Dibs

The current fad in which parents make kids feel like omnipotent geniuses is not just a fad but an industry whose players include such self-publishing “print-on-demand” (but I ask you — demanded by whom?) Web sites as lulu.com. The parents of homeschooled North Carolina eight-year-old Thomas Little have issued press releases announcing that their son has just “published” his “first but not last book,” The Adventures of the Symbols, in which keyboard symbols such as “@,” “$” and the wily “%” engage in a good-vs.-evil tussle. Thomas’s father, college professor David Little, says he noticed the high-IQ tot typing avidly last year. When asked what he was doing, Thomas replied, “Writing a novel.” Dad hooked son up with self-publishing site and, 28 pages later, voila: another sad case of arguably unfounded ego-expansion. It’s not the boy’s fault. “I called the local papers about his book. Thomas wanted to see his name in the paper, as most children enjoy this thrill,” says his father in a press release. Slow news week — before Al-Zarqawi’s death knocked everything else out of the headlines, local TV and radio covered Thomas’s story. Oops, now so has Dibs!

You know him from The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas and Biodome. “I feel like I have gone skydiving and I’m falling from the sky toward earth at 120 miles per hour,” says Stephen Baldwin now, anticipating the release of his new memoir about finding religion. “The wind is howling in my ears and whipping across my face. But somehow, I feel calm and at peace. I’m not afraid.… My prayer is that … you will be willing to take a chance, drop your guard, and enter into an experience like the one I’m having with God!” Having acted in some 65 films, Stephen Baldwin is less famous than his brother Alex. His new memoir, The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the New Hardcore Movement of Faith, will be released Sept. 19 from Warner Faith. It recounts his Long Island childhood, his journey through “the bowels of Hollywood’s bright lights and huge temptations” and finally the story of how “Stevie B” — as the press release says — “converted to radical Christianity and how it has affected the Dynasty of the Baldwin family…. He is actively using his stardom to take his faith and inspirational messages to the masses…. Early comments [on] the book have ranged from outbursts of laughter, to anger, to complete disbelief that an ‘insider’ had the nerve to turn on the world that essentially gave him his platform and power. It carries the reader deep into the world of the Baldwin Dynasty and gives the first clear look at why this family is the ostentatious, fun and radical group that they are today. Baldwin will take the country by storm by driving in his CUSTOMIZED GM CUBE called the ‘Lord’s Lounge’ which boasts the cover of the book shrinkwrapped around the gnarly vehicle…. Be on the look out for baby Baldwin driving the CUBE to a city near you!”

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You know her as the megabestselling author of such books as Toxic Bachelors and Daddy, but Danielle Steel is also the brains behind a San Francisco art gallery, Steel Gallery, soon to be defunct. In 2003, Steel got the idea of opening a showplace for comtemporary artists who, as she told the San Francisco Chronicle, “are really struggling with something…. I haven’t done anything but write in so many years that it feels good to be out in the world again. My publisher is shuddering about this whole thing, but my agent has been very supportive.” She named the gallery after its most noticeable structural material, not after herself, and was angry when a local magazine, the first to report on the venue, called her a dilettante. She hung around the place but discouraged autograph-seekers: “I like to be here a lot, but if people come here just for that, then I won’t be here. I am horrendously shy.” Anyway, that was then. This is now. Steel Gallery is closing its doors this month.

Beantown isn’t big on pastures, but from June 4 until September 5 the city is home to more than a hundred life-size fiberglass moo-cows, “grazing” on sidewalks and other urban settings as part of CowParade Boston, a public-art extravaganza and fundraiser. To celebrate the launch of Houghton Mifflin’s new American Heritage® Dictionary, Boston Edition, HM editors worked with professional decorative painter Carol Leonesio to create a design for the company’s representative bovine, whose sleek synthetic “hide” is adorned with attractively inscribed Boston-themed terms from the dictionary such as “duckling,” “aquarium,” “Kennedy, John Fitzgerald,” “pilgrim,” “tea party,” “lobster” and “Walden Pond.” It stands in front of HM headquarters at 222 Berkeley Street. With the addition of five hundred more words and more than 4,000 other updates, the dictionary’s latest edition is due out next month. After September 5, all the cows will be auctioned off to benefit the Jimmy Fund, a local cancer charity.

Even if you don’t read it, this one has to win an award for Best Title Ever. A spunky, curly-haired, famous doctor who performs abortions is found dead in her swimming pool at the end of a day on which she fought with both her lawyer husband and college-student daughter. Who killed Diana? Given her outspoken views on a hot-button issue, she also had her share of enemies among pro-lifers: Cue the classic depiction of the evangelical with a creepy smile, a standby in the vast majority of books published this year. When yet another oppressive reverend pops up in this ambitious whodunit, you’re like: “Nooo! Can’t some novelist create a Buddhist monk with a creepy smile instead?” Still, you can’t have a book about an abortionist without an anti-abortionist. And Hyde captures the doctor’s philosophical dilemmas as movingly as she does the graphic surgery scenes.

Grade: B+

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She wanted to be an orthodontist, but at seventeen, hot island babe Dayanara Torres was persuaded to enter the Miss Puerto Rico pageant instead. She won, then shortly thereafter she entered the Miss Universe pageant and won that too. Told you she was hot! During and after her reign, she founded scholarship programs for poor children and sang a duet with Peabo Bryson. She learned to speak Tagalog, hooked up with a Filipino movie star, appeared in Filipino films, and was the model for a lanky Dayanara doll which became a very big seller in the Philippines and Puerto Rico. She married fellow singer Marc Anthony in 2000, had two kids with him and divorced him in 2004, less than a week before Anthony married Jennifer Lopez. Gorgeous Torres had emergency surgery two months ago to correct an “intestinal obstruction” — not the sort of thing you want to picture. But wait! Returning to her childhood orthodonture dreams, she has authored a bilingual book for children about the importance of preventing tooth decay. Published through the Crest Healthy Smiles program, Ricky and Andrea’s Healthy Beautiful Smiles follows a brother and sister through their first visit to a dentist. It’s available for free at this Web site or by calling 1-866-989-9968 through July 29.

It’s always fun or at least psychedelic to imagine your fav books recast in alternate genres, alternate time periods, alternate countries and such. A sci-fi version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Beowulf as chick lit. So imagine Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses … set in 18th-century Korea! At least the century hasn’t changed from the novel’s original one. (The 1999 film Cruel Intentions fast-forwarded Laclos’ work to the present era, complete with pot, Sarah Michelle Gellar acting like Sarah Michelle Gellar, and a speedy Jaguar.) Korean director E J-yong has made yet another movie adaptation of the book: Untold Scandal, a blockbuster (as opposed to an art film) which broke box-office records in its opening weekend two days ago. Over 3 million ticketbuyers went to see it, tempted by a famous cast and by sex scenes that are far more explicit than in previous adaptations of the novel. “The dialogue is also elegant and rich in color, an extra bonus for native speakers of Korean,” reports Korean site Ohmynews.com.

Admit it. You get soooo hot over those preternaturally huge eyes, that wild flowing hair and the cute way those sailor-suited schoolgirls and cone-breasted androids wreak havoc and save damaged planets. It’s all female Japanese cartoon characters all the time at Yuricon, the Tokyo convention for fans and creators of lesbian manga and anime. Yaoi is Japanimation/comix featuring gay male love; yuri — the word means “lily” in Japanese — is its lesbian counterpart. Fans include lesbians, but also curious teen girls and guys of all kinds who believe two gals are better than one. More and more yuri is getting translated into English every year, and a fav occupation of yuri fans is to search for girl-girl love — vis-a-vis touching, or crushes, or longing looks — in old favorite animanga such as Sailormoon. This year’s Yuricon was held April 17, chaired by yuri manga artist Rica Takashima and sponsored by Erica Friedman, whose Newark, New Jersey-based ALC Publishing company issues yuri manga in the US. Friedman also heads Yurikon LLC and hosts Yurikon.com, which offers hot stuff for fans “on the lookout for cool, butchy, cute anime and manga lesbians” and lets users augment a master list of “lesbians, wannabees and oughtabes in anime and manga.”

Alexander McCall Smith, beloved author of several bestselling novels featuring Botswanan female detective Precious Ramotswe, is great friends with Flea, bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The pair met in 2004 after the bassist (real name Michael Balzary) posted on the band’s web site about how much he loved Precious Ramotswe. Having survived a suicide attempt, drugs and rehab, Flea found the plump African sleuth’s adventures “really fun to read and make you feel like human beings can have worthwhile lives.” Attending a lecture by the 57-year-old Smith — who is also a bioethics expert and bassoonist — the 43-year-old rocker introduced himself. A lively friendship was born. Smith (who calls the younger man “Mr. Flea”) told a Scottish reporter this week: “I know it seems a strange pairing but he’s my pal in the rock world.”

Bringing alive in all their horrifying glory seven infernos that changed Americans’ sense of identity and brought entire urban areas to the brink — from a 1760 Boston fire to the 1967 Detroit fire to 9/11, with others in between — historian Hoffer will make you keep sniffing the air in search of smoke. Winningly, he weaves the well-researched personal accounts of survivors and witnesses into larger contexts entailing the evolution of firefighting and great shifts in economy and consciousness. Intriguing too, even for nongeeks, is the actual science: those alchemies of fuel, heat and oxygen (“a wonderful servant, but a tyrannous master”) that turn steel as soft as boiled spaghetti, and make human skin go from red to black to literally melting. We anthropomorphize fires, Hoffer notes, because they kill and destroy like little else — yet they have no motive and aren’t really “evil.” He deserves bonus points for covering 9/11 without implying that it was an inside job: that’s the sick hobbyhorse of far too many authors and academics today.

Grade: A