Barbara Demick's NOTHING TO ENVY named 2010 National Book Award Finalist!

The 2010 National Book Award finalists have been announced, and among them is our very own NOTHING TO ENVY: ORDINARY LIVES IN NORTH KOREA by Barbara Demick.

"A groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction" (Slate), NOTHING TO ENVY is a riveting, never-before-seen view into one of the world's most repressive regimes through the lives of six ordinary citizens.

Read an excerpt of NOTHING TO ENVY: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385523912&view=excerpt

See the complete list of National Book Award finalists: http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010.html

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Barbara Demick's NOTHING TO ENVY named 2010 National Book Award Finalist!

The 2010 National Book Award finalists have been announced, and among them is our very own NOTHING TO ENVY: ORDINARY LIVES IN NORTH KOREA by Barbara Demick.
"A groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction" (Slate), NOTHING TO ENVY is a riveting, never-before-seen view into one of the world's most repressive regimes through the lives of six ordinary citizens.

Read an excerpt of NOTHING TO ENVY: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385523912&view=excerpt

See the complete list of National Book Award finalists: http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010.html

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Sara Gruen on the experience that inspired her to write APE HOUSE.

Right before I went on tour for Water for Elephants, my mother sent me an email about a place in Des Moines, Iowa, that was studying language acquisition and cognition in great apes. I had been fascinated by human-ape discourse ever since I first heard about Koko the gorilla (which was longer ago than I care to admit) so I spent close to a day poking around the Great Ape Trust's Web site. I was doubly fascinated--not only with the work they're doing, but also by the fact that there was an entire species of great ape I had never heard of. Although I had no idea what I was getting into, I was hooked...
To continue reading, visit Sara's site: http://http://saragruen.com/2010/07/a-letter-from-sara-2/

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The most villainous grifters in Matt Taibbi's GRIFTOPIA

A who's who of screwing you

Tea Party: "One of the key psychological characteristics of the Tea Party is its oxymoronic love of authority figures coupled with a narcissistic celebration of its own "revolutionary" defiance."

Sarah Palin: "Being in the building with Palin that night was a transformative and oddly unsettling experience. It's a little like having live cave-level access for the ripping-the-heart-out-with-the-bare-hands scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A scary-as-hell situation: thousands of pudgy Midwestern conservatives worshipping at the Altar of the Economic Producer, led by a charismatic arch-priestess letting loose a grade-A war cry."

Michelle Bachman: "Minnesota congresswoman who thought the movie Aladdin promoted witchcraft and insisted global warming wasn't a threat because 'carbon dioxide is natural.'"

Barack Obama: "proved to America is that his government couldn't even win back the right to truly regulate this massive industry, even with a historic mandate at his back and after giving away everything he had to trade, conceding even the power to tax."

Rahm Emanuel: "an overconfident and immensely unlikable neo-Svengali, who resembles Karl Rove, only more driven, and with better hair."

CNBC: "more or less openly a propaganda organ for rapacious
Wall Street banks, funded by ad revenue from the financial services industry."

Rick Santelli: "basically a half-baked PR stooge shoveling propaganda coal for bloodsucking transnational behemoths like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs."

David Brooks: "the archpriest of American conventional wisdom."

Goldman Sachs: "No one ever just referenced "Goldman"; they would say, "those motherfuckers" or "those cocksuckers"or "those motherfucking cocksucking assholes at Goldman Sachs."

Geithner, Bernake, Paulson, Larry Summers, et al:
scrambled to find ways to use taxpayer money to subsidize megamergers that left the banking sector even more concentrated than before.

Sovereign Wealth funds: Imagine the biggest and most aggressive hedge fund on Wall Street, then imagine that that same fund is fifty or sixty times bigger and outside the reach of any major regulatory authority, and you've got a pretty good idea of what an SWF is.

Ben Nelson: One of the all- time leaders in insurance company largesse--no other industry has given him more money in his career, a total that currently stands at over $1.2 million.

Horizon Blue Cross: Operates like a Mafia gang that insists on its protection money.

Billy Tauzin: The principal author of the Bush-era prescription drug benefit bill of 2003--a massive giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry that barred the government from negotiating bulk rates for Medicare purchases of drugs.

Alan Greenspan: The biggest asshole in the universe.

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