Oooh, this is a good one. My writer friends have been quite busy. I have two books to give away now and will have two more titles to give away in another week or so. What must you do to get these books sent to you absolutely free?

You DON’T win by leaving a comment on this blog item.

You DON’T win by leaving a comment on the Facebook post about this blog item.

You DO win by dropping me a line (immediately!) via EMAIL to hank [at] hankstuever [dot] com.

Here are today’s books:

American Savage: Insights, Slights and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love and Politics by Dan Savage. Advice columnist. Podcaster. Public intellectual. And probably the only person I know who actually looks good (and thoughtful) while resting his face in his palm. Yes, it’s Dan Savage, the man with more horse-sense than all of us put together, and he has a new book out of fresh thought and collected wisdom about sex (of course), monogamy (and monogamishness), marriage, gay rights, bigotry — the whole wonderful package. Lots of rave reviews already, and, as always, plenty of raving lunatics too. I bought mine, plus TWO COPIES GONE! THANKS FOR PLAYING. to give away. Dan was in Washington over the weekend and we had lunch and I was on the ball enough to get these copies signed for you.

There’s a lot to absorb and think about in American Savage, but Dan says don’t overlook the epigraph in the front from A.E. Housman’s poem “The Laws of God, the Laws of Man”:

And if my ways are not as theirs

Let them mind their own affairs.

Their deeds I judge and much condemn,

Yet when did I make laws for them?

The One-Man Book Club has been meeting in secret for quite some time over at Goodreads, if you ever feel like following along. I’ve been slowly going back through my shelves and adding thoughts and reviews of books I read years ago. For some reason, all this time I’ve managed to never notice a neato widget where I can add my Goodreads reviews to this blog. Here are some recent reads, and there are plenty more where these came from …

Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

An embroidered and loose-with-facts (see her disclaimer all the way at the end of the book) highly-creative memoir from someone that a more charitable person might call “difficult.” (I believe another word for it is a–hole.) I found it almost impossible to enjoy her yarns about food and restaurateur-ship through all her bitterness and cultural snobbery and necessity to blur/alter years, facts and people in service to the “momentum” of her memoir. On page 29, she gets the year and album title wrong for a Barbra Streisand song (“What Kind of Fool”) which she claims her father listened to “over and over and over” — more than a year before the album was on sale. It’s a little thing, true, but the little things matter. If the confabulation doesn’t matter to you, and you aren’t alienated by her personality and style, then there are several chapters here about food and professional kitchen stress that anyone can enjoy.

Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: And all the Brilliant Minds Who Made The Mary Tyler Moore Show a Classic by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Books about TV history are hard to do; the risk of being boring is pretty high. Also, I tend to think that there’s sometimes no faster way to ruin the pleasure of a good TV show memory than to read a 300-page book about it. There’s a lot to juggle — the story of How It Was Made + the reader’s (and writer’s) nostalgia + the Social Meaning and Historical Context + all the insidery network poop about ratings, executive decisions, Emmys, etc.

While reading Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s history and analysis of the impact of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” I kept coming back to that dreaded book-review word: “uneven.” There are some great stories in here, well-reported, clearly organized. It’s sort of enthralling to read along as the MTM Show (and the subsequent MTM juggernaut of sitcoms and drama) comes together and recovers from a disastrous start.

But the writing is often clunky, especially in long passages that try to put the whole thing in a social context. There is also a lot of stating-the-obvious. The book recovers near the end when detailing the afterlife of the show and its actors, then dips back down into term-paper talk and pop-contextualizing. This book felt like it was one more edit away from finished, but it was worth reading.



View all my reviews

The Police album Synchronicity is 30 years old on June 1. And so is everything else about the summer of 1983.

Mowing the lawn. Standing in line for Return of the Jedi. Mowing the lawn. “Every Breath You Take.” Mowing the lawn. The B-52s Whammy tour at the Oklahoma City Zoo Amphitheater (Red Rockers opened). Mowing the lawn. The Gatorade slushies at the snack bar at the Woodlake Racquet Club. Mowing the lawn. John “Devo” Devero’s zippy little Nissan. Mowing the lawn. The Uncanny X-Men. Mowing the lawn. National Lampoon’s Vacation. Mowing the lawn. Stephen King novels. Mowing the lawn. The first time I told the haircut lady that I’d like my hair to be a little bit longer in the back and then shorter on top and in the front. Mowing the lawn. My Rolling Stone subscription. Mowing the lawn. Discovering a copy of the Village Voice at the newsstand of the Penn Square B. Dalton’s and trying to figure out where, precisely, this “village” was located. Mowing the lawn. “Burning Down the House.” Mowing the lawn. The second time my father and I went to see Flashdance (which we’d already seen the week before, on our weekly pizza-and-a-movie night, as per some documented or unspoken custody arrangement). Mowing the lawn. Turning 15. Mowing that fucking lawn.

The average person inhales and exhales about 6,286,920 times a year. That’s about 189 million breaths since “Every Breath You Take” was everybody’s favorite song.

UPDATE, 6/1/13: Miss Gradenko checked in and reports that she is completely safe.

Here’s a secret about Oklahoma City that I wonder if the New York Times and other national news outlets could ever pick up on while they cover the horrible aftermath of the May 20 tornado in Moore, Okla.: It’s a big place out there.

Oklahoma City encompasses more than 600 square miles in all, including the little burbs and towns that overlap and intersect with it. There are parts of town and sides of town — and with those descriptions come all the standard American psychic and actual boundaries of sentimentality, loyalty, school districts, train tracks, rivers, interstates, race, class, tax assessments. These distinctions fall completely away in times of need and disaster, especially tornadoes. People care and people help. But those boundaries are patched up and reconstructed when it’s over, like everything else.

I was born and raised on the far northwest side of town — Lake Hefner, Warr Acres, the Village, Nichols Hills, “Fridayland.” There is nothing topographically or meteorologically different from my side of town and the Moore side of town (23 miles apart) except for the inexplicable fortune of near-misses on my side of town. In my childhood of tornado sirens and wild storms, the only loss I ever personally witnessed was part of the back fence, some trees, some windshields. Why must Moore suffer so? It’s the very definition of random misfortune. It’s cruel.

Another secret, more secret than the first, especially on days like today: Tornadoes can be enthralling; right up until the moment they aren’t. Tornado drills  in grade school (tucking ourselves into protective little crouches in dark hallways); sirens blaring; standing out on your front lawn watching the air around you turn green as the wall cloud races across your horizon; the urgent drawl of TV weathermen saving everyone’s lives by telling them to get back inside. It’s adrenalin-laced fun and don’t let Jim Cantore and an entire army of self-deputized, storm-chasing cowboys tell you otherwise. (There’s only so much science to admire and pursue; the rest is sport.)

I own five prints of paintings by John Brosio, whose work includes a lot of midwest tornadoes. In some of the paintings, people are either oblivious to them or just carrying on with their lives. What Brosio captures in these works is both terrifying and gorgeous and, to varying degrees, imaginary. It’s a complete disconnect from tragedy and yet it gets at the darkness. (Pictured above: “Scouring” (c) John Brosio. I own a print of this, which hangs in my office. I wish I could afford to buy one of his actual paintings; I think J.J. Abrams bought them all.)

Where I come from, tornadoes are a key part of personal biography and family history. Measuring the relative danger by instinct and nothing else, my mother would invite anyone who wanted to come along to get in our 1977 station wagon and look for the tornado. Going farther back, she remembers getting in her father’s little airplane to fly up to Woodward, the day after the devastating tornado of 1947, to see if her grandma, uncles, aunts and all the cousins were still alive. They flew in circles over the Schneider family wheat farms. They saw one of the Schneider houses, damaged but intact, caddywhompus, twisted off its foundation, Dorothy-style. There was no sign of life. They flew in low. To my grandfather’s utter relief, his siblings and their children came running out of the house, waving to him. Everyone was OK.

I was at a church youth group meeting on a Sunday night in the late spring of 1984 when our side of town went under a tornado watch and then a full-on warning. The lights went out. The sirens went off. We laughed and told jokes but one girl cried so hard she started hyperventilating. Even then it was enthralling, but listening to her sobs, I finally registered my own fear.

It missed us. It skipped and stuttered and hit somebody else’s particular piece of Oklahoma. It always missed us, but no matter what side of town you live on, you live with the idea that the odds are what they are, and you’re no better (or better protected) than anyone else.

Donate to the Red Cross now.

(Oklahoman front page via the Newseum’s daily front-pages display.)

I am the worst blogger in the world, I know.

But I return with some news and an exciting event to pimp, er, promote: I’ll be moderating a discussion with original MTV veejays Nina Blackwood and Mark Goodman at the Gaithersburg Book Festival on Saturday, May 18, at 2:15 p.m. Nina and Mark are promoting their new memoir (co-written with Alan Hunter and Martha Quinn), VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave. I will be peppering them with questions and opening it up to the audience for more.

I couldn’t be more thrilled; I worshiped these people from just about the beginning. When MTV started in 1981, I would only babysit for people who had cable. Our street got cable in 1982 just as I started high school and, well, look at me now. (Hey, you know what? I’ve written about all this more than once. Here’s a piece I did when MTV turned 25, back in 2006.)

So I welcome the veejays with, as Journey would have said, open arms – and I hope to see you all there. Come on out, it’s free.

(Hey, teen Okies of the ’80s: Who remembers when Alan Hunter came to the  Sound Warehouse on May Avenue in 1983 or so for some sort of contest with … was it John Cougar? ZZ Top? What was the deal? I only remember waiting for hours and then giving up and going to the mall instead — it was a rabid mob. Or did I hallucinate the entire thing?)

Time for another Tonsil blog book giveaway. This one is a real jackpot — the first three responders will get a package of three new books written by friends o’ mine. You’re not competing for individual titles; winners will get all three. (You don’t want all three? Look, these aren’t lima beans I’m servin’ here. You’ll get three delicious books — and perhaps the pleasure of re-gifting one or two of them out to a wider, literate world.) See instructions below. To win, you must send an email, not leave a comment to this blog post.

First up: Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde, a funny and smartly written young-woman-in-the-big-city memoir by Rebecca Dana.

It’s the story of how Rebecca moved to the big city, reached for all the brass rings, and after a time ran smack into her own hubris. Loveless and roofless, she answers a roommate ad and moves in with Cosmo, an Orthodox rabbi who’s also on the verge of a life change. This book has been featured on the “Today” show and everyhere-elsewhere, and look, here’s Rebecca talking about it to VanityFair.com.

Clearly Rebecca (a former star intern of the Style section, many moons ago) doesn’t need my help at all in the PR department, but two other writers very near and dear to me DO, and that’s why I’ve bundled their books with Rebecca’s, in hopes of just a tiny bit of SEO mojo. The next two books are self-published, which used to be a pejorative description, and now, well, who can say what the best way is to reach the most readers? It’s no longer about putting the horse before the cart. It’s about driving a car there instead.

* * *

So, next up: A former editor of mine from Austin days, Anne Rodgers, with Dr. Maureen Whelihan, has come out with a landmark survey of the sexual history of everyday women. The book is called Kiss and Tell: Secrets of Sexual Desire from Women 15 to 97.

Culled from surveys of 1,300 of Dr. Whelihan’s patients in Florida, the women featured in these in-depth interviews (who’ve been granted pseudonymity) represent every decade, starting with teens, and on up through the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s … all the way up the 90s.

What turned them on? How did they learn about sex? What have they figured out about it? What do they enjoy? What do they regret?

Here’s what novelist Sarah Bird says about Kiss and Tell, in a blurb for the book:

“Kiss and Tell does what no other book on the subject of sex has done; it sits you down at the kitchen table with real women of all ages as they tell you their stories — of their first times, their secret desires, what they wish their partners would do, or not do, or do again. …”

And here’s just some of what Tinsel author Hank Stuever had to say about it:

“As a journalist and writer obsessed by everyday American lifestyles, I’ve always wanted to know more about the two biggies you’re never supposed to ask about: money and sex. … [Kiss and Tell has] uncorked fascinating anecdotes from the epic, lifelong story of female sexual experiences. [It's] a surprising, heartfelt and valuable book. …”

What I didn’t say in my blurb: Kiss and Tell is exactly the sort of book I always hoped to run into when I used to babysit in people’s houses as a teenager and do some lite snooping. What better endorsement is there than that?

* * *

And last and so totally not least, we have Spike Gillespie’s The Maine Event, a travelogue/memoir of Spike and her partner Warren’s trip to Maine. This book is a delightful little madcap adventure.

But, Spike being Spike, it’s so much more than that. This is a book for people who seek the calm and the Zen in all situations and yet always find themselves needing to speak to a supervisor, if you know what I mean. One of the pleasures of knowing (and reading) Spike all these years is to follow her journey back and forth from hilarious hothead to Earth mother.

I loved The Maine Event weeks before I read it, when Spike launched a Kickstarter drive to fund the book. I wonder if that’s really the new publishing model? Pitch a book to us and if we’re dying to read it, we’ll pony up.

So, now you know. I of course urge you to seek out these books and spread the word. And BUY them. But, as an enticement, here’s how to win these three very different but excellent books absolutely FREE: E-mail me at hank [at] this website [dot] com. First three responders get the whole enchilada, mailed to you via the U.S. Postal Service. Go for it. UPDATE — 2/19/13, 6:45 p.m. EST: ALL GONE!

Sorry to have made it seem that I once again abandoned this blog. After I left Montana, I was on the road for 37-38 days (depending on how you add it up), with a lot of stops along the way. I’m back in D.C. now.

While criss-crossing America, I also went back to my job as TV critic at The Washington Post, filing a heap of TV reviews from hither and yon, mostly yon.

I’m getting ready to authorize a redesign of HankStuever.com, which will include (I hope) a place for visitors to catch up on my latest reviews. There is, of course, already an easy way to do that, on my bio/archive page at the Post. Click here. You can read recent reviews of “The Americans,” the end of “30 Rock,” “House of Cards,” the inauguration, the Golden Globes, “The Following,” “Enlightened” and more …

Coming soon: Random thoughts from the road trip and a BIG book giveaway. Don’t feel neglected.

Monica Hesse and Dan Zak’s 2013 edition of The Washington Post’s annual List is out, and it’s a good one.

This is the 35th year that the Style section has put out an “in/out” List, a tradition begun by Nina Hyde and Jura Koncius in 1978. It was my great pleasure (and huge headache) to pen The List in 2000 and then from 2003-2009. It is my greater pleasure that Dan and Monica are now in charge of doing it. Like anything worthwhile, it’s much harder than it looks.

And now, The List: A Mockumentary, which not only explains the storied tradition of this New Year’s feature, it also gives you a chance to bask in the Dan-ness and Monica-ness of it all. (Unfortunate Skype cameo by yours truly halfway in …)

Cheers, everyone. Here’s to 2013. My goal for this year is to get everyone to call it TWENTY THIRTEEN instead of the dopey two-thousand-thirteen.

My semester as the T. Anthony Pollner professor at the University of Montana’s School of Journalism has been one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. (Yes, ever.) Thank you students, faculty, Kaimin staff and especially Carol Van Valkenburg. And, miles away but often in our thoughts, Alice Thorpe, Ben Pollner and friends and family of Anthony Pollner.

I’m off. The shortest way back to D.C. is obviously west to Seattle then down to Oregon, then California, then New Mexico, then Kansas, then Texas. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

Reading is the only way to learn how to write. I kept pushing this point all semester and I certainly assigned a lot of readings. This being college, and these being college students, we operate with this wonderful notion that everyone has the time and desire to read it all.

But anyone who ever went to college knows that’s not true. Although I “loved to read” as a teenager and college student, I didn’t truly get busy reading until after I left college. At about age 22 or 23, I suddenly wanted to read everything, especially longform feature writing, nonfiction books, cultural criticism and serious magazines and newspapers. I started reading not only for content, but to study the craftsmanship.

It’s a habit, like exercise. Wondering why a particular writer seems to have so many ideas and great stories in him is like wondering why someone has six-pack abs. (Sorry for this sorta macho metaphor.) People with beautiful bodies make it look easy, because the rest of us don’t get up every single morning and see them working out for hours and hours. People with beautiful words in them are working out, too, when they read. Last week’s New Yorker is basically 100 stomach crunches or a series of stretches, just a warm-up to our real regimen. Reading is regarded by most as a leisure activity, but it isn’t — or not only. It takes the same sort of discipline as exercise. It requires the same amount of effort.

There are several articles I wanted us to read as a group in the class that we just never got around to. (I always knew we’d never get to all of it.) When I tweaked the final two weeks of class and altered the final story assignment, I abandoned quite a few examples of pop-culture narrative, especially the longer stuff.

So here’s a list. You might not ever get around to it. Many years may go by, and, in a nostalgic twitch, you’ll return here for these links. They’ll be here.

My biggest regret is that we didn’t get to do the fraught genre of Celebrity Profiles. I was going to start with two classics …

• “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” by Gay Talese in the April 1966 issue of Esquire, which has been studied and autopsied time and again.

• Pair this with “Do You Sleep in the Nude?,” a profile of Ava Gardner by Rex Reed, also from Esquire. (Not online, that I can find, but reprinted here in The New Journalism.)

For the sake of discussion, I wanted to contrast that with a couple of celebrity profiles from the current day that provoked a lot of debate about the genre, including self-indulgent writing, breaking conventional formats, crossing ethical boundaries, jealous writers, “girly” journalism and whatnot:

• “American Marvel,” Edith Zimmerman’s profile of actor Chris Evans from GQ in 2011.

• “The Full Tatum,” Jessica Pressler’s profile of Channing Tatum, also from GQ in 2011.

… and I was also going to ask the Jour494 students to fan out into the world and bring back a celebrity profile from the current crop and dissect it, looking for how it was assembled and where (or if) any journalistic compromises seem to have been made.

Some other readings we never got to:

• Maureen Tkacik’s 2011 takedown essay about Steve Jobs. This remarkable, measuredly brutal essay ran during a wave of hagiographic obituaries after Jobs’s death. It also gives us a lot to think about, argue about, and consider –not only about Jobs, but about our tech-consumer culture.

• I wanted us to read Dan Kois’s 2012 New York Times Magazine profile/story about Lynda Barry’s writing workshops, mostly for the pure pleasure of it.

• I wanted us to read a couple of Chris Jones (former Pollner prof, Esquire writer) articles: One, a gorgeous 201o profile of Roger Ebert, and the other, also from 2010, was a mysterious case of a man who won The Price is Right’s Showcase showdown with a correct (to the exact dollar) bid, which had never happened before.

• Another casualty of time and syllabus space: A 2012 story in Rolling Stone by Josh Eells, The Secret Life of Tom Gabel.

• Most college students have read (or were asked to read) journalist Barbara Ehrenreich‘s Nickel and Dimed. (If you haven’t read it, please do. One of our era’s finest works of immersion journalism.) I wanted us to read her essay on the pink-ribbon cancer culture industry, “Smile or Die: The Bright Side of Cancer.” You can read the original Harper’s magazine version of it here. I recommend her book Bright-Sided: How Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. (I would add: “and Journalism,” so we could talk about the uses of skepticism in this relentlessly upbeat, big-hugs, magical-thinking age.)

• Jake Silverstein’s book, Nothing Happened and Then It Did, is something I’d like to give anyone starting out on his or her first journalism job. It’s a strange book, in that it reprints some of Jake’s longform nonfiction for magazines and alternates with fictional chapters about a “Jake Silverstein,” a young journalist in pursuit of big stories in the west Texas wastelands. I would much rather that young journos with wandering hearts and an appetite for adventure read this instead of Hunter S. Thompson.

• We were supposed to read Washington Post music critic Chris Richards’s page 1 tale of the hunt to find the ruins of George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic’s missing “Mothership,” rumored to be buried in the kudzu jungles of suburban Maryland.

• I also wanted us to read Michael Kruse’s piece about a woman who died in her garage and whose body went undiscovered for a long time, even after the house went into foreclosure. The pop-culture angle here is difficult to determine, but I wanted us to examine the power in the details of the things we own and keep in our homes. Once you’ve read it, you really must read this.

• There’s something fun and startling about “Eating Beef Jerky at the Bodies Exhibit,” written in 2010 by Trent Moorman of The Stranger. I wanted to incorporate this piece somewhere between our talks about criticism and scene stories.

• Tony Earley’s 1998 Harper’s essay, “Somehow Form a Family,” about a childhood spent watching television (“The Brady Bunch” especially), almost made our reading assignments during the personal-essay stage. Here’s a link to the book version.

• It probably wouldn’t have been a huge hit in class, but someday check out Rebecca Brown’s “Hawthorne,” an essay about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, from her book American Romances.

• I had picked out the first chapter of Joshua Gamson’s “The Fabulous Sylvester,” a biography of the late, gender-bending disco singer of the ’70s/’80s. Just read the first 13 pages, “Get Ready for Me” — an amazing act of setting scene and character while describing a whole other world, in this case, that of South Central Los Angeles teenagers of the 1960s.

Also:

• More Susan Orlean — including her profile of schlock painter Thomas Kinkade. Just go ahead and get yourself a copy of The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup.

• A little more Joan Didion — pictured above in her everyday guise, smoking next to her Corvette — including the title essay from The White Album.

• Take a look at David Samuels’s magazine stories in his collection Only Love Can Break Your Heart. Likewise, check out Nathan Rabin’s The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture.

• I had flagged a couple of chapters to share from Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.

• Don’t forget Henry Allen: Going Too Far Enough (collected essays from the Washington Post) and What It Felt Like (an epic 10-part essay on the 20th century).

Also don’t forget everything else ever written. Get busy. There will be a quiz, and it will be given by everyone in the writing business who thinks they’re smarter than you.

PS: If you want to share thoughts about books, I’m on Goodreads.