TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Stephen King’s Glass Menagerie When an enormous transparent dome settles over a small town in Maine in Stephen King’s new novel, it’s just fine with Big Jim, the local tyrant-in-waiting, and his pet goon squad. feeds.nytimes.com |
Into the West A thorough, well-wrought political history of James K. Polk’s presidency and the triumph of Manifest Destiny. feeds.nytimes.com |
The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story by Mary-Kay Wilmers | Book review Mary Kay-Wilmers's family history of spies and shrinks intrigues Archie BrownMary-Kay Wilmers is best known as the long-standing editor of the London Review of Books. In this, her first book, she has produced a deftly woven saga about three members of her own family who embodied some of the main currents of recent history. The Eitingon family provides plenty of raw material for a riveting story, but digging it out was clearly far from easy, especially as several of its members worked for the KGB – or the Cheka, OGPU and NKVD, as the Soviet security organs were earlier known.The family member who comes closest to dominating the narrative, Leonid Eitingon, was a cousin of Wilmers's maternal grandmother. He joined the Cheka in 1920, shortly before his 21st birthday. Along with other Chekists, he played a ruthless part in the Russian civil war, shooting a number of the more prosperous citizens of the Belorussian town of Gomel in cold blood. At the end of the 1920s, he led an operation producing fake documents which persuaded the Japanese that 20 Russian agents who were working for them had secretly applied to have their Soviet citizenship restored. The Japanese duly shot their anti-Soviet allies. This, Wilmers remarks, was "the kind of ruse Leonid enjoyed".He was to employ it again in Spain in the late 1930s and in Belorussia during the Second World War. As a high-ranking NKVD officer who was a master of several languages, he was responsible for numerous kidnappings and assassinations even in peacetime. His most notable success – certainly in the eyes of Stalin – was his organisation of the murder of Leon Trotsky.That did not save Leonid from arrest during Stalin's antisemitic purge of the early 1950s. It occurred as he stepped off a plane in Moscow after performing, with customary efficiency, the latest task allotted to him by the Kremlin – "liquidating" Baltic nationalists.Other family members were more appealing. Max Eitingon was an early acolyte of Sigmund Freud. A highly cultured man who established an institute of psychoanalysis in Jerusalem, he also had contacts with Russian émigrés involved in the abduction (and execution) of an elderly anti-Soviet Russian general from Paris in 1938.Motty Eitingon, the author's great-uncle, is the third central character in the story. He began his life in the Belorussian town of Orsha but moved to Leipzig in 1902 when he was 17. He was for many years a highly successful businessman (although he ended up bankrupt), in Germany and later in the US, trading principally in fur, which he purchased in bulk from the Soviet Union. To get favourable deals from his suppliers, Motty took pains to be on good terms with the Soviet embassy and visitors from Moscow. Indeed, he was questioned more than once by the FBI as a possible communist whose financial arrangements overseas were dubious. Noting that the kind of deals Motty made were impossible without very good contacts in Moscow, Wilmers adds: "So the question has to be asked: was Leonid one of them?" She thinks it unlikely. Rather, Motty wished to be connected to powerful people, whether in Washington or Moscow, and enjoyed doing favours, "especially favours that would turn out to be useful to him".Wilmers has taken a cool, searching look at some of her more exotic relatives in this superbly written book. The Eitingons is much more than a family history, for the author has a deep knowledge of the cultural and political context, whether of 20th-century America or the Soviet Union, in which they lived. It stands as an intimate portrait of a world that seems far removed from our own.BiographyPoliticsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Paperback Mass-Market Fiction Top 5 at a Glance1. DEAR JOHN, by Nicholas Sparks2. THE ASSOCIATE, by John Grisham3. ARCTIC DRIFT, by Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler4. THE LOVELY BONES, by Alice Sebold5. CROSS COUNTRY, by James Patterson feeds.nytimes.com |
Waterstone's boss brought to book • Christmas sales slump brings MD's departure • Critics accuse owner HMV of neglecting chainCompared with many professions, it probably remains the most gentlemanly. But life can be brutal in books too, especially when there is a sales slump to contend with.Today, the world of publishing was left reeling when Gerry Johnson, the managing director of bookseller Waterstone's, was pushed out of his post after sales slumped amid a string of celebrity flops and fierce competition from the internet and the supermarkets.Muted interest in autobiographies – such as television presenters Ant & Dec's Ooh! What a Lovely Pair and comedian Peter Kay's follow-up book Saturday Night Peter – dented the book market over Waterstone's key Christmas trading period, when the chain also suffered additional pressures from closing down sales at its collapsed rival Borders.The struggling bookseller's parent company, HMV Group, admitted the problems went deeper than that, however, and analysts said the retail group was paying the price for neglecting Waterstone's as it focused on revamping its entertainment stores with smoothie bars, concert ticket sales and live music deals.Speaking after Waterstone's revealed a 8.5% fall in like-for-like sales in the five weeks covering the Christmas period, the chief executive of HMV Group, Simon Fox, said he and Johnson had "agreed it was time for a change".But Fox, credited with turning around the group's eponymous stores in a torrid media market, conceded he too must take some of the blame for Waterstone's woes over his three years at the helm."I take full responsibility. We had a good year the first year and the performance has been unsatisfactory over the last two years. I take full responsibility for sorting it out," he said.Turning around the last large specialist chain of bookstores in Britain was a matter of "urgency", said Fox, as he pledged to focus more on what customers want, to tailor stores to local markets and to accelerate online and digital book growth as customers' habits change.He added that long and much-publicised delays in setting up a distribution hub for Waterstone's had also taken focus away from what customers wanted in the chain's high street stores.The business once credited with revitalising bookselling around Britain when it launched 25 years ago, Fox continued, would now streamline its "front of store offer" in which tables of piled-high books greet customers. However, Fox said, Waterstone's would at the same time deepen its range under the new leadership of his right-hand man, Dominic Myers."It's reflecting our roots in a 21st-century world," said Fox. "It's not about going back and going back to dusty old bookshops. This is about building a specialist chain that is relevant in a Google, Amazon world."The chain of more than 300 bookstores will also carry fewer copies of the big celebrity titles after a Christmas when stars' literary endeavours disappointed, Fox added.Neill Denny, the editor-in-chief of the Bookseller magazine, confirmed that the celebrity memoir had a poor Christmas, partly owing to recession-hit readers losing their appetite for tales of glitz and glamour.In 2008, a memoir by the chatshow host and comedian Paul O'Grady sold 664,000 copies in hardback whereas this Christmas the celebrity top-seller, by Ant & Dec, sold less than half that at 309,000.But Denny stressed that Waterstone's performance under Johnson needed to be put into context, saying: "The high street book market [Nielsen's General Retail Market] was down 8.6% in the 10 weeks to 2 January, while Waterstone's was down 8.9% – so he was tracking a declining market. What Simon Fox wanted him to do was outperform that as the only national specialist chain, and whether that is a realistic goal or not is a different question."Johnson was also a trifle unlucky in that the collapse of Borders led to a month-long closing down sale at the chain, with massive discounts of up to 90%."Within the publishing and bookselling industry, few are willing to go on record and risk unsettling the last man standing in the book chains market. But there was a general feeling that today's dire trading figures confirmed long-held concerns that the HMV Group had focused so much on turning around its own entertainment stores that Waterstone's became what one unnamed source called "an also-ran".Despite the claims of neglect, Fox said Waterstone's would survive: "I think it would be a tragedy if this country didn't have a chain of specialist bookshops."Most evidence from Britain's traditionally vibrant publishing industry suggests that consumer appetite for books remains strong. The publisher Bloomsbury today trumpeted "excellent" sales in 2009 driven by a strong publishing programme featuring the chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the novelist William Boyd.Though the figures will not be announced until 30 March, Nigel Newton, its founder, said the publishing house behind the Harry Potter series had been resilient to the rise of other media and growing time pressures on consumers."The place for books in people's lives remains robust and vigorous and people are continuing to read books at a rate of knots," he said.Waterstone'sBooksellersRetail industryKatie AllenZoe Woodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |