Fans of Kiki Strike be aware that the latest Bloomsbury catalog included a teaser that a sequel will be listed in the Fall catalog. No word - anywhere - as to what it's about but I'm delighted to see a return to this story.

Teresa Duncan has a few quotes and very cool graphic highlighting a Maureen Dowd Op-Ed piece at the NYT (paid subscription req) on comparisons between the war in Iraq and the French war in Algeria. Author Alistair Horne, whose book, A Savage War of Peace, I desperately want to read, gives this opinion (among others):

" 'The depressing problem of getting entangled in the Muslim world,' [author Horne] replied. 'Algeria was a thoroughly bloodthirsty war that ended horribly and cost the lives of about 20,000 Frenchmen and a million Algerians. There was a terrible civil war. ...De Gaulle ended up giving literally everything away and left without his pants.'

I received a very cool sounding book from Serpent's Tail the other day: Back to the Badlands: Crime Writing in the USA. In 1989 author John Williams interviewed several US crimewriters including Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy. This time around he includes some of those original interviews as well as new pieces with George Pelecanos and Daniel Woodrell. From what I've already scanned it's very well done and should provide a nice and worthy peek at present day crime writing and just how these authors come up with the dark and realisitc stories they do.

I also received Sins of the Innocent from Unbridled Books, a memoir about a french woman who ends up trapped in Hitler's Germany. It sounds like a very different take on the WWII experience and I was quite intrigued when I caught sight of it in the backlist portion of the new catalog. (I missed it somehow when it came out last year.) I thought the cover photo was very romantic - I assume it is the author and her husband - the couple are looking all 1940s and happy for a moment, but you know bad things are on the horizon. Over at Bookslut feature writer Heather Smith does not like the 1940s covers, choosing one as her worst of 2006:

This is probably a bit unfair, but I am so tired of books about World War II and the Holocaust being tarted up as nostalgia porn. It's all there -- the Schindler's List qualities (stylish trousers/pleated skirts/discreet use of colorization/cobblestones) and its resemblance to virtually every other occupied France novel/memoir out there. It commits the same errors that that the Iraq communiqués do in that it visually places recent history into a distant and romanticized past.

While the Iraq lit uses images of sand, artillery, barefoot children with big eyes, and more sand,Suite Française reduces World War II to a black and white stock photograph of a couple turned away from the camera, the better for you to admire their aquiline features and good tailoring. An actual photo of Nemirovsky was used as the cover for the French edition and her expression -- thoughtful, modern, direct -- cuts through the nonsense of distance. She looks like she could be the woman standing ahead of you in line for coffee.

I think the point is that they always look like "the woman standing ahead of you in line for coffee" - in other words it could be you in the same situation as the author - it could be you.

I'm really looking forward to reading this book.

Honest to God, if one of the Bush twins gets a book deal I might just go a little bit crazy. Someone has to be kidding about this, right? Don't you just long for the days of Chelsea Clinton?

In reading Bradford Washburn's obituary, (famous mountain climber who did a ton of climbing on Mt McKinley) I stumbled onto the obituary for sociologist and author Thomas Lyson. I'd never heard of Lyson before this but found the thesis behind his book, Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food and Community, to be very timely. (It was published just three years ago.) Here's a bit from the obit:

He criticized what he saw as an increasingly globalized approach to agricultural production and its withering influence on independent family farms, which he believed form the social underpinnings of countless rural American towns.

At the same time, he argued that small country schools in New York State and elsewhere should not be consolidated into suburban school systems, but kept open to educate rural children where they live. Without rural schools to anchor communities, he said, a migration to larger towns would ultimately empty the countryside.

The book certainly sounds well done and what a loss he is, as communities are just starting to get behind the message he clearly believed in so strongly.

Finally, allow me a moment to squeal with excitement over the news of Eddie Campbell's next gn: The Black Diamond Detective Agency. It's a western!!! Catch up on the news from Campbell's blog which you should be reading anyway and also the First Second Books blog, his publisher. He rocks, and I'm so looking forward to this one. (It is one of my missions in life to get more kids and teens reading comics; Campbell is one of my secret weapons in this quest.)