As many of you perhaps know, Prime Minister Tony Blair was voted out of Parliament just a few weeks ago after a ten year stint at No. 10 Downing Street. The timing, as you may also know, is ripe for a rash of Blair critiques and retrospectives, the first major one being The Blair Years: The Alistair Campbell Diaries.

Campbell, Blair’s Press Secretary and strategist from 1994-2003, kept exhaustive diaries of his time in with the former Prime Minister, and touched on many major events as he and Blair saw them: the rise of the Labour party, the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland, the death of Princess Diana, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror. Most valuable, though, are the moments at which Campbell captures the man behind the nation, defying relentless and crushing pressure to govern in what he hoped were the people’s best interests.

During the time he was in Parliament, Campbell was called Blair’s right hand man and the second most powerful figure in Britain. If he doesn’t know what went on behind closed doors, then maybe we were just never meant to know. But he does dish on Diane Rehm:
Listen to the full interview.

“Life is not a fairy tale, and even the most perfect spouse can not be your all-in-all,” says Denise Jackson, wife of country singer Alan Jackson. “We all have our faults, and every adult alive has regrets.”

(Cue Je Ne Regrette Rien.)

Denise’s latest tome It’s All About Him: Finding the Love of My Life touches elaborately details how the pressures of fame contributed to the slow disintegration of her marriage with the country star. He was unfaithful, she was too controlling and neither would give in, so they separated. Some three months later, she had an epiphany: “I just remember driving home and just crying out to Him, and saying I can’t take this anymore,” she told Today’s Ann Curry. “‘I can’t believe You want my family to be apart. But if You do, I just give it all to You. I know You’ll take care of me.’ It wasn’t that things changed immediately. But I had just this sense of peace.”

But things did change, and now the high school sweethearts are together again and closer than ever!

Denise did note warily some moments later, “I’m not saying every marriage should be saved.”

Watch the full interview, in which she reveals who the “Him” in the title really is. And don’t miss Alan performing his newest song, “It’s All About Him”, which he wrote to honor his wife’s book. Aw.

Have you ever been to Provincetown? It’s a hell of a town. Nestled amongst tourist hamlets at the outermost tip of Cape Cod, it has inexplicably become a magnet for bohemian culture and boasts one of the largest gay populations in Massachusetts. Many a vacationing family has unwittingly driven out there only to their very foundations irrevocably rocked.

Hyperbole, yes, but the town still would make a fantastic setting for your first novel, except that Annie Dillard beat you to it. Her latest is called The Maytrees and follows the post-WWII marriage of bohemian couple Toby and Lou Bigelow from its tipsy, when-a-young-man’s-fancy-turns-to-love beginnings to its crumbling, adulterous descent some twenty-five years later.

Described on her barnesandnoble.com author page as being a “gregarious recluse”, Dillard emerged to briefly discuss The Maytrees on NPR over the weekend. Listen to the full interview and read an excerpt.

Philip K. Dick has, in the years since his death in 1982, supplied the basis for more okay/pretty good science fiction than any other person. Ever. Surprisingly, and unjustly, the man that gave us Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and Total Recall (among others) is still largely unknown to the general populous. Until now…

Literary hero Jonathan Letham, whose own novel You Don’t Love Me Yet appeared this past March, has edited and republished four of Dick’s novels — The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — in one seminal volume: Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s.

Letham talked about the project on NPR this past weekend, during which time he cited Dick as a major personal influence and discussed the author’s notoriety in the fledging sci-fi scene (”He’s sort of like what Lenny Bruce was to comedy in the 1960s.”) Listen to the full interview.

Do you remember Poppa Neutrino? I suspect very few people do, but for god’s sake they should! His accomplishment(s) are definitely for the history books. In 1998, Neutrino — who changed his name from David Pearlman after a brush with death some years earlier — built a raft from trash he found on the streets of New York. Pushing off from there, Neutrino sailed across the North Atlantic on his homemade raft, and actually succeeded.

And not only that, he also invented the Neutrino Clock Offense, a nearly unstoppable football play that a former New York Jets coach called “as innovative as the forward pass”.

He’s just that kind of guy.

Now, ten years after his historic voyage, Neutrino, seventy-four, is preparing to take another, similar one across the Pacific. It is around the preparation for this voyage that Alec Wilkinson has based his book, The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino, which serves both as a biography and an in depth explanation of Neutrino’s philosophical base, a concept called Triads. He believes that that in order for a person to be truly happy, he or she must define their three deepest desires and pursue them without end.

The fun doesn’t end there: Wilkinson appeared on NPR just yesterday. Listen to the full interview.

Exempted from military service, violinist Gottfried Keller spent the waning days of World War II playing for wounded soldiers, a task he felt was demoralizing and a misuse of his talents. He dared not complain, though, and was rewarded with a trip to nearby labor camp. After meeting briefly with the commander of the camp, Keller begins playing anew, but this time for the inmates, for whom his violin, it is hoped, will inspire hope in otherwise despondent men. As Keller plays the greats, the author Eugene Drucker, unravels his character’s life, revealing the death of his best friend and the Jewish fiancé he fled from at the outset of the war.

Drucker is himself a professional violinist, and his mastery of the instrument informs The Savior, his first novel, all throughout. He appeared yesterday on The Diane Rehm Show. Listen to the full interview.

In her latest book, Otherwise Normal People, Aurelia C. Scott has found people that like to garden, but none of that “buy a couple of plants from the grocery store and throw them in the ground and then never look at them again because plants don’t deserve my time and attention” crap. These people garden the way Lance Armstrong rides bikes, and as Scott shows us, the results are amusing, frightening, and often times very enlightening.

The book centers around a group of competitors preparing for the American Rose Society’s spring show. They live anywhere from North Carolina to California, they are housewives and brain surgeons and sheet metal mechanics, and they all have their own tips and secrets for growing the perfect rose. Scott expertly chronicles the group’s passion, often getting swept up in the fervor herself, but never pokes fun at the somewhat esoteric nature of the competition.

Listen to rosarian anecdotes on the Diane Rehm Show.

Jewish terrorism analyst Solomon Rosner lies dead in a hotel in Amsterdam, and it is Gabriel Allon’s job to sift through Rosner’s files. It’s in doing this that Allon discovers two things:

1. Rosner had requested an emergency meeting with Allon’s employers, Israeli Intelligence, not twenty-four hours before his death.
2. The target is the daughter of an American ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Allon appears seconds to late to save the girl from being brutally kidnapped, but reveals his face to her captors, setting in motion of chain of events that ties Allon forever to the girl and places in his hands the fate of Western Europe.

Dan Silva is routinely hailed as one of the most gifted spy novelists alive, and Gabriel Allon, the art-restorer/part-time spy/”the legendary but wayward son of Israeli Intelligence”, is perhaps his best known character. Appearing in no less than seven books so far, Allon has gone to hell and back to give us a thrill, and the seventh, The Secret Servent, is no exception, addressing relevant but touchy issues such as Islamic fundamentalism and the moral boundaries of intelligence and interrogation.

Silva’s been in the news a fair amount this week. NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse says nice things about him here, and Today has , posted the first chapter on its website.

A meteorologist at a local news station writes a novel about a super hurricane. If that isn’t wish fulfillment, I don’t know what is. The meteorologist in question is WABC-TV New York’s Bill Evans, who teamed up with novelist Marianna Jameson to write Category 7 (Subtitle: “It’s the Biggest Storm in History!”). The super hurricane in question is Simone, the product of a mad scientist named Carter Thompson who has learned how to create and guide impossibly huge storm systems. So now Simone is threatening to wipe Manhattan clean off the face of the earth, and only a courageous group of meteorologists can stop it.

And how about this for an apocalyptic first sentence: “Rain lashed through the hellishly hot Saharan sky, hurling itself groundward with chaotic fury only to evaporate before it made contact with the dying earth.”

Read the excerpt here.

Cleveland Indians superstar Jay Alcazar has been accused of his rape, and damned if his manager Howie Traveler is going to leave him high and dry. Before you run to flip on SportsCenter, perhaps you should make a quick stop at the NPR website.

“What! NPR doesn’t cover sports! You’ve gone mad, boy!”

No, you’ve gone mad! NPR recently sat down with sports writer Frank Deford, in whose novel The Entitled, you’ll find Alcazar and Traveler faced with decisions that could end their careers or land them in jail. To complicate things further, Alcazar has been around the bases a few times off the field, too, and when Traveler walks by his player’s hotel room on one such night, he sees that will make him continually question everything he’s put his career on the line for.

And we don’t find out who is right ’til the very end!

When asked why he chose baseball to frame his plot, Deford responded, “the easiest thing to write about and I guess the most fun to write about …. Every day there [are] winners and losers and there’s drama and there’s joy and there’s glamour. And the guys playing it are young, and so lots of times they say all the wrong things.”

True enough. Listen to the interview and read the article here.