John Vaillant has won a Governor General's Literary Award in the non-fiction category for his book, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed. Described by the Governor General’s jury as the quintessential Canadian story, The Golden Spruce brings to life the story of a furious logger who destroyed a famous, beloved 300 year old tree on Queen Charlotte’s Island in 1997, outraging environmentalists and lumbermen alike.
The Governor General’s Literary Award, which comes with a $15,000 purse, is under the aegis of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Ann Arbor has dozens of lively book groups, some of which may need to fuel their fires and lengthen their lists this winter. If you don’t mind being slightly behind publishing trends, consider titles that were popular about a year ago. The library is likely to have more copies of these than of current bestsellers. One example is the 2004 book “Truth and Beauty: A Friendship,” by Ann Patchett. The book chronicles Patchett’s long-time friendship with writer Lucy Grealy "Autobiography of a Face”, and how that friendship changed over time. The writing is just as good and the story just as compelling as on the day the book was published.

Jeanne Birdsall has won the 2005 National Book Award in the Young People's Literature category. The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and Very Interesting Boy won the coveted award for this first-time author. It is the story of a widowed botany professor and his four daughters who spend a summer in the Berkshires.
A reviewer for School Library Journal said, "Problems are solved and lessons are learned in this wonderful, humorous book that features characters whom readers will immediately love, as well as a superb writing style. Bring on more of the Penderwicks!"

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

The Gettysburg Address:
Lincoln at Gettysburg: the Words That Remade America by Garry Wills
November: Lincoln’s Elegy at Gettysburg by Kent Gramm

The Battle:
Gettysburg by Stephen W. Sears
Hallowed Ground: a Walk at Gettysburg by James M. McPherson

Michigan at the Battle:
The 4th Michigan Volunteer Infantry at Gettysburg: the Battle of the Wheatfield by Martin Bertera

A Multi-cultural View of the Battle:
The Colors of Courage: Gettyburg’s Hidden History: Immigrants, Women, and African-Americans in the Civil War’s Defining Battle by Margaret S. Creighton

Last night, William T. Vollmann’s searing complicated epic, Europe Central, received the much-coveted National Book Award in the fiction category. The NBA judges described Vollmann’s 811 page masterpiece as…”heroic art, the writer’s courageous immersion in totalitarian ugliness to retrieve forgotten moral heroes…”

Vollmann, 46, won over four other formidable finalists:

E.L. Doctorow for The March
Mary Gaitskill for Veronica
Christopher Sorrentino for Trance
Renè Steinke for Holy skirts

Winners in the other categories of the 2005 National Book Awards are:

Young People’s Literature

Jeanne Birdsall for The Penderwicks – for more details on this title, watch the upcoming blog from Kidlit

Poetry

W.S. Merwin for Migration: New and Selected Poems

Non-fiction

Joan Didion for The Year of Magical Thinking

Mr. Vollmann considered himself such an underdog, given his competition, that, when presented with the National Book Foundation’s sculpture and check for $10,000, said, “I thought I would lose, so I didn’t prepare a speech.”

November 14 through November 20 is Children's Book Week. Try some folktales from around the world and celebrate with us. From Persia try Three Princes, or Rose's Smile.

November 14 through November 20 is Children's Book Week. Try some folktales from around the world and celebrate with us. From Russia try Russian Folk-Tales, Matreshka or Tale of the Tsar Saltan.

November 14 through November 20 is Children's Book Week. Try some folktales from around the world and celebrate with us. In the "What a Doll" program the following stories were featured. The story "Grateful Statues" is from Japanese Children's Favorite Stories and Juan Bobo and the Pig.

David Westheimer, author of the Von Ryan’s Express (1964), died yesterday in Los Angeles.

The former WWII POW and later editor of the former Houston Post newspaper, used his wartime experience to pen Von Ryan’s Express which was made into a movie by the same name a year later, and starred Frank Sinatra and Trevor Howard. In 1980, Westheimer wrote the sequel, Van Ryan’s Return.

Westheimer also wrote My Sweet Charlie (1965), which became a Broadway play in 1966 and which netted Patty Duke an Emmy for the TV adaptation in 1970.

Vine Deloria, Jr., generally considered by historians and anthropologists to be the most important spokesperson for Native American issues for the last thirty-five years, died November 13, 2005.

Deloria exploded into the national consciousness in 1969 with his incendiary Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto.

Several of his other writings – God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (1973), Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (1974), and Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (1995) – showcased his dual background training as both a student of theology and an attorney.