Media Digest: Search Outside the Book; The New Yorker Knows Just the Thing; Pearl vs Pearl
by Calvin Reid and Steven Zeitchik, PW NewsLine -- Publishers Weekly, 11/26/2003
Antiquarian and used booksellers rejoice--the British Library has reached an agreement with Amazon U.K. to put more than 2.5 million literary works from its catalog online. According to Reuters, the deal will make it easier to find books published before the current ISBN identification system was founded in 1970. Buyers will be able to browse the British Library Catalog and contact a seller through Amazon's list of used booksellers.
The choir will hear the words--or the artwork--of the preacher--when the New Yorker starts running ads next month promoting bookbuying. The ads are being done in conjunction with the AAP and include original cartoons. In one, a caveman hands what appears to be a stone tire to his friend and says "First I thought of giving you a books gift certificate, but then I remembered there aren't books yet."
Salon reviewer Sally Eckhoff offers oblique appreciation ("not everyone can get this kind of back cover copy") and sly censure ("horse people go nuts over anything that praises their obsession") for Horse People, Michael Korda's new book on the Horsey set and those who love them.
When we wrote a few weeks ago that the media had uncovered some revelations in the Danny Pearl case that Bernard-Henri Levy had uncovered in his book Who Killed Daniel Pearl last summer--a book, incidentally, we very much liked, both for its journalism as well as its flights-of-fancy--prompted Sarah Crichton to write in and remind us of the many pleasures of A Mighty Heart, the book she co-wrote with Mariane Pearl about Pearl's late husband which made some of the same discoveries. The books are in many ways mirror images of each other--an investigative journalist writing of his personal feelings for a man he never knew; a mourning wife conducting some investigative journalism of her own--and thus very much invite comparison. The particular comparison, in the case of William Dalrymple's essay in The New York Review of Books, is rather bifurcated: it gushes over the MP book--"her generosity and calm strength...raises her book from a simple widow's narrative into something larger"--but its take on BHL is, um, more guarded. "It is deeply flawed, riddled with major factual errors, and in every way a lesser book than Mariane Pearl's," he writes, "much of it is invented and its political analysis ill-informed and simplistic."
