BOOKSHELF

AN INTERVIEW WITH DOROTHY FALL

SARAH STILLMAN, TRUTHDIG - When I recently stumbled upon Confucius'
ancient invective against armchair academics - "The scholar who
cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar" - I
couldn't help but wonder: In the unlikely event that the grumpy old
philosopher's words were enforced through the barrel of a gun, just how
many contemporary Western political scientists would be left standing?
Although your guess is as good as mine, I can assert one thing with
confidence: If I had to identify a single 20th-century thinker who could
save the fuzzy-sweatered clan from extinction on such an awkward
occasion, my money would be on the late French political scientist
Bernard Fall.

Sure, this unsung exemplar of rough-and-tumble scholarship met his
tragic death almost 40 years ago, stepping on a land mine in Vietnam
while conducting research for his eighth book on foreign interventions
in the region. But Fall's name is now witnessing a much-deserved
resurrection among activists and counterinsurgency experts as our nation
stumbles deeper into yet another catastrophic misadventure abroad,
tripping over familiar phrases like "stay the course" and "light at the
end of the tunnel" while the American death toll in Iraq climbs toward
3,000.

Against this Orwellian backdrop, Dr. Fall offers us a powerful model of
wartime scholarship at its least comfortable and most courageous. Never
content to pontificate on counterinsurgency from within the Ivory Tower,
Fall traveled frequently to Vietnam to catalogue body counts, survey
Vietminh tactics, and map fissures between official political rhetoric
and what he liked to call "hard facts." He then relayed his findings in
a wide array of popular publications like The Nation and Foreign
Affairs, as well as in scholarly books with telling names like "Hell in
a Very Small Place" and "Street Without Joy" (the latter celebrated as
"the definitive military history of the Indochina conflict" by the New
Republic).

Regarded as the first theorist to publicly document why American troops
were destined to repeat French failures in Vietnam, Fall paid the price
for this title in ways that might have prompted Confucius to stroke his
beard approvingly: He confronted jungle rot and dysentery during his
tropical fact-finding missions (much as he had at age 16, fighting in
the French Resistance against the Nazis), faced ostracism for his
politics within some camps of the academy, and endured wiretaps and
accusations of spying from the FBI.

But you needn't take my word on any of this. If you're eager for
details about Fall's larger-than-life biography or want proof of his
recent popular comeback, look no further than a new memoir by his widow
that hits bookstores this month, "Bernard Fall: Memories of a
Soldier-Scholar."

Drawing upon 30 years of interviews and newly released U.S. government
documents, Ms. Fall traces her late husband's transition from waging
guerrilla wars to theorizing them. She offers a compelling chronicle of
Fall's scholarship, tracking his escalating commitment to denouncing the
Vietnam War and helping us to grasp why such a diverse array of
government policymakers, public intellectuals and military leaders
viewed him as a critical ally.

All this is sandwiched between accounts of Dorothy Fall's own intimate
journey as a painter, a mother and-come that untimely telegram in 1967 -
a mourner. As a result, the prose sometimes tiptoes dangerously close
to the no man's land between biography and memoir - not quite
fine-toothed or rigorous enough to qualify as the former, but not quite
juicy or literary enough to qualify as the latter. But oddly, this is
precisely what many readers will grow to appreciate about Ms. Fall's
approach: Amidst the recent deluge of woe-is-me confessionals and
scholarly biographical tomes denser than Grandma's fruitcake, it's
refreshing to encounter a narrator who makes no attempts to woo us with
her labyrinthine footnotes or wow us with a peek at the skeletons in her
late husband's closet. Instead, she simply aims to tell us an important
story about her life with an extraordinary man who lost his mother to
Auschwitz and his father to the Gestapo, who cradled a gun in the French
Resistance and investigated Nazi war crimes as a teenager, who trudged
through jungles and rice paddies to document foreign blunders in
Vietnam, who won her heart with letters from the world's most dangerous
highway, and who suffered greatly to tell his version of the
truth-ultimately paying with his life to issue a cry against hubristic
U.S. interventions that echoes all the more urgently today.

http://www.truthdig.com/interview/item/200601003_the_un_quiet_frenchman

ORDER 'BERNARD FALL'
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=1574889575/progressiverevieA/

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NEW LEAP IN ON DEMAND BOOKS

ROWAN WALKER, OBSERVER, UK - A machine that electronically stores 2.5
million books that can then be printed and bound in less than seven
minutes is to be launched early next year. It prints in any language and
has an upper limit of 550 pages. The 'Espresso' will be launched first
in several US libraries. The company behind the project - On Demand
Books - predicts that, within five years, it will be able to reproduce
every book ever published. . . . It is estimated that the books will
cost less than 1p per page - but a machine of your own costs about
L25,000.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1980675,00.html

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INTEREST IN AUDIO BOOKS GROWING

NY TIMES - Unlike onscreen e-books, which never quite caught on,
downloadable audio books have taken off, driven by the explosive
popularity of the iPod.
According to the Audio Publishers Association, downloads have grown
sharply, rising to 9 percent of audio book sales in 2005; that is a 50
percent increase over the previous year. Audible.com, which pioneered
downloadable audio books nine years ago, also sells them through Itunes
and Amazon and has a membership model similar to that of Netflix; its
membership has grown 54 percent over the last year, to 345,200. Going
exclusively to a downloadable format saves publishers the expense of
duplication, packaging and distribution. And the savings are often
passed along. Audible's full-price version of "The Audacity of Hope" by
Barack Obama costs $20.97 (although various discounts are available),
while the CD version retails for $29.95; undiscounted, unabridged
versions of Michael Crichton's "Next" are $34.97 by download and $49.95
on CD.

Because of lower production costs, titles that a few years ago would not
have had audio versions at all are now being recorded; the decision is
based largely on projected hardcover sales. And if they prove popular
enough as downloads, some of those productions will eventually be made
into three-dimensional audio books.

With virtually no promotional budgets, audio book publishers rely on
riding the coattails of the print version's publicity, marketing and
advertising. (Book ads increasingly include "Also available as an audio
book," which audio publishers, protractedly battling the belief that
listeners are readers' intellectual inferiors, consider a breakthrough.)
So while the success of a download-only title on Audible.com is a factor
in determining whether to release a CD, publishers still link that
decision more closely to hardcover sales.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/books/04audio.html?ref=arts

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THE END OF MACWBER BOOKS

NY TIMES, PRINCETON, NJ - Logan Fox can't quite pinpoint the moment when
movies and television shows replaced books as the cultural topics people
liked to talk about over dinner, at cocktail parties, at work. He does
know that at Micawber Books, his 26-year-old independent bookstore here
that is to close for good in March, his own employees prefer to come in
every morning and gossip about "Survivor" or "that fashion reality show"
whose title he can't quite place. Shoppers used to spend hours in
Micawber Books picking just the right book, the store's owner said.

"It kills me," Mr. Fox, 53, said over coffee on Friday afternoon,
shaking his head. "The amount of time spent discussing culturally iconic
shows has superseded anything in the way of books that I can detect.
Discussing books is very much one on one. It just hurts me.". . .

Mr. Fox said that Micawber's first chain competitor, Encore Books,
arrived in the mid-1990s, and his sales plummeted 25 percent, nearly
putting him out of business. Soon after, Barnes & Noble and Borders came
to town. And then there was Amazon.com.

But beyond those factors, Mr. Fox said, he blames a change in American
culture, in the quickening pace of people's lives, in the shrinking
willingness to linger. During the 1980s, in the store's early days,
customers would come in and stay all afternoon, carefully inspecting the
books that were packed tightly together, spine to spine. . .

[Another] crisis for independent booksellers, Mr. Fox said, is the
current state of publishing. The job of building writers' reputations
and nurturing them has fallen to agents, he said. Publishers are
concerned only with the bottom line, he added, looking for the home run
instead of the single. . .

Independent bookstores across the country are suffocating, squeezed by
Amazon.com and the chain bookstores that deliver deeper discounts and
wider variety than independent shops. According to the American
Booksellers Association, a trade group of independent bookstores, there
are about 2,500 such stores in the United States, down from about 4,700
in 1993. And that is not counting those that sell only used books.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/books/03mica.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin


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