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.

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Presidential Candidate John, is unfortunately best known for her perseverance in the face of terrible challenges. She first lost a sixteen year old son in a freak car accident. She was then diagnosed with breast cancer on the eve of the 2004 presidential election. Now, at the onset of the 2008 campaign, she discovered that cancer had moved to her bones, and was now classified as incurable. The doctors gave her about five years to live.

Now, if that woman chose to offer some advice about determination, you would listen, yes? Of course you would, which is why you’ll read the excerpt of her memoir Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers, which was recently released in paperback. In it, you’ll find heart-wrenching descriptions of love, grief, and the value of people coming together.

Lovely.

Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain has a new book, Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them, in which he examines the most difficult aspect of being a Decider: making decisions. Written with Mark Salter, the book is largely anecdotal and offers numerous examples of good and bad decisions. During an interview with NPR, McCain drew heavily on history, citing stories from Vietnam and former presidents in an effort to explain how he came to make some of his hardest decisions, most notably his choice to support the Iraq war at its outset.

Of the current state of the war, which he also touches on in the book, he had this to say: “Every bit of knowledge and instinct, awareness and confidence that I have makes me believe absolutely that setting a date for withdrawal will result in chaos and genocide in the region, and we will then have to call on young Americans to make even greater sacrifices.”

Listen to the interview and read an excerpt.

By now, every candidate in the 2008 election has published at least one book, from Obama on down to Biden. The former has, in fact, written two memoirs — The Audacity of Hope and Dreams of My Father — both of which were runaway best sellers. Why? Jon Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek, argues that the senator’s compelling life story has made them so popular.

Says Meacham, “One of the most ancient devices in presidential politics is to sell one’s life journey as the qualification for high office, whether it’s Lincoln in the log cabin or Andrew Jackson standing up as a 14-year-old to the British and having the British officer hit him in the head with a sword, and it was, I think, very astute of Obama to use his own life in that way.”

Books as a campaign tool began in earnest with Jimmy Carter during the 1976 election, when he published Why Not the Best? “It’s a way of getting his vision of the country out,” Meacham told NPR. “And since then, it’s become a kind of course requirement for a presidential candidate to publish something. How many people read them I think is a very open question.”

Read the article and listen to the full interview.

William Gibson, arguably the king of science fiction for the past two decades, has written a new book! Spook Country, a stand-alone sequel to 2005’s Pattern Recognition, continues Gibson’s tradition of incorporating cutting-edge technology into his books. When he sat down with NPR over the weekend, he cited two specific examples that heavily inform the book: “Locative Art”, which involves creating a blended reality that combines aspects of the real world with a virtual one. Early on in the novel, an artist attempts to convince the managers of the Virgin Mega Store to allow him to set up a virtual recreation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lethal heart attack. Unbeknownst to the managers, though, the piece was already displayed and looping endlessly, but nobody could access it because they did not have what Gibson calls “the URL”.

Spook Country also examines post 9/11 “Big Brother” technology, and the increasing lack of privacy for both the watcher and the watched. Says Gibson, “If you’re a crooked politician, and you’re lying about something, we’re going to know about it, because in the digital world…everything is porous, and its not easy to keep a secret for very long.”

I’ll say this, though: after listening to the interview, which was one of the more interesting I’ve heard recently, I still have absolutely no idea what this book is about. See if you can figure it out.

SoHo wasn’t always the hipsters paradise. Before it became a mecca of designers, fashionistas, and other people that dress better than you or I, it was really kind of seedy: run down, lots of dubious-looking clubs and shops, obvious drug addiction. It’s this, the SoHo of old, that provides the backdrop for Irini Spanidou’s third book, Before, which centers around the beautiful Beatrice, the “It-Girl” of the neighborhood. Beatrice has moved in with and is supporting her hard-drinking, painter husband, Ned, who is oblivious to the fact that his new wife has become an unattainable object of desire for the junkies in the neighborhood. People float in and out of Beatrice’s life, there are ups and downs, and all the while, Beatrice feels powerless, struggling for a self-knowledge and self-worth.

Did my description not make a lick of sense to you? Listen to an NPR interview with Spanidou herself, and be sure to read the excerpt.