New York Times 2011'in en iyi 100 Dikkate Değer Kitabı

Temsilcisi bulunduğum  Henry Holt yayınevinin iki kitabı  New York Times'ın, 2011 yılının en iyi 100 Dikkate Değer Kitabı listelerinde yayınlandı.

MIDNIGHT RISING by Tony Horwitz, ABD'li kölecilik karşıtı, isyancı John Brown’un Ferry şehrine yaptığı baskın ile ilgili tarihi bir kitap.

AND SO IT GOES by Charles Shields, Kurt Vonnegut'un biyografisi

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2011.html?pagewanted=3&_r=2&src=twr

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AND SO IT GOES. Kurt Vonnegut:Bir Yaşam: Dresden'den, annesinin intiharına, çok sevdiği kardeşinin zamansız ölümüne, bir dizi mutsuz evliliği ve edebi kaygılarına kadar Vonnegut'a "Kederli Adam" ünvanını kazandıran olaylar zincirleri ve bu çalışkan adamın hayatındaki yürek burkan kesitler....

MIDNIGHT RISING: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. Amerika'nın en sıkıntılı tarihi şahsiyetlerden birinin Horwitz'in usta kalemiyle anlatısı.

AND SO IT GOES by Charles Shields was reviewed in today’s New York Times.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/books/charles-j-shieldss-and-so-it-goes-on-vonnegut-review.html NEW YORK TIMES
November 2, 2011Vonnegut in All His ComplexityBy JANET MASLINAND SO IT GOESKurt Vonnegut: A LifeBy Charles J. ShieldsIllustrated. 513 pages. Henry Holt & Company. $30. Charles J. Shields got nowhere with Harper Lee when he tried to interview her for the 2006 biography “Mockingbird.” But he got lucky with Kurt Vonnegut. Mr. Shields found a lonely talkative octogenarian who had scores to settle and a reputation that badly needed restoring. Vonnegut had once told Martin Amis that the only way he could regain credit for his early work, those books from the 1950s and 1960s once so beloved by college kids, would be to die. He died on April 11, 2007, less than a year after Mr. Shields first approached him. And the two did not spend much time together. But Vonnegut gave the go-ahead that has allowed Mr. Shields to construct “And So It Goes,” an incisive, gossipy page-turner of a biography, even if it’s hard to tell just how authorized this book really is. Denied permission to quote from Vonnegut’s letters, Mr. Shields relies on paraphrases and patchwork to create a seamless-sounding account. Astonishingly, this book has nearly 1,900 notes to identify separate sources and quotations. But it doesn’t sound choppy at all.Although he does not acknowledge it, Mr. Shields shares the slick commercial instincts that shaped Vonnegut’s early career. He has written about Central America, sexual disorders, test taking, Saddam Hussein, Martha Stewart and Buffalo Bill Cody in books never meant for the mainstream. Vonnegut began his career with journalism, writing public relations copy and paperbacks that were sold in drugstores (although those paperbacks, “Player Piano” and “The Sirens of Titan,” would be reprinted with the requisite fanfare some day). He was married, in his mid-40s and a father of three, teaching at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (“This clown is going to teach us how to write?”) by the time he became an overnight sensation.Mr. Shields is not shy about using the words “a definitive biography of an extraordinary man” to describe his book. “And So It Goes” is quick to trumpet its biggest selling points. Mr. Shields means to separate image from perception: He depicts Vonnegut as an essentially conservative Midwesterner, proud of his German heritage and capitalist instincts, who developed an aura of radical chic. He also describes a World War II isolationist who aligned himself with Charles A. Lindbergh yet became an antiwar literary hero. And he finds a life-affirming humanist sensibility in a writer celebrated for black humor. How this man would eventually be recruited to brainstorm with the Jefferson Airplane and be hipper than his own children are among the mysteries on which Mr. Shields casts light.“And So It Goes” also traces the paradoxes in Vonnegut’s personal life. He was widely regarded as a lovable patriarch, for instance, at a time when he had left his large family behind. He also sustained a populist reputation even when he developed a high social profile in New York with the photographer Jill Krementz, his second wife. Ms. Krementz, who is called “hard-wired to the bowels of hell” by Vonnegut’s son, Mark, clearly did not cooperate with Mr. Shields. The book takes frequent whacks at her, holding her accountable for much of the unhappiness in Vonnegut’s last years.Mr. Shields provides a good assessment of misconceptions about Vonnegut’s writing. Those impressions persisted throughout his later life, perhaps because the books that followed “Cat’s Cradle,” “The Sirens of Titan,” “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” and “Slaughterhouse-Five” became increasingly unreadable.“On the strength of Vonnegut’s reputation, ‘Breakfast of Champions’ spent a year on the best-seller lists,” Mr. Shields writes of that 1973 disappointment, “proving that he could indeed publish anything and make money.” Although he is clearly conversant with Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater, Montana Wildhack and other “denizens of a zany Yoknapatawpha County for the Vonnegut faithful,” Mr. Shields could have spent a lot more time on the planet Tralfamadore without boring his readers.Vonnegut and his first wife, Jane, raised three orphaned nephews as well as their own three children, in a cacophonous house on Cape Cod. “There was a definite disconnect,” one of them says, between his whimsical writerly sweetness (one critic labeled him “an ideal writer for the semiliterate young”) and irascible manner. And for the first part of his writing career Vonnegut successfully compartmentalized his familial and writerly personas. But eventually they began to blend, as Mr. Vonnegut made himself more of an explicit persona in his writing (sometimes melding with Kilgore Trout). He reached “a tipping point in the balance between fresh narrative and essayistic memoir,” Mr. Shields maintains. And once the real experiences and opinions took over, allowing him to trade on his celebrity, he became a target of vituperative attack.“This is a speech I’ve given a hundred times, but I do it to make money,” Mr. Vonnegut told an audience in the days when his charm began to wane. “And So It Goes” depicts him as living in his “own private rain,” stuck in a “hexed” second marriage, nursing grudges and running out of writerly inspiration. When he accepted a fellowship at Smith College in the fall of 2000, the student newspaper complained bitterly: “Deify Celebs Much, Smith?” The paper ran an editorial asking, “How many of you read your first Vonnegut book in August?” “And So It Goes” isn’t a book to rekindle the popularity of its subject’s work. Mr. Shields acknowledges that much of it was too time specific to age well. But it offers a potent account of struggle, popularity and painful longevity, which extended to the point where Vonnegut could toss off little bits of “news from nowhere” and not much else. Twitter might have suited him perfectly if he were still here.