L.A. Times Books

Dying and end-of-life issues are the focus of several new books.

"Life," Truman Capote quipped, "is a moderately good play with a badly written third act."

The independent-thinking American entrepreneur and philanthropist stops by USC to promote his autobiography.

Ted Turner admits to having "foot-in-the-mouth disease." For a good deal of his adult life, he has made headlines for his controversial remarks, although in recent years, he has cast a lower profile. Now Turner is back, appearing on "60 Minutes" and "The Late Show With David Letterman" to promote his memoir "Call Me Ted," a look at his life that chronicles his rise from billboard businessman to cable visionary to philanthropist.

The revivals of the David Mamet plays remind us that greed is not a new phenomenon.

The extremity of our greed-fueled economic crisis may have pessimists wondering whether American values have reached an all-time low. Two David Mamet plays from decades past currently being revived on Broadway suggest not. Our old conniving friends from "American Buffalo" and "Speed-the-Plow" do more than entertain us with their patented verbal jazz -- they reassure us that we were just as crooked a generation ago.

In 'Autophobia,' Brian Ladd considers how our lives have been altered -- for better and for worse -- by freedom on four wheels.

"Autophobia" is one of those concepts that carries a useful double meaning. As Brian Ladd defines it early in this brisk analysis of cars and car culture, it's "an obscure psychiatric diagnosis of 'fear of oneself.' " But, if bent just a little, it can also mean fear of the most successful machine of the modern age.

A newspaper hoax in 19th century New York holds sway over its audience and provides a glimpse into why people believe the unbelievable.

The Sun and the Moon

Stephenie Meyer had never visited Forks, Wash., when she decided to set her teenage vampire novels there. But their huge success has brought thousands of tourists -- and the town is drinking it up.

When the timber economy that had sustained this wet and distant place for its first hundred years came crashing to earth like an old-growth Douglas fir, people exhausted themselves trying to figure out what the future would hold. What would happen to the little town clinging to the western slope of the rain forest on the Olympic Peninsula with its single grocery store, one traffic light and 3,100 residents?

Sparking young adult literature through a female confessional voice.

Francesca Lia Block is a Los Angeles writer with a unique voice that blends lush imagery, hip fairy tales and punk poetic lyricism. She is best known for her "Weetzie Bat" books, which premiered in 1989 and drew critical acclaim and a rapturous fan base while helping to revolutionize young adult literature.

The country takes a back seat to Africa when it comes to world awareness of the disease. Essayists reveal a culture of repression and shame.

Reporting in the American media on the spread of AIDS has focused on Africa. Yet India, with its enormous population, its grinding poverty juxtaposed with rapidly growing wealth and its distinctive attitudes toward sex, has become an epicenter of the disease.

A look at the third president, his slave mistress and the antebellum South.

Thomas Jefferson is an American icon. Founding Father, author of the Declaration of Independence, minister to France, our first secretary of State, vice president and ultimately the third president. But it has become de rigueur to point to a necessary asterisk: that Jefferson, like all Southern aristocrats, was a slaveholder.

Love and tragedy in a small Basque village used as a practice ground for World War II.

On April 26, 1937, Miguel Navarro kissed his wife, Miren, and baby daughter, Catalina, goodbye before setting out for the hills hoping to catch a few fish or rabbits -- something to provide a bit of meat. Miren and Catalina headed for the Monday market in the Spanish town of Guernica to shop for any food that might still be available in the hard times of worsening civil war. The little Basque family planned to join Miren's father and mother later for dinner before Miren and Cat departed by train the next day to seek temporary housing in the relative safety of Bilbao.

A final miscellany from the late chronicler of American life.

Studs Terkel, who died last month at the age of 96, was America's most popular oral historian.

'I really feel like I can keep pushing,' the Southern California poet says.

Like everyone else at the Old Dominion Literary Festival, Southern California poet Douglas Kearney had turned his ringer off. So when a stranger called and left an undecipherable message, Kearney, preparing for his reading, didn't think much of it. As a result, he was late to learn he'd won a $50,000 Whiting Writers' Award.

The authorized biography of Nobel Prize-winner V.S. Naipaul.

Literary biographies are a bulimic business. The writer packs down as much life as he can in his books; the biographer tries to force it back up. No one expected V.S. Naipaul, the tetchiest writer alive, to submit to this kind of indignity. But seven years ago, shortly after winning the Nobel Prize, he granted Patrick French unrestricted access. The result is an unflinching account of the 20th century's unlikeliest literary giant. Part tragedy, part comedy, part murder confession, "The World Is What It Is" has outraged the British press. And that is just how Sir Vidia likes it.

A champion of writers and of causes, his passion, often in the form of indignation, emerged in his writings.

It is a quirk of personal history that I spent the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, at dinner with John Leonard and his wife, Sue, in a restaurant on New York's Upper East Side, as out the window flatbed trucks bearing earth-moving machines rolled south.

A survey of works traces American history, thought and culture.

Jay Parini's knowledgeable analysis of key texts that have formed Americans' ideas about themselves and their nation, "Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America," would make an excellent starting point for a college course.

Actress Kathy Kinney is the title character of a new children's storytelling website that aims to prove reading is cool.

She's like Pippi Longstocking, Mary Poppins and Mrs. Claus all rolled into one -- an amiable woman of mysterious origin who's hoping to do for reading what "Sesame Street" has done for learning.

The instant knowledge provided by the Web is invaluable, as is the deeper communion provided by books.

"On or about December, 1910," Virginia Woolf once wrote, "the world changed." Sometime during the early aughts of this century, it changed again. The Internet leveled our cultural landscape. There was an epistemological free-for-all, a paradigm shift. The pyramid of media hierarchy flipped -- top down became bottom up -- and people-powered content started to change the way we think. ¶ In 2002, I owned a small independent publisher, Context Books. That year, we published a beer coaster of a book titled "War on Iraq." The substance was a hybrid: part-book, part-blog. Former U.N. Special Commission inspector Scott Ritter had spent the summer of 2002 telling anyone who would listen that President Bush was going to start a war in Iraq and that it would end in disaster. We boiled that down into a punchy project -- concept to bookshelf: eight weeks. Six months later, the president was on TV telling America about the war he'd just launched.

The novelist creates an alternate history in which Adolf Hitler fathers a child by Richard Wagner's daughter-in-law.

Better known as a novelist, British writer A.N. Wilson is also a biographer of such literary figures as Tolstoy and C.S. Lewis. In his latest book, he draws upon both strengths as he conjures up two real-life characters, Adolf Hitler and Winifred (known as "Winnie") Wagner, composer Richard Wagner's British-born daughter-in-law and Hitler acolyte.

'The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell' edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton

In 1961, Elizabeth Bishop wrote Robert Lowell about Madame de Sévigné, France's venerated master of the art of letter writing: "Have you ever read her? She is marvelous, and the wonder is that the letters survived, and are so much better than most things written on purpose." There's a sweet, self-conscious irony there: Bishop's own letters were exquisitely written and radiant with purpose, never more so than when she addressed Lowell, who took the medium as seriously as she did.

A first-person look back at the era.

The revolution -- the one that took place in the 1960s -- was in fact televised. The music, the antiwar movement, the drug culture and the social upheaval of the era became major benefactors of the first wave of saturation media coverage. To the straight world, the events that defined "the '60s" were jarring anomalies that shook the status quo. Moms and dads across America recoiled in front of their sets, fingers crossed that their kids weren't getting their heads busted by the cops.