The PW Morning Report, August 26, 2008

By Dermot McEvoy -- Publishers Weekly, 8/26/2008 5:23:00 AM

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

A daily round-up of the latest publishing news: Hertzberg Slams S&S; Laurence Urdang Dead; E-Textbooks No Bargain; Misha Defonseca Back in Court; Dave Freeman Dead; Sean Connery Autobiography; and Margaret Thatcher Demented

S&S Chastised Over the "Big Lie" That Is Jerome Corsi Book by Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker
Hertzberg: "On a foundation of small, medium-sized, and extra-large falsehoods, The Obama Nation erects a superstructure of innuendo, guilt by (often nonexistent) association, baseless speculation, and sinister-sounding but irrelevant digression. The result is an example of what used to be known, in the glory days of ideologically driven totalitarianism, as the Big Lie—in this case, a fabricated, alternate-universe Barack Obama, who, we are told or invited to infer, is a corrupt, enraged, anti-American, drug-dealing, anti-Israel, pseudo-Christian radical leftist, black militant, plagiarist, and liar, trained as a Muslim and mentored by a menagerie of Marxists, Communists, crypto-Communists, and terrorists"

Laurence Urdang, Lexicographer, Dead at 81, reports New York Times
Language expert was author of many books and the managing editor of the first edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, the first dictionary to be compiled with the help of a computer

E-Textbooks No Bargain, reports Los Angeles Times
Contrary to popular opinion, e-textbooks are not necessarily a better investment than their printed counterparts

Misha Defonseca Back in Court, reports AP
Publisher Jane Daniel seeks to have $32.4 million verdict overturned because Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years was fiction, not a memoir

Dave Freeman Dead at 47, reports Los Angeles Times
Author of 100 Things to Do Before You Die died after fall

Sean Connery, Milkman
AP reports that Connery’s autobiography, Being A Scot, is about to be launched at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The story begins long ago when the future James Bond was a humble milkman...

Margaret Thatcher Demented, reports AP
Daughter Carol Thatcher writes in A Swim-On Part In The Goldfish Bowl that the former British Prime Minister is suffering from dementia and can’t remember the Falkland War