Short Takes

A book about the German immigrants who battled each other in the 19th century to create the great companies that still dominate American brewing was bought for six figures by Andrea Shulz at Harcourt. It's called Ambitious Brew by historian Maureen Ogle, and the seller of world rights was Anna Ghosh at Scovil Chichak & Galen.... A memoir by an autistic woman, once homeless, who learned to relate to other humans by studying gorilla behavior and eventually earned a Ph.D. and became a teacher, was bought by Linda Loewenthal, just before she left Harmony. It's Songs of the Gorilla Nation, and Loewenthal preempted it for world rights for six figures from agent Jenny Bent at Harvey Klinger.... A book heading for Frankfurt with a six-figure German sale already in the bag (to Bastei) is the cryptological thriller Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, which Doubleday is doing in the U.S. The book is represented here by Heidi Lange at Sanford Greenburger, and the agency's Peter McGuigan will be fielding foreign offers at the fair.... Bob Weil at Norton won a three-day auction for what is described as a touching and lyrical memoir by veteran New York Times correspondent Dan Barry. It's called Pull Me Up, and Weil paid in the low six figures to win North American and audio rights from agent Todd Shuster at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. Barry describes his childhood in an eccentric Long Island Irish-American family, his years with the paper and his ultimate return to the land of his forebears.