Our Work

Susannah Rosenblatt on Scottish-style whisky-making in Taiwan

Susannah Rosenblatt, who reports from Taiwan, landed a centerpiece story for Monday's International Herald-Tribune (the global NY Times edition) on a Taiwanese firm trying to make Scottish-style whisky. It is, she reports, a pretty good effort. From her story:

 YILAN, TAIWAN — In a sweltering, five-story warehouse on this subtropical island, T.T. Lee’s brash ambitions are ripening in 35,000 aged oak barrels.

Laboring against climactic conditions and established Western competitors, Mr. Lee, a beverage magnate, has built Kavalan, the first whisky distillery in Taiwan.

Kavalan might seem like a quixotic attempt to vault Taiwan into the $41 billion global whisky business, given that the island is about as far from the Scottish highlands as one can get. But it is producing nine million bottles annually at its facility with mountain views.

Yet to connoisseurs’ shock, the upstart brand managed to beat British labels at a blind tasting in January during a Burns Night, which celebrates the poet Robert Burns — a public relations coup that the company says has tripled sales. Industry watchers are starting to take notice.

“That place gets my pulse racing because of the possibilities of what they’re doing there,” said Jim Murray, author of the book, “Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible.”

Rosenblatt, a former L.A. Times staffer and political campaign reporter, is based in Taiwan, where she has written on a wide range of subjects, including the occasional movie review and book review, and blogs at Hsinchu Asked.

Scott Martelle on Scott Turow and the return of Rusty Sabich

Our Scott Martelle had a piece in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend on Scott Turow and his sequel to the 1987 groundbreaking novel, "Presumed Innocent." Turow's new novel, "Innocent," picks up with lawyer -- now judge -- Rusty Sabich, whose trial formed the core of the original novel. And yes, Sabich is accused of murder again. From the story:

 [I]t helped make Turow a rich man. In a harbinger of Hollywood deals to come, Sydney Pollack bought the film rights for $1 million before the book even came out in August 1987. The paperback rights quickly sold for $3 million — a record for a debut novel.

Yet "Presumed Innocent" also propelled what had been a marginal genre — the legal thriller — to the top of the bestseller list, paving the way for successors such as John Grisham. 

And now, 23 years later, Sabich is back in full as the main character in "Innocent" (Grand Central: 408 pp., $27.99), Turow's latest. Another body has been found, and this time the victim is Sabich's wife. While Sabich's innocence is again presumed, it's not so clear that he really is. 

"When you write books, something grabs at you, and it's often years later that you understand what it is you're trying to do, and what it is that's moving you," Turow says. "For whatever reason, it felt like I just needed to check back in with this guy."

Scott Martelle on coal, mining deaths and history

Our Scott Martelle has an op-ed in this morning's Los Angeles Times linking the recent deaths in Massey Energy's West Virginia coal mine with the 96th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre, which occurred during a Colorado coal strike over issues that included mine safety. But the parallels, he finds, go deeper - and stem from the coal operators' resistance to regulation. From his piece:

But there had been no defusing the conflict in Colorado, where the mine owners — led by the Rockefellers' Colorado Fuel & Iron Co. — were so powerful that they effectively created their own laws, stole elections at will and installed mine superintendents to rule small fiefdoms enforced by hired thugs. 

As if short-circuiting democracy wasn't bad enough, the coal operators ignored government safety regulations, considering them an intrusion on their right to make a profit. In the eyes of the Rockefellers' man in Colorado, Lamont Montgomery Bowers, the miners had a simple choice: Work under the operators' terms or find another job, safety be damned.

Don Blankenship, who runs Massey Energy, would have fit right in.

Janet Wilson weighs in on a couple of enviro books

Our Janet Wilson, former environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, takes a look in the San Francisco Chronicle at a couple of new books, "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet," by Bill McKibben and "How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth's Climate," by Jeff Goodell.

The short version: We may have already blown it. From Wilson's review:

Forget 2050. We're already cooked. Thanks to the greenhouse gases we've piled into the atmosphere, the natural world as we knew it is gone. It's time to figure out how to preserve what's left. 

That's the in-your-face conclusion of "How to Cool the Planet" and "Eaarth" - so spelled because the old Earth is dead. But Jeff Goodell's and Bill McKibben's books - timed for Earth Day, on Thursday - diverge dramatically in exploring solutions to an altered planet that "represents the deepest of human failures," in McKibben's words.

Scott Martelle on Elif Batuman and Russian literature

Our Scott Martelle has this review in the Cleveland Plain Dealer of "Possessed," a debut collection of literary travelogue essays by Elif Batuman. From his review:

If you're honest with yourself, you'll admit that when you hear "Russian literature," you think of college classes you wish you'd cut -- and books that can seem as long as a Siberian winter.

But in this delightful debut, Elif Batuman makes you look at Russian literature from a fresh perspective, using an unusual blend of memoir and travelogue as she delves into the lives and personalities of such Russian literary giants as Isaac Babel, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy.

Many of the chapters are extensions of pieces Batuman first wrote for The New Yorker and n+1 and range geographically from Palo Alto, Calif., where Batuman managed to lose one of Babel's daughters at the local airport, to Uzbekistan, where Batuman spent a few months studying Uzbek. 

In a sense, the details of Batuman's essays are less significant than the tone. She cruises through minor crises with an air of detached amusement, eye focused on the little absurdities that make travel -- and people -- fun.

Nancy Wride helps familiarize kids with the elements of writing

Nancy Wride was mentioned in this recent story in the Long Beach Press-Telegram on a program she helped coordinate that exposes students to the mechanics of writing and putting together books. See, we're not just about our own writing here. 

Wride was a longtime LA Times staffer, and now works freelance from Long Beach. The program is a series of six free workshops called "Authors and Illustrators Night" at Lowell Bayside Academy. 

Sponsored by the local PTA, the program links students with professional authors and illustrators, who guide them through the process of conceiving and writing a story, then creating a book.

Kris Lindgren on Bob Dylan, lyrics and illustrations

Our colleague Kris Lindgren, who knows her way around rock and roll and the book world, has a piece in today's LA Times on "Bob Dylan Revisited," a collection of illustrators' takes on Dylan's lyrics. From Lindgren's article:

"Why, one wonders, would anyone feel the need to illustrate the lyrics of the most evocative of modern songwriters? Do such Bob Dylan lines as 'Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night,' 'I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways' or 'the cracked bells and washed-out horns / blow into my face with scorn' really require graphic interpretation? That depends, of course, on the illustrators."

The book is out from W.W. Norton, and includes such illustrators as Dave McKean, Gradimir Smudja and Lorenzo Mattotti.  

Catching up with some busy co-op members

While we were focusing on the three-part survey of our former colleagues at the LA Times, co-op members have been busy with a wide range of articles. A bit of a round up:

Nancy Wride has begun blogging for The Good Men Project, and has this piece on the recent stage shared by "Mad Men" creator Matt Weiner, artist Shepard Fairey (of Obama/Hope-showdown-with-Associated Press fame), Good Men Project film producer/director Matt Gannon and Good Men Project cofounder Tom Matlack.

Jim Gerstenzang had an op-ed piece he co-authored published in The Detroit News and in The Baltimore Sun, arguing that the government should use mandates instead of relying on market forces to demand higher gas mileage from motor vehicles. Gerstenzang is editorial director for the Safe Climate Campaign, and co-wrote the piece with Dan Becker, the director.

And Scott Martelle had a profile of Terry Teachout and his new biography, "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong" in the LA Times.

Susannah Rosenblatt and the China lover - it's not what you're thinking

Susannah Rosenblatt -- if we had bureaus she'd be our Hsinchu Bureau Chief -- has a piece in The China Post on Ian Buruma's second novel, "The China Lover." It's a bit of an over-reach, she says:  

"The story is most exciting in Part One, set in the lawless melting pot of 1930s Manchuria, where Jewish merchants rub elbows with Russian gangsters and Chinese peasants cower from ruthless Japanese occupiers. Buruma deftly sprinkles rich historical detail, from influential books of the period to lovely sketches of village life, with political intrigue and the omnipresence of ceremony and obligation in Japanese culture. 

"Part Two is also lively, with surprising cameos by American luminaries like Truman Capote, and takes a gentle swipe at the pretension of the mid-century modern art world. 

"Things start to fall apart in Part Three, in which an aimless porn maker writes scripts for Yamaguchi's TV program. Improbably, the story detours to Palestine in the shortest and most hastily rendered portion of the book. Here, Buruma attempts to link Japanese history with modern revolutions in the Middle East, but the dramatic change of venue and violent denouement overreach."

Scott Martelle on Clarence Clemons' memoir, 'Big Man,' and his life in the E Street Band

Scott Martelle, a rather productive freelance book critic (who also does general assignment features and profiles), appeared in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer Sunday with a short review of "Big Man," a three-pronged memoir by Clarence Clemons, the sax-playing sideman in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. 

The book was written with TV producer Don Reo, a longtime friend of Clemons'. This is from Martelle's review:

" The format here is promising, a triptych of short segments by Clemons and Reo augmented by uneven "legends" vignettes spun out of possibly real Clemons encounters with Norman Mailer, Kinky Friedman, Thomas Pynchon and others. Some of these work as satirical takes on music and rock celebrity -- like a "Shouts & Murmurs" piece in The New Yorker. 

"Unfortunately, the Clemons sections, which seem to have been ghost-written by Reo, hover at the surface. Even the news that Clemons, already suffering from bad hips and knees, suffered a mild heart attack slides into the book almost as an afterthought."

Martelle, a 12-year veteran at the Los Angeles Times, has recently had reviews and author pieces appear in the LA Times and the Washington Post, and has written profiles for Publishers Weekly, as well as travel pieces and other magazine profiles. He also is an author, finishing up his second work of history for Rutgers University Press.