He’s dead, but, man, does he keep the pulp press pumping! I couldn’t be talking about anyone else but Elvis Presley, who would’ve been 72 today. Last year, print was very kind to the King, turning out Jerry Schilling’s excellent Me and a Guy Named Elvis (see our interview with the author) and Ken Burke and Dan Griffin’s satisfying The Blue Moon Boys: The Story of Elvis Presley’s Band. Thus far into 2007, all is strangely quiet on the Elvis front, and an Amazon search indicates that we can expect only paperback editions of hardcover releases this spring (e.g., Charles L. Ponce de Leon’s Fortunate Son: The Life of Elvis Presley and Bobbie Ann Mason’s Elvis Presley).

That said, we can start salivating for a big, long-delayed posthumous biography of a man many consider the King of the Conscious Punks, that is, Joe Strummer. I first heard about Chris Salewicz’s Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer (Faber & Faber, May) in mid-2003, shortly after Strummer’s shocking cardiac death in December 2002. For a good year, I stalked, via e-mail, a game (and fittingly mohawk-wearing) publicity director, who kindly told me the author needed more time. Now it seems that a galley is on the way, and I can’t wait to report on a book I’ve long pined for, as have myriad other fans who want to see Strummer up there with the best in the rock pantheon. With some luck, it will stand up to Pat Gilbert’s definitive treatment of Strummer’s band, Passion Is a Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash.

At Heather’s impetus, I, too, will emerge from the depths of winter-holiday-season office decampment to wish for and wonder about a book. 

The tie between folklore and linguistics may seem flimsy to those not buried in a world of fricatives and syntax, vowel shifts and universal grammar. (I often worry over the difficulty of linguistics for lay readers and why the study hasn’t yet been very popularized.) But the Grimm brothers saw a very close tie, and I’ve been told (albeit by a biased linguistics professor) that they began their accumulation of fairy tales for language study purposes. Give me a good biography to prove it!

The Brothers Grimm by Jack Zipes got a good review from LJ at first publication in 1988 and after being updated in 2002, but its focus on the literariness of the tales is clear. 

I would love to see a linguistic biography of the brothers. Jacob is responsible for Grimm’s Law, which can be used to trace English words to their Indo-European predecessors, to find the links between English words and their German, Latin, and even Hindi counterparts, and to recreate ancient, extinct parent languages.

Now, if someone could find a way to explain this fascinating history in an accessible way (maybe via the Grimms’s lives and studies, nudge, nudge), I would be one very happy reader.

And please, by all means, any of you secret linguistics enthusiasts out there, let me know of any easy-to-read linguistics books that exist!  (I’ll check out my shelf of college linguistics textbooks, but something tells me I won’t come up with too much to recommend in the layperson’s linguistics category.)

Pity the book bloggers who abandoned their electronic abode for two weeks. We meant no offense—we were drowning in books, reviews, Christmas candy, and hateful administrative tasks. We wanted to blog our way into oblivion, but we had consumed too much sugar and had crashed out in our cubicles. But now we’re back (sans Mirela and Willy), diabetic, and badder than ever.

First on the agenda for this staffer is my Wish List of books that I would personally like to see published over the coming year. These titles sometimes serve selfish purposes, though they also undoubtedly interest a sizable portion of the public. Take, for instance, my hope for a decent biography of recent Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductees Blondie. I’ve been griping about the lack of intelligent literature on this seminal group since my arrival in 1998, and I’m not going to stop until I get something on the scale of Phoebe Hoban’s excellent Basquiat: The Life and Death of an Art Star, something that digs deep into the punk, hip-hop, and art culture of ’70s and ’80s New York—and doesn’t forget to reflect on singer Deborah Harry’s still-powerful influence today.

The many photo books are nice (e.g., Mick Rock’s Picture This, Roberta Bayley’s Blondie: Images, 1976–1980) but in a way reinforce the idea that Blondie was only a pin-up when its founding members pioneered sampling disparate musical streams like disco, calypso, and rap.

And now for something completely different: I also am desperate to see a demystification of the American healthcare system for readers aged 20-something and up. If you are lucky enough to have coverage, there should be breakdowns of HMOs and definitions of lingo like primary care physician and deductible. If you don’t have diddly but want to scrape some together, there should also be a strategy to that end, not to mention a history of how America developed its abysmal system—and how other countries take care of their own. Fred Brock’s recent Health Care on Less Than You Think: The New York Times Guide to Getting Affordable Coverage came close, but no cigar.

I can go on, dear readers: Where, oh, where, is a field guide to the various head-shrinking therapies (do I want to go the way of Freud, or cognitive-behavioral techniques)? Why is there no manual for communicating with the “pod people” (those who sleep, eat, and commute wearing headphones plugged into MP3 devices)?

Before this turns into a desperate rant, I’d like to turn the discussion over to you and my fellow editors.