Between the Covers

Travel to the world's coldest places while sweating by your pool

Another 90-plus day, and many more in sight for the next few months. You think: Hey, if I walk the dogs at 7:30 a.m. it won't be so hot. Wrong. It's muggy and hot, and not even a freezing cold shower can make you feel any better about being outside.

And so I find myself drawn to biologist Bill Streever's Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places. Streever, who chairs the North Slope Science Initiative's Science Technical Advisory Panel in Alaska (whew) and has served on a climate change advisory panel, writes about all sorts of cold: avalanches, glaciers, snowflakes, frostbite. He writes about Shackleton, hibernation, the Ice Age and other elements of cold.

"We fail to see cold for what it is," Streever writes, "the absence of heat, the slowing of molecular motion, a sensation, a perception, a driving force."

Here in Florida we usually fail to see it at all, unless someone drops the thermostat too low. So Cold holds a certain appeal at this brutal time of a year, when Streever's dip into an Arctic swimming hole doesn't sound crazy at all but positively refreshing.

Cold hits shelves July 22.

Memoirist Frank McCourt gravely ill

Frank McCourt is seriously ill with meningitis and not expected to survived, the Associated Press is reporting.

AP spoke with McCourt's brother Malachy (also an author), who said the author of Angela's Ashes and 'Tis, is in a New York hospice, his "faculties shutting down." He had recently been treated for melanoma, but Malachy said his brother had been doing well until about two weeks ago.

"Sense and Sensibility" gets a Quirky makeover

Publisher of the campy hit Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Quirk has announced its next Jane Austen mashup in its Quirk Classics series: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. I know, I know. Sea Monsters lack the panache and appeal of the living dead. I mean, they live in the sea, just don't go in it and you're safe, right? How hard can that be? I don't even go into the ocean if there are jellyfish.

The book, according to Publisher's Weekly, is due out Sept. 15 and concerns what happens when "the Dashwood sisters, evicted from their childhood home by their conniving stepmother, land on a mysterious island full of man-eating sea creatures, instead of a nearby, downgraded, English cottage," writes PW.

First printing is 200,000 copies, but you have to wonder: can sea monsters even come close to tapping into the zombie craze?

Read the full story here.

Coming soon: "Twilight" comic

EW.com reports that Little, Brown will be publishing Stephenie Meyer's Twilight in graphic novel form. You know, since there just is too much Bella and Edward lovin' to remain confined to mere books.

Meyer, says EW, is "deeply immersed" in the project and will be reviewing every panel herself.

Click here to read more - and to see a sketch.

Daniel Radcliffe on the end (almost!) of "Harry Potter"

There is light at the end of the Harry Potter tunnel, and Daniel Radcliffe can finally see it. The sixth film in the franchise, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, opens Wednesday, which leaves one book and two movies to go for Radcliffe, who turns 20 later this month.

We talked to the man who has played J.K. Rowling's young wizard about life with -- and after -- Harry.

Q: Does it get easier to play Harry as the series progresses?

A: It's easier to play in the sense that I feel like I'm getting better. But whenever I feel I'm improving, the part gets more challenging. The funny thing about acting as a profession is how rewarding it can be the more seriously you take it. The more challenging it is, the more fun you can have with it.

Q: How did you prepare for the emotional scenes in Half-Blood Prince ?

A: What's interesting about Harry is how he resists showing emotion. He is trying desperately to keep it together. So I try to isolate myself on the set. Normally I go around talking to everyone, blah blah blah, but when I have to do that kind of scene I stay to myself. Sometimes you do take it home with you. The worst is when you do a big emotional scene, and you don't feel you're getting it right. Then when you go home, it's open-a-vein time.

Q: Can you imagine a life without Harry Potter ?

A: I think it will be very strange. Previously, when I've done other films or Equus onstage, I've always done them knowing I'm going to come back to the safe haven of Harry Potter. . . . I'm used to having Harry to punctuate chapters of my life. But when we finish the films, it will be time to move on. I certainly want to do more stage work, as much as I can. I take it as seriously as I take film.

Q: What was it like doing the nude scene in Equus ?

A: I'm not pretending that I'm the most confident person about my body. I worry like everybody does! But if you take the job, you take what comes with it. I wanted to do the play. People thought it was going to be gratuitous, but it's not like that. It's a tender and awful and important scene. I had a great time doing it, and it was the most important thing I've done in my career in terms of letting people know I was willing to work hard. People are cynical about young people; they think we don't want to work hard.

Q: What will you miss most when the series ends?

A: Being with all my friends. I'll know them all for the rest of my life, and we'll be friends, but we won't be working together.

Q: Do you still attract screaming girls, or have they turned their sights on Rob Pattinson?

A: Thankfully he's taken the heat off me. I'd like to publicly thank him for that! No, I get a few, but you have to remember they're screaming for someone else, not me.

CLICK HERE TO READ HERALD MOVIE CRITIC RENE RODRIGUEZ'S REVIEW OF "THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE"

 

Farrah's friend to publish diary about former Angel

Farrah Fawcett's close friend Alana Stewart (as in, she used to be married to Rod Stewart) is publishing a diary she kept while the late actress battled cancer, reports the Associated Press.

The book, called My Journey with Farrah, will be published by William Morrow and is due out in August. Some - the story does not say how much - of the proceeds will go to the Farrah Fawcett Foundation for cancer research. 

I truly hope some money goes to the foundation, because otherwise this whole thing seems kind of exploitive to me.

What are you reading now?

``Thanks perhaps to the rainy Boston summer, I'm in an Irish mood. I just finished Neil Jordan's brilliant novel Shade, about a murdered starlet who tells her tragic life story from beyond the grave. I'm now reading Stalking Irish Madness, an unforgettable memoir by Boston writer Patrick Tracey, who travels to Ireland to find the origins of his family's long history of schizophrenia. Great stuff.''

JENNIFER HAIGH, author of The Condition

Haigh appears at 8 p.m. Wednesday at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave. in Coral Gables.

Don Draper - the reason for "Atlas Shrugged" sales?

The Ayn Rand Institute reports that Penguin USA has shipped more than 300,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged to bookstores, distributors, chains, online resellers, libraries, businesses and other institutions in the first half of 2009.

Compare that number to the first half of 2008: Penguin shipped 85,000 copies. According to the institute, 7 million copies of the book have sold since it was published in 1957, many of those by high school or college kids, I'm sure, who had little interest in Rand's philosophy.

What could have happened in a year to spark such interest?  The folks at the Rand Institute seem to believe it's the book itself that is luring readers. But those of us with DVD players know better. It's Mad Men. Specifically, Mad Men on DVD.

The AMC series about the heady days of advertising - you know, when you could chainsmoke and drink at work and treat the secretaries as a sort of sexual smorgasbord - mentions Rand and/or Atlas Shrugged quite a few times, as Don Draper's boss likes to remind him he's Rand's ideal man every now and again.

This, by the way, is Don Draper (with his lovely wife Betty):

  

See what I mean? I'm not so sure it's Rand's theory of objectivism that's drawing people.

Self-published author gets book deal via Kindle

Some readers may have issues with Amazon's Kindle, but author Boyd Morrison is definitely not one of them. Crunch Gear reports that Morrison has sold two books (one called The Ark) to Simon & Schuster after uploading and selling the books himself via Kindle. He was an active member of KindleBoards.

 CG writes that he'll be published in hardback in 2010. Read more here.

Harry Potter movies vs. books

In honor of the sixth Harry Potter movie - the one about that Half-Blood Prince - Michelle Kerns compares the books to the films over at examiner.com, sorting out what worked and what didn't in each of the films so far.

My favorite line: "In 157 minutes, Goblet of Fire barely takes a single misstep."  Yes. Loved Goblet. Thank you for chopping all that nonsense with the utterly boring house elves.

Click here to read the story.