Dibs

Amazon.com was forced to admit having made a huge mistake last weekend and has vowed to alter its UK site as a result. The trouble erupted when links to books for gun enthusiasts and marksmen appeared on the page for Sandra Uttley’s book Dunblane Unburied, about a tragic 1996 school massacre in Scotland that left sixteen children and a teacher dead. The page for Uttley’s book displayed a “Perfect Partners” option — comparable to the “Better Together” option on Amazon’s US pages, which alert shoppers to similar books preselected to pique their interest. The alleged “perfect partners” included Gun Digest: The World’s Greatest Gun Book and Successful Rifle Shooting. Ouch.

“They cut me in my stomach and my guts were laid out, hanging from my stomach. It was like when you gut a fish,” said rap artist and author-to-be James Lathlin after a gang attacked his head, chest and abdomen with knives outside his Manitoba, Canada home last Saturday. A devotee of the late singer Tupac Shakur, Lathlin is a former gang member himself — an enthusiastic car thief charged at least once with assault — who now coordinates an inner-city youth center and has penned a memoir, Better Days, set to be published with the help of a grant established by Shakur’s mother. Police have arrested 29-year-old Abimael Zuniga-Torres of the B-Side street gang for the near-fatal stabbing. Lathlin, who used to belong to the Overlords, said he knows of Zuniga-Torres but has no personal history with the would-be killer. Lathlin’s transformation from gangsta to working stiff has been covered at thuglifearmy.com, thugz-network.com, mobfiggaz.com and other sites.

Defying all apparent indicators of dorkdom — the author is a middle-aged professor; the book’s title is “A Love Affair with the Sea” — this memoir by a British marine biologist recounting his research and adventures around the world is limned with joltingly gorgeous writing and hilarious observations that will leave you flopping and panting like — well, like a grounded ocean creature: “I saw … a blur swilling below me, and a fuzzy cloud as a flatfish fled…. Then two seaweeds closed around my neck with the soft hands of a strangler.” Vivid descriptions mix with light science and personal memory: Norton was a failing student, the worst in his school, until that first adolescent dip under the waves gave him a reason to care. Talk about perfect beach reading!

Grade: A

“Ambassador Osama bin Laden” is welcomed with open arms to New York City in a crazed fantasy-future America that suffers under “oppression by ultra-liberal extremists” who let the United Nations control the US government. Osama secretly plans to nuke the Big Apple on 9/11’s twentieth anniversary. Who can save us? Only a biomechanically engineered Sean Hannity, Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy, that’s who! Along with superhot chicks and buffed-out hunks, the trio battles wussy doves and international evil in Liberality for All, billed as “the first comic-book series directly marketed to the ‘vast right-wing’ audience.” Created and written by Mike Mackey of ACC Studios, with cover artwork by Dungeons and Dragons fantasy master Larry Elmore and interior art by Donny Lin, “this action-packed, patriotic knee in the groin to the embodiment of the ultra-left is a blatant satire of liberalism,” according to a press release from ACC Studios, which is donating 100 percent of its Web site’s proceeds to earthquake relief efforts in Bantul, Indonesia, home of artist Lin: “When we heard that the quake was in Bantul, we immediately tried to contact our artist. When we discovered Donny and his family were alive and uninjured, he proceeded to relate his ‘on the ground’ account of the carnage: Dead bodies along the roadside, injured desperate for treatment, homeless seeking shelter, hungry seeking food, loved ones mourning their dead… Entire villages totally flattened…. We proposed to Donny that we donate funds from our website to his family, he selflessly told us that there were others in greater need, so it was decided that all donations go to two local Catholic churches in Bantul currently embedded in the relief effort.” Keep America radioactivity-free with Sean, Ollie and G.!

In today’s weird book news … there’s a crisis in the stuffed-animal industry! Plump squashy stuffed toys (which our Brit pals call “plush toys”) are expensive to transport and hard to keep clean in stores where disgusting little fingers streak them with effluent, according to a man whose company has spent ten years “developing products to deal with the ever growing problem of shipping plush.” Donald Spector and his associates at the Innovation Fund are solving the problem by inventing a line of children’s books whose characters pop out as stuffed toys nearly two feet long: “The value of having a character emerge from the inside is going to be sensational and [the] books are going to be fun. … A book can be about ‘My Trip to Disney World’ and from the back cover a 20-inch plush figure pops out of the book! The technology is a major advance. The product looks and feels like a regular stuffed character but it can be compressed and recompressed continuously. It is like a Jack-in-the-box, except it comes out of the box and feels like a plush animal, not like a batch of springs.” … Well, that’s a relief! I hate batches of springs.

According to news reports today, Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library are teaming up to make 300,000 e-books — electronic digitized texts that you read on your computer screen instead of curled up on the couch — available for free between July 4 and August 4. That’s a lot of reading material to squeeze into one month. But it raises a larger question: whatever became of the “e-book revolution,” once touted as the nemesis of the book publishing industry, which would soon be driven to extinction? If anything, the 300,000 free e-book bonanza seems less like a harbinger of Things to Come and more like a Desperate Ploy for Attention. Despite the dire prognostications during the dot-com boom, the book industry is still surging ahead full-steam. People still buy books, and they’ve shown with their wallets that they’d rather read them in bed or on a commuter train than hunched over a desk while squinting at a screen. E-books may find a niche market within the overall book publishing industry, but for the foreseeable future, the Age of Paperbacks has no end in sight.

Admit it — if you aren’t seventysomething yet, sometimes you wish you were, because then you could get away with speaking truth to power whenever the bloody hell you felt like it: either because no one would dare to punch a silver-haired dissenter in the mouth, because the elderly have acquired a lifetime of confidence and wisdom, or because nobody listens to them anyway. Born in 1928, Ozick — who’s always been worth a listen — admits to having been more naive and gullible when she was young. But now in this collection of essays about fellow literary figures, she fearlessly skewers hypocrites, anti-Semites and other shatterers of what we love about Western civ. Susan Sontag is dead, but that doesn’t mean Ozick goes any easier on her for making moral relativism into an international fashion, turning whole generations onto the lethal idea that nothing is better than anything else.

Grade: A

Buy this book at Amazon.

A disgruntled lawyer in the waning years of California’s dot-com boom, Walton discovered eBay. An old army buddy taught him how to buy cheap art at thrift shops and sell it on the site for thousands. Greed got the better of both men as they began forging famous artists’ signatures’ onto paintings — when one of their forgeries sold for $135,000, that was big news. Then they got caught. And convicted. Fake is Walton’s somewhat reedy, crybaby memoir about the part of his life about which he now says he is most ashamed. Except … while trying to put his shattered life together, Walton sold some software he’d designed for six figures. And he nabbed a major book deal. So if you have a thing about ill-gotten gains, and if you don’t believe that wrongdoers should benefit for their crimes — even, or especially, if the benefit derives from a mea-culpa — then don’t make Walton any richer by buying his book.

Grade: C

A Canadian interior designer in France’s romantic, castle-studded Dordogne region hunts for her twin sister, who disappeared twenty years previous without a trace while hunting for orchids. It’s a teensy bit predictable, but Wan’s careful attention to character development makes this mystery novel fairly chewy beach reading for those with a penchant for flowers, France, French food and/or wine, all of which get the slightly pretentious name-droppy treatment — which includes mentioning the names of dishes and other nouns in untranslated French for that head-scratching, wonder-if-it’s-oysters effect. If references to a Chinese American character as “Oriental” seem passé and un-PC, note that the author is Chinese-born herself.

Grade: B-

This hyper-intellectualized assessment of Tijuana succeeds in spite of itself. Burdened by an academic, postmodern sensibility, Here is Tijuana! over-analyzes the elusive significance of the city’s “urban space” and cultural milieu. But if you cast aside the nagging impression that the books’ editors are trying to prove some kind of esoteric political point, you can truly get a feeling for the chaotic, bizarre and funky world of Tijuana, the last outpost of the Third World at the foot of America’s gleaming spires. Here is Tijuana! contains very little narrative text, but is rather a lavish compilation of gritty street-level photographs and random textual snippets: quotes from Tijuanans, statistics, paragraphs from incisive essays, strewn together in three loosely organized sections. But the photographs alone are worth the price of the book: hundreds of intimate snapshots of life on the streets, alternately documentarian and artistic. You won’t so much learn any facts about Tijuana from reading this book as gain a gut-level sense of the city’s ambiance and significance, both to Mexicans and Americans.

Grade: A-