Medical writer Skloot examines the legacy of Lacks’ contribution to science and the effects on  her family, wary of the medical establishment that has a long and troubled history with black folks. The best known case of medical research abuse involving black Americans is, of course, the Tuskegee experiments of the 1930s to study the long-term effects of untreated Syphilis, without knowledge or consent of the patients, imprisoned black men.

After listening to Skloot, I tracked down a book I’d read a few years ago, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present, by Harriet A. Washington.

Medical journalist Washington wrote of the shameful history of the physical and medical misuse of black Americans long before the Tuskegee experiment. She cited medical journals and previously unpublished reports that openly acknowledged racial attitudes and experimentation. She detailed a litany of medical abuses and experimentation aimed at black men in the military and in prison, as well as women and children, all without proper notification or consent.

More recently, I read The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, by psychiatric professor Jonathan M. Metzl, revealing that in the 1960s schizophrenia was racialized from an illness suffered by sensitive white intellectuals to one of disaffected angry black men who were diagnosed and locked up for their aggressive reactions to racism.

So, I’m not surprised at the revelations of Skloot’s book but what The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks shows is the stunning — and generally unacknowledged — contributions of black Americans to medical research. But it would be so much better if the contributions were made willingly, which raises the concern that too many black Americans shy away from medical research precisely because of the troubled past.

“You very quickly got kind of wrapped up in the joke of it all. They were all so desperate to see if they could talk to the great man,” he said.

In news more of the moment, the release of the unfortunately named iPad (which Ian Chipman is quite excited about) has prompted people to publish articles about e-books almost as fast as it’s possible to read them. The iPad’s effect on the market does seem to provide a welcome check and balance on the seeming dominance of the Kindle, and even emboldened publisher Macmillan to push back with a proposed new pricing model–a move that caused Amazon to remove the “Buy” buttons from Macmillan’s books.

But, amidst all the swirling heat and dust of battle, the most interesting article about the iPad took an entirely different tack. Writing in the New York Observer, Lee Siegel concerned himself not with price points and market share but with the very nature of the beast, explaining “Why the iPad Is Actually a theyPad“:

The keyboard-weak, camera-less iPad simply won’t allow you to easily construct a blog, make a video or comfortably make extensive revisions to your Facebook profile. The new gadget exists solely as an instrument of the new digital hierarchy, which has to create new passive audiences in order to survive, just the way the old hierarchy did.

Siegel is, of course, the guy who pseudonymously defended himself on his own blog, so readers may take his thoughts on Web 2.0 with a large grain of salt. But he provides an important reminder that we need to think big thoughts about the latest, greatest gadgets, even while we’re slavering over their cool new features.

In a similar vein but striking a different note, Adam Penenberg wrote, pre-iPad launch, that the “e-book . . . is, at best, a stopgap measure” (”Forget E-Books: The Future of the Book Is Far More Interesting,” Fast Company):

A visionary author could push the boundaries and re-imagine these books in wholly new ways. A novelist could create whole new realities, a pastiche of video and audio and words and images that could rain down on the user, offering metaphors for artistic expressions. Or they could warp into videogame-like worlds where readers become characters and through the expression of their own free will alter the story to fit. They could come with music soundtracks or be directed or produced by renowned documentarians. They could be collaborations or one-woman projects.

Visionary, perhaps, but also requiring a complete redefinition of the phrase ”writing a novel.”

And it’s been awhile since we had a good publisher screwup: Bloomsbury USA faced ire for putting a white girl on the cover of Jaclyn Dolamore’s Magic Under Glass, which has a dark-skinned heroine. (”Bloomsbury USA faces another race row over book cover,” by Alison Flood, Guardian). An honest mistake? Well, they did the same thing last year on Justine Larbalestier’s Liar. Those who cannot remember the mistakes of the past et cetera et cetera et cetera.

But author feuds are ever so much more fun! Fightin’ Martin Amis has proved that bold words sell newspapers, at least in Britain (”Martin Amis in new row over ‘euthanasia booths’,” by Caroline Davies, Guardian).

Now 60, Amis has picked a fight with the grey power of Britain’s ageing population, calling for euthanasia “booths” on street corners where they can terminate their lives with “a martini and a medal”.

Came one response:

“What are these death booths? Are they going to be a kind of superloo where you put in a couple of quid and get a lethal cocktail?”

Came another: Joan Brady, calling Amis an “aging provocateur” and quoting Shirley Maclaine, writes:

“You think it’s not going to happen to you,” she said, shaking her finger at the grinning younger man in the chair opposite her. “You just wait. It is going to happen.”

But, to be fair, Amis, who is a granddad, isn’t whistling in the dark. He had already said, “Well, I’m not a million miles away from that myself.”

On another writing note, last week HarperCollins launched inkpop, an interactive writing platform for teenagers.  What makes this site especially interesting is the fact that HarperCollins editors and authors review the site’s top selections and provide feedback to participating writers whom they think have potential. It’s a win-win for everyone!

Remember, first-time authors, even Madeleine L’Engle had to work herself out of the slush pile to get A Wrinkle in Time published.

The biggest question for us in the lit world is the one that makes us look the most like vultures: What’s in the vault? Like everyone else, I’m fascinated. Are there a few novels? Seven hundred short stories? Terminator fan fiction?

Over the decades since Salinger stopped publishing, there have been numerous reports of varying degrees of reliability that Salinger did in fact maintain a mythical stash. MSNBC reported today:

“I love to write and I assure you I write regularly,” Salinger said in a brief interview with the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate in 1980. “But I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.”"

The New York Times repeats a claim made by Joyce Maynard, an ex-lover, writing that she knew of at least two novels in a safe, also adding the following:

As for the fictional family the Glasses, Mr. Salinger had apparently been writing about them nonstop. Ms. Maynard said she saw shelves of notebooks devoted to the family.

And this enticing bit of gossip comes from his daughter’s tell-all, in which she explains her father’s organization system for dealing with his output:

A red mark meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this ‘as is,’ blue meant publish but edit first, and so on.

It’s nearly impossible to imagine that Salinger didn’t see this coming. As inward as his life had become, he was aware of his status in the world, and was unusually sensitive about it, too. Otherwise, would he have repeatedly withdrawn his plans of publishing Hapworth 16, 1924? Would he have rushed out with such vehemence to squash the publication of the so-called sequel? If he really wanted his unpublished works to vanish entirely, he needed to burn them.

I’m not someone who carries The Catcher in the Rye in his back pocket, but I haven’t been immune to the book’s influence. My favorite teacher in college, the brilliant Jay Holstein, put Catcher right alongside The Old Man and the Sea, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and the Book of Ecclesiastes. Holstein devoured the text. Was Catcher really a book about incest? What secrets were to be unlocked by the name of Holden’s brother, B.D.? There were things going on under the hood that I could only begin to understand; the fact that I understood even that was exciting.

This paragraph from the NYT piece strikes me the most:

In the fall of 1953 Mr. Salinger befriended some local teenagers, and allowed one of them to interview him for what he assumed would be an article on the high school page of a local paper, The Claremont (N.H.) Daily Eagle. The story appeared instead as a feature on the editorial page, and Mr. Salinger felt so betrayed that he broke off with the teenagers and built a six-and-a-half-foot fence around his property.

Maybe he thought that children, only children, could be trusted in this life. And when that was revealed to be untrue, then why not wall himself inside a fortress? It might be lonely in there, but at least there were no phonies. Or were there?

Best Novel

The Missing, by Tim Gautreaux

The Odds, by Kathleen George

The Last Child, by John Hart

Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, by Charlie Huston

Nemesis, by Jo Nesbø, translated, by Don Bartlett

A Beautiful Place to Die, by Malla Nunn

Best First Novel By an American Author

The Girl She Used to Be, by David Cristofano

Starvation Lake, by Bryan Gruley

The Weight of Silence, by Heather Gudenkauf

A Bad Day for Sorry, by Sophie Littlefield

Black Water Rising, by Attica Locke

In the Shadow of Gotham, by Stefanie Pintoff

Best Paperback Original

Bury Me Deep, by Megan Abbott

Havana Lunar, by Robert Arellano

The Lord God Bird, by Russell Hill

Body Blows, by Marc Strange

The Herring-Seller’s Apprentice, by L.C. Tyler

Best Fact Crime

Columbine, by Dave Cullen

Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, by Jeff Guinn

The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston’s Racial Divide, by Dick Lehr

Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art, by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo

Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa,  by R.A. Scotti

Best critical/Biographical

Talking About Detective Fiction, by P.D. James

The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler

Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King, by Lisa Rogak

The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, by Joan Schenkar

The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, by Bev Vincent

Best Short Story

“Last Fair Deal Gone Down” – Crossroad Blues, by Ace Atkins

“Femme Sole” – Boston Noir, by Dana Cameron

“Digby, Attorney at Law” – Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, by Jim Fusilli

“Animal Rescue” – Boston Noir, by Dennis Lehane

“Amapola” – Phoenix Noir, by Luis Alberto Urrea

Best Juvenile

The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity, by Mac Barnett

The Red Blazer Girls: The Ring of Rocamadour, by Michael D. Beil
 
Closed for the Season, by Mary Downing Hahn

Creepy Crawly Crime, by Aaron Reynolds

The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline, by Nancy Springer

Best Young Adult

Reality Check, by Peter Abrahams

If the Witness Lied, by Caroline B. Cooney

The Morgue and Me, by John C. Ford

Petronella Saves Nearly Everyone, by Dene Low

Shadowed Summer, by Saundra Mitchell

It is what it is, which, if you work in magazine land or comics world, is pretty exciting. I happen to work in both, so I’m pretty much slavering. No, it probably won’t kill the Kindle as an ebook reader (though that part of it does look waaay nicer), but where it’s light years ahead is in its rich graphical interface. This thing is the perfect comic reader. The model is here already with the iPhone comics readers, where you give ‘em a freebie with issue #1, then charge $.99 or so for the following issues. How easy is it to spend a buck you don’t even have to take out of your pocket to see what happens next to Atomic Robo? (Hint: bad news for Nazis.) But to have it be page-size rather than panel-size is a game-changer.

And how about magazines? How cool would it be to read Booklist on this thing as it appears in print, tap a review, and shoot over to all the neato stuff (find some similar title recommendations, see what else the author has written, immediately add it to a list for Baker & Taylor) we’ve got on Booklist Online, just like that! (/snaps fingers)

Even more, newpapers can chunk in videos right inside of articles–see ya, network newscasts! Chicago weatherman extraordinaire Tom Skilling can give me the forecast, but I’ll be the one in charge of zooming through and around all those high-tech weather models. I want to touch all of my media content on a gloriously glossy screen, and I want it yesterday. Let the saving of the publishing industry commence.

I’m sure there’s all manner of finer points, but that’s for tomorrow (or, you know, many tomorrows’ tomorrows). For today, I’m sold. Anyone got an extra $500 lying around?

Unlike last year’s winner, the panel of judges had nothing but glowing things to say about A Scattering:

Novelist Josephine Hart, who chaired the panel of judges, said his winning book, A Scattering was “good bordering on great,” and that when she said great she meant the likes of Yeats and Browning. “It is devastating piece of work and all of us on the jury felt it was a book we would wish everybody to read.”

Hart said the winner, decided by an 11-person jury, had been chosen by a “substantial” majority. The dissenters were happy for it to win, she said. (”Christopher Reid wins Costa book prize,” by Mark Brown, The Guardian) 

Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris

Personal Days, by Ed Park

e, by Matt Beaumont

Intuition, by Allegra Goodman

The Greatest Gift, by Danny Leigh

I read at my desk all the time, although only on lunch hour (even at a book-review journal we’re too busy to read), and what I read is determined more by what’s being published soon than my own personal whim. If publishers suddenly stopped publishing, I’d probably read more old books about pool – but then I’d be out of a job and I’d have all day to read.

What factors do you consider when bringing a book to work? Which help the day go faster (Lichtig suggests Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness and Tom Hodgkinson’s How To Be Free)  and which are best avoided?

For the complete list of finalists, visit the NBCC’s blog. Winners will be announced on March 11.

The Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) also gave out awards in Boston. Winners include Adriana Trigiani whose novel Very Valentine took top honors  in the women’s fiction categoryon the 2010 Reading List. Instead of giving a speech, Trigiani called her mother and gave away a prize:

For a complete list of RUSA winners, please visit their blog.

I particularly hope the news filters into the culture of young black men. Recently, while reading the newsletter on the web site for ALA’s Black Caucus, I ran across the unhappy statistic that 0.5 percent of the nation’s 110,000 librarians are black men. I’d never thought about it but was certainly aware that it was rare to see a black man behind the librarian’s desk, so rare that I guess that’s why I’d never thought about it. The newsletter featured profiles of several black men on staff at university libraries, community libraries and the Library of Congress.

So, I do hope the news reaches more young black men. Meanwhile, I struggle with the two of my own to get them reading more, whether they are destined for librarianship or not. The younger one, at 13,  has discovered books by author Anthony Horowitz and hopefully is moving beyond Manga.

The older one, at 21, suffers through my many recommendations but seems to feel that his reading list at Ohio Wesleyan University is enough for now. After reading CBS News correspondent Byron Pitts’ memoir, Step Out on Nothing: How Family and Faith Helped Me Conquer Life’s Challenges, and learning that he too went to Ohio Wesleyan, I slid the book across the kitchen table to my son (at home on spring break) and suggested he might enjoy a fellow commiserator on how dull Delaware, Ohio, is (all the better to study, I think). When my son got up to finish packing to return to school, the Pitts’ memoir remained on the kitchen table. (Months later, Pitts visited OWU on his book tour and got to reunite with professors he mentioned fondly in his book.) But recently, home for winter break, my son — entirely voluntarily — picked up my copy of The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther and asked if he could have it to read. Of course, I gushed “Of course!”