Michael Chabon "The Yiddish Policemen's Union"

For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.

But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life—and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage—and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears.

At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written. [Link to recent article in The New York Times].

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Rutger Hauer "All Those Moments" (Chapter One)

Chapter One

The Day My Whole Life Changed

Which comes first, the belief or the success? I don't know. But you have to believe it's all going to work out. It's weird to say, but I've hardly ever been confident, and at the same time I've never really had a hard time making decisions. So somehow I must have felt confident enough.
—Rutger

In early 2004, I had a problem.

I was in Los Angeles, and I had a job lined up that was keeping me in town—a small-budget movie that I thought was kind of interesting. It had something to do with a virus and the Internet and the fate of mankind. It seemed like it was all set, but then one of the financial backers suddenly disappeared. The producers called my agent, saying, "Well, we're not going to do the movie." This happened on a Thursday.

Now, disappointment is a way of life when you're in the movies. Sometimes you don't get the part you want, and sometimes a film you're in just dies. I've been in situations where I'm talking to my manager or agent, and I'll say, "What about that film we worked so hard on two years ago? When are we going to see that?" And it turns out the film died on the vine. A backer pulled out and the film is not going to be released. The film is made, it's sitting on a shelf somewhere, and that's where it will continue to sit until the end of time. You have to be somewhat stoic about these things if you want to keep your sanity.

All the same, the early death of the virus movie came as a blow—I had been counting on it. The lease on my house in Santa Monica was up, and I had to decide if I was going to rent a house for another year. On the one hand, I couldn't be sure I'd get enough work during the year to justify it. On the other hand, although my primary home is in Holland, I need to have a base in the United States because I have a green card that I don't really feel like giving up.

"Oh, jeez," I said to myself. "What am I gonna do now?" It was a conundrum that could keep Einstein awake in his bed at night.

On Friday morning, I got another call from my agent.

"We have something really interesting."

"Let me guess," I said. "They're going to do this virus thing after all?"

"No. That would be good, but no. I think it's even better than that."

"Okay. I'm all ears."

"A young English director named Christopher Nolan is making a Batman movie in London. It's going to be sort of a more British version than the earlier ones, and he's interested in you for a part. Are you willing to travel, and if you are, will you travel quickly?"

"Let me read the script and I'll let you know."

My agent hesitated. "Okay, but you have to let me know by tonight."

"Tonight?"

"Tonight."

They sent a courier over with the script for Batman Begins early that afternoon. It was a totally different Batman, and had nothing to do with the earlier movies. In fact, it was a new beginning to the story. The character they were considering me for was Richard Earle, the CEO of Wayne Industries, who has made the company profitable by investing in arms deals and other sinister, under-the-table activities. It was a minor role, but I could see where I might have fun with it. In the story, he's the big boss, and the people who work for him snake around because they're a little afraid of him. He has that authority thing going on, and people want to get him, but they don't want to confront him directly. I thought the script, and the character, were really good.

The sun was just setting—the last light going out of the sky—as I called my agent back that evening.

"I like the script. So what's the deal?"

"Well," he said, "the deal is that they fly you to London very soon. And if they like you, you're working very soon. If they don't like you, you pay to fly yourself back to L.A., or to Amsterdam, or wherever you like, and you're not working."

Los Angeles to London is ten or eleven hours in the air. At least two and a half hours in the airport waiting to leave. Probably another two hours for a layover somewhere. Eight or nine hours lost to time-zone changes. A long journey by anyone's estimate—I could use a few days to prepare.

"When do they want me to fly?" I said.

"Tomorrow morning."

There was a pause on the line as I digested this latest information.

"Rutger?"

"Yes, yes. Fine. Tomorrow is fine."

I packed my bags in about twelve minutes—when you travel as much as I do, a lot of this stuff is just waiting to go, and the two bags I tend to travel with are solid and loyal companions. One is a Japanese designer's concoction, which is tougher than it looks and has already weathered the storms of several years. Nothing too fancy there—it holds clothes.

The other "bag" is a German trunk made out of aluminum. It is sooo strong. Not that it would do me much good, but it could survive anything—a plane crash, a nuclear war, you name it. It holds vitamins, a small weight for a specific exercise I need to do with one leg, and an ice-pack thing I need to use on the other leg when it has a busy day—the legacy of countless stumbles and falls during a career in action movies.

Scripts I should have read already are also in the trunk, along with cameras of various kinds. The DVD with a short film on it called The Room that I codirected, and which I enjoy showing people. It's in there. It also holds some books, some sweats, and some coins from the countries I visited last year rattling around at the bottom. Finally, there is the sophisticated Boy Scout knife for grown men—you'd be surprised at some of what I've been able to accomplish with that thing.

The foregoing is excerpted from All Those Moments by Rutger Hauer, and Patrick Quinlan.

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The Italian Job by Gianluca Vialli - excerpt (Chapter One)

Chapter One

The First Few Kicks

It all begins with a ball and a child. The ball is usually some kind of plastic/rubber compound (leather is for the big kids) and, these days, it originates somewhere with cheap labour. The child, of course, is flesh and blood, yet he or she is drawn to this artificial object, mesmerized by its shape and its unfamiliar smell. It looks solid and inert but as soon as it's nudged, a wonderful thing happens - it moves!

Anyone who has seen a child approach his or her first football may relate to the wonder they experience as the little leg stretches out to kick, and, magically, the ball rolls away.

It may sound clichéd, but at that age, that moment of first contact between child and football, everyone is the same. The Italian child is like the English child, and they are no different from a Venezuelan or an Inuit. What is striking, though, is how quickly the footballing paths diverge when the outside world crashes in. Even in the earliest kickabouts with parents, siblings or friends, footballing differences begin to emerge, and grow with the child, particularly in those who, like me, have the good fortune to turn their relationship with the ball into a life-long profession. Climate, culture, social class, economic conditions, all play their part. They divide the footballing world - but that is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it enriches us. Without it, there would be no 'Italian football', 'English football' or 'Brazilian football'.

We all have a sense of what those terms mean. We know that football is different in different countries. In fact, we have a mass of stereotypes: German football is disciplined; Italian football is defensive; English football is direct; Brazilian football is full of flair. I wasn't satisfied with these descriptions. To me, they seemed like convenient short-cuts to explain a far more complex reality, one which is rapidly changing.

I wanted to dig deeper. I wanted to understand, as best I could, the way things really were and how they were evolving. I wanted to figure out how, when and why those differences developed. Understand where we are, where we came from and where we're going. And, perhaps, destroy a few myths, unravel a few mysteries and offer one or two suggestions along the way.

We spend a lot of time talking about football - all of us, whether we're players, coaches, the media or fans.We talk about it pretty much incessantly.We've got twenty-four-hour television sports channels, radio stations, daily sports newspapers in Italy, lengthy sports sections in the English papers and, of course, the constant chatter in bars and pubs from Rome to Rotherham. It struck me that much of this discourse is both immediate and specific.We are drawn to it because it's so vast and colourful.We think about who won or lost and why, which player or team is better, whether the foul was inside or outside the box, how it made us feel. And that's all wonderful.

But we don't generally think about what lies beneath: why we see and experience football as we do. Why do some places produce certain types of player? Why do some supporters prefer a certain kind of football? Why do some countries prefer certain tactical schemes?

If we all start in the same place, why do we end up all over the footballing spectrum?

Of course, I am only one man and I don't have all the time and resources in the world, so I have focused here on the two footballing schools I know best: Italy, the country of my birth, where I lived and played until I was thirty-two, and England, my home for the last decade, where I have played, managed, married and started a family.

The thing about football is that it's a living thing. It moves and changes, slowly but inexorably - and, over time, radically. Much of the recent change has gone hand in hand with the globalization that has touched most aspects of modern life. Mass culture is eroding national and geographic identities. Those children, who were all the same when faced with a football at the age of three, are, in many ways, remaining the same as they grow older.

Imagine going to six cities in five different continents - Bari (Italy), Bangkok (Thailand), Bloemfontein (South Africa), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Boston (United States) and Burnley (England): take one ten-year-old boy from each place and put them in the same room. Now imagine that language was not an issue (pretend there's a universal-translator machine like there is in Star Trek - work with me here!). What would the kids talk about? What would they have in common?

Chances are, they'd have plenty to talk about. Most probably, they play the same games on the PlayStation, watch the same films on television and listen to the same music on the radio or their MP3 players. They've probably been driven around in the same cars and they would all be familiar with McDonald's (though the Italian boy's mamma might not have allowed him to eat there . . .). And they would all know who David Beckham is.

I think back to when I was ten. What could I have discussed with my foreign peers? Certainly a hell of a lot less than today's ten-year-olds. Maybe a bit about films or music, football, if it was a World Cup year. But that was it. Our common culture was far smaller than it is today. The world is shrinking - as we are often reminded.

Still, even when I was a child, a common thread linked me with my peers: we played our first football matches with friends, in streets, courtyards or parks, not in any organized setting. It's another stereotype, which goes right back to Pelé and his ball of rags in the favelas of Bauru, in the state of Săo Paulo, but it certainly holds true. Every professional today has a story about their first epic football battles. In fact, everyone who has played the game at any level, whether competitive or not, will probably find them familiar.

'We lived in tenements and there was what we called a back court where women put their washing,' says Sir Alex Ferguson. 'At each end you had two poles, which served as goals.Along the side, for maybe twenty odd yards, we had these dykes, which served as cellars for the shops nearby, and at the back there was a wall, so it was fully enclosed.'

© Transworld Publishers

Gonzo by Hunter S. Thomson

AMMO Books is pleased to announce its debut title: GONZO by famed American author and journalist Hunter S. Thompson. GONZO presents a rare look into the life of Thompson, whose groundbreaking style of “gonzo” journalism made him one of the greatest writers of his generation. Now, for the first time, his photographs and archives have been collected into a visual biography worthy of his literary legacy. With a heartfelt introduction by close friend Johnny Depp, GONZO captures a man whose life was as legendary as his writing.

AMMO Books presents this impressive limited edition title, featuring hundreds of personal photographs—many taken by Thompson himself and never before published. Accompanied by writing and memorabilia, this visual history gives insight into the literary icon’s life. GONZO chronicles Thompson's numerous adventures, including his early days as a foreign correspondent in Puerto Rico, living in Big Sur in the sixties, time on the road with the Hell's Angels, running for Sheriff of Pitkin County in 1970, and many personal moments with friends and family throughout the years.

This one-of-a-kind book is the ultimate tribute to the Good Doctor, and a must-have for any Thompson fan. Lovingly edited and designed, and lavishly printed, this extraordinary package includes a specially designed box that contains the book and a limited edition gallery-quality photograph byThompson. This is an exclusive offering of only three thousand individually numbered copies available worldwide, destined to become a treasured part of your personal library.

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