes.

Taste of Persia: A Cook’s Travels Through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, and Kurdistan by Naomi Duguid (Workman/Artisan; OverDrive Sample) won the International category, which continues the recent fascination with that cuisine. Like Victuals, it is a double winner, having also topped the IACP Culinary Travel category.

The full list of winners is online.

Mindy Kaling has optioned the rights to Alyssa Mastromonaco’s recently released memoir, Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?: And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House (Hachette/Twelve; OverDrive Sample) reports Deadline Hollywood. In it, she writes about her time as Barack Obama’s deputy chief of staff for operations in the White House.

Plans are in the works to turn it into a TV series with Kaling producing. No word yet on who will star but Jezebel says that it “sounds like it’ll be right up Kaling’s alley —The Mindy Project minus the doctor stuff with a dash of Veep, a hint of The West Wing, minus any House of Cards Underwood-ian touches.”

The publisher calls the book “less political diatribe than a gossip session with an older sister,” which is fitting as Mastromonaco and Kaling are friends, introduced, says Deadline, by Obama himself.

As we posted, the book spent two weeks on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction list and got attention when it was published last month. People reviewed it, saying it is “brimming with … humorous, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, as well as up-close-and-personal moments with Obama that shed new light on who he is as a leader, man and friend.” New York Magazine ran an interview, as did USA Today.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (PRH/Doubleday; RH Large Print; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) debuts on the USA Today Bestseller list at #7, a ranking that far outdistances Grann’s first book, The Lost City of Z, which hit a high of #68.

There is more good news for the journalist turned author. Deadline Hollywood reports that a dream team might join forces for the film version, consisting of Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Robert De Niro. The trio, who have never worked together on one film, are said to be seriously considering the project.

Flower Moon is a rich story for them to dig their teeth into, a true crime tale of high murder counts, conspiracies, the FBI’s young director, J. Edgar Hoover, and a former Texas Ranger named Tom White. The Independent speculates on who will play which historical figure, “DiCaprio [who previously played Hoover in Clint Eastwood’s 2011 film J. Edgar] may take up the role again, with De Niro probably the pick to play Tom White.”

The film rights were sold in a hot auction for 5 million, roughly a year before the book hit shelves. Variety says it “was one of the highest prices paid for movie rights in recent memory.”

It might prove a sound buy. The Lost City of Z is more than held its own in very limited release. However, it did not perform as well when it expanded to more theaters this past weekend.  Critics are mad for it, with the A.V. Club asking “Is this the best movie of the year so far?”

UPDATE:
The book was featured on the 4/30 CBS Sunday Morning.

The news media is focused on Trump’s first 100 days, but it seems people still want to know about the campaigns that preceded it. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (PRH/Crown; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) hits the new USA Today bestseller list at number 3.

Library holds have grown dramatically since the book’s publication date, increasing ratios at impressive rates, albeit on cautious ordering. One library we checked has moved from a ratio of 1:1 to 53:1. Another jumped from 6:1 to 42:1.

As we noted earlier, NYT chief book critic Michiko Kakutani calls it “compelling” and says “Although the Clinton campaign was widely covered, and many autopsies have been conducted in the last several months, the blow-by-blow details in Shattered— and the observations made here by campaign and Democratic Party insiders — are nothing less than devastating … and while it’s clear that some of these people are spinning blame retroactively, many are surprisingly candid about the frustrations they experienced during the campaign.”

A potential future female presidential candidate also debuts on the list. Landing at No. 8  is This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class by Elizabeth Warren (Macmillan/Metropolitan Books; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample). She tells the paper’s Washington Bureau Chief, Susan Page, “The direction that Donald Trump and his team want to drive this country is a direction that I don’t think America’s middle class can survive.”

The authors of both books have been making the media rounds.

Gretchen Carlson is at work on a new memoir,  Be Fierce: Stop Harassment And Take Your Power Back (Hachette/Center Street Books), scheduled for publication on September 26. The announcement come amidst media coverage of accusations of sexual harassment at Fox and the recent firing of Bill O’Reilly.

In a statement Carlson said “Make no mistake – sexual harassment is not just about sex. It’s really about power. Sexual harassers feel they can get away with it because they believe they’re the ones holding all the cards. It doesn’t occur to them that the women they’re harassing have power too. We need to encourage women to stop being silent, stand up and speak up and join the movement. Together we can make change.”

Carlson filed a lawsuit against former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, leading to his ouster, paving the way for O’Reilly’s exit. She is just one of many at the network to have shared their stories. Her book will gather the voices of others without such a megaphone. According to Hachette Imprint Center Street Be Fierce , will “Gretchen’s experience and powerful stories from the thousands of women who have reached out to her who refuse to submit to intimidation of any kind. Gretchen will also share the wisdom and research of lawyers, psychologists, and other experts helping to confront this problem and advance what has become an international conversation about women refusing to shut up and sit down.”

She may not be able to be completely candid, however. As The Daily Beast points out, she “can’t discuss her former employer under the terms of a $20 million settlement agreement.” She tells the site, “Obviously, I can’t talk about the details of the case, but my goodness, I don’t need to … I can be an advocate for this issue. We’ve got a lot of work to do. I never expected to be the face of this issue. Who would?”

Carlson’s first book was her PR-ish memoir Getting Real (PRH/Viking, 2015). It hit the USA Today‘s list at #140 and lasted just one week. In it, she presented a more flattering picture of her boss, calling him, “the most accessible boss I’ve ever worked for.”

Mozart owned a pet starling bird, one he bought in 1784 just after finishing his Piano Concerto No. 17 in G. It could sing part of his new composition.

The story of that bird and Mozart’s relation to it is one of the subjects of Mozart’s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Haupt tells NPR that in researching the book she followed suit and adopted her own pet starling, rescuing a five-day-old from a nest about to be destroyed.

Haupt tells NPR that her bird Carmen, like Mozart is smart,  mischievous and an amazing mimic, anticipating the household routine,  “I wake up in the morning … and she looks at me and says, ‘Hi Carmen,’ which is the first thing I would say to her. And then the cat comes downstairs and she says ‘Meow.’ And then I go to make the coffee, and before I grind the beans she goes, ‘Rrrrr.'”

Mozart wrote an elegy for it upon its death and more than one musical critic believes at least one of his compositions is is based on the starling’s song.

In a starred review Booklist calls the book a “hard-to-put-down, charming blend of science, biography, and memoir.”

Some libraries we checked are running 5:1 hold ratios on light orders. Several others have not ordered it.

Kory Stamper has something of a following. Terry Gross, the host of NPR’s Fresh Air is one, as she makes clear in her interview with the associate editor at Merriam-Webster’s about her book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries (PRH/Pantheon; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample).

This is the second wave of attention for the book. As we posted in March, detailed coverage by the NYT sent the book soaring on Amazon‘s sales rankings. The Fresh Air interview does that again, sending the book back up in to the Top 100.

Most libraries are now on top of demand, but the interview is great fun for any word nerd.

Bill O’Reilly is out at Fox News but not at Macmillan imprint Holt.

USA Today reports that the ex-broadcaster has the backing of his book publisher. “Our plans have not changed,” says Holt publicity director Patricia Eisemann, of the next book in the highly profitable Killing series that O’Reilly writes with co-author Martin Dugard.

The Killing books, which examine the deaths of public figures such as Killing Kennedy (2012) and  Killing Patton (2014), have made a killing for Holt. They have also been the source of money-making movies for National Geographic. The cable network has also announced that they plan to continue to develop a TV movie based on Killing Patton.

The NYT reports that “more than 17 million copies [of the series are] in print and [it] is a reliable source of annual revenue for the [publisher]. In recent years, new books in the series have sold 1.1 million copies in the first few months after release.”

Recent press stories about the reasons behind O’Reilly’s ouster shine an ironic light on his newest book, Old School: Life in the Sane Lane (Macmillan/Holt; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample), which Janet Maslin described in her NYT review as “meant to set forth the code of decency, honor and determination that made O’Reilly what he is today.” It debuted at #2 on the USA Today best-seller list, moving down slightly to #5 this week.

The NYT questions whether that will continue, writing “Even if Holt sticks with Mr. O’Reilly, sales of his books will almost certainly decline without his perch at Fox, which he used to promote his books to millions of viewers.” That seems borne out by Amazon’s sales rankings where the book has slipped to #19.

The next Killing book is set for a Sept. 2017 publication. With no title, no cover art, no advance reviews and no description on the publishers site, there is no information on what subject it addresses.

Untitled O’Reilly
Bill O’Reilly, Martin Dugard
On Sale Date: September 19, 2017
Hardcover | 304 pages |
$30.00 USD, $38.99 CAD
ISBN 9781627790642, 1627790640

Terry Gross interviewed Alyssa Mastromonaco yesterday on NPR’s Fresh Air, sending her memoir Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?: And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House (Hachette/Twelve; OverDrive Sample) into Amazon’s Top 50, currently at $37.

President Obama’s deputy chief of staff for operations. Mastromonaco shares insider details about his administration, often in contrast with Trump’s, including how the president’s personal travel budget works, the threats that face presidents in the post-9/11 world, and the selection process for Cabinet positions.

Seemingly small details underscore that women are still newcomers in the world of politics, such as the lack of women’s bathrooms in the West Wing.

The book spent two weeks on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction list and got attention when it was published last month. People reviewed it, saying it is “brimming with … humorous, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, as well as up-close-and-personal moments with Obama that shed new light on who he is as a leader, man and friend.” New York Magazine ran an interview, as did USA Today.

Holds remain strong in most libraries we checked, several running at 4:1 and a few others topping 7:1.

Heavy media attention is sending an account of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign soaring up the Amazon’s sales rankings to #3, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (PRH/Crown; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample).

In today’s NYT, chief book critic Michiko Kakutani calls it “compelling” and says “Although the Clinton campaign was widely covered, and many autopsies have been conducted in the last several months, the blow-by-blow details in ‘Shattered’— and the observations made here by campaign and Democratic Party insiders — are nothing less than devastating … and while it’s clear that some of these people are spinning blame retroactively, many are surprisingly candid about the frustrations they experienced during the campaign.”

Most other media sources assigned they political reporter to the book.  Having been closer to the campaign on a day-by-day basis, they offer a different take. NPR’s Washington desk correspondent, Ron Elving, says “There is no Big Reveal, no shocking secret answer. Instead we get a slow-building case against the concept and execution of the Clinton campaign, with plenty of fault falling squarely on the candidate herself.”

A Washington Post piece by senior politics editor Steven Ginsberg is even less positive: “the quick-fire version proves too limiting” he says noting there will  “surely be many books about what really happened inside the 2016 campaigns. Going first has its advantages — perhaps in sales and attention.”

Will Shattered be the next Game Change, the best selling analysis of the 2008 campaign by Mark Halperin and John Heinemann? Elving does not think so, saying the personalities involved in that campaign, Obama, John Edwards, John McCain, and Sarah Palin were “more compelling and telegenic, calling out to turn themselves into the TV movie they became,” adding, “Ultimately, Allen and Parnes get inside the campaign but not inside the mind of Hillary Clinton. Much the same seems to have been true for most of her staff and, ultimately, the voters.”

Halperin and Heinemann are working on their own book on the campaign, following up on their successful Showtime series, “The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth,” now in its third season, covering Trump’s first 100 days in office. As yet untitled, the book is expected to be published early next year. HBO has already acquired the rights to it.

Clinton will publish her own memoir in September. Described as a collection of her personal reflections on quotes and stories that have helped her “celebrate the good times, laugh at the absurd times, persevere during the hard times,” it doesn’t sound like it will delve deeply into the campaign.

There were no prepub reviews for Shattered, indicating it was embargoed, and libraries have ordered it very lightly, with some systems facing 5:1 ratios.

Proving what is old can be new again, Bill Nye is in the middle of a double debut, decades after he first caught the public eye.

His chapter book, Jack and the Geniuses: At the Bottom of the World by Bill Nye and Gregory Mone, illustrated by Nicholas Iluzada (Abrams; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample), a mix of science, adventure, and mystery, debuts on the NYT Children’s Middle Grade Hardcover list at #6. It is doing very well considering every title ranking above Nye’s has been on the list for 10 weeks or more.

Next week brings the debut of his new Netflix’s show, Bill Nye Saves the World, on April 21. Wired says it will span “13 episodes that seek to debunk anti-scientific claims and myths in topics ranging from sex to alternative medicine to, yes, climate change.” The NYT says it is a “it’s a talk show, not a children’s program,” but Nye tells the paper to expect to be entertained. “The comedy bits,” he says “are brilliant!”

According to Netflix, “Each episode will tackle a topic from a scientific point of view, dispelling myths, and refuting antiscientific claims that may be espoused by politicians, religious leaders or titans of industry.”

On the horizon, Nye has a book for adults coming out this summer, Everything All at Once: How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap into Radical Curiosity and Solve Any Problem (Macmillan/Rodale; Recorded Books), a mix of memoir, history, science, and problem solving using rational, methodical, fact-based approaches.