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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.