Alec Klein went to a high school better than yours. Every year, 28,000 kids apply to Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, and only 850 are accepted. Among those that do make it, there is a 25% acceptance rate to Ivy League schools. The alumni include Nobel laureates, Academy Award winners, and business luminaries. Stuyvesant kids are far smarter, wittier, more successful and maybe even prettier than those that went to your high school.

But Alec Klein wants to know the reasons why? He graduated in the class of 1985, and now he has gone back to try and figure out what makes his school so special. His book, A Class Apart, follows several students — the ten-year-old prodigy, the captain of the football team, the jaded poet — and several faculty members through a year at “Sty High”, and finds in equal parts the fulfillment of the American dream and vicious educational elitism.

Klein was featured on the Diane Rehm show on Tuesday. Check out the interview.

Come Monday, summer will be over, and you’ll have to put away those white linen pants, and that little skirt with the whales one it. Or will you…? Thanks to the magical world of books, you might be able stave off fall responsibilities a little while longer. That Night, Alice McDermott’s 1987, involves two star-crossed lovers and a 60s Long Island summer. Told from the perspective of a ten year old neighbor, the reader meets Rick and Sheryl, follows them through their courtship, an unplanned pregnancy and what reviewer Alice Leccese Powers calls, “serio-comic rescue attempt gone awry”.

“In That Night,” Powers writes. “McDermott lovingly bares the suburban soul — no, she bares the American soul — hidden behind metal Venetian blinds and crisply manicured hedges. In the end we glimpse her characters - the lovers and the child narrator — all grown and transformed by one summer night. That Night.”

Intriguing, no?

Read the full NPR review, and an excerpt of the story here.

I suppose its been around four years or so since Johnny Cash died. There have been a few books out, countless articles, a big-name movie that got an Oscar nod or two, all of them claiming to have the inside scoop, the real story on the real Man in Black. None, I repeat, none of them are as surprising as I Walked the Line.

The name on the cover reads Vivian Cash — Johnny’s first wife — but the book is comprised almost entirely of love letters to her, from him. The book traces the rise of their romance, when they met at an ice rink in 1951; his letters while overseas in Germany, during which time he promised her “oceans and oceans of love and devotion,” and encountered alcohol seriously for the first time; and their inevitable downfall, their relationship a victim of Johnny’s increasing fame and substance abuse.

This is a part of Johnny’s life that is routinely glossed over, and as The New York Times points out, the 2005 Cash movie Walk the Line ” presented [Vivian] as a nagging, ever-pregnant obstacle to his storybook romance with June Carter.” Vivian went on record saying once “[there are] people of the Nashville mind-set, who prefer that I be written out of Johnny’s history altogether.” The similarities between that story and this extend only to the names, and the side of Johnny shown here is a fiercely romantic one that is rarely, if ever, acknowledged.

Read The New York Times review of the book here.

Think back to your high school days. And now think about all the terrible things that happened to you then. A curse would explain all of that, wouldn’t it? Like the fact that your voice uncontrollably cracked every day for three years, or that you had hair, lots of hair, where other kids didn’t? A curse, when you think about it, is really the only logical explanation. For Oscar Wao, the curse has a name —Fukú — and it’s billed as the “the Curse and Doom of the New World”. The Wao family has endured five hundred years of tragedy, premature death, torture and star-crossed love, and that has all fallen down on little Oscar’s pubescent shoulders.

And all he wants to do is be the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien! And have a girlfriend! But so it goes in Junot Diaz’s first novel The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. Reminiscent of Jonathan Safran Foer at his best, Diaz plumbs the depths of the Wao family, bringing to light every instance of Fukú and how it has shaped Oscar’s life.

Listen to Alan Cheuse’s review on NPR, and expect to see this book again.

Al Roker’s Today book club returns from months of dormancy to promote a book that perhaps needs no promotion: Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, the first of the His Dark Materials trilogy. The book has all the trappings of a children’s fantasy novel: orphaned English child; ambiguously ominous uncle; giant animal ally, and so on.

The book’s protagonist is Lyra Belacqua, whose pleasantly unfettered life is shattered by the arrival of her uncle, Lord Asriel, who talks crazy talk of a natural phenomenon called “Dust”, and the outlines of a city in the Aurora Borealis that he has surmised is part of an alternative universe. Meanwhile, children have begun to disappear, the victims of “Gobblers”, a bizarre race that uses the kids for terrible experiments. When Lyra’s playmate Roger goes missing, Lyra runs away to find him, heading North into a dangerous land where she’ll meet up with mercenary polar bears, a vagabond troop of gyptians (gypsies), witches and a Texan in a hot air balloon.

Somehow, her uncle is involved.

Sound like your cup of tea? Read the excerpt, and don’t forget to watch the trailer for a movie adaptation staring Nicole Kidman and that hottie Daniel Craig.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned at college, its that you should always heed titles with more than one colon in them. Why? They have a lot of things to say. Important things. Things you need to hear. Like Tom Stanton’s Ty and the Babe: The Incredible Saga of Baseball’s Fiercest Rivals: A Surprising Friendship and the 1941 Has-Beens Golf Championship. Isn’t that second colon especially captivating?

Stanton’s book follows the fierce rivalry between two baseballs greats, Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. The legends met early on in their careers when rookie Ruth, “a platter-faced, gray flanneled 20-year-old” went up to pitch against Cobb for the first time. Opposites in every way, the men competed from that day forward for fourteen seasons. Insults and taunts were slung from both sides, and the exchanges almost came to blows on numerous occasions. The book culminates in a charity golf match several years after each had retired, stoking the competitive fires one last time. The press loved it.

Stanton beautifully details the rivalry, and the larger atmosphere of baseball in the time period. He goes beyond the stereotypes - Cobb as a racist, Ruth as a womanizing blockhead - and builds three-dimensional, flawed, and exceptionally talented men. He appeared on The Diane Rehm Show to discuss the project.

Listen to the full interview

It’s that time of year: the kids go back to school. For some, its a period of rejoicing and rekindled marriage, and for others, it marks what they fear might be the end of their life’s usefulness. They wander listlessly from room to cavernous room, desperate for something to clean, something to yell at. Are you one of the latter? Loading up the minivan with dorm room essentials and weeping as your babies disappear into the sinful, corrupting world of higher education? Carin Rubenstein was, until she realizes that “most of us will learn not only to live with our children’s absence but to love it.”

Rubenstein continues on in her newest book Beyond the Mommy Years, “Our time with our children is borrowed, leased, rented out to us, and there comes a point at which we have to realize that it’s mostly over…Your child is a child for barely eighteen years; but your grown child is an adult for decades. So we have to prepare ourselves to be mothers of adult children for the rest of our lives.”

Sound cold and callous? Don’t discount Rubenstein’s book just yet. Read the excerpt posted on Today’s website and then think twice about paying for Timmy’s bus ticket home at Thanksgiving.

Imagine a world without human beings.

The tag line to the latest Omega Man remake? Hardly. Rather, its the premise of journalist Alan Weisman’s newest book, The World Without Us, an examination of what might happen if the strain of humanity was taken off the earth. For instance, in days’ time, the pumps that keep our subways dry would fail, flood, and begin eroding underground construction. In a year’s time, millions more birds will exist in a world without airplanes. In twenty years’ time, the steel beams that support New York’s East Side would buckle and break. As Lexington Ave. collapses, it would become a river. Our plastic would exist long after everything else. Our radio signals, however broken, would be emitted forever.

The book is full of juicy factoids like those, but Weisman also takes a look at parts of the world untouched by human hands — Chernobyl, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the old-growth forests of Poland — and uses those environments to further inform his post-apocalyptic vision.

But Jon Stewart makes it all funny. Watch the Daily Show interview.

So here’s a good one: earlier this year, in an effort to discover new talent, Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, teamed up with the social networking site Gather.com to launch a competition entitled “First Chapters”. Taking its cues from American Idol and its ilk, the website offered a forum for any writer to post a first chapter to be judged and voted on by the general populous. When all was said and done, more than 2,600 writers responded, and those entries were pared down to five finalists, who were in turn judged by a team of industry professionals and pared down to two. The grand prize winner, Terry Shaw, submitted his novel, The Way Life Should Be, entirely on a last-minute whim; runner-up Geoffery Edwards had sent his Civil War epic Fire Bell in the Night to more than three hundred publishers before being discovered. Now, come Sept. 18, both will be enjoying prominent positions in Borders Stores across the country. Hot damn.

The contest was so successful that Gather.com has started another — this one for romance writers — and plans to hold more general fiction competitions in the near future.

Read the original NPR article here.

Endurance seems to be the theme today here at Media Buzz. Our latest installment follows renowned journalist Mike O’Connor as he attempts to uncover the reasons why, every so often, his comfortable small-town life in Texas would be violently uprooted, and his family would flee across the border into Mexico. They would leave with only a few hours’ notice, and would jump from suburbia to extreme poverty, oftentimes within a span of two or three days. The O’Connors never knew what lay ahead of them, only that they must remain anonymous. Despite their parents’ insistence otherwise, the children knew something was up.

Now, some thirty years later, the O’Connor parents are dead, and Mike has attempted to unfurl the mysteries and secrets that surrounded his childhood. What he finds is a bizarre mix of schemes, petty crime and McCarthyism that might garner him a Most Unusual Childhood Award. O’Connor sat down with Diane Rehm to discuss said childhood and how he began unraveling the family story. Listen to the full interview here.