It’s hard to believe Jersey bounty hunter Stephanie Plum has been with us for thirteen books now. Have no idea who that is? I didn’t either, until I read a Today excerpt from author Janet Evanovich’s latest book, Lean Mean Thirteen. We find series heroine Plum reunited with her lousy lawyer husband, Dickie Orr, albeit briefly, though, as Orr disappears not fifty pages in, leaving only bloodstains and bullet holes. At the logical top of the list of people who might want Orr dead, Plum sets out to clear her name, and with the aid of super hunky, on-again off-again boyfriend officer Joe Morelli, she discovers just how deep Orr’s lousiness goes.

Need a better reason to read Thirteen? This is a description of Lula, a woman who works in Plum’s cousin’s bail bonds office.

Lula is a black woman with a Rubenesque body and a Vegas wardrobe that’s four sizes too small. She is a former ‘ho, currently working as a file clerk for the office and a wheelman for me … when the mood strikes. Today, she was wearing big fake-fur Sasquatch boots, and her ass was packed into poison-green spandex pants. Her pink sweatshirt had Love Goddess spelled out in sequins across her boobs.

Today calls the novel “daring”, and who am I to disagree?

Jazz Great Wynton Marsalis called it “ghetto minstrelsy” while rapper Snoop Dogg said “hip-hop is what makes the world go around”. Some have said that it simply perpetuates countless age-old stereotypes while others insist that hip-hop gives a creative outlet to urban youth. If the genre has done one thing over the course of its twenty plus year existence, it has sparked controversy. Its lyrical content and legitimacy as an art form have been questioned again and again, but those who sing its praises say it is a product of it’s inner-city environment. Regardless of what they say, hip-hop has become one of the most popular genres of music on the planet and shows no signs of waining. It must be on to something…

Michael Eric Dyson certainly thinks so. A Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Dyson has become one of the foremost thinkers of the “hip-hop intelligentsia”, and was voted one of the 100 most influential black Americans by Ebony. His latest project is Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip-Hop, a series of essays that consider some of the pertinent issues surrounding the genre, from its often times profane and sexist lyrical content to the inadvertent self-parody caused by its rampant commercial success. The book also features an intro by Jay-Z and an outro by Nas.

Watch the Today interview, and read the prelude>.

I really have no idea how you could not know this by now, but just in case, the seventh and final Harry Potter novel is being released worldwide on July 21. The series is by far the most popular in the history of publishing, so successful in fact that its author, J.K. Rowling, is now worth an estimated 1.1 billion pounds, significantly more than the net worth of the Queen of England. It seems as though literally everyone has at some point picked up a Harry Potter book, seen one of the five movies, or dressed up as Dumbledore and appeared in public. Now, on the eve of the grand series finale, literally everyone is trying to make sense of it all.

Scholastic editor Arther A. Levine spoke with NPR recently about how he first discovered the Harry Potter phenomenon, and how it has ballooned into more than he could ever imagine. Listen to the full interview here. Under that same link, you will also find an interview Rowling did with NPR in 1998, before the books struck it big, in which she discussed the origins of the idea.

On The Diane Rehm Show yesterday, an author, a movie critic, and the headmistress of a Harry Potter fan site gathered to trace the ten year history of Harry in all its various forms, and to offer predictions for the final book, ominously titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Listen to that interview here.

And finally, Today has devoted an entire section of its website to the books. It boasts various interviews with Rowling herself, the stars of the movies, and pillars of the publishing industry, who are making gleeful predictions of how well The Deathly Hallows will sell. Find out more than you ever wanted to know here.

The Clash, which for a number of years enjoyed the title of “the only band that mattered”, has emerged as a lasting symbol of the politics and noise of 1970s punk, and is one of the few bands from that era that still enjoys any sort of cultural relevance. They were the first band to take punk beyond its three chord boundaries, mixing together elements of reggae, rockabilly and R&B into a wholly unique sound that served as an elegant platform for front man Joe Strummer’s highly politicized lyrics. Unfortunately, after dozens of London Calling reissues and hundreds of Rolling Stone and NME retrospectives, many of the details of the band and Strummer’s life have been glossed over or lost. Thank god for Chris Salewicz, a feature writer for NME during the band’s heyday. Some thirty years after the fact, he brings us Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer, a biography that spans the first raucous days of punk to Strummer’s tumultuous, conflicted post-Clash years. Salewicz sat down with NPR recently and discussed one of the central themes of the book: how does a figurehead in an anarchist movement, one that shuns material wealth, deal with commercial success?

Listen to the full interview here.

Nora Roberts has sold over 294 million books, writes at a clip of a book a month, and has set up shop permanently on the New York Times Bestseller List. Certainly such achievements should be honored, and in the only way Americans know how: bobble head dolls.

Yesterday was officially Nora Roberts Day in the small burg of Hagerstown, Maryland. The Washington County hamlet will honor their local girl done good with at a Hagerstown Suns baseball game, during which 1,000 commemorative edition bobble head dolls will be passed out to lucky fans. Roberts, who likes to attend as many Suns games as her hectic schedule allows, will throw out the first pitch.

If that wasn’t enough, it was also Robert’s wedding anniversary. How about that?

Read the Hagerstown Herald-Mail article here.

(Photo credit: Ric Dugan / Staff Photographer)

Günther Grass served in the Waffen-SS. He was rejected from the submarine corps at age fifteen, and so two years later, he volunteer for, and was accepted, into Hitler’s elite forces. Grass had kept this secret for sixty odd years, during which time he was racked with impossible guilt over his Nazi affiliations. In his newest memoir, Peeling Back the Onion, Grass claims he never fired a shot and spent a majority of his time fleeing military police, but still dutifully bears responsibility for his party’s savagery throughout the war.

The book, and the admission contained therein, have thrown the Nobel Prize-winning writer into the middle of a vicious critical cycle of attack and defense. He discussed the issues surrounding his memoir with Charlie Rose on Tuesday. Watch the full interview.

We live in an age where everything is fluid, most of all moral standards. They’re often the focal point of politicians’ stump speeches, but these past six years have seen some atrocious acts dismissed, talked around, justified and flat out ignored. In a country where our founding document, which guarantees us certain rights and protections, is being ignored as often as it is evoked, how are we supposed to interpret the term “civil liberties”?

American Civil Liberties Executive Director Anthony Romero sets out to answer that question in In Defense of Our America. He takes a look at several post-9/11 civil liberties cases — the Guantanamo Bay issue, the NSA spying program, the “American Taliban” — and examines their importance in the larger civil rights battle.

Romero appeared on Diane Rehm yesterday. Listen to the full interview.

When tasked by the National Endowment for the Arts to put together a book of solider’s writings, editor Andrew Carroll didn’t expect to find “The Cat”, a poem written by then newly-deployed Marine Ryan Alexander about a relationship he fostered with a pregnant cat. “You have this very stoic culture in the armed forces, where they’re not encouraged to and there isn’t a lot of expressing oneself,” Carroll says. “You do what you’re told, essentially, and there aren’t a lot of opportunities to say, ‘Here’s how I feel about that.’”

Operation Homecoming is the culmination of the NEA’s project. The organization drafted the help of Tom Clancy, Mark Bowden, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Jeff Shaara, and Marilyn Nelson, who encouraged U.S. Military Personnel to start writing about what they were experiencing, what they felt. Carroll came in and edited together the volume, which contains pieces from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as writing from the families they left behind.

Carroll was interview on NPR recently. Listen to the full interview, and read an excerpt of work, including “The Cat”.

In the past few years, it seems as if people are finally taking notice of all that’s going on in Africa. Movies like Blood Diamond and The Last Kind of Scotland, and books like Dave Eggers’ What is the What and Philip Gourevitch’sWe Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda highlight both the beauty of the continent and the atrocities it has had to endure. Author Aminatta Forna makes a significant contribution to that list with her newest, Ancestor Stones, a novel that takes on Sierra Leonian life through the eyes of four sisters over the course of eighty years.

From Sierra Leone herself, Forna saw her father hanged for leading the popular opposition against an increasingly tyrannical dictator. She fled to Britain where she could only watch from afar until granted the chance to go back two years ago to interview dozens of women about their wartime experiences, noting that women have a distinct view of the war. Where with men, war is all about where they were and what they did, “The experience of war is different for women,” she said in an interview with NPR. “Every woman in that country lived under the constant threat of rape and sexual assault. In my family’s village, on a single day when the rebels invaded, every single woman was raped and some of them were taken away.” It was those interviews that would become the source material for her four sisters and their wartime experiences.

Listen to the full interview.

Quick, what’s the hip, new, rebellious thing amongst teenage girls today? Being good! What would Paris and Lindsey think?

Those two are actually major catalysts for the movement, which has been profiled by Wendy Shalit in her latest book, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good. Girls across the country are boycotting barely-there clothing from companies like Hollister and Icing. A girl in Philadelphia is upset by a profane book read in English class, so she takes her case to the school board. In a blog, another girl details a struggle she’s having with her mother, who she feels is pressuring her to lose her virginity. Shalit argues that these aren’t just isolated incidents, but rather a reaction to the hyper-sexualized teenagers on TV and in movies. She describes how the primarily the media, but also friends and, surprisingly, parents can derail a girl’s efforts to discover herself, and outlines specific cases in which teenage girls have resisted all of that and become who they want to be.

Shalit spoke with Diane Rehm yesterday. Listen to the full interview.