Overlooked, But Not ForgottenThe Daily Beast offers its list of The 14 Best Books You Missed This Decade. The list features no books containing "a wizard, a vampire, or a code."
Mum's No Longer the Word on MI5: Chris Rutten of the LA Times reviews Defend the Realm, an in-depth look at the British Security Service by insider Christopher Andrew--a Cambridge scholar and MI5's "official historian" for the better part of the last decade.
Sunday Book Review cover: Christopher Caldwell on Koestler by Michael Scammell: "The biographer Michael Scammell wants to put Koestler's multifaceted intelligence back on display and to show that something more than frivolity or opportunism lay behind his ever-shifting preoccupations and allegiances. As a source of information, 'Koestler,' the work of two decades, will never be surpassed. As an argument for the man's importance, however, it must contend with the eccentricity of Koestler's preoccupations and "” although Scammell does not always seem to realize it "” his vices."
Joanna Smith Rakoff on A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein: "If this sounds tawdry, it's not. Grodstein ... is a terrific storyteller and an even better ventriloquist. She beautifully captures Pete's sly self-deceptions: the man-of-the-people persona that masks his deeply rooted elitism, the liberal pose that hides an almost pathological conservatism.... Ultimately, though, this is less a novel about one imperfect citizen than a sharp account of the status-driven suburban culture that turned him into a monster of conformity, a place where the air at parties is rife with 'the vague but persistent smell of striving' and a father can, without irony, deem his son's dropping out of college a 'tragedy.'"
Rick Moody on When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin by Mick Wall: "Maybe the time for arcana is past, the time for the picayune details of dinosaur rock "” such that it's the dirt, not the song, that remains the same. Maybe some publisher was looking over Mick Wall's shoulder saying, 'Put more about the shark incident in there!' ... Wall is conflicted enough about the facts that he allows this mythologizing title to be appended to his work: 'When Giants Walked the Earth.' But these were no giants, these were just young people, like you, who for a time happened to have more power and influence than was good for them. In the midst of it all, they made extraordinary music."
Jonathan Dee on Summertime by J.M. Coetzee: "For all its self-deprecations, there is no contesting that the 'Scenes From Provincial Life' trilogy is a fundamentally narcissistic project. But the vandalism Coetzee commits upon the easily checked facts of his own life ultimately serves to sharpen a question that does seem genuine, and genuinely self-Âindicting: Doesn't being a great artist demand, or at least imply, a certain greatness of spirit as well? ... 'How can you be a great writer,' says Adriana, 'if you are just an ordinary little man?' Coetzee may feel it is too late to amend his legacy in the second regard, but even from beyond the fictional grave he is determined to expand upon the first."
Patrick Cockburn on Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacc "The vividness and pace of Sacco's drawings, combined with a highly informed and intelligent verbal narrative, work extremely well in telling the story. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how any other form of journalism could make these events so interesting. Many newspaper or television reporters understand that the roots of today's crises lie in obscure, unpublicized events. But they also recognize that their news editors are most interested in what is new and are likely to dismiss diversions into history as journalistic self-indulgence liable to bore and confuse the audience."
Larry Rohter on Your Face Tomorrow: Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marias: "On the surface 'Your Face Tomorrow' is a strange hybrid. It is almost as if Henry James or Marcel Proust decided to write a novel set in John le Carre's world. There are occasional bursts of action and much clandestine skulduggery. But 'Poison, Shadow and Farewell,' like the two previous volumes, 'Fever and Spear' and 'Dance and Dream' is essentially a rumination on several of the Really Big Themes that tend to captivate great writers: love and death, power and violence, and, above all, betrayal, loyalty and deceit, both personal and at the level of the state.... 'Your Face Tomorrow' requires patience, effort and intellectual discipline of the reader. 'Poison, Shadow and Farewell' delivers a payoff at the end, but the real challenge, and pleasure, is in getting there."
Washington Post:
Simon Johnson on Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin: "Andrew Ross Sorkin is the Stephen Ambrose for our financial crisis, with the blow-by-blow story of how rich bankers fought to save the Wall Street they knew and loved. The details in 'Too Big To Fail' will turn your stomach. The arrogance, lack of self-awareness, and overweening pride are astonishing.... Sorkin puts you there -- you see events unfold moment by moment, you hear the conversations, you can sense the hubris. The executives of our largest banks ran their firms into the ground, taking excessive risks that even now they fail to understand fully. But, as these individuals saw it, unless they personally were saved on incredibly generous terms, the world's economy would grind to a halt. This is as compelling as it is appalling."
Charles on Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler: "If you know 'Jane Eyre' and love it, don't deny yourself the pleasure of this intense little companion book. South African-born Sheila Kohler, who now teaches at Princeton, sinks deep into the details of Brontë's life to re-create the atmosphere of her tragic, cloistered family. Parallels between Charlotte and her famous heroine are an irresistible subject of critical inquiry, and even if those parallels are sometimes drawn too baldly in 'Becoming Jane Eyre,' Kohler's novel remains a stirring exploration of the passions and resentments that inspired this 19th-century classic."
Los Angeles Times:
David L. Ulin on Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza: "Built around two forgotten incidents (the 1956 mass killings of Palestinians in Rafah and Khan Younis), it is a book that digs deep, exploring the relationship of past and present, memory and experience -- rigorously reported yet always aware of the elusive nature of testimony, the way that stories solidify and harden over time.... What is the value of history in such a landscape? How do we make sense of where we are? These are the primary questions raised by 'Footnotes in Gaza,' and it is to Sacco's credit as an artist and a journalist that he proposes no easy answers -- nor, indeed, any answers at all."
The Globe and Mail and The Guardian have light review coverage this week.
The New Yorker:
Anthony Lane on High Society: The Life of Grace Kelly by Donald Spot "The sex life of Grace Kelly, like the home life of the Incas, is one of those distant but down-to-earth matters which we can investigate in depth, and muse upon at length, but never really hope to understand. According to some observers, she herself may not have grasped its implications; in the words of a columnist at Photoplay, 'I wonder if Grace Kelly knew she had so much S.A.' To which the only proper response is, W.T.F.?"
The New York Review of Books:
Jonathan Raban on Going Rogue by Sarah Palin and Sarah from Alaska by Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe: "In Sarah from Alaska, Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe, who were embedded reporters on the Palin campaign for CBS and Fox News, and earn for themselves a couple of paragraphs of abuse in Going Rogue, which adds to their credibility, largely confirm Palin's story in its broad outline and coloring. Their Schmidt and Wallace are characters nearly identical to her Schmidt and Wallace. Read side by side, the two books work like a stereoscope through which to watch the steadily darkening atmosphere of the campaign, the quarantining of Palin from the press, the infighting, the stream of leaks, and the vain attempts to educate the candidate in current affairs.... By both accounts, Palin was treated with extraordinary condescension from the start; more as a dim and wayward eighth-grader than as a sitting governor, putative vice-president, and the speaker whose rallies drew ten and twenty times the crowds that showed up to hear John McCain."
And note "Night," Postwar author, and frequent NYRB contributor, Tony Judt's first in a series of "short reflections," in which he reveals (to me at least) that he is suffering from an advanced stage of Lou Gehrig's disease: "The best way to survive the night would be to treat it like the day. If I could find people who had nothing better to do than talk to me all night about something sufficiently diverting to keep us both awake, I would search them out. But one is also and always aware in this disease of the necessary normalcy of other people's lives: their need for exercise, entertainment, and sleep. And so my nights superficially resemble those of other people. I prepare for bed; I go to bed; I get up (or, rather, am got up). But the bit between is, like the disease itself, incommunicable."
The New York Times Room for Debate blog has a post on how to sort your books to keep the wheat and sell the chaff. It's tied to the changeover of the year but, man, this strikes me as the most reliably groovy way to pass a few hours regardless of the season.
Whenever my wife gets into a Mike-should-do-some-organizing phase I offer to take responsibility for the bookshelves, and that means many happy hours of checking dog-eared pages for the good stuff, and testing spines for springiness (a split spine doesn't damn it but does move it closer to the sell pile), and sorting books by subject (Fitzroy Maclean's Eastern Approaches has probably never left the side of Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia in the ten years since I've read them).
I did a major sell this summer, and it felt good at the time; but I discovered long ago that I have a pretty terrible instinct for what I won't miss. I sell it, and then a few weeks later I go to look something up in it. I'm still grieving for the Historical Atlas of Central Europe I sold then, and even as I stood at the sell counter at Half-Price Books I knew I'd regret the loss of the NYRB edition of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy with the freaky blue-green spine. But it had to g its blue-greenness was so haunting in its beauty that I could no longer have it in the house.
In any case, the NYT post has some good culling advice from the likes of Francine Prose and Jane Smiley and is worth a read.
What's Old Is Jung Again: One of the pioneers of modern psychology and dream analysis, psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) is enjoying a renaissance of sorts among readers who want to curl up on the couch with him. The facsimile edition of The Red Book--Jung's illustrated chronicle of his own dreams from 1914 to 1930--has been flying off the shelves of booksellers this holiday season. [The New York Times]
J.K. Rowling Dominates the Decade: At least in book sales, that is. Rowling takes the top spot as the bestselling author of the decade with over 29,000,000 copies of her Harry Potter series sold. [The Guardian]
Our Omni editors wish you a wonderful holiday, and hope that you'll give, receive, and devour a good book over the long weekend. We'll see you back here on Monday, December 28.
Candid McMurtry Hits the Airwaves: In typically self-effacing style, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer that over the years he's written some "pretty good books." The author's candid comments set the stage for reading his just released Literary Life: A Second Memoir, the follow-up to his 2008 bookseller's bio, Books: A Memoir. [NPR]
Different Jacket, Still Numero Un Like the US, Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol is the topselling book in the UK for holiday gifting. Seems fiction is in, while celebrity bios are out among British readers. Check out the UK edition's very different cover. [The Guardian]
Moving & Shaking: This morning's Today show feaure on Kevin Michael Connolly--a professional photographer and athlete born without legs--puts his memoir Double Take in a top spot on today's Movers & Shakers list.
One of the pleasures of visiting Baltimore was getting a chance to meet the editors of Raw Dog Screaming Press, an indie publisher that has been putting out fiction that might otherwise fall through the cracks. RDSP books tend toward the gritty or the surreal, often flirting both with what you might call "literary" and what you might call "pulp." There's a definite hyper-real noir vibe to their books as well--a wonderful energy and visceral quality that helps lift their efforts above the ordinary. Editors Jennifer Barnes and John Lawson have a definite vision for their press and I expect them, over time, to become a major player in the indie press. Here are a few recent titles of interest... Welcome to Oakland by Eric Miles Williamson - From the Washington Post's review: "The novel swirls through a series of half-plots, portraits and anecdotes of Murphy's various bar buddies, interspersing diatribes on race, class and literary fiction, among other things. Williamson rails against almost everybody, including readers and critics who live in a fantasy world of justice and resolution. Between its episodic structure -- brilliantly echoing the rhythms of jazz, by the way -- and the blunt-force trauma of the narrator's attitudes, what emerges is no easy read. T-Bird navigates a sea of violent revenge with a cargo of rot-gut booze."
Finale by Paul A. Toth - When Jonathan Thomas receives a threatening letter apparently sent by an ex-girlfriend, he pursues the sender but finds himself unraveling another mystery he would have better left unsolved.
Unintended Consequences by Larry Fondation - The fourt installment in Fondation's "LA Stories" series. This new collection reveals with precision the way life can tangle good intentions and trip up even the most sure-footed among us. Compact city fables for our times.
D.D. Murphy, Secret Policeman by Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Massie - D.D. Murphy has a way with words-or is it that words have their way with him? Work the clues alongside this unlikely sleuth to reveal an underground cabal of letters, a conspiracy of meaning, right below the surface of the everyday world. Murphry is both hero and villain, an unforgettable personality who will have you cringing while you laugh and rooting for his every misguided plan.
Cursed by Jeremy C. Shipp - "A tightly written story of suspense and occult horror. Nicholas believes that he has been cursed, and he is not alone; his eccentric love interest, Cicely, is convinced that the fate of the world depends on her possession of a tennis ball...Using Nicholas's idiosyncratic voice and fondness for lists, Shipp effectively conveys the claustrophobic world of people caught up in events beyond their control." - From the Publishers Weekly review.
When You Wish Upon a Chef: British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver was awarded the $100,000 TED grant for his work fighting obesity and promoting healthy eating in the UK.The prize money will be used "to enact a wish" that will be revealed at the 2010 TED conference in February.
First Fiction: Granta editor John Freeman picks the Best Debuts of 2009 for NPR.
Moving and Shaking: We haven't even made it through the Christmas Eve (let alone New Year's Eve) but early resolutions bring Flat Belly Diet! for Men to the No. 2 spot on our Movers & Shakers.
(The kind folks at Fountain Bookstore, including owner Kelly Justice, created a wonderful display for Finch; meanwhile, a flagging author stands next to a bust of a dead one; more on Poe below...)
I was on the road from October 28 through December 12 traveling up and down both coasts promoting my books Finch and Booklife with a series of gigs at indie and chain bookstores, universities like MIT, the Library of Congress, comic shops, and even a bar. This is the latest in a series of reports from events like the National Book Awards. You can read the others on my Omnivoracious contributor page. Weird Southern Juxtapositions
Richmond's one of those studies in contrasts that makes your head spin. You can drive into the city through a semi-battered industrial section and see a weathered, pollution-blackened pseudo-doric column with "Entering Richmond" chisled into it against a backdrop of a burnt-out car and yellow grass struggling up through cracked asphalt. If you stand in one of the more famous cemeteries, you can see not just the roiling river and its insane rapids, but also the 1970s-style concrete of the university buildings surrounded by old-style Victorian and Southern Gothic statuary, beyond which loom factory smokestacks. Standing amid a bunch of dead confederate war heroes, looking out on a multi-cultural college, and then later wandering through some cool bohemian shops only minutes away from huge stone stallions rearing up with folks like Stonewall Jackson atop them...well, that's parts of the South for you, I guess. (Another statue depicts Arthur Ashe, but the way he wields his racquet, it truly looks like he's beating the crap out of the adoring marble children looking up at him.)
(Wait. What's that there pyramid doing in the cemetery?)
Fountain Bookstore
Richmond also has a fabulous institution, the Fountain Bookstore, now run by Kelly Justice and ably assisted by, among others, Doc, Heather, Tess, and Steve. Not only did they have the cool display for Finch when I came in, they also were playing the Murder by Death soundtrack for the novel. Tess actually is a third-generation indie bookseller, and when I mentioned the movie Santa Sangre, Doc immediately came back with the name of the director, "Alejandro Jodorowsky." Which is when I knew I was in good hands--and I was right. The Fountain folks were among the most knowledgeable and friendly of any bookstore I read at during the tour. As the holiday party special guest, I thought I ought to entertain, so rather than a straight reading I told the Romanian "professional cockroach" story (direct link to podcast here), which pertains to part of Finch, then read the part of Finch that was inspired by the incident, followed by the somewhat tongue-in-cheek Evil Monkey Guide to Creative Writing published as an appendix in Booklife. It was a good event, and I was in an excellent mood, with Finch having made the year's best lists of the Washington Post and the Barnes & Noble Review, among others, and been on the Wall Street Journal's holiday gift book guide.
I even shot my first promo in the bookstore basement, which is undergoing a makeover. "We thought it looked a lot like your fantasy city of Ambergris," Kelly told me, before positioning me, teetering on boards, in front of some messed-up bricks. It's a measure of how comfortable I became on the tour doing things on the fly that it was all one take, reproduced below for your amusement (note the blooper at the end).
The Poe Museum
Staying with John and Kyla Glover, librarians and writers, I got a good glimpse of the historical anchors of the city while also getting a look at the modern context. We not only visited cemeteries, we passed by the former house of weird writer James Branch Cabell, and visited the Poe Museum. As their website says, "Richmond's Poe Museum boasts the world's finest collection of Edgar Allan Poe's manuscripts, letters, first editions, memorabilia and personal belongings. The Poe Museum provides a retreat into early nineteenth century Richmond where Poe lived and worked...Opened in 1922, in The Old Stone House, the museum is only blocks away from Poe's first Richmond home and his first place of employment, the Southern Literary Messenger."
Having always associated Poe with Baltimore, this information came as a bit of a surprise. The museum itself was an entertaining hodgepodge. Certain sections seemed to be of the "this is a piano owned by a friend of a cousin of Poe's" variety, but the manuscript sections and the display concerning Poe's entry point into detective fiction I found fascinating. The most interesting point I took out of the exhibits was simply this: contrary to my impression of Poe as being somewhat dysfunctional and not fitting into society, he was a high-functioning, ambitious individual who died under mysterious circumstances. Whether my original impression or the impression given by the Poe Museum is the correct one, I don't really know, but it made me interested in revisiting Poe and his work.
(Poe the detective, and the memorial to Poe inside the manuscript exhibit.)
Which brings me to a book recommendation: The Ellen Datlow-edited Poe: 19 New Tales Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. It contains original work by Kim Newman, Pat Cadigan, Sharyn McCrumb, Lucius Shepard, Laird Barron, Suzy McKee Charnas, and others. Although published way back at the beginning of the year to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Poe's birth, it's a great holiday gift for anyone you know who loves weird fiction (along with Datlow's Lovecraft Unbound.) You can also try Peter Straub's reprint anthology Poe's Children, and definitely peruse In the Shadow of the Master, which reprints classic Poe tales with interesting afterwords by a variety of modern masters of horror and mystery.
(Poe, the anthology, and Ellen Datlow, editor)
Finally, if you're interesting in some modern interpretations of Poe, my friend S.J. Chambers has been publishing some very interesting articles and essays on the subject:
Sunday Book Review cover: Jeanette Winterston on The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar: "Concealment was her game, and her way of life. Dating three women at a time was not difficult for her. She collected snails, liking their portable hiding place and the impossibility of telling which was male and which was female. She traveled with snails in her luggage and kept hundreds at home. If she was bored at dinner parties, she might get a few snails out of her purse and let them loose on the tablecloth. As she didn't eat much, she was often bored at dinner parties.... This is a biography of clarity and style. A model of its kind."
Andrea Wulf on Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England by Amanda Vickery: "Few writers have such a talent for transforming the driest historical source into a gripping narrative, for teasing stories from account books, inventories, ledgers and pattern books.... If until now the Georgian home has been like a monochrome engraving, Vickery has made it three dimensional and vibrantly colored. 'Behind Closed Doors' demonstrates that rigorous academic work can also be nosy, gossipy and utterly engaging."
Suzanne Vega on Paul McCartney: A Life by Peter Ames Carlin: "Our eyes dry in a hurry as we careen from breathless fan-boy writing to dusty travelogue descriptions of Liverpool at the turn of the 20th century, while Carlin describes some immigrants flooding in and others flooding out, 'departing for the untrammeled shores of the New World.' Yawn. Why are shores always untrammeled? No one ever seems to write about how trammeled most shores actually are these days."
Barry Gewen on In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp by Er Tai Ga "It's tempting to try to read Mr. Gao's story optimistically, as a lesson about the strength and resilience of the human spirit, with this book as the happy ending.... Mr. Gao is less sentimental; he understands how little his own choices had to do with his survival. If he hadn't been a painter at a time when the government needed painters, he probably would have died at Jiabiangou like most of the prisoners there. At many steps along the way he had the good fortune to find mentors who taught him, patrons who protected him. We don't hear the stories of those people who didn't happen to find patrons because they aren't here to tell their tales."
Washington Post:
Charles on The Anarchist by John Smolens: "Have you ever cut yourself on a piece of glass without realizing it? Just like that, Smolens slides through gruesome episodes in such muted, unadorned prose that you barely realize what's happened until you see the blood. The genius of this novel is the tension he creates by moving quickly from quiet, moving scenes in the president's sickroom or Czolgosz's prison cell to raw, startling flashes of violence during the criminal investigation.... It's an enthralling descent into the dark byways of the criminal mind and the vast system of canals that ran through Buffalo. Here is the crime that launched the 20th century, the unlikely imprint of a lonely man's delusion on the soft metal of the world."
Seth Faison on When China Rules the World by Martin Jacques: "The result is 'When China Rules the World,' a compelling and thought-provoking analysis of global trends that defies the common Western assumption that, to be fully modern, a nation must become democratic, financially transparent and legally accountable. Jacques argues persuasively that China is on track to take over as the world's dominant power and that, when it does, it will make the rules, on its own terms, with little regard for what came before."
Los Angeles Times:
James Marcus on The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam: "It is very difficult to write even a small masterpiece. But there is something harder still: writing a sequel to a masterpiece.... There are scenes of exquisite power, including a couple of encounters with the slippery Veneering (perfect name, by the way). So why does Betty's story pale next to that of her husband [in Gardam's Old Filth]? ... 'The Man in the Wooden Hat' retains the feeling of a subsidiary work. And yet without it, these scenes from a marriage would be woefully incomplete. It turns out that even a (relatively) silent partner has something important to say."
The Globe and Mail:
Martin Levin on Gardam's Man in the Wooden Hat: "Ultimately, despite its wry humour, despite its forgiving delight in human infelicity, its sense of the absurd, its nuanced understanding of just how very difficult it is to arrange things well between human beings, this is, almost surprisingly, a very moving book. It's the portrait of a marriage that, against the odds, against temptation, against the contrasting characters of its pairing, against the great disappointment of childlessness, against time itself, against the greater attractions of another, somehow survives, perhaps even prevails.... For its wit, its compassion, its tragicomic view of life, its deep staccato probings of human action, Jane Gardam's Filth series will rank as one of the great literary achievements of recent years."
Andre Alexis on Glenn Gould by Mark Kingwell: "In the end, I want to say that this is both a brilliant book and one that is flawed. It is a book that, intentionally, provokes thought about the nature of biography and the relationship of biographer to subject. And I'm grateful for the provocation, enough so that it is a book I would recommend."
The Guardian:
Steven Poole on the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary: "It has, of course, long been the case that no reader or writer with a serious interest in the English language could afford to be without the complete OED. Now, it gives me no displeasure to say, you need the HTOED as well. The price may look steep, but it might turn out to be one of the last great printed reference works...: all the more reason to buy it swith, mididone, with a siserary, and in quick sticks."
Hermione Lee on Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith: "One line of Hepburn's, from ThePhiladelphia Story (Smith's favourite movie), is, she says, a 'lodestar' to her when writing anything: 'The time to make your mind up about people is never!' That paradox "“ a very firm-minded character speaking a line, with fierceness and conviction, about not making your mind up "“ is at the heart of this flexible, complicated, attractively impassioned collection of essays."
The New Yorker:
No new reviews (last week's was a double issue), but here's a bit from Joan Acocella's subscription-only piece on The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling by Peter Ackroyd: "If Ackroyd thought that Chaucer was this dull, why did he bother to translate him? Readers coming to 'The Canterbury Tales' for the first time should avoid this version, and instead do one of two things. The best is to buy Vincent Hopper's interlinear translation.... This is unashamedly a pony. It places the new word directly under the original word--a device that makes the syntax feel old-fashioned but that will also quickly teach you Middle English, which is not hard.... For people who steadfastly refuse to confront Middle English, the best recent translations are those of Colin Wilcockson and Nevill Coghill (both Penguin Classics) and David Wright (Oxford World's Classics). Don't worry that Wilcockson's doesn't include all the tales. Truth to tell, some of them are boring."
Harper's (subscription only--c'mon, it's only 15 bucks):
Francine Prose on The Americans by Robert Frank: "What made the loneliness and isolation that The Americans captured even harder for the critical and general audience to accept was the fact that, a few years before its appearance, a hugely popular exhibition and its companion volume, The Family of Man, had depicted the world, America included, as one giant inclusive, warm-hearted kinship system sharing the same joys and sorrows. Organized by Edward Steichen, and featuring several of Frank's photos, the show encouraged its audience to see photography as a merry postman delivering candy hearts. And now that very same messenger was bringing terrible news."
