Houston News Blog

​Earlier this year, Houston author Kimberly Frost launched her Southern Witch series with Would-Be Witch, which was released in February, and Barely Bewitched, which released in September (a third installment is planned for 2011). The series combines horror with humor and centers on Tammy Jo, a young woman who lives in a small Texas town. While she comes from a magical family, Tammy Jo's powers don't seem to work too well, but she's working on them.

Frost, who's a doctor in an Medical Center emergency room when she's not writing, says the idea for the Southern Witch series came from her own reading and television watching habits. "I was reading humorous mysteries and a lot of dark urban fantasy. I was watching shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and thought, 'I like it when they combine the humor with the horror, what if I did that for a book?' But I wasn't sure it would work."

Later she bumped into an editor in a hotel hallway during a writer's conference and mentioned the idea. When the editor responded positively, Frost started writing Would-Be Witch that same day. "This book sort of took me by storm. This character had been rattling in my head for about a year. As soon as I gave myself the go ahead, I started working on it that day." While still at the conference, Frost finished the beginnings of the story and had a critique partner read it. "She was reading it and she started laughing. She'd read a little more and she'd laugh. I thought, 'I think I have something here.' So I got excited about it and wrote it really quickly."

​John Connolly, the Dublin-born author of Every Dead Thing and The Killing Kind, is in Houston today to promote The Gates, his new young adult title. While many of his adult novels are dark thrillers featuring ex-cop Charlie Parker, The Gates is a horror story with touches of comedy that features a small boy named Samuel Johnson. While making his trick-or-treat rounds, Samuel and his dog are unfortunate enough to see their neighbors accidentally open the gates to hell (let's just say it involves both a spell and a Hadron particle collider).

Gates has been getting rave reviews for its spirited, smart eleven-year-old hero Samuel who handles quantum physics and demons, snooty teachers and blustering babysitters, each with the same amount of dread and fascination.

Connolly spoke to Hair Balls about The Gates and his American tour.

Hair Balls: How's the reception to the book been so far?

John Connolly: It's been lovely. I haven't had a chance to talk to as many kids as I've wanted -- that's not in the creepy way. But when I was in the UK, there were a lot of kids coming to signings and here there seems to be a crossover with my adult audience.

In Houston, I'm talking at a kids' bookstore and then I'm doing some schools, which I'm really quite looking forward to -- although they're much harder than bookstores. If you go to a bookstore, the adults there are kinda pre-sold; they're there because they want to be there. In schools, kids are there because you're better than homework.

​Let's see: Sally, the heroine of the book really doesn't like her kids all that much from time to time. She feels trapped by them, suffocated by their needs and although husband Nick helps out, he's not so hot with the details or the planning.

But she's completely outdone by another woman in The Wrong Mother, the one who lets her young daughter scream out her fear of monsters in a dark bedroom, and who drives away from a 3-year-old to teach her a lesson about obedience and getting along with mummy.

And half the time, you can't tell who is doing the talking. Is this Sally descending into awfulness, or someone else? And why do the British go on having children if they don't seem to like them very much? Oh and yes, there's dead bodies.

"I write quite twisty books," says Sophie Hannah, the British author in town to speak at Murder By the Book at 6:30 tonight about her latest murder mystery. Twisty, uncomfortable from time to time, but ultimately rewarding. And books that hit close to home because as all parents know -- even the best -- kids can be snots and even if you love them, it's kind of hard to like them all the time.  

​Going from being a biomedical engineer NASA to writing Final Approach, a thriller set in a skydiving camp, wasn't as big a leap for debut author Rachel Brady as you might think. The Pearland resident tells Hair Balls, "After three or four years of reading a lot of mystery and a lot of suspense, it occurred to me that I never figured out, while I was reading the book, who the villains were. I started to pay attention to how [the authors] were doing that. Where are they putting the clues that are getting me off track? Then I though, 'I wonder if I can do that?'"

Over the next four years, Brady crafted a mystery novel, never intending to publish it. But somewhere in the process, she started going to writers' conferences and joined a few writers' groups. There she found the encouragement to submit the work to agents. After just a couple of tries, Final Approach sold.

In the story, Emily, the lead character, is a woman who once helped to recover a missing child, when she saw the boy in a restaurant with a couple other than his parents. Now a private detective has come asking for her help in finding another missing child. While not a trained detective, Emily does have experience as a skydiver and since the suspects are based in a sky diving camp just outside Houston, she has the perfect cover.

"The idea for the story came one day when I was sitting [in a restaurant] having lunch by myself," she says. "I saw a little baby who looked like a baby from my playgroup, but those weren't her parents. So I looked at the baby again, and it wasn't her. I started to think about it, what if that was her? Would I go up to the table, would I call her mom? What would I do?

Photo courtesy Rothko Chapel

​Rothko Chapel embarks on its 2009 - 2010 public program season tonight with Emmy-award winning journalist, author and former Houstonian Rubén Martínez at the helm.

Tonight's talk is the first in the Chapel's four-part series with the epic title: Truth and Consequences on the Mexico-United States Border: An Overview -- A Series Examining Issues Critical to Human Rights and Environment. If the title is still too vague, Martínez will give a brief overview of the series before delving into his own experiences living near the border in every southern border state in the last 10 years.

That journey brought him to the University of Houston's elite creative writing program six years ago. And just like many good sports players Houston's ever had, after three years, we lost him to another team.

The chisme was that UH would not give Martínez tenure so when another school offered a better position, he split. He is now Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

But Martínez explains it differently. "I didn't leave Houston with hard feelings. Loyola was a better fit. My wife, Angela, had stronger job opportunities in Los Angeles. We had twin girls on the way and it's my hometown," Martínez tells Hair Balls. "I loved my time in Houston. It was my first real job in academia. UH was the first job where I was allowed to be a professor. Until then, I was in the writing ghetto teaching creative writing to students."

Photo by Katharine Shilcutt

Interior of the West Alabama Bookstop

​Hair Balls got choked-up yesterday when we got the press release about Barnes & Noble closing Houston's beloved Bookstop on September 15 so that owner Barnes & Noble can open a store in the River Oaks Shopping Center the following day.

The company's press release touted the infallible awesomeness of the new, 32,000 square-foot space, which will include one of those exotic, hard-to-find coffeehouses called "Starbucks." But Hair Balls wanted to find out why the company would want to shutter a unique store housed in a historic building and open yet another big-box book behemoth. After 25 years, was it no longer profitable? Was it not practical to maintain both the Bookstop and the new store?

David Deason, B & N's vice president of development told us via e-mail: "Our lease has expired and the space has simply become too small for the services we can offer our customers. Our business model has changed and it is appropriate for us to move on." He also stated that "We loved our ties to the Alabama Theatre. At the time we moved into the theater, we were at the leading edge of retail; pioneers, really, in utilizing the theater. But the landscape has changed dramatically and the time has come for us to move on. We were great custodians of the space and we support the community's efforts to maintain the theater."

Photos by Katharine Shilcutt

HIWI: Ike, the exhibition at the Galveston Arts Center

​Nearly five years ago, Houston became home to one of the most unusual and subversive tourism campaigns in recent memory. The Houston: It's Worth It (HIWI) campaign began with a simple website and a list of twenty things that Houstonians -- and the world at large -- despise about our fair city. Among them were annoyances -- or what the group behind the HIWI campaign, ttweak, calls "afflictions" -- like traffic, mosquitos, billboards and the long summers. But the underlying message of the campaign was clear: despite these idiosyncrasies, Houston was completely worth it.

Photo by Margaret Downing

Well, there he was at a table in an H-E-B in Fort Bend County and he was peddling books, which is either the most naive or desperate or optimistic of things someone can do in a grocery store on a weekend.

Actually, it was his book. Eighteen years old and an author -- not of a children's book -- but of a book that promises to give its readers the "steps to become a successful young entrepreneur."

Keith J. Davis, Jr., AKA Jer'Rod,  graduated from Cy-Springs High School two weeks ago. Last year he wrote his first book Young? So What! He's a teen with big plans and a polished way of presenting himself, which he comes by naturally being the son of veteran marketer Keith J. Davis, Sr. AKA Mr. D-MARS.

Within five minutes at the stores he'd sold his book to two different people, carefully signing each one, asking how the inscription should read. Cost: about $11.

A dockworker's strike in Houston? When was the last time we had a dockworker's strike in Houston?

We're not sure, but such an event plays a key role in a new novel that got a big-time review in The New York Times yesterday.

Black Water Rising, by an author named Attica Locke, concerns a black man who is an old flame of a blonde woman who is, in the 1981 timeframe of the book, mayor of Houston.

The mayor, according to the Times, "has a stiff blond head of helmet hair, an important office and a politician's survival skills." Kathy Whitmire, we hardly knew ye!! (Of course, in real life Whitmire ended up marrying a registered sex offender.)

Reviewer Janet Maslin says the book is "atmospheric [and] richly convoluting."

Roger Clemens is no longer the only former professional baseball player under investigation for lying to Congress. With the Tuesday revelation that Sammy Sosa was one of the 104 MLB players to test positive for PED use in 2003 (along with Alex Rodriguez) comes the word that a congressional committee is looking into whether Sosa lied to Congress when he testified in 2005 that he had never used a PED. And this brings about a good time to check in on Clemens, about who there has been relatively little news recently. Actually, except for a vague claim that he's willing to answer some questions for the blog Houstonist -- which from what I can tell has yet to happen -- there's not been much news from the Rocket camp lately.

There have, however, been a couple of books published about Clemens in the past couple of months, and I thought I would discuss those.  They are The Rocket That Fell To Earth:  Roger Clemens And The Rage For Baseball Immortality by Jeff Pearlman, who also authored a bio of Barry Bonds several years ago, and American Icon: The Fall Of Roger Clemens And The Rise Of Steroids In America's Pastime by the investigative team at the New York Daily News which has broken many of the hot stories on the Rocket since he was named in The Mitchell Report.

Photos by Melanie Pang

A line wound around the railing of the second floor of the Books-A-Million bookstore at 1201 Main Street to get stage and film actor and Broadway musical Rent superstar Anthony Rapp's signature for his book Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent, not to mention anything and everything with the word "Rent" on it. Fans went through the lines multiple times, totaling at 116 numbers taken to wait for his signature and a possible photo op.

Rapp took time, multi-tasking as he signed a pile of his memoirs, to answer a few questions from Hair Balls.

Hair Balls: What finally drove you to write this book?

Anthony Rapp: I've been writing stuff ever since I was a little kid, but I never tried to write a book...I don't know if you're familiar with the big beautiful Rent coffee table book with the black cover, that publisher...asked to meet with me. One of the things that he used to do...[was approach] celebrities or people who are famous a little bit that he thinks might have something to say. He starts to talk with them, meet them, to see if they have a book in them. So, he wanted to talk to me about that and I was very flattered ... In talking to him, his father had passed away when he was in his 20s, from cancer, and my mom was still alive when we first started talking, but quite ill, and it was very clear that it was not going to be much longer. He asked me if I would consider writing about that experience, and I said yes and I didn't really know how I was going to do it. I started working on it, and working on it, and working on it, and we came to a really good place where we both felt we knew what the book was. It was kind of a roundabout thing that wouldn't have happened if it weren't for him. And I was very, very grateful, but it was also the hardest thing I've ever done.

Few people live up to the (somewhat shopworn) descriptor "citizen of the world" more than Pico Iyer, who today divides his time between Southern California and rural Japan. Born in England to scholarly Indian parents, raised in California, and partially educated in England (at Eton and Oxford), Iyer shuttled back and forth between continents and cultures throughout his youth.

And then, after college, he really started traveling. Beginning as a reporter for the now-venerable Let's Go series of travel guides, Iyer has since graduated to writing both novels and travel literature, with renowned titles like Video Night in Kathmandu, Falling Off the Map and Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, & the Search for Home under his belt, not to mention regular bylines in magazines like Time, Harper's, National Geographic, The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.

Both of Iyer's parents were of a deeply spiritual bent, so it's no surprise that Iyer has been called "Thomas Merton on a frequent-flyer pass." And there's a certain sense of inevitability in the fruition of his latest book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Iyer's father was one of the first friends the Dalai Lama made after the beginning of his exile 50 years ago, and the younger Iyer has known the Tibetan holy man for 30 years.

Brazos Bookstore and the Asia Society of Houston are bringing Iyer to town on Wednesday. Iyer will be discussing this masterfully-crafted work at the Westin Galleria at 7:30 pm, but here we range beyond that to talk about how to travel the world without leaving Houston, Iyer's admiration of our Museum District, and the nasty disposition of a certain Anglo-Indian Nobel Prize-winner.

The woman who wrote the comedic vampire books that inspired the HBO series True Blood is author Charlaine Harris. In what will be her only appearance in support of the reissue of her book Living Dead in Dallas, the second Sookie Stackhouse title, she's set to speak at the Central Branch of the Houston Public Library tomorrow.

The book is named Living Dead in Dallas, so a stop in the Big D would seem a natural, but Harris chose to come to Houston instead and she talked to Hair Balls about why. "My favorite book store in America is in Houston, Murder by the Book on Bissonnet. The owners and staff of MBTB supported me when there was no career to support, starting twenty-plus years ago. So if I sign anywhere for a book, it'll be in Houston."

It's official: The Edward James Olmos Book Fair Houston Latino Book and Family Festival is no more. At least not as presented by Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, the organization that originally brought the festival to town.

To be honest, there have been riffs with corporate sponsors for the last three years, Tony Diaz, NP's founder and director, tells Hair Balls.

Sponsors wanted more traffic, NP wanted more substance. Sponsors wanted quick-moving book-signing lines, NP wanted workshops for writers, and activities that encouraged readers, especially young ones. Sponsors insisted on the George R. Brown Convention Center as the festival's location. Not only was the GRB expensive, but try as it might, NP couldn't turn the GRB plane hanger atmosphere into a cozy reading room.

"There's always been some tension between us, from the beginning. But this last year, the riff was really obvious. We'd ask them why we had to have it at the George R. Brown, and they'd say, 'Well, do you want to do it at the Reliant Center?' We just didn't look at things the same way," says Diaz.  

With the recent news of Barack Obama's record-breaking $750 million campaign fundraising efforts, it's an interesting time to release a novel about greed and deception in the field of political moneymaking. Especially if you, the author, were part of the team that helped secure Obama's three-quarters-of-a-billion sum.  

But local lawyer/politician/author John Odam tells Hair Balls he actually finished his political thriller, The Candidate Conspiracy, before he started working on the Obama/Biden Texas Finance Committee. (Really, he did.)

The book is set in Houston and follows Jennifer Spencer, a young lawyer, who while volunteering for the United States Senate campaign of Warren McDonald, suspects his incumbent opponent is financing his run illegally under the table. Her hunch turns into an international investigation involving Russian hit men, Colombian drug cartels and evil gun lobbyists.


 

One of the best parts of living the life of Miss Pop Rocks (in addition to the celebrity status I enjoy in my own mind) is sometimes I get my hands on promotional stuff marketing people send the Press, and then I get to make fun of it here.

The latest treasure to arrive in my mailbox? Ladies and gentlemen, I'm talking about Hooking Up With Tila Tequila: A Guide to Love, Fame, Happiness, Success, and Being the Life of the Party, a new book by MTV's favorite bisexual and Houston's own Miss Tequila. In addition to a title as long as the Amazon, there are several meaty chapters in this tome including "Sluts" and "Girls Get Real." I don't know about you, but I hear Pulitzer calling.

Because I care about you, my readers, I've decided to highlight for you the best moments out of Tila's book. The woman is so wise, really. Check it out:

Given the amount of personal information he’s spilled on the radio over the years, avid listeners of “The Howard Stern Show” probably know more about the private life of cast member/comedian Artie Lange than most of their close friends and relatives.

A natural-born storyteller, Lange has entertained audiences with tales of his growing up in blue-collar New Jersey, stint as a longshoreman, the tragic story of his father, and -- most frequently -- his bouts with depression, substance abuse (booze, pills, coke, heroin), and, uh, a penchant for hookers.

In Too Fat to Fish, the title taken from his mother’s admonition, Artie Lange recounts his life and initial efforts to break into stand-up comedy, which led to a stint as an original cast member of Mad TV, appearances in movies, and finally a permanent chair in the Stern show studio in 2001. That the text swings wildly across a range of emotions is keeping in perfect synch with the many moods of its author.

We've already told you about the Twilight stop in the Galleria last night.

In case you didn't believe us, here's some photographic evidence, in slide-show form.

Warning -- there might be a temporary glitch with the captions matching up with the pictures. It will be fixed soon. In the meantime we're blaming it Victoria.

-- Richard Connelly

The Twilight Tour hit Hot Topic in the Galleria last night, and while there were a few screams and a few tears, the chaos that hit malls in other cities was avoided here. That could be because neither of the movie’s main stars, Kristen Stewart (human Bella) or Robert Pattinson (vampire Edward), was slated to appear. Instead, 750 Houston fans got to meet Taylor Lautner, who plays Edward’s werewolf rival Jacob, along with Rachelle Lefevre and Edi Gathegi, who play more minor vampires Victoria and Laurent in the new film based on Stephenie Meyer’s popular series. Jill Chipley, a 15-year-old freshman at Klein Collins in Spring, had been camping at the Galleria since noon the previous day. She stood at the very front of the line with her mother waiting to meet the stars. Like many in the line snaking behind her, she was in her Twilight T-shirt. Lurking around somewhere was her dad, who jokingly described himself as “long-suffering.”

John Grogan’s Marley and Me sold millions of copies and, as you probably have heard, has been made into a film starring Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson that will be hitting theaters soon.

Many people of refined tastes no doubt saw the 2005 memoir about a man and his incorrigible yellow lab on the bestseller lists and said, “thanks, but no thanks.” I wasn’t one of those people. Marley and Me made me laugh hysterically and cry bitterly. It was a wonderful story well-told. I recommended it – and still do – to anyone who will listen. Hell, I will probably even go see the movie.

All of this is to explain why I was so disappointed by Grogan’s new memoir, The Longest Trip Home.

Sure, ice may be a dominant form of currency in the aftermath of a hurricane. But here’s what Tunnel Mole needed to survive two weeks of no electricity: a miner's hat avec flashlight. That's best for bedtime, to snuggle in and devour some juicy noir -- make mine the XX chromosome variety, please.

Houston's homegrown Busted Flush Press, owned by Murder by the Book's David Thompson, has another winner with A Hell of a Woman: An Anthology of Female Noir, edited by Megan Abbott, herself a 2008 Edgar Award winner.

Noir is known for cutting to the chase; laying it on the line. We remember how much we loved it when we read one statement from the book, “Her mother taught her that the strongest poison came from the most beautiful flowers.” Only we’re not gonna tell you which story that was taken from, ‘cause we don’t want to spoil that story's ending.

In her introduction to the morbidly entertaining Doomed Queens: Royal Women Who Met Bad Ends from Cleopatra to Princess Di, author Kris Waldherr asserts that there are still “doomed queens among us.” “Whatever your opinion of [Hillary] Clinton or [assassinated Pakistani Benazir] Bhutto, there’s one point we can all agree on: Their femaleness was – and is – considered a liability in their quest for power.”

Since there’s no mention of Sarah Palin, you have to assume this book went to press before John McCain announced her as his running mate. Although, given that Palin’s main liability appears to be her politics, not her sex, perhaps she simply didn’t fit with Waldherr’s theme.
In casual style, with somewhat hokey illustrations and fun asides on everything from Indian funeral rituals to black magic to mermaids, Walderr offers up 50 juicy stories from the last 3,000 years detailing queenly deaths by beheading, burning, drowning, poison, stabbing, strangling, starving, suicide and more.

Michael T. Luongo originally wanted to call his latest book Gay Travels in Islam, but the editor thought it was too controversial. Instead it became Gay Travels in the Muslim World. “I don’t really see a difference,” Luongo told Hair Balls.

Luongo, who lives in New York, was working a travel writer when the 9/11 attacks took place. “That changed my views about everything. I could write about stupid hotels and beaches, but I felt that it’s more important to write about places that people are afraid to go to. The notion of ‘travel in peace’ became important to me. I began to travel more to war zones. In 2003, I made my first trip to Afghanistan.”

But how did 9/11 lead to a book about gay travel in the Middle East?

Over ten years ago Barry Williams, who played Greg Brady on a little show called “The Brady Bunch,” released a little gem of a book entitled Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg which detailed his hot and heavy crush on Florence “Ma Brady” Henderson as well as the shocking revelation that Alice was a crystal meth freak (okay, kidding).

A longtime Brady fanatic, I appreciated the tell-all for what it was – an obvious last ditch attempt at making some much needed cash. And you know what? I didn’t fault Barry for that. His book was delicious dish and much needed fodder for my Brady lovin’ fantasies. It was cute and packed with gossipy goodies…without revealing too much.

Flashforward a decade and we have Maureen “Marcia” McCormick putting out her memoir entitled Here’s the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding my True Voice, in which we discover that perfect Marcia not only had a serious coke problem, but Eve Plumb, who played Jan, used to walk around naked in the dressing room and fart indiscriminately. (I know this because I purchased the People with an excerpt from the book…like I wasn’t going to?)

A Most Wanted Man, John Le Carre's 21st novel, has some familiar aspects: a seemingly successful man facing a moral crisis; an idealistic woman who partly triggers that crisis; and spy agencies that don't much care for morals or laws.

It's all catnip to his many fans. From the opening pages you know Le Carre is delivering the goods, and -- until an abrupt and unsatisfying finsh -- he keeps up the spell.

The plot centers around Tommy Brue, a banker in Hamburg who is cruising along with few worries until he gets a phone message from an attorney. Brue's late father, it turns out, had been in business with Soviet officials who were looking for a safe place to put the loot they took as the evil empire crumbled; the son of one of those officials is now looking to claim it.

It’s still Hispanic History Month for the next 11 hours or so, and to celebrate I thought I’d review Ana Castillo’s new novel The Guardians. What a mistake.

The Guardians was actually painful to read. It’s overwrought with “Hey, hey – we’re Latin! Aren’t we cool? Aren’t we cute? Aren’t we exotic?” (Yeah, go ahead and call the Chicanismo police - I said it.) I’ve got nothing against “cool, cute, exotic” but with its labored, badly done writing, The Guardians achieves none of those things.

Not being much of a mystery fan, I haven't read Dennis Lehane's best-sellers like Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone. But I like to rummage around in the often-sneered-at genre of historical fiction, and Lehane's latest is squarely in that category.

The Given Day takes place in Boston just after World War I, when the city was full of anarchists, cops itching to strike over horrid working conditions, a flu epidemic and a clannish world of newly arrived immigrants.

With a cast of finely drawn characters and events that seem sadly inevitable even as they're suspenseful, Lehane easily draws you into the world with hardly a misstep.

We sure miss the innocent days of 2000, before we went to war and the economy tanked, when song lyrics were what people worried about. Mark Oliver Everett, also known as E or A Man Called E – his band is the EELS – had the surreal experience of his work being used as a political prop.

“The campaign to elect the tragically inept Republican candidate George W. Bush to the White House used the Daisies of the Galaxy album as an example of the entertainment industry marketing smut to children,” he writes in his memoir, Things the Grandchildren Should Know. “I know. Pretty hilarious. I was thrilled by it, of course.”

The album has a “storybooklike” cover and features songs such as “It’s a Motherfucker,” so of course E had made it to corrupt the children. One of the offending lyrics held up by the geniuses in the campaign was from a song called “Tiger in My Tank”: "When I grow up I’ll be/An Angry Little Whore." What the song’s really about is selling out, a major theme of the book.

Click here for a slideshow of images from the book...

Louisiana artist George Rodrigue dedicated his new book Blue Dog Speaks “To Brother Edward Scanlan, who threw me out of class for drawing.” Brother Edward was a Christian Brother who taught Rodrigue in high school and sometimes threw him out of class for practicing his future vocation.

“He passed away a year ago; he was 97,” Rodrigue tells Hair Balls in his soft Cajun accent. “You know, once you’re with the Christian Brothers, they always hound you for money. When I first became known as painting the blue dog, they came to me and they wanted some money. I said, ‘Brother, look, I’m gonna give you these 20 prints. They’re very valuable. You can make a lot of money with them.’ They told me, ‘No, Brother Edward doesn’t want that, he wants some money.’ Then the next year he came back to buy some prints.”

On the one hand, the timing couldn’t be better for The Smart Cookies’ Guide to Making More Dough: How Five Young Women Got Smart, Formed a Money Group, and Took Control of Their Finances, which came out this week. Don’t we all want to be smart about money, now more than ever?

On the other hand, with Wall Street imploding, the timing couldn’t be worse. In this climate, it’s hard to swallow some of the book’s claims – for example, how after becoming a smart cookie, “You’ll know how to increase your income now and how to buy a house that’s not just a home but a real moneymaking investment.”