Diaper-wearing stalker astronauts! Celebrity corpses awarded custody to six-month old babies! Judges weeping in courtrooms! Pop singers shaving their heads while checking in and out of rehab! Airline passengers trapped on blizzard stranded planes for 11 hours! Canine scrotums striking terror in the hearts of school librarians! I guess there must be something to this whole Mercury in Retrograde business in which everything goes wacky for three weeks. Come to think of it, my computer was acting oddly yesterday. Therefore I don’t plan to sign a contract, buy a car, or get married until March 8 when Mercury’s malevolent  influence on our lives eases up. Ah, but then we have the Ides of March to look foward to. 

These are exciting times, let me tell ya. Borderline indecently exciting. But I digress. 

The 2nd annual New York Comic-Con is on the horizon! And, did you know that librarians can get a free weekend professional pass to the conference? Furthermore, did you know that on Friday, February 23rd (trade day), Library Journal is the presenting sponsor of four panels of librarian luminaries specifically for you?

So don your geek cap, wear that witty and irreverent T-shirt, put on those steel-toed Doc Martens, and slip on that backpack shaped like some weird plushy animal/alien. I, for one, am planning to put my hair in pigtails, because if I can’t wear pigtails at Comic-Con, then where can I?

And hey, if you see that corset vendor who was there last year - try one on! It’s a trip - and considering that your oxygen intake is cut in half, I mean that literally.

Be sure to sign up at the Professional Registration page - deadline is Feb. 12th!

For more information about the panels, go to this webpage and scroll down to the bottom. The panels ae all moderated by John Shableski of Brodart and the panel titles are:

Feb. 23rd: Panels for Librarians

10:00 AM: Superheroes and Manga: Making Room for Both at Your Library

11:15 AM: Format and Genres: Understanding Comics, Super Heroes, SciFi, Fantasy, Manga, Comics Lit, Humor and Web Comics

1:30 PM: Anime: Making the Most of this Video Entertainment

2:45 PM: Graphic Novel Classics Every Library (public and school) Should Shelve and Circulate

This Con is not to be missed. You make valuable contacts, learn from peers and publishers, get the pulse of the industry…while having fun with frothing fanboys and fangirls leering at manga, graphic novels, figurines, and anime. If the idea makes you giggle with glee (rather than back away slowly), this is the show for you.

I’m actually not as scary as I sound.

Such a bizarre Jerry Springer-like story today about the NASA astronaut arrested for the attempted kidnapping and murder of a female Air Force engineer whom Lisa Nowak believed to be a rival for the attentions for a male astronaut. (I’m sure the Lifetime Channel is buying the movie rights as I write!) While the press obsessed about the case’s weirdest element (aside from the pepper spray, BB-gun, buck knife, and sundry disguises)—the diapers Nowak wore on her 900-mile drive from Houston to the Orlando airport to confront her rival—I thought about the eerie similarities to Stephen Harrigan’s insightful novel Challenger Park.

Like Nowak, Harrigan’s Lucy Kincheloe is a wife, mother, and an astronaut. In Lucy’s case, she is training for a mission to supply the international space station; this past July Nowak flew her first mission to the space station. Like Nowak, Lucy falls in love with a NASA colleague, but the other end of her romantic triangle is not another woman but Lucy’s troubled ex-astronaut husband. Harrigan vividly captures the personal and professional stresses facing female astronauts, although I don’t think he had stalking and marathon diaper-wearing in mind as the end result. 

It is very sad, but not entirely surprising that Barbaro’s life was brought to an end this week after an 8-month struggle following his disastrous injury out of the starting gate at the Preakness.

Eclipse Press, part of Blood-Horse Publications of Lexington, KY, was all set optimistically to publish Barbaro: The Horse Who Captured America’s Heart, by Sean Clancy, a hardcover, in landscape format, with 100 color photos. Review copies of the April publication were recently delivered — and then Barbaro’s life ended. Eclipse will issue the book, still as close to the original  pub date as possible, with a revised final chapter.

Of course Barbaro was the exception in thoroughbred horseracing, and another book, also due in April, will remind readers what most of the sport is like. Not By A Long Shot: A Season at a Hard Luck Horse Track, by veteran racing reporter T.D. Thornton (PublicAffairs) shows readers the more prevalent conditions that exist around this “sport of kings,” with aging horses competing on aging tracks, where young jockeys hope to beat the odds and make it into the big time, where a lot of local men and women — from rural to Runyonesque, and not with the coffers of kings — enjoy the spectacle and are the main support of a multi-billion-dollar betting industry.

Many of us have been to a local racetrack, where ”racing lives [are] lived below the radar,” as the Not By A Long Shot galley sheet puts it. I once bet on a 9-year-old mare named Fast Emily in a race at the Great Barrington, MA fairgrounds. We didn’t win. Thornton reminds us that even the best of the horses lose 75% of the time.

Readers may enjoy a celebratory book about Barbaro, with his 6 races, and the millions earned and spent trying to save him (a rescue motivated at least in part so that millions in stud fees could have been earned — thoroughbreds are only allowed to reproduce by “live cover” ). But Thornton’s book will make sure that they understand Barbaro in context.  

Look for reviews in forthcoming issues of LJ.

I assign political science titles for review in LJ. For the past many months, this classification has overflowed with books relating to the war in Iraq and the “War on Terror,” but another kind of book is coming in quite often now: the presidential candidate’s biography or autobiography. 

Bill Richardson was ahead of the game. He only just declared that he is exploring a 2008 run, but he put his autobiography, Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life, out in 11/05. I hope it doesn’t set the standard for all of these books. Our reviewer called  it “revealing — to a fault,” e.g., Richardson writes of loading up his Alfa Romeo to move to New Mexico in 1978. This tugged at how many readers’ heartstrings as they remembered their own trials with getting luggage into their Italian sports car?

John Edwards took a different approach in 11/06 and put his name, as editor, behind Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives, celebrating the value that each of us places upon the homes in which we grew up. The nostalgia (literally) was enough to give me neuralgia, but many have understandably, if predictably, admired the collection of memories and photographs from a spectrum of famous and ordinary individuals. Memories of souped-up tranportation were of living room Lionel train sets rather than Alfa Romeos.

To balance his coffee-table entry with wonkier stuff, Edwards is one of three editors of a volume due out in May from the New Press, Ending Poverty in America: How To Restore the American Dream. Will he gain readers? Will they turn into voters? If so, will they vote for him?

Is Nader planning another run? His most recent book publishes in a couple of weeks: The Seventeen Traditions, from HarperCollins. This is billed as Nader’s most personal book because he professes the importance of parents in raising children “of virtue and talent” (he quotes Jefferson on that). Is he trying to win some “family values” types who need to replace their worn-out volumes of Bill Bennett? Should libraries adjust their collections accordingly?

John McCain took a cue from Bill Bennett with his Character is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember, written with Mark Salter. Later this year, the two will  be bringing out Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them, which may not seek to include the younger readership of the previous title because he too is now honing in on votership. 

As for McLain, there have already been a few biographies of Hillary Clinton. Most of the McLain studies are sympathetic to him, while perhaps one of the few balanced studies of Clinton is  Gil Troy’s Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady, worth keeping in mind as the campaigns heat up.

Barack Obama published his second autobiography The Audacity of Hope, last October, following his Dreams from My Father. Now Black Dog & Leventhal is promoting the “first biographical portrait ever” of Obama, by People magazine’s Steve Dougherty. They distinguish it from Obama’s own books by titling it Hopes and Dreams. It’s due in about a month.

Last year at ALA in Chicago, both Mayor Daley and Senator Obama spoke to the convention. It was a fascinating juxtaposition: Mayor Daley was fire and brimstone, punching his fist into his hand, speaking with astonishing passion and flare. Obama was the relaxed and conversational communicator. There seemed no question that Mayor Daley’s speech was written specifically for America’s librarians, and that made his speech have a certain magic to us. He boasted, deservedly, of all the work he has done on behalf of Chicago’s public libraries, and he spoke of the values of reading in highly personal and meaningful ways. Senator Obama’s speech was the generic one that ALA members often hear from the visiting politician, all about how he loved libraries as a kid, how much it mattered to go there. As a librarian, maybe I was disappointed, but as a voter, my own hopes and dreams are newly alive.  

Like Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s excruciatingly prolonged death in 1975 (”Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!), the Judith Regan soap opera continues apparently with no end in sight. PW reports today that HarperCollins announced the closure of the Los Angeles office of the fired publisher’s ReganMedia imprint. While the company expects to publish most of the titles Regan acquired, it has canceled the publication of 7, Peter Golenbock’s controversial novel about MIckey Mantle. Ooops! Unfortunately we have just closed our February 1 issue in which our review of this steamy book is running. Too late for us to pull. Oh well, at least my reviewer has the consolation of owning a now-valuable galley. And I don’t doubt that Golenbock will find another publisher, despite the tawdry nature of his novel. It definitely lacks the radioactive toxicity of O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It.    

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.

The e.coli outbreak that has sickened Taco Bell customers in New Jersey and on Long Island has now spread to  New York City, Delaware, South Carolina, and Utah. Health officials have traced the tainted green onions thought to be responsible back to a California farm. While this indicates a problem in the oversight of our national food production chain, your patrons and the local restaurants in your community also need to be reminded of the importance of safe food handling practices. Margaret Merrill’s November 1 collection development article,  “Handle with Care”, offers an excellent overview of key resources for both consumers and restaurants. Post a link to this article on your website, make a display of the titles you do have in your collection, or create hand-out flyers listing these titles. Get the word out!

The 25th anniversary of the detection of AIDS came and went this summer without much ado in the book market. If memory serves, only one dared tackle the state of the virus in the United States, Susan Hunter’s AIDS in America (Palgrave), which my reviewer thought too strident in its criticism of the Christian Right and the Bush administration.

The failure of this book and the lack of any others were a grave shame considering that AIDS is an epidemic in this country among African Americans (and is projected to become the third leading cause of death worldwide by 2031), though you’d never know it unless you live in a predominantly black neighborhood (I do—Bed-Sty, Brooklyn, whose bus stops often bear ads for AIDS/HIV medication). As LJ reviewer Elizabeth Williams reports in her forthcoming collection development article on AIDS and African Americans (look for it in the January 15th, 2007 issue), although blacks make up only 13 percent of the population, they add up to 50 percent of Americans diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.  

With a figure like that, you’d think there’d be a bevy of print and A/V materials for consumers, but there are not. The value of our article lies in the precious resources Elizabeth managed to dig up (e.g., Eric Goosby’s Living with AIDS/HIV), as well as her informed weeding suggestions. I’ll post the link closer to publication, and I welcome you to offer up any other titles to augment the rather spare bibliography.

For those who care, here’s the 2007 Collection Development schedule in total:

• January 2007 African Americans & AIDS
• February 2007 Genealogy
• March 2007 Travel to Canada
• April 2007 Business of Nonprofits
• May 2007 Gay/Lesbian Fiction
• June 2007 Water Sports
• July 2007 Anime
• August 2007 Knitting
• September True Crime
• October Neuroscience
• November Punk Music
• December Regional Gardening (Northeast)

Now that Rupert Murdoch has pulled the plug on the O.J. Simpson book/TV package (see Wilda Williams’s “The Juice Is Cooked” and “Sleazy Does It!”), it may seem pointless to dedicate any more space to the topic. But I can’t help but luxuriate in its anticlimactic end: Judith Regan, Simpson’s publisher at Regan Books, orchestrated and fanned a damnable furor only to have it stamped out by her Big Boss. This was, in fact, more shocking and titillating to me than the spin of the Simpson book and boob tube special. Why, you may ask?

Regan, as many publishing people know, has been manufacturing celebrity dreck for years without reprimand. Take last year’s autobiographical novel by celebutante Nicole Ritchie, The Truth About Diamonds, which mananged to make me livid on a Friday afternoon. This book is not fiction as it’s labeled—it’s straight-up, juice-drenched memoir, packaged with airbrushed glamour shots of Richie; in other words, another way to push celebrity gossip, not further contemporary fiction.

Of course, the Simpson project took Regan’s M.O. to a whole other level. But I never thought for a second that it would be too much for the American public to handle given how long we’ve been worshipping at the altar of the often sick and narcissistic rich and famous (remember Madonna’s Sex became a best seller in 1992 despite being slammed as pornography). That we did protest loudly enough in the Simpson case gives me hope for the future of standards in publishing, though I wouldn’t drop my guard when it comes to Regan.