I’ve never known anyone in the book industry who was as loved on both coasts as Bill Chleboun (pronounced clay-bone).

Bill was my former colleague in the book review department of the San Francisco Chronicle. When he died recently of heart failure at 81, a light went out in the book world, and I don’t mean b.c. (before collapse). He was reading books on an iPad two weeks before his death.

Bill was hired by the Chronicle in 1982 to sell advertising space for the floundering Sunday Book Review section that I had been editing for about six months.

His first step was to create an honest regional best seller list, quite a phenomenon at the time. I had long believed that the tastes of Bay Area readers were far more diverse and adventurous than the New York Times best seller list reflected, and here was a way to prove it.

Every Tuesday, Bill called fifteen Bay Area booksellers and asked them what was selling in Fiction, Nonfiction, Hardcover and Paperback categories. Later they would just fax their lists in, but Bill understood the single cohesive factor at the heart of the book trade — gossip — and spent much of the day talking about authors coming through town, surprise up-and-comers, big-budget flops, impulse buys and front-of-store merchandising.

On Wednesday, Bill called the publishers whose books were going to appear on the best seller list that Sunday and told them the good news. No one took his calls at first — marketing directors and ad managers hated talking to newspaper sales reps — so Bill started with secretaries and assistants who were glad to hear gossip from the stores and to make the announcement to their bosses that one or two of the house’s books would be listed that Sunday on some West Coast newspaper’s list.

 

As the Chronicle grew editorially, so did the power of its Best Seller List. Bay Area readers were more adventurous, Bill discovered, when it came to taking a chance on first novelists and unknown nonfiction writers. Word of mouth spread more quickly in the Bay Area than in other regions, so new titles stayed on the list longer. And with better-known authors, there was a prophetic nature to the list. When a new novel by, say, A. S. Byatt or Margaret Atwood hit the Chronicle, you could often predict that in two or three weeks it would hit the New York Times’ list.

Very soon, Bill’s calls to New York were put through to marketing and sales directors immediately. Everybody loved hearing Bill’s news but more important, his gift for schmoozing kept them on the line. He was fascinated by everything about the book trade, especially the crap shoot factor (why readers buy some books, not others) that kept everybody guessing. Plus he had the gossip.

I got to witness Bill’s relationship with publishers every spring when I accompanied Bill on his annual selling trips to NY. Usually the reason the book editor went to New York with the ad sales rep was to ensure that a meeting would take place at all. With previous ad reps I had found that marketing people would take the meeting only to interest me in reviewing their books, while the ad manager pretended to listen the rep’s pitch for ads.

On the trips with Bill, however, we’d be ushered into the national sales director’s or marketing director’s office with me leading the way because I was the female and of course the big cheese book editor. Instead of gushing at me, as publishing people were trained to do, our hosts would say, “Oh, hi, Pat,” and brush right by to greet the man they wanted to see.

“Bill!” they’d exclaim. “You old sonofagun! How was your flight? Want some coffee? Sit over here in our one good chair, ha ha, we reserve the best comforts for our Wednesday morning caller, right Bill? Hey, how about those 49ers?”

At this point, everyone was filing into the office, from the assistant whom Bill always schmoozed first to the sales director whom Bill knew from way back to assorted marketing people and maybe even the head-of-house who just happened to drop by (“Hey, is it Wednesday?”) and sometimes a shy but erudite editor, because the other secret about Bill aside from being a great schmoozer was that he read voraciously and loved talking about the content of books, which you just didn’t hear in New York all that much.

Then there was this other funny thing that happened because publishing is so gossipy. Everybody knew that Bill and I had five weekdays to see about 60 people so we hit the ground running on Monday morning and were probably traveling faster than they could call each other on the phone (today it would be texting) with the latest gossip.

By mid-week, the meetings would change in tone after everyone got done smiling and gushing, and someone would turn to Bill and say, “So what have you heard?” This meant what hot new rumor, what secret merger, what hint of a scandal, what news of somebody getting fired, what inklings of an author bolting (leaving one house for another) had we picked up in our dash from one office to the next?

And Bill the old sonofagun would always have that delicious tidbit at the ready to set their ears aflame, such as (this goes back a long, long way but you’ll get the idea), “Well, we keep hearing that Sonny’s spending too much,” which referred to Sonny Mehta, the wunderkind editor who had just been imported to NY by Random House to shake up Knopf but was rumored to be in over his head. To news like this from Bill, our publishing friends would always say something like, “Well, that confirms it, then,” and everyone would nod sagely at Bill.

This is not to say getting ads for the Book Section was ever easy. As corporations bought more and more publishing houses, ad budgets dried up fast, putting The Chronicle Book Review in jeopardy again and again. One year Bill sat down with the Book Review staff and created a new kind of Holiday Book Review. This was an old-fashioned rotogravure insert with full color capability. It was printed out-of-house with controlled production costs that allowed Bill to offer catalog discounts for ads and “added value” extras that other newspapers could not provide.

One of these was our hot-off-the press distribution to bookstores throughout the Bay Area. Internally, however, Bill found the Chronicle distribution system slow to deliver something this out of the ordinary. So he decided to bring in his own pickup truck and handle San Francisco stores on his own.

This meant that early one December morning the Chronicle’s book review staff would meet Bill at a loading dock off the premises where we counted out and tied up stacks of the Holiday Book Review in bundles of 100, 200, 300 and upward for various city bookstores to give away at the counter. Then we’d load the bundles into the back and leap in the truck as Bill took off so we could drop off the right number of copies to the right stores as soon as they opened at 10 a.m.

I wouldn’t say the first time was a complete disaster except that I had perhaps fantasized how wonderful this hands-on experience would be. While it was true that the Book Review had become a boon for independent bookstores, I thought the Holiday Book Review itself was going to be such a terrific selling tool that when the sales clerks looked up to see my colleague Alix Madrigal and I rushing into the store calling out, “Here it is! The Chronicle’s Holiday Book issue is here!” everyone at the front desk would — well, not break out in applause exactly but at least recognize the masthead, let’s say, and quickly place a stack on the counter to get the magic working right away.

So I was surprised when booksellers at the front counter started saying as soon as we came in, “Don’t put that there,” or “What is it?” or “Go talk to Receiving,” or even “Take it right back outside.” Oh well, such misunderstandings are the foundation of the book trade, as Bill used to say, and indeed it turned out that the buyers had forgotten to alert the clerks up front. Once we learned how to talk our way into the stores, booksellers everywhere discovered that the Holiday Book Review did help customers choose books.

But what I remember about those trips most of all is sitting on the top of Holiday Book Review bundles in the back of Bill’s truck early in the a.m. and smiling at my colleagues Alix, Bob and Sarah, who were gazing up at skyscrapers and hotels rushing by and thinking what a joy it was to have someone like Bill Chleboun on the staff.

Bill was one of the nicest guys in the book trade. He saved the Chronicle’s Sunday Book Review every day for a dozen years and made it such an institution that it’s still published every week, decades after he retired.

No matter how much things have changed, the book industry is all the better for Bill’s kind of innovative thinking, his curiosity about how things work and his respect for the people who devote their hearts and souls to the process of getting books into the world.

BILL CHLEBOUN: CELEBRATION OF LIFE

A memorial for Bill will be held on Sunday, April 22, at 519 Golden Gate Avenue in Point Richmond CA 94801. For information and RSVPs, email Bill’s wife, Jan, at jbsroost1@mac.com .

If you wince at the word “Guantanamo” and think there’s nothing new to learn about the hellhole even Obama can’t shut down, wait until you meet the detainees from Afghanistan whom the author, an American law student who acted as translator for defense lawyers as early as 2006, came to know during more than 30 trips to and from the heavily barricaded cages that critics have called “our” Abu Ghraib.

We know from the outset we’re going to hear the by-now familiar stories of torture, hoods, stress positions and sexual humiliation; of screaming interrogators and dead-of-night batterings, of Orwellian tribunals, denial of due process and the whole, sad, shameful mess that has made Guantanamo a continuing nightmare.

But what we don’t expect in this book is humor – not gallows humor (the prisoners are already half-dead) or angry humor (they’re too resigned), but an affectionate, teasing kind of humor usually reserved for members of a close family.

Author Khan certainly didn’t expect anything light-hearted or emotionally moving when she first applied to the FBI for security clearance in 2005. An Afghan American who grew up in the United States speaking fluent Pashto with her immigrant family, Kahn was a law student in her 20s when she became concerned about the plight of prisoners from Afghanistan at Guantanamo.

Some detainees at the prison, especially those from Saudi Arabia, came from the kind of wealth that allowed their families to hire aggressive U.S. criminal defense lawyers even when the Bush administration denied them representation. But Afghanistan is such a poor country that prisoners languished for years at Guantanamo before the Supreme Court decision of 2004 gave them access to U.S. courts, and the first pro bono lawyers began setting up meetings.

Enter, then, the thoughtful and unaffected Kahn, whose belief in American values and love of Afghan customs are the basis for many inspired and energetic declarations. (“I was young and idealistic,” she writes. “But so were the framers of our constitution … “) that lead her to “Gitmo.”

Her writing is so open and intriguing that we root for Khan the first time she meets prisoners whom she’s told are hardcore terrorists — “the worst of the worst,” as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called them.

Again we are forewarned this is not going to be an easy book to read. It will be full of nightmarish accounts by men arrested in their villages and blindfolded and shackled while being transported from the equally notorious Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But happily for the reader, Khan has a knack for starting us off with small glimpses of abusive treatment so that when the real horrors come later in the book, we’ll be ready.

Kahn’s own preparations pave the way. She wears a shawl over her head in deference to Afghan culture and lays out chai tea, baklava and pistachio nuts – anything she can find at the Starbucks on the base that’s closer to the spicy Afghan diet than the pizza and ice cream the lawyers innocently bring as treats.

And this is the big surprise for readers: Within minutes, regardless of age or social position, the detainees she meets are so relieved and grateful to find a respectful and good-natured Pashtun speaker in their midst that they welcome Khan like a daughter or a sister.

The oldest prisoner, Haji Nusrat, who’s in his 80s with paralyzed legs and a litany of horrors from his detainment that should have killed him long before, interrupts Peter Ryan (the lawyer) in mid-sentence and turns to Khan.

“ ‘Bachai (my child),’ he said. ‘Why are you sitting on the edge of the chair like this? Sit back in your chair.’ “

“I realized that I looked tense, so I leaned back in my plastic chair. He smiled and gestured for us to drink our tea. Then, he told me that I needed to spend time in the mountains of Afghanistan to improve my dialect. I should go live with his family for a few months, he insisted, Then, he asked me whether my parents were still living and how many brothers and sisters I had.”

All the prisoners are like this with Khan, and before we distrust their way of talking to her — could it be a stall or a distraction or a lie or some bad thing, some calculated way to stay off the realities that brought them to Guantanamo? — we are intrigued.

“I had no idea that there were Pashtun girls like you in America,” says Ali Shah Mousovi, an “extremely hospitable” older man, a former doctor, who reminds Khan of her own father. The trust between them allows him to tell the full story of his incarceration, including episodes of sexual abuse that are so horrible he can’t look either of them in the eye.

“ ‘Peter may not understand why this is so humiliating for our people,’ Mousovi said to me. ‘But you are a Pashtun. You understand why.’ I nodded awkwardly.”

To break the ice, Kahn describes her family and introduces Peter not just as a lawyer but as a friend. “When I said that Peter and his wife were expecting a baby in a few months, Mousovi smiled for the second time.” Just seeing an American who’s trying to make things better sparks new interest in the long-resigned and near-dead Afghans.

Kahn even gets away with teasing a stern FBI agent for not removing his sunglasses indoors (like “an X-Files wannabe”), and she can barely suppress laughter when one detainee explains that a group of prisoners nicknamed a hated male guard “Moonica Lewinsky.”

One young prisoner, Taj Mohammad – a herder of goats who’s learned to read English from soft-porn magazines like Maxim and Playboy, which the guards provide cooperative prisoners – asks Khan to help him define English terms he can’t figure out.

“ ‘I told the guards that the girl who speaks Pashto is coming, and I asked them to make a list of words so you could translate them for me,’ he said. This list of innocuous English words turns into something else by the time it gets to her.

“My jaw dropped as I scanned the list. ‘What does it say?” Taj asked. ‘Tell me.’

“The first word on the list was ‘bestiality.’ The second was ‘pedophile,’ the third was ‘intercourse,’ and the fourth was ‘horny.’

“ ‘I think those soldiers have played a little trick on you and me,’ I smirked.

“ ‘Tell me,’ he persisted. ‘What did they write?’

“ ‘I don’t know how to say these words in Pashto,’ I responded. ‘I learned Pashto from my parents.’

“Taj’s eyes widened. ‘Okay, just tell me one of the words,’ he insisted.

” ‘I don’t know them,’ I said.

” ‘Then, tell me what it means.’

I scanned the words again. ‘Bestiality means showing meena – affection or love – to some of those goats you tend,’ I said, smiling. ‘But it’s not a good sort of meena.’

“Taj let out a laugh. He got the picture.”

Khan develops easygoing relationships not only with prisoners but with the bus drivers, guards and interrogators she meets. She tells us funny things that happened on the way to habeas corpus meetings, like giant cockroaches causing havoc on the 20-year-old airplanes to Cuba and the overweight passengers who broke the plane’s cheap seats.

Another funny thing: Summer rains cause “hundreds of orange crabs (to) take cover in our rooms” (when they stayed overnight) by rushing under the door. Not amusing at the time, but anything’s better, she tells us, than the detainees’ tiny cells, “slightly larger than a king-size mattress.”

What she can’t abide are the petty and time-wasting regulations that allow military authorities to turn as tyrannical at Gitmo as Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.

Take the case of the “contraband underpants,” which begins when a Judge Advocate commander writes a letter (reprinted by Khan) to say the military was shocked to discover two inmates wearing illegal underpants. A British lawyer named Clive Stafford Smith is accused of smuggling the contraband into Gitmo, but Smith takes one look at the labels – “very popular among the military” – and sends a furious letter back:

“It does not take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that members of your staff (either the military or the interrogators) did it,” he says. The culprit must have been a sympathetic guard who tried to make life bearable for a couple of weary prisoners, but like so many other oddities at Gitmo, the truth will never come out.

Khan is very good at sprinkling human interest stories with the more painful facts of human detention: You may remember George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld gloating over the leaflets that the U.S. rained down on Afghanistan to encourage people to help the United States in the war on terrorism. Well, here’s the real story: The Department of Defense denies this, but what the leaflets actually said (Khan reprints the front and back to prove it) was that anyone in Afghanistan would be paid a bounty of “MILLIONS OF DOLLARS” by the United States for turning in members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The amount bounty finally ranged from $5,000 to $25,000, still a fortune in the Middle East, so everyone from Pakistani warlords and al-Qaeda members to greedy passers-by and opportunistic neighbors made a lucrative living by fingering innocent men.

As a result, she reports, of the thousands of detainees ending up at Guantanamo from Afghanistan, “many, perhaps even most” were not guilty of any acts of terrorism, but since nobody was told the charges against them, few could mount a defense. (Even those who tried, Khan records, were kept imprisoned by hard-hearted military tribunals that remained accountable to no one.)

Eventually we feel close enough to the author to think of her as a sister ourselves and so are fearful for her when Khan, who has never been to the Middle East, begins to think she must travel to Afghanistan herself on behalf of the prisoners she has interviewed. Her hope is to find character witnesses and to photograph the homes, offices, colleagues and families of prisoners to prove to the military tribunals that legitimate identities of these men really do exist. That’s the only evidence the tribunals will accept.

Khan remembers her mother’s oft-told advice, “Now is not the time to be complacent.” If no one else will find this evidence for these detainees, who is she to stay home, safe and sound? And then we see that crossing the line from objective translator to passionate advocate is only the beginning. For this dedicated American lawyer with Afghan roots, this “very good Eastern girl” whose doctor-parents instilled in their kids the principles they believed American democracy has been struggling to fulfill, it’s more like her moment of destiny has arrived. She must go.

Of course everyone who knows Khan, from her parents and friends to the lawyers she works with and even some prisoners at Gitmo, is shocked to hear of her plans. Warning after warning comes to her about the dangers of a single woman traveling alone in Afghanistan. Not only will her American accent be recognized by residents who will suspect or even attack her, people say; but also the threat of U.S. Army convoys shooting anything that moves and the Taliban morality police arresting women for the slightest reason could put her life in jeopardy.

But Kahn, innocent to the end, yet creative, tough, informed and — really, we have to give this to her — heroic, sets off for Afghanistan regardless, sometimes accompanied by an escort but mostly on her own. What she learns about the country, and the effect Americans have on it, is worth a half-dozen books.

One unforgettable lesson is the “bogus development” she observes in Kabul and other cities. Here American-type buildings – high-end hotels, Internet cafes, fashion boutiques and restaurants – have not only replaced schools, hospitals, sewers and grocery stores; they have thrown the economy of the country so off-balance that residents can’t afford basic housing or supplies. A house in the Wazir Akbar Khan district that used to cost $300 a month to rent, she tells us, now rents for an unbelievable $15,000 a month.

The American presence causes many more fascinating but ruinous changes: Since the American dollar is the only currency in places like Kabul City Center, “a massive, multimillion dollar megamall” has been constructed to cater to Americans and Europeans (and “Afghans who lived abroad,” then returned with Western tastes).

So here, writes Khan is Afghanistan, “a predominantly Muslim country,” yet “signs of Christmas specials (were) everywhere” inside the mall, while outside, “the typically proud Pashtuns” have had to resort to begging. Of course, they can’t stand on their own feet, because so many have lost their legs in explosions from some of the ten million land mines (my italics but wouldn’t you put ‘em in?) scattered throughout Afghanistan.

Even worse is the “invisible genocide” that has resulted from the “depleted uranium in populations bombed by coalition forces,” Khan writes. No wonder “mysterious illnesses” have cropped up among adults, but these are nothing compared to the severe deformities of infants.

Throughout this tour of Afghanistan, Kahn never overdramatizes what she saw, never succumbs to shock value. But there is a photograph she took of one baby — with tumors for eyes, no nose and bloated, rubberized skin for lips — that looks like a mutilated Mr. Bill doll (from Saturday Night Live) and will haunt readers for a lifetime.

“When I saw my little boy with those monstrous red tumors,” the father of another deformed baby tells her, “I thought to myself, why is it difficult for Americans to understand that they are hated in our country? If I did this to the child of an American family, that family would have the right to pull my eyes out of my sockets.”

Perhaps this is the greatest benefit of Kahn’s book – that for all the barbaric circumstances surrounding them, people want to talk to her, open up to her. We stop seeing them as the enemy and are more interested in them as family.

One of the most touching conversations occurs back at Gitmo when a female lawyer confesses that the meetings with Afghanistan detainees have “chipped away at my biases. With every prisoner I met, I realized that each was a unique individual. Every man was as different from the next as any two people could be.”

The prisoner she and Kahn are talking to, Abdullah Mujahid, was once the police chief of Gardez and tries to explain the difference between American and Afghan ways of dealing with women.

Afghan men, he says, “are happy to take care of our women, protect them. And women in my country are happy to depend on their husbands and fathers.” A spirited conversation ensues about whether “the feminist movement had shortchanged American women” (guess what position Khan takes), and we all come away learning something new about cultural perspective.

Kahn even gives us a feminist reading of the Koran and explains her own attraction to wearing a veil for “the element of mystery” it brings to one’s eyebrows and eyes. Trying on veils at the mirror before her trip to Afghanistan while using makeup to give herself “dark, smoky eyes,” she tells us that “instead of deflecting attention, I think veils hypersexualize women.” That lasts about five minutes when she’s actually traveling in Afghanistan and confronts a harsher reality for women than she could have imagined.

Well, as you can see, thanks to Khan’s ability to insert a sense of humanity into the controversy over torture and the effects of war, I was engrossed in even the most painful parts of My Guantanamo Diary, and still am today.

Following the death of Osama bin Laden, It’s important to be informed in every detail of the way America deals with political suspects. This is even more crucial this week as new evidence surfaces that few detainees at Guantanamo ever had terrorist (or any political) connections, how the most useful information came from “quite cooperative” prisoners who were not tortured and how “coercive techniques ‘didn’t provide useful, meaningful, trustworthy information’ ” at all (New York Times 5/4/11).

From the moment he moved into the White House, Barack Obama promised to close Guantanamo, restore habeas corpus and “end torture and rendition” – a tall order for any new president facing huge and entrenched military objections. His persistence may pay off in the long run, but meanwhile we need a humanitarian guide.

Perhaps because this is the most painful and shameful controversy in the 21st century, we can thank our lucky stars that America still produces and publishes writers like Mahvish Rukhsana Khan. With her obsession for the truth and her respect for tenderness and warmth amidst the most hardened circumstance, she has made the entire horrible ordeal a testament to human resilience and compassion.

Capitola-by-the-Sea

The year was 1999, and Capitola — a charming coastal village about four miles south of Santa Cruz, California — was about to decide whether Borders Books and Music would be permitted to build a “Titanic-sized” store (22,000 square feet) in the middle of downtown.

If the Council voted yes, as predicted, at least four local bookstores would be wiped out, and this was the reason that people kept getting up to take their place behind the two microphones in the aisles.

And boy, were they mad.

A Big Bag of Garbage

One woman walked up to the stage with her husband and dumped a big bag of garbage in front of shocked City Council members. “We’ll clean this up, but Borders won’t,” she declared, having gathered the trash from the parking lot of the nearest Borders store in Sand City, about 10 miles away.

An independent traffic consultant reported that parking needs for the proposed Borders had been grossly underestimated. The audience gasped at revelations that Capitola’s traffic engineers had used 15-year-old studies, published “long before megabox bookstores like Borders were around.”

A graduate student stated that none of the books required by her classes could be found at any Borders stores in adjacent areas, while all titles were stocked by independent booksellers in the Capitola-Santa Cruz area.

“Borders will always come with false promises,” said another. “They say, ‘Oh, we have 200,000 titles,’ but after a few months, the inventory shrinks to less than half that. ‘Oh, we gear 25 percent of the stock to regional interests.’ That is not true – this is a chain store that makes its money from a formula order in Ann Arbor, Michigan. ‘Oh, we give money to local charities,’ Borders says. Well, a few thousand dollars per store maybe, but that’s far less than contributions made even by Seeds of Change,” a children’s bookstore across the street.

You can read my column that week here about protests ranging from Shared Parking Methodology to loss of riparian vegetation, “impacted” traffic patterns, ancillary-vs.-freestanding cafes and “the outright lies” that Borders and Barnes & Noble were now notorious for telling.

Borders was so confident of a ‘yes’ vote that it hadn’t even sent a representative. After all, most city governments believed the chain’s line: “Doesn’t everyone want more bookstores, not fewer?” Council members were bored with arguments that Borders was a predator, not a bookseller; that it chewed into the local economy; that it cut wages, hours, inventory, staff to the bone.

Maybe all that was true, these officials said, but how could any city council in America say ‘yes’ to one store and ‘no’ to another?

The Bookseller Everyone Waited to Hear

This was the stalemate that froze the proceedings until Neal Coonerty, a respected bookseller whom everybody had waited to hear, finally rose to speak.

Neal Coonerty in the 1980s

Neal owned Bookshop Santa Cruz, a legendary independent bookstore dating back to the wild and woolly small press revolution of the 1960s. With his wife, Candy, Neal had galvanized residents after the disastrous 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and literally dug his store out of the rubble. The Coonertys then joined merchants and city leaders in raising a tent city downtown that kept Santa Cruz away from bankruptcy for years. (See Neal’s own remembrance of this “Small Town Miracle” here.)

But that night it was the irony of Neal’s speech that impressed everyone in the hall. Word had leaked out that in the unlikely event of a ‘no’ vote, Borders would simply move plans for its next megastore up the coast to Santa Cruz — and not just to any address, mind you: The next Borders would be located at 1200 Pacific Avenue, right down the street from Neal’s store at 1520 Pacific Avenue. (At that time, finding bookstores with an established customer base and swooping in to knock out the competition was the thing Borders and its evil sister Barnes & Noble did best.)

Rightness vs. Might

But Neal spoke as if none of that ever occurred to him. He talked about the rightness of a city council preserving the town’s character by protecting local merchants. If you didn’t keep the big boxes out, he said, the heart of your city would die. We’ve seen it happen in thousands of gutted downtowns across the country; don’t let it happen here.

Bookshop Santa Cruz

Council members perked up a bit, but you could tell they weren’t really listening until Neal pointed out that cars waiting for places to park around Borders would back into Bay Street, then all the way onto Pacific Highway 1, causing traffic accidents that would result in lawsuits against not only the town of Capitola but each and every individual on the City Council.

And that seemed to do it. In a close (3-2) vote, the Council announced that Borders was welcome in Capitola, but only if it built a 12,500-square-foot store, half the size of its original proposal.

It took a while for the astonished populace to realize that this, essentially, was a ‘no’ vote. Borders had never built anything less than 20,000 square feet in the continental U.S. and would most assuredly back off in Capitola, especially since bigger bait waited up the coast in Santa Cruz. Suddenly people rose to their feet, incredulous that a compromise about traffic would actually stop the corporate behemoth that had marched through so many towns like an invading army.

A Moment to Remember

Still, this was not the moment I remember most about that long night. That would occur later as everyone started filing out, when the owners of Capitola Book Cafe, Kaleidoscope Teachers Store, Seeds of Change Children’s Bookstore, Mockingbird Bookstore, Bookworks in nearby Aptos and other booksellers looked at Neal with gratitude and respect and empathy and fear.

Because sure enough, in August of 1999, Borders announced that it would abandon its plans in Capitola and open a big new flagship store at 1200 Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz. Neal’s family had barely recovered from Candy’s death by a stroke the month before. Construction didn’t take long. At its May 2000 grand opening, the football-field-sized Borders was so streamlined, plush, well-stocked and gorgeous that even Neal’s most loyal customers went in “just to look.”

But then Neal and his staff went to work: They cut the Bookshop’s budget, trimmed events, reduced the number of workers from 50 to 30 and hung in for the short term, which lasted for more than a decade. Few observers gave them much of a chance, since the second thing Borders and Barnes & Noble did best was to take a loss until all the independent bookstores nearby ran out of money. You’d think 11 years would have done the trick for Borders, but no. Thank heavens.

Talk about the Titanic

So this was what struck me last week when Borders Books and Music, now bankrupt and noisily dying, announced the closing of 200 stores. Popping out from that list like an infected toe was the big, fat (talk about Titanic) 22,000-square-foot Santa Cruz Borders at 1200 Pacific.

Casey Coonerty Protti

Neal’s daughter Casey, who took over management of the store (Neal is a county Supervisor today; his son Ryan is a city councilman), said one of the reasons Bookshop Santa Cruz survived was that people weren’t just loyal; they came back again and again because of “the staff’s passion for books and our belief in local shopping.” Well stated. You can feel that draw today from the Bookshop’s fantastic calendar of author appearances, book clubs, poetry readings, photo contests, short-story competitions, signups, mixers and outdoor events.

The Other Surprise

But here was the incredible effect of it all: Whenever I walked by Borders on my way to Bookshop Santa Cruz, I could not believe the ambience of the street.

In typical Santa Cruz fashion, the Coonerty family made it appear that two giant bookstores were friendly neighbors rather than tooth-and-nail competitors. I’m sure that’s not the way they felt, but that’s the way things looked in a downtown area that itself had refused to die after not just one earthquake but several.

(It wasn’t just appearances only. As reported here, after the attack on 9/11 destroyed a Borders store in the basement of the World Trade Center, Neal walked up the street to the Santa Cruz Borders to “give them a card that we were sorry for their loss but happy that all their customers and employees got out of there safe.”)

You can read Casey Coonerty Protti’s gracious letter to customers about the closing of Borders. What a relief to know this is one independent bookstore that can now invest in its own future.

The Last Question

And while it’s fun to say that Borders had a pyrrhic victory on the way to its own demise (I’ve never used “pyrrhic” before!), what astounds me is the damage the chain leaves behind — hundreds (maybe thousands) of dead independent bookstores across the country; shabby Borders stores remaining that are so gutted of inventory they look like thrift shops in bad times, and a customer base that is shifting again, this time not under any chain bookstore control.

Indeed, isn’t it interesting (though scary) that one reason Borders, not Bookshop Santa Cruz, will fail is that many readers are moving away from brick-and-mortar stores toward Amazon, Costco/Target/Wal-Mart/Sears, Goodreads, eBooks and other influences that have altered the retail landscape as well as the very practice of reading.

Heaven knows it’s not easy for young booksellers to enter this modern void. And yet, here they come — not hundreds but surely dozens of smaller, leaner, tougher bookstores that know how to rebuild the browsing experience, the author event, the hand-sell, the personal relationship with every iPhone-carrying customer. These owners know how much we need that bookstore experience, despite and because of our addiction to the screen.

So goodbye, Borders! You big meanie. You big, arrogant, irresponsible mess of a bookstore chain! And welcome back independents, one by one by one.

To recap: The Biltons surrounded themselves with “several large piles of books” as they sat on the floor “for a couple of hours” at a Barnes & Noble store. They “lobbed” the books back and forth and photographed pages with their iPhones, then “left the store without buying a thing.”

Only later did Bilton wonder, gosh: “Did we do anything wrong?” He sought out legal experts: “Did we indeed go too far?”

I have never heard of such self-absorbed rudeness or flat-out idiocy in a bookstore and was further incensed when the article revealed that Nick Bilton is the lead technology writer for the Times and author of a book about the future of iPhones, for heaven’s sake. But enough about me.

Defacto Shoplifters

“Yes, you and your wife went too far,” writes Denny Hatch of the website Target Marketing, “And your tacky little iPhones’ theft of copyright wasn’t the half of it.”

Hatch says Bilton was guilty of “de facto shoplifting — taking merchandise off the shelf, using it and then discarding it.”

In the world of direct marketing, this is “the equivalent of the catalog bandit — the woman that orders three party dresses from a catalog, chooses one to wear to the party and then returns all three the next day for a full refund.”

A Treacherous Course

The Biltons not only got away with ruining the merchandise, writes Richard Curtis at [e-reads], a reprinter of out-of-print books.

“By the mere act of clicking their iPhone a dozen times, Nick Bilton and his wife steered a treacherous course between fair use and piracy, between the Copyright Act of 1976 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,” Curtis observes.

Bilton tried to excuse himself by saying that “many people have a cavalier attitude toward using cameras to obtain copyrighted material.”

Curtis huffs, “Cavalier indeed. Our archives are packed with the exploits of ‘cavaliers.’ Up to now the Times has tiptoed around the issue of piracy in the book business …. But the time is approaching when the subject will take center stage, for it is by far the greatest threat to the future of authorship and the success of the e-book industry.”

Infringement Recipe

Perhaps it’s not Bilton’s actions but his article that should be held up to scrutiny, writes Bill Rosenblatt at Copyright and Technology. By describing how easy it is to photograph book pages in a store, Bilton has published an “infringement recipe” that could “induce” readers to do the same. Given the newspaper’s exposure and influence, “would [publishers] have a case against the New York Times?”

Swiping More Than the Bar Code

Of course, readers already have the “recipe” for photographic infringement, and more. As independent-publishing expert Dan Poynter puts it, customers regularly “visit a store, see a book they want, pull out their iPhone, check the price at Amazon and make a one-click order.”

To do this fast (before the staff sees ‘em! bad, bad customers!), iPhone users simply photograph the book and let technology take it from there. As Poynter explains:

“Now Amazon makes the process faster and easier with an iPhone App. With Price Check for iPhone, buyers can photograph the bar code of a book (or any other product), say the product name, or type it in. Amazon will find the product and offer it for sale—often for much less. Point, scan, check, click, done. And Amazon delivers.”

Blatantly Criminal

“If only the problem were just cell phone pilferers,” writes Suzanne White, author of bestselling astrology books. “People today can scan my entire books and put them up for sale all over the Internet — Kindle, Nook, Crook, et al, and nobody stops them. Others try. I try. But we don’t always succeed.”

White says that “Amazon now asks authors placing their books on Kindle to check a box attesting that they own the rights.” But elsewhere, piracy flourishes. One magazine group in France copied an astrology book by White and “pleaded innocence” when she sued. This group “tried to prove I was complicit because I had written horoscopes for one of their magazines. They had very powerful big guns.” She settled for 5000 francs.

In another case, “back in the beginning of Facebook, I found an
app called Chinese Horoscopes that used my text,” White recalls. “It was doing such good business that after much haggling, I eventually went into business with the guy! He had taken the texts quite innocently from a site that claims to ‘share copyrights.’ I wrote a stinging how-dare-you letter to the owner who wrote back saying that because the company was offshore, I could do nothing.”

The commercial appeal of nonfiction books makes them vulnerable. “Astrology and Tarot and I Ching or diet or cookbooks and many other subject areas are commercial and easily exploited,” White says. But novels are copied illegally, too, especially in foreign countries.

“Does Stephen King know when his books are pirated in Czech or Hungarian, Chinese or Urdu? I doubt it,” White says. “Neither he nor his publishers can read those languages. Let’s face it. This is the Internet. There is money to be made in pirating any and everywhere. Publishers can’t police it any better than authors can.”

Most egregious for White was a matchmaking site in New York that “used my New Astrology™ book, pasted my photo on the front page …. then wrote to congratulate me! I could not get him to take it down. Instead, he hired someone to rewrite it all, paraphrased my whole book and changed the name of his site, and eventually tried to sell it to me for a million dollars (no lack of chutzpah there). Eventually he went bankrupt.”

(Granted it’s not saying much, but) I’ve never heard of such blatant stealing! It’s so criminal, and yet, as White says, going to court is not an option. “The folks who scan my books and pirate them are not rich people. I would be suing in the dark.”

Watching the Bookstore Go Up in Flames

Here’s another scam that floored me. In his article, “The Price of Now: Why I Hate Bookstores,” Kyle Bylin at Hypebot.com says he read the first chapter of Bilton’s book at a bookstore and was so taken with it that “I didn’t want to wait,” so he bought it right there, knowing “I could buy it cheaper on Amazon.”

He did consider another shortcut: “I’ve heard of people buying books from Barnes & Noble and returning them once their Amazon shipment arrives. I opted not to do that.”

My hero! We’re back to women and their pretty dresses! This scheme involves buying and returning the physical book after using the bookstore as your bag man. And won’t that book feel nice and new to the next customer.

Here’s what went through Bylin’s mind as he bought the book for a higher price in the bookstore than he would have paid at home, ordering it on Amazon: “In my head, I came up with the excuse — that while I’d be content with watching the store go up in flames for their high prices — I did like walking around, browsing, and the experience of holding books before I bought them elsewhere.”

So here’s a reader who understands the perilous situation of bookstores, all right. He’s just so jaded by the Internet that he sees the retail price as “a donation for feeling sorry about reading for free.” This was a real jaw-dropper for me. A … a…. donation? You mean, like a … a …. charity? Because you feel sorry for the bookstore?

Exactly, says Bylin. It’s the bookstore’s fault for overcharging the poor customer: “The instant gratification of getting what I want now, in my hands, something that I can carry home and read: Shouldn’t that be the bonus and not the cost?”

Yes, let’s all remember: The world is here to bring everyone like you instant gratification because today nobody owns anything, really. Copyright law is so “uncharted,” as Curtis says, that tools are everywhere to help you monetize, maximize, and Appize everything you want.

Being Almost That Stupid

And everybody’s in on this scam. even authors like Bilton, muses Poynter. “So,” he writes, “was Bilton’s ‘confession’ a publicity stunt to bring attention to his book?”

That would be hard to figure, since Bilton’s article makes him look so stupid. But maybe fame is fame: If you just get your name out there — even exploit the newspaper that (I guess) employs you — readers will race to buy your book.

But could that have been Bilton’s idea all along? I must say, when I listen to Bilton interviewed on the Internet, he seems far more knowledgeable than the kind of jackass who clogs up the aisles of a bookstore while photographing pages of new books and dumbly wondering, “Did we do anything wrong?”

Self-run Social Library Places

To be charitable, maybe Nick Bilton and his wife didn’t actively set out to steal. Maybe they simply represent masses of people who have changed their minds about brick-and-mortar stores in the last decade.

Certainly they, and perhaps millions like them, don’t think of bookstores as places to go to buy books. To them, in the 21st century, bookstores are just vehicles for “showcasing books for Amazon,” as Poynter puts it.

If that’s true, surviving bookstores may now be seen as “self-run social library places,” muses Suzanne White, because they offer book clubs, author events, classes, cooking demonstrations, storytelling hours, sidelines and even books lining shelf after shelf.

At these bookstores, observes White, “bookish and other types can meet and greet each other, have coffee and a sandwich and get to know authors, take courses and hear writers talk about their work.”

Wait a minute: That sounds familiar in a way that’s, you know, alarming.

A successful bookstore, White adds, is more like a “bricks-and-mortar social network,” and there it is, the retail/electronic world in reverse: No longer does Amazon need to mimic the retail experience with its “Look inside!” feature and browsing facsimile. Instead, bookstores should now try to be Facebook inside the retail environment, a place where you can import all your “friends” right there in the aisles.

Isn’t that what the Biltons were doing? They could just email those iPhone photos to their contractor, so they didn’t bother about that pesky problem of buying a book or actually reading it.

This is why Bilton’s “infringement recipe” is so seductive! Customers who “hate bookstores” like Bylin at Hypebot don’t want to wait, and you shouldn’t either! You can “like” bookstore displays, Tweet shelf talkers, video author events and order, order, order books from every other resource but the store itself.

The Entitlement of Internet Pricing

Thank heaven many readers agree with Ben Patterson, a reader who left this comment at Hypebot: Along with “paying rent, providing a community gathering spot [and] bringing cultural events into a neighborhood,” brick-and-mortar bookstores are also “responsible for collecting sales tax — all things Amazon does not do.”

And to bookstore hater Bylin himself, Patterson wrote: “I suppose, if you’d rather have a Cash4Gold or PaydayAdvance on every street corner, that is an alternative, but it feels a lot like Internet pricing entitlement is negatively impacting neighborhoods and service.”

My new hero! That is so true: The sense of entitlement people get from pricing things on the Internet has turned consumers into tyrants! That’s why Bilton and his wife felt so righteous camping out in the aisles; and why Bylin has the audacity to pity rather than respect bookstores.

Patterson understands this odd reasoning: Keep the playing field even by charging Amazon sales tax, he says, and people will stop believing that Amazon is somehow ahead of the game by eluding the law.

That’s the real meaning of internet entitlement, I guess. Once you have your smart phone, anything on display in some dumb brick-and-mortar store is all yours for the taking.

According to Bilton’s article, the couple sat down “cross-legged on the floor” and surrounded themselves with “several large piles of books,” which they “lobbed back and forth” (!) for “a couple of hours” (!!) while researching “ideas for a new home that we are planning to buy.”

Isn’t that nice. Whenever you need a library, just go to a bookstore, Bilton suggests. There you can turn new books into used books for all the customers to follow.

Then Bilton and his wife “snapped a dozen pictures of book pages with our iPhones” and “went home without buying a thing.” Very tidy. Bilton does mention that they “placed the books back on the shelf” like the Good Samaritans they see themselves to be.

A Disturbing Idea

But later that night, Bilton was struck by a disturbing idea: “I asked my wife: Did we do anything wrong? And, I wondered, had we broken any laws by photographing those pages?”

So conscientious! After all, those pages were protected by copyright, a very big word for a very important concept. You’d think an explanation of copyright would be the point to an article with the headline: “Can Your Camera Phone Turn You Into a Pirate?”

But no. The authorities Bilton consults compare the use of cell phones that photograph book pages today with the use of Xerox machines that duplicated book pages during the ’70s, and the use of Napster programs that shared music files during the ’90s.

According to these experts, technology has advanced so quickly that copyright laws can’t keep up, so nobody really knows the exact definition of piracy when it comes to cell phone cameras. But Bilton’s journalistic drive demands a deeper truth: Will he get caught?

“Need I worry yet that a phalanx of lawyers will soon grab me between the Home Decor and New Age aisles at Barnes & Noble?”

Well, if I were the two thugs running this chain, I would have thrown the Biltons off the escalator, but you know, bookstore clerks are nice. They allowed this couple to clog the aisles and rummage through new books on the floor because it might have sounded rude to ask them to put their !@#$%^&*! cell phones away.

That leaves readers to ponder a thought by Julia A. Ahrens, associate director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School: “By the time this becomes an issue,” she tells Bilton, “we might not even have bookstores anymore.”

That’s comforting, isn’t it, Nick? One day the same might be said of libraries.

Bookstore Rudeness

I know that bookstores have long been invaded by ill-mannered customers who blithely sit down in the aisles, break the spines of new titles, “lob” books around or — these I could throttle — buy a book on Amazon and bring it into a bookstore to have autographed at an author event.

But Bilton’s article raises new questions about the effect of cell phones on social manners in general. Maybe we’ve all grown accustomed to cell phone users driving erratically or talking loudly on the street or in elevators and restaurants because for some reason, they think their conversation takes precedence over everyone else’s experience.

What I can’t figure out are bookstore customers who blatantly use cell phones to compare prices with Amazon’s while they walk around the New Release table, or worse, take cell phone photos of books they might want to read so they can buy them on Amazon later.

I won’t go into Kindle owners who actually bring … well, you get the point.

This is not just rude behavior; it’s profane. A bookstore offers browsing opportunities and instant camaraderie with staff and authors that we never find on the Internet. There’s something sacred about a place where censorship is fought routinely, unknown authors are welcomed and introduced and young adults who’ve inexplicitly stopped reading are lured back to books they’ll treasure forever. For a customer to interrupt this kind of sacred exchange because they’re so entirely self-involved seems tragic.

Thanking Our Lucky Stars

The Biltons don’t appear to be stupid or cheap — I bet if you asked them, they’d want to contribute to the betterment of bookstores. Then, too, Nick Bilton is the lead technology writer for the New York Times and author of I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works (Crown; 304 pages; $25), a book published last fall about the impact of iPads and smart phones. That makes Bilton an expert. Yet he doesn’t know the meaning of copyright? When he and the missus took advantage of the bookstore staff’s good graces, he had to ask, “Did we do anything wrong?”

So come on, Nicky, get off the phone. Think how you’d feel if somebody photographed your book and blithely departed “without buying a thing.” The future you write about can and should provide Americans with every kind of reading option, most especially the bookstore option.

Here’s one reason: With books, the Internet has ushered in our current era of “the democratization of publishing” in which everybody’s a critic. True, traditional critics at newspapers and magazine may still be influential, but readers give as much or more weight to reviews by bloggers, customers, book clubs and, of course, themselves.

Theater criticism, on the other hand, has remained more parochial and elitist. A handful of trusted reviewers still seems to reign, and among these few, for Broadway shows especially, the New York Times has inordinate power.

Fighting Back

LuPone is both victim and victor to this oddly provincial tendency. She has even been doubly damned: Despite her incredible talent and wildly favorable notices in Europe, LuPone has been the subject of hostile critics in New York not just for a few years but for entire decades.

This forced LuPone to re-earn audience regard every time she appeared onstage. For example, thanks to early publicity, tickets for Evita, her first big hit, were sold out so far in advance that LuPone and her co-star Mandy Patinkin had to outlast the sour impact of New York critics who hated her performance. This surprised even LuPone:

“The audience was pissed off the moment they walked into the theatre because they’d spent $35 a ticket on a flop,” she writes. “(Can you imagine how pissed off they’d be today, at $125 a pop?) They sat there scowling at the stage with their arms folded across their chests as if to say, Prove it. We ultimately did.”

Why would New York theater critics single out Patti LuPone? I think it’s because she has always refused to fit a mold. Formally trained at Julliard, adept at everything from Shakespeare to slapstick, she is gifted with a musical range and authority that regularly knocks ‘em out of the balcony, not to mention those rubberized lips that can stretch across Times Square and keep you laughing at (some critics might say) at unorthodox moments.

The Tipping Point

So it was Frank Rich’s negative review in the New York Times, which was published after he saw the London production of Sunset, that lost LuPone the role of Norma Desmond in the New York company. Although British critics loved her, Variety announced that producer Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted to fire LuPone “as soon as the Frank Rich review came out,” she writes. And so he did.

But the tipping point came in 2007 when LuPone opened as Mama Rose in a City Center (off-Broadway) revival of Gypsy. Every night for this brief three-week run, “the audience gave us a standing ovation,” she writes. The entire company, including its producers, was “sure we were going to Broadway.”

Then came Ben Brantley’s back-handed review in the New York Times. At first sounding as though he congratulated LuPone for bringing “a startling lack of diva vanity and even a spark of bona fide mother love” to the character of Rose, Brantley then sliced LuPone to pieces:

“But once you introduce such traits into Mama Rose, the air starts to leak out of her. Ms. LuPone is less a Rose of billboard-size flair and ego than the sort of pushy but likable woman you might compete with at the supermarket for that last perfect sole fillet.”

LuPone writes with her characteristic humor, “Gypsy almost choked to death on that sole fillet.” Suddenly the Broadway management wanted to back out. Producer Roger Berlind actually told LuPone and director Arthur Laurents, “You would have to be crazy to bring Gypsy to Broadway after a review like that.” A single review.

LuPone writes: “The second time he said that to me over the phone, I said, ‘Roger, you give the critics the power. If you don’t want to do [the show], that’s one thing, but if you don’t want to do it because of a critic, then why bother producing anything?”

That about sums up the entire trajectory of quiet outrage that’s been building up against unjustly arrogant reviewers for decades, not only from artists but from the audience that pays to see/read/experience them.

LuPone continued: ” ‘I can’t guarantee you a good review,’ I said. ‘If you look at my history with the New York Times, this is nothing new. I can only do what I do, and you’ve seen that. You’ve seen this extraordinary production and cast, and you’ve seen how the audience reacts. Trust your instincts and don’t give critics the power.’ ”

Go, Go, Go, LuPone

I bet any theatergoing reader mentally stood up after reading that passage and gave LuPone a standing ovation for this statement alone. I certainly did, and do, and thank heaven the story doesn’t end there.

Not only did LuPone convince the producers to carry on, she dug even deeper into the role, threw out the original Jerome Robbins choreography, got Laurents to cancel the reprise of “Small World” (he confessed it only got in there because Ethel Merman “needed something to sing in the second act”) and unleashed her full power when Gypsy did, finally, open on Broadway.

This time, Ben Brantley was impressed. His review in the New York Times was effusive about Patti LuPone “building a bridge for an audience to walk right into one woman’s nervous breakdown” so there is “no separation at all between song and character.”

He even issued a kind of apology: “And yes, that quiet crunching sound you hear is me eating my hat.”

Boooooo, Ben Brantley

Of course, a critic stepping in front of his subject and turning the spotlight on himself is the worst possible error one can make in a review. It brings critical standards to a new low and distracts readers from the work under review. Remember when Brantley reviewed his personal obsession with Julia Roberts rather than her performance onstage? We had to wade through Brantley’s adolescent crush to get to his (by then corrupt) idea of the quality of her performance.

And just recently, in a review of the musical Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Brantley observed that the play proceeds so fast and erratically that it doesn’t allow LuPone time to finish her solo. He added snidely, as though we all remember what happened with Gypsy, “(And woe unto ye who deprive La LuPone of applause.)”

La LuPone. That’s so sophisticated, Ben. How New York audiences allow the New York Times critics to get away with that much power is bewildering.

But, hooray: LuPone got the last laugh, literally, when she won a Tony for playing Rose in Gypsy. Having been nominated for the award rarely and winning only one other time, she left her audience laughing when she got up to accept and said to the world, “It’s such a wonderful gift to be an actor who makes her living working on the Broadway stage — and then every 30 years or so, to pick up one of these.”

All of which to say that while actor/singer/comic/tuba player Patti LuPone sails through her memoir bringing one skeleton after another out of the closet from New York to Hollywood to London, we readers get to chuckle and wonder in wow-I-didn’t-know-that delight all along.

Who knew, for example, that centuries ago, opera singers canceled performances at the peak of their menstrual cycle because blood would so engorge their vocal cords that they could blow a singing gasket, as it were, that would render them silent for days and weeks afterward.

The great Jessye Norman told LuPone this, but too late: Following disastrous vocal blowouts (especially during Evita previews because that !@#$%^&! Andrew Lloyd Webber wouldn’t lower the register but more about that below), LuPone — one of Broadway’s most powerful and versatile singers — had to have surgery and learn how to sing all over again.

That Breast-grabbing Topol and Others

And who knew that Topol, the Israeli actor who played Tevye in the movie version of Fiddler on the Roof and co-starred with LuPone in The Baker’s Wife, was an “obnoxious, unprofessional,” breast-grabbing, tyrannical spoiled brat of a star who refused to sing lyrics he didn’t like, so he would substitute “blah, blah, blah, blah.”

LuPone tries to be fair: “I know there are supposed to be two sides to every story, but believe me, both sides thought he was an asshole.”

Paul Sorvino is seen as “a classic show-off tenor”; John Houseman was just as dictatorial at Julliard as he was in the role of Professor Kingsley in The Paper Chase; Hal Prince was misguided and self-aggrandizing as the director of Evita; actor Bill Smitrovich — her husband in the TV series Life Goes On — is characterized as a “self-absorbed bully” (and boy, do we believe her); director John Berry turned out to be “an obnoxious human being with absolutely revolting personal hygiene”; and we’ll get to that !@#$%^&*! soon.

In fact, though, the bad guys are few. LuPone admires and loves a phone book of celebrities (Stephen Sondheim, Meryl Streep, Arthur Laurents, Mandy Patinkin, Angela Lansbury, Kevin Kline, Trevor Nunn et al) as well as Australian theatergoers (they throw out blankets of streamers and candy), sympathetic ushers (who take the cast of a turkey like The Baker’s Wife to dinner), dressing room ghosts (they do exist), her Sweeney Todd tuba named Irene that she stashed in her dressing room closet each night so she could say, “Good night, Irene!” and hundreds of others including a wonderfully earnest Concorde pilot who, learning that the great Patti LuPone might miss a performance in London because of blizzards along the way, pulled out all the stops and announced heartfully from the cockpit, “You’ll go on tonight, and you’ll give the performance of your life!” And she did.

The Lurching Sets of Sunset

But it’s the behind-the-scenes glimpses of a showbiz few of us see that make the book so absorbing. In London, the huge state-of-the-art sets for Sunset kept lurching unpredictably around the stage with LuPone and her costar clinging to the furniture until it was discovered that the radio frequency used to trigger the hydraulic lifts was too wide-open, meaning that every cell phone, taxi cab and courier service passing by in the street outside sent Norma Desmond’s living room skittering across the stage (another screwup by!@#$%^&*!)

LuPone had her problems in Life Goes On playing a “docile mom in a patriarchal family” whose dialogue stopped at “Yes dear, no dear, whatever you want, dear,” but she loved Chris Burke, the young Down syndrome actor who played her Down syndrome son, Corky.

One director, Rick, who was notorious for making actors repeat each take dozens of times, was typically insensitive with Chris.

“In one episode,” LuPone writes, “Chris had to say the word customer, but he just couldn’t get the plosive out, the k sound in customer. Rick made him do 42 takes because he couldn’t say ‘customer‘ without stammering — 42 takes in front of all of us, a ton of extras and the crew. That would have been a nightmare for any actor, let alone one with Chris’s challenges. Chris covered his distress well and just tried to please Rick. He did it, he finally did it, and we were all there to hug him and love him up a lot.”

It’s great to listen to LuPone narrate the audiobook version because her diction is as meticulous as her painstaking creation of each character. She learned the hard way to nail every aspect of character development in rehearsal before playing the part to a live audience; how to sustain “character maintenance” when performing a role hundreds of times on the road; how to weave her own sense of humanity into villainous roles (Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd; Fosca in Passion; Norma in Sunset; Rose in Gypsy); and how to know when all your research hasn’t really prepared you for a part.

For example, to create the role of Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (played by Randy Quaid) for a TV movie, LuPone listened to the former first lady on seven hours of tape and thought she had captured every nuance of speech, posture and style. Then she met the Lady Bird in Texas.

“To break the ice, [Lady Bird] asked me, ‘What have you done?’
” ‘I played Evita Peron,’ I said.
“And while I jabbered some inanity, she said, ‘Well, it’s a far cry from Evita to me. Evita was a bird of paradise, and I’m just a little mouse.’ ”

Uh-huh. This from a woman as bull-headed as her husband. At that moment, LuPone realized how much “I’d underestimated Lady Bird” and made the adjustment that saved the character.

Mr. Megalomania: Andrew Lloyd Webber

But the most revealing parts of the book come when LuPone tells all about that !@#$%^&*! composer/producer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who is nailed here for mercilessly manipulating actors, directors, media and audiences to serve his own megalomaniacal needs.

With Evita, one wonders why a composer would sabotage his own production by insisting the already demanding score be kept out of range of the one Broadway star who could sing it. Or why a seasoned director like Hal Prince would consent to creating a simultaneous company in Los Angeles. (As LuPone makes clear, “once you have dual productions, you have dueling performances, then comparisons, and someone always loses.”) And speaking of self-sabotage how could it help the New York company, struggling against negative reviews as they were, to hear from Harold Prince upon his return from Los Angeles “that the L.A. company was better than we were?”

Stuff like that was child’s play compared to what happened with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s next production, Sunset, which he asked LuPone to perform in workshop and was so blown apart by her performance that he asked her to star in the London production that very night. He also offered her the role in New York and, with contracts signed, made the announcements to the press.

Nevertheless, LuPone tells us, Webber began manufacturing rumors, which the press gobbled up that Patti LuPone was having one catfight after another with Glenn Close, Barbara Streisand, and Meryl Streep, either for stealing songs (Streisand) or the entire part.

She calls Webber a coward, and rightly so it seems, for never speaking to her directly. LuPone had to learn from a gossip column that she had been replaced by Glenn Close in the NY production, and although the settlement fee from Webber was hefty (the LuPone family swimming pool is named after Andrew Lloyd Webber), the injustice of it all (and I’m only touching on the worst parts) would have taken the stuffing out of a lesser actor than LuPone.

What sticks with the reader in all these stories is LuPone’s delight in everything from the highest standards of her craft to the silliest and most enduring legends. She can’t stand the kind of “entitled” actors who are content with sloppy performances, spread dirt about colleagues and have the audacity to phone in sick. But she loves the Damon Runyon effect of a dressing room filled with showgirls, private detectives, bodyguards, and police rushing in to announce a bomb threat they won’t take seriously until a proper break occurs in the play.

The real turning point in her career, however, is not to come until she both flops and triumphs in the latest revival of Gypsy. This story teaches us all a lesson about the ridiculously overinflated power of certain critics — namely that fop, Ben Brantley of the New York Times — so I’ll save it for next time.

Not one parent at the show could open Tiger, Tiger to even begin page one because it’s so menacing, so terrifying and so creepy …. or so it seemed by the look of it.  The fact that the author, Margaux Fragoso, lived to tell the story would seem astonishing enough;  that she writes in a beautiful, gripping narrative voice with the most astounding insights opens our ears (and, incredibly, our hearts) to otherwise unspeakable matters.

I can say that once you do open the book and you do begin reading, it’s impossible to put down. And boy, is it needed. Fragoso refuses to be either victim or avenger. What she learned about herself and human nature keeps us appalled and instructed every step of the way. From the start, her choices in life are so unexpected and in a way so thrilling that … well, again, you hafta see for yourself. The wait may be excruciating, because Tiger, Tiger is going to simmer (and not on the back burner) at Farrar, Straus & Giroux until its March publication.

(BTW, thank you, Autumn, at From The TBR Pile, a blog for readers that’s turned up a good handful of other books named Tiger, Tiger [or Tyger, Tyger in goblin speak] that you can find here. And extra thanks of course to poet William Blake who started it all.)

*About the Trade Show

NCIBA stands for Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, and this group, like a dozen other bookseller organizations across the country, sets up a mini-convention every Fall so that bookstore buyers can be sure they’ve got their inventory ready before crazed gift-givers stampede the store.

This year, Publishers Weekly reports, attendance was down at these regional trade shows all over the country as independent bookstores continue to close. And yet despite eBook readers like the Kindle and iPad stealing storekeepers’ sales by offering so much text space you could fit over a thousand books on a single unit, a new light is dawning. First, customers who love the experience of holding and reading a physical book are buying them in stacks (gosh, it turns out that actual books make better gifts than empty space on a reading device). Second, Google is late but still may launch its own eBook inventory in December, and went it does, Google Editions will be offered exclusively through independent bookstores.

This could be a huge boost  and maybe a saving one for indies. Of course Amazon loyalists will resist it, but because the treasure trove of Google Editions is said to be even more massive than Amazon’s and could be faster and more easy to negotiate through indie websites, Google Editions could wipe out the unfair competitive advantage that book vendors from Amazon to chain stores have been using to drive indies out of business.

Equally important, again, is the fact that so many readers are finding that they miss the tactile environment of “real” books and don’t enjoy the impersonal robot look of eBook readers after all. Finally bloggers and Tweeters are discussing what we’re not told about the Kindle experience — the dull screen, sanitized text, lack of page numbers and phony Victorian drawings of authors (Poe, Dickinson, Joyce) who end up looking more funereal than literary. Remember, if you’re a supporter of independent bookstores, November and December are the make-or-break months, plus it’s so much fun to buy personal gifts for everyone on our lists, including kids, in a single bookstore.

DRIB (Don’t Read if Busy)

I hope when Tiger, Tiger is released that Farrar’s publicity department will raise an issue that’s hit the headlines this week and caused a Facebook/Twitter boycott of Amazon regarding a title called The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child Lover’s Code of Conduct by Philip R. Greaves.

Here’s a book that provides a real service to child molesters by showing how to get around those pesky laws protecting minors and how to stand proud about not using condoms with children, how to make the whole experience kindly and fun for everyone,  and much much more.

If you ever needed proof that nobody’s home at Amazon, here it is: The company routinely bars pornography and other sexually explicit or offensive titles, yet Amazon, caught sleeping at the switch when this pro-pedophile book got listed on Kindle –  tried to hide behind First Amendment issues as messages of outrage came pouring.

Anderson Cooper of CNN does a good job covering the issue and finding out just how icky and dangerous The Pedophile’s Guide can be by interviewing everyone’s favorite therapist, Dr. Phil McGraw, who makes enormous sense about the difference between free speech and exploitation. Cooper also explores with New Yorker legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin why “no court in the country” would ever force Amazon to remove the book, and why that’s a good thing (it’s up to you, Amazon, not the courts) in this important video.

This week enough people protested to shame Amazon into removing the book, thank heaven, but the point to make here is that Fragoso’s insight about pedophiles’ sense of entitlement in Tiger, Tiger is mirrored in The Pedophile’s Guide and useful for society to know.

Welcome Back, Laura H

Not so scary but equally mesmerizing is another hot-as-a-firecracker work of nonfiction, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (Random), which, as lush and addictive as her first blockbuster, Seabiscuit, comes out right on time for the holidays.

And what a book it is. Unbroken takes off like a shot as we watch a manic boy, born to be a juvenile delinquent in the 1920s, named Louis Zamperini running away from cops and storekeepers so fast that instead of going to prison, he’s discovered by track-and-field coaches and wins his way into competing as the youngest distance runner at the Berlin Olympics of 1936.

(Two quickies from the thousands of absorbing details Hillenbrand unearths: 1) German fans were so entranced with American sprinter Jesse Owens that as soon as stepped off the train in Berlin, scissors-wielding crowds surged forward  “and began snipping off bits of his clothing” with such fervor that a near-naked “Owens leapt back onto the train.” 2) When not racing, the incorrigible Louis Z. went around Berlin stealing “souvenirs,” including a Nazi flag that was seductively hanging in front of Hitler’s very Reich Chancellery. Two guards caught him, but he talked his way out and was even given the flag to take home.)

Although terrified of airplanes, Louis Z becomes a turret gunner on the WWII bomber Green Hornet but is shot down in the Pacific with two other airmen, and they all slowly starve on a disintegrating raft until Japanese planes spot them in the middle of a million miles of ocean and begin strafing just as Louis dives under the raft where — ta da! — sharks have been waiting for just this moment. And that’s just the end of the Prologue.

Other writers might better describe how it feels to be a speck in an indifferent and watery wasteland, but that giant existential loneliness really hits home, thanks to Hillenbrand’s incredible research and edge-of-your-seat storytelling. Sure to be another dense and luscious bestseller and a great gift for non-sailors, just as her last book Seabiscuit was beloved by non-horselovers.

The recent death of Berkeley, Calif., bookseller and activist Pat Cody reminds me what a privilege it is to work with books at any time.

Pat and her husband Fred opened Cody’s Books in 1956, long before the emergence of computers or chain stores, and right in the middle of a conservative backlash called McCarthyism that ravaged free speech almost as badly as the Patriot Act has in our last decade.

The Codys are remembered as champions of civil rights, but throughout even the most turbulent decades, when gas masks hung by the cash register and protesters squared off against police outside the store, their core belief was the value and the right and the privacy of reading.

To Fred and Pat, it didn’t matter who walked into the store — a homeless self-publisher (hardly an oxymoron) or a professor of physics from UC Berkeley: Matching the right book with the right customer was the highest act of political engagement they knew. Their first and last job as booksellers, they felt, was to contribute to the experience of quiet solitude that can only happen during the act of reading. When the reader’s mind meets the author’s mind, they believed, the world will change. Thank heaven that Andy Ross, who bought Cody’s Books in 1977, believed the same thing.

Pat was not the emotional one  — she never got as teary as Fred when it came to expressing political or literary passion. I remember Fred’s voice cracking when he talked about the day Aldous Huxley came into Cody’s Books (then a “hole in the wall” the size of a living room). “He was like me,” Fred said of the nearly blind writer walking slowly around the store examining everything, even the signs on the shelves. “If he saw something in print, he had to read it.”

By the time Cody’s moved to Telegraph Ave., where Fred allowed antiwar protestors to meet on the triangle of empty space in front of the store (so they wouldn’t “unlawfully congregate” in public streets), the mood of passionate engagement inside was the same as the mood outside.  Stories are legion about Cody’s Books in various stages of fervor and chaos, with employees running around answering questions and books waiting in unopened cartons and political meetings stopping store traffic, when suddenly Fred would march calmly and joyously out of a back room, throw his arm around the shoulder of a clerk and say, “Look at this great book that just came in!” and insist the clerk turn to Page One and start reading.

Some said the store remained open because of and in spite of Pat and Fred’s politics. In the early 1950s, they had gone to Mexico rather than succumb to FBI demands that they publically name Communist friends. According to their son Anthony, while in Mexico “they attended social gatherings at the home of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and met luminaries like Pablo Neruda, who declared that Pat’s “lemon meringue pie was the best he ever had.” Fred gave up a career as a professor rather than sign the dreaded “Loyalty Oaths” (stating they weren’t members of the Communist Party) that in California would split academia down the middle. (This controversy lasted right into the 1970s, when San Jose State University hired Fred and Pat’s good friend, the author Jessica Mitford, as a distinguished professor, then fired her for refusing to be fingerprinted or to sign a Loyalty Oath.)

It’s tempting to say that Pat Cody was the last of the Old Lefties, those great former communists whose idealism never quite agreed with the harsh realities of the Communist Party. So they left the American CP, one by one, channeling their hopes for a just society into the civil rights movement that would also become a literary force, at least for the Codys, beginning with the Beat Movement of the 1950s.

One of the most affectionately revealing stories about Fred’s passion for free speech took place at that very time, when San Francisco police arrested City Lights publisher and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti for “willfully and lewdly printing, publishing and selling obscene writings,” namely Allen Ginsburg’s Howl and Other Poems.

As “a gesture of refutation and dissent,” Fred feverishly stacked copies of Howl floor-to-ceiling in every window of Cody’s Books and waited with arms folded and smoke coming out of his ears for the Berkeley police to come get him. As poet Joyce Jenkins later wrote in Poetry Flash, “Berkeley’s tradition of intellectual freedom held fast, and no arrests were made” — much to Fred’s disappointment.

Pat Cody’s role in all this was less flamboyant yet often more trenchant, more enduring, even more iron-willed than Fred’s.  With a master’s degree in economics from Columbia University, Pat wrote articles for the business division of The Economist magazine, and this important trickle of cash helped pay the mortgage on the Codys’ now famous Fulton Street house, where they were raising four kids.

And it was Pat the tough-minded bookkeeper who kept Cody’s alive by somehow juggling an increasing payroll, mounting bills from impatient publishers and an expensive inventory that kept spreading with every gorgeous art book, German import, and self-published book that even Fred couldn’t sell.

You can read about all this in Pat’s own memoir, Cody’s Books: The Life and Times of a Berkeley Bookstore, 1956 to 1977, but I think the way I will always remember and feel inspired by Pat is her work as the visionary organizer who built a national movement called DES Action from her kitchen table.

Like millions of pregnant women from the 1940s to the 1960s, Pat had been prescribed a drug to prevent miscarriage called diethylstilbestrol or DES, which, she learned to her horror in 1974, was causing cancer and infertility in millions, including, possibly, her own daughter.

The first chapter of Pat’s second book, DES Voices: From Anger to Action begins as Pat the DES mother fights tears while breaking the news to her 18-year-old DES daughter, Martha. It’s such a heartbreaker that readers are amazed how quickly Pat then matter-of-factly sits down with other DES mothers to create a model of grassroots activism.

Not only do they discover that doctors are unaware of the drug’s effect and how to diagnose it, they realize that DES Action is the only group committed to tracking down and alerting the millions of DES mothers, daughters and sons (and, tragically, a similarly affected third generation). And then DES Action must convince medical researchers, policymakers, foundations and legislators (Pat and her daughter Nora, who becomes DES Action’s executive director, testify before a number of Congressional groups) that inattention to DES is simply the first crucial domino. Push it over and you see a long, long line of others that collectively should be called Neglect of Women’s Health in General.

But perhaps the greatest irony in DES Voices is Pat’s warning to present generations: Synthetic estrogens, the most damaging component of DES, did not disappear when DES was taken off the market, Pat explains. They have turned up in Hormone Replacement Therapy for menopausal women today and in plastic bottles and plastic food containers that may be causing the same kind of endocrine disruption that Rachel Carson first wrote about in her classic book, Silent Spring.

I don’t know how they did it, but somehow DES Action quietly got the news about plastic bottles channeled through enough sources that today, stainless steel and other reusable bottles are becoming the universally acknowledge safe choice. Well, I take that back. I think they did it because Pat Cody was behind this movement from the start.

All this came to mind when Pat died, but there is one more stunning realization I’d like to remember, thanks to that dear gracious woman who brought dignity and grace to just about everything she thought or wrote or spoke about.

At a time when many people approaching 90 (Pat was 87) are overwhelmed by, you know, kids today trying to read while multi-tasking on iPhones or checking in on Twitter or playing with iPads and Kindles, Pat was thrilled by all of it.

She published DES Voices through lulu.com and cheered when Google announced itself as the “eBook ally for independent bookstores.”

She was intrigued by the idea of eBook readers (“think of the trees they’ll save”) and loved the enormous changes occurring in libraries thanks to the computer revolution. Few real witnesses were left, after all, who could observe, as she did, that “people need libraries now even more than they did in the Great Depression.”

And yet even when I heard Pat’s characteristic optimism flow forth about the digital revolution, an uneasy feeling would descend that made me feel like just another whippersnapper messing around on the Internet playground with new and trendy gadgets promising to “enhance” (who are we kidding?)  the experience of reading.

Perhaps Pat’s most enduring legacy, along with her voracious love of books  and a talent for super-organization and good-natured survival skills that still distinguish the independent bookseller, is the belief that she brought to the simple act — the subversive, the heartfelt, the intellectual, the freeing, the spiritual and the profound act — of reading a book.

Andre Agassi’s ‘Open’ Reveals Dark Underside of Early Training

I’m sure I wasn’t the only reader of Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open, to laugh when announcers at the US Open mentioned what a crime it would be if the legendary tennis coach, Nick Bollettieri, is passed over for the Tennis Hall of Fame.

A Prison for Teenagers

In Open, Agassi lambastes Bollettieri’s famous tennis academy as a “prison” where teenaged hopefuls are forced to exhaust themselves on tennis courts, live in “cell blocks” and act out in a cafeteria that resembles “a mental hospital where the nurses forgot to hand out the meds.”

And that’s just in the mornings. In the afternoons, students are taken by bus 26 miles away to Bradenton Academy, another windowless prison where “the light is fluorescent and the air is stale, filled with a medley of foul odors, chiefly vomit, toilet, and fear,” Agassi writes.

The school, more than the tennis academy, overwhelms Agassi with feelings of claustrophobia and failure. “At the Bollettieri Academy, at least I’m learning something about tennis,” he says. “At Bradenton Academy, the only thing I learn is that I’m stupid.”

Under Bollettieri’s management, however, even tennis takes a back seat. As the other boys tell Agassi, “our job is to keep Nick’s four sports cars washed and polished” because Nick is “a hustler, a guy who makes a very nice living off tennis” while stifling his students’ growth.

Worse, Nick reminds Andre of his tyrannical father, Pops, a seeming tennis mentor who is, like Nick, “captivated by cash.” It never occurs to the former paratrooper Bollettieri that he’s really known for running “a tennis sweatshop that employed child labor.”

Grain of Salt

One reads all this with a grain of salt because by the time Andre is shipped off to Bollettieri at age 14, his need to rebel against Pops is about to explode. Afraid of his father’s anger, he knows he can act out against Bollettieri instead, so he begins donning his famous outlaw look — gaudy earrings, pink Mohawk, cosmetics and denim cutoffs (instead of tennis shorts) on the court. All this and more, Agassi acknowledges,  “represents a neat little fuck-you to my father.”

Still, his description of the school is heartbreaking.

Many of the students at Bradenton are failing, Agassi writes, but the teachers pass them all. “They don’t want to cross Nick. Bradenton exists because the Bollettieri Academy keeps sending it a bus full of paying customers every semester.

“The teachers know that their jobs depend on Nick, so they can’t flunk us, and we cherish our special status. We feel a lordly sense of entitlement, never realizing that the thing to which we’re most entitled is the thing we’re not getting — an education.”

Under the cloak of rebellion, a learning paralysis sets in. “In every class I sit quietly at my desk, staring at my feet, wishing I were somewhere else,” Agassi remembers, “while the teacher drones on about Shakespeare or Bunker Hill or Pythagorean Theorem.” He can’t tell the difference among any of them.

The System is Rigged

That’s such a classic definition of a student losing his focus, his interest in learning, even his ability to read, that we wonder how many other Bollettieri kids learned how “stupid” they were right alongside him.

Instead of family, or a savvy tutor, or a sympathetic teacher coming to the rescue, Bradenton abandons its students, Agassi tells us, to cope with boredom, mounting pressures to win every match and crippling bad habits as they bluff their way through one homework assignment after another. (An English teacher recognizes a spark of interest in Andre, but the system buries her efforts to help him.)

“We’re always behind on schoolwork and falling ever further behind,” Andre writes. “The system is rigged, guaranteed to produce bad students as quickly and efficiently as it produces good tennis players.”

The Bollettieri Academy website lists the many tennis champions who once attended his academy — Pete Sampras, Boris Becker, Maria Sharapova, Venus and Serena Williams are only a few — but one wonders if they and hundreds of other Bollettieri alumni also confronted challenges of academic malaise and neglect.

Functional Illiteracy

Agassi, though singled out for his gifts as a tennis player, isn’t alone as he drifts into functional illiteracy and drops out of school before finishing the ninth grade. He makes a deal with Bollettieri to begin touring early, gets his mother to complete a correspondence course that earns him a high-school degree and is plagued forever by guilt and failure, always worried that behind his outlaw image, he’s just a stupid jock.

No wonder Andre ends up building a $40-million charter school in an impoverished section of his hometown of Las Vegas.

In the book, Bollettieri makes a “makeshift truce” with Agassi, traveling with him on tour as a “sounding board” and, for a time, “honestly, a friend” — until Nick “puts the touch on me for money,” Agassi writes. This is after Nick sells the academy to IMG (in the book he complains to Andre that he did so for all the wrong reasons and lost money in the process). After spending “hundreds of thousands above the hundreds of thousands I’ve already given him,” Bollettieri is at least consistent in his regard for Andre. But that’s another story.

What Really Rankles

I think what really rankles me as a reader of Agassi’s book is not only hearing the US Open announcers praise Bollettieri as a great coach who’s destined for the Hall of Fame, but also finding similar praise elsewhere on the Internet.

At Tennis.com, for example, Tom Perrotta writes:

“I’m not going to waste much space stating the obvious: If Bollettieri doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame, then there’s no point in having such an institution. Whether you love or loathe his brash attitude, self-promotion, ever-present sunglasses, permanent suntan and unique definition of ‘marriage’ (he has had eight wives), he is — objectively, without any rational argument to the contrary — one of the two or three most important coaches the sport has ever known…”

Really. But what kind of coach is that?  When the kids in your charge are all of 14, shouldn’t you help them find balance in their lives, even (and especially!) if they’re destined to win big tournaments, as Agassi was?

As he grows older, Agassi aligns himself with better advisors — clearly “father figures” who understand his deeper needs and help him find himself, though that process takes decades.

But the reader keeps wondering: What about today’s students at Bollettieri and other “academies” for up-and-coming teenagers in all sports — kids stuck in “gulags” who spend eight hours a day training and four hours failing in class. Are they, too, passed on by uncaring teachers?

[Note: Today the Bollettieri Tennis Academy is now a part of IMG Academies, and Nick is still the spokesperson. IMG seems to have parted with Bradenton (which looks like a terrific preparatory school on its website) and brought in Pendleton School, an on-campus facility that in turn appears to be dedicated to providing a good education for its students on their way to sports stardom. So the question that comes to mind as one looks at these gorgeous websites is how much pressure from the sports world, the media, the families, the coaches and fans like you and me is still creeping in. Or have those pressures simply moved below the radar.]

‘Get a Little Better Every Day’

I did get one more laugh upon viewing a video at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy where Nick himself tells us the secret of his success: “You have to know how to read people,” he says. “Whatever asset I’ve had is the ability to look at somebody and know how to relate to that person and help that person get a little better every day.”

Uh-huh. Well, there’s no doubt that Bollettieri looked at Andre Agassi as a real cash cow early on.  Making Andre “a little better every day” meant that Agassi got better at tennis despite Bollettieri and the Bradenton school, then turned over “hundreds of thousands” of dollars to Nick.

I’m sure in the larger sense that we all share a concern that sports champions in the United States are admired as much for their entertainment potential as for their athleticism on the court or field or track.

But Agassi is saying that things don’t have to be that way. That’s why he’s still pouring his heart and soul, not to mention more millions, into his charter school for kids who are just at the age where good teachers and good coaches can make a difference.

New Priorities

Then I got to thinking about Kerri Strug, the Olympic gymnast who injured her ankle and went on to make her last vault anyway. She landed right on the worst part of that ankle and won the Gold Medal for America “before crumpling to the floor in pain.” At which point her spotlight-stealing coach, Bela Karolyi, carried her around to wild cheers from the crowd and took all the credit.  

Well, we are the audience and we are the ones cheering, so we’re the ones who can instill new priorities. It’s happening in pro football, after all: Coaches no longer allow players to “play through” symptoms of concussion — a small step, granted, but important — and fans have applauded the decision.

With more books like Agassi’s Open, maybe “academies” will provide a well-balanced education to up-and-coming young players, making them equipped to explore the whole world instead of one small part of it.

Had such priorities been in place with Kerri Strug, the US Olympic team would never have allowed such an injured player to continue. The coaches would have taken her out of the competition the instant they spotted her damaged ankle.

Then a message would have gone out to millions of young viewers that risking your health for temporary glory is not worth it, and that future Hall of Fame coaches are here to help players really and truly “get a little better every day.”