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A reporter’s account of the fight over what influences hurricanes.

Dreaming At the Gates of Fury by Alexander Taylor, a review from Powells.com by Chris Faatz.

MPW: If you have a reputation to defend, to protect--two stars, three stars in the Michelin--you should be behind your stove. The simple reason is, those people are paying high prices to eat your food. They expect you behind the stove, they expect you to be there, they expect you to cook their dinner or contribute to their dinner. They don't expect you to be on a TV show or miles away in another country. See, I have nothing to defend. I let go of my status. What I like about coming to America is it gives me a great opportunity to share my story with a few special people, like today with yourself.

Amazon.com: I heard this summer you're stepping in as the UK host of Hell's Kitchen. What made you want to get back in the spotlight?

MPW: I'm a boy who loves his profession--I love the restaurant world. And what I find TV's doing in the UK to the industry is devaluing its currency. If you look at Hell's Kitchen in the UK it doesn't encourage or inspire anyone to send their children into the industry. It's got to be interesting, it's got to be educational, it's got to be intelligent. Viewers at home want to see food. They don't want to see someone constantly swearing or belittling. I want to give people insight into what a professional kitchen is really about. There's a lot of love, there's a lot of romance. People help each other, people work with each other. My chef used to shout at me, but service was service. There's nothing wrong with an old-fashioned bollocking.

 

Amazon.com: Do you think any of those bollockings will make an appearance?

MPW: I'm sure they will. But you've got to put a little humor into your bollockings. In my kitchen, if I gave a bollocking to somebody, I did so in a way that it made the others smile or laugh. The guy that had a bollocking five minutes ago, he's now off the hook--he's now smiling at the other guy having a bollocking. You've got to put a bit of humor into it.

 

Amazon.com: And the only right answer is Yes, Chef... Yes, Chef...

MPW: That's all they say... Programmed at a very young age.

Amazon.com: Finally, what would you order for your death-row meal?

MPW: I would have things like gulls eggs with celery salt. A great roast chicken or caviar or smoked salmon. Very simple things, but all delicious quality.

Amazon.com: And to drink?

 

MPW: Hmmm... I'd have to have the house cocktail

Ugur Akinci writes in The American Chronicle that screenwriters should start with the ending when writing a screenplay. After you've figured out your ending, Akinci says to move on to steps 2-6.

2. Think your way backwards, all the way to the beginning of your script. Try to see the whole movie playing from beginning to the end on that little movie screen inside your forehead.

3. Chop your story into 18 to 25 sequences.

4. Divide each sequence into 3 to 5 scenes.

5. Sit down and write the whole thing as quickly as possible from start to finish, without stopping for any reflection or self-criticism. The minute you stop and start "thinking" about it, the chances are you will freeze and never get done.

6. Once you finish your 100 to 120 pages, you can re-write, edit and polish to your heart's content. Yes, writing is rewriting. But "writing" -- and not the "rewriting" -- comes first.

It may not work for everyone, but if you get stuck why not start from the ending?

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Complete contents of the Book Review since 1997.

Last Week: Mike, Allan, the professor and four henchmen sent by Chib Calloway stole eight paintings from the National Gallery warehouse on Doors Open Day.

Richard Bachman died of “cancer of the pseudonym”; looking back to when “The Thorn Birds” was the No. 1 title.

The movie adaptation of Evening, Susan Minot's poignant tale of paths not taken and the persistence (and vagaries) of memory hits the theaters today, with a screenplay by The Hours author Michael Cunningham and an all-star cast featuring Claire Danes, Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Glenn Close, Natasha Richardson, and more. Check out the trailer, then watch cast members discuss the film, including:

• Hugh Dancy on using the novel to prepare for his role, as well as the potential male audience response to a "chick flick"
• Claire Danes on how one watershed weekend shapes her character's life
• Evening author Susan Minot on the evolution of her book from short story to novel, as well as the its transformation to the silver screen

A scholar finds that in ancient Greece, religion meant power for women.

San Francisco writer Laura Albert lost big in court when a federal jury awarded the production company $116,500. The jury agreed that Albert had defrauded Antidote International Films Inc. who lied to the company by pretending she was a male prostitute named J.T. LeRoy. The case is a total embarrassment for the literary community which embraced LeRoy's writing and endless sob stories about his tortured youth. Not only were any of the stories true, J.T. LeRoy never existed anywhere but in the mind of Ms. Albert.

To extend the ruse, Albert's friends donned wigs and posed as the fictitious LeRoy at book signings. They duped journalists with the phony back story about a past as an underage male prostitute. Albert even made phone calls to a psychiatrist while posing as the troubled teen, and grabbed the attention of such authors as Tobias Wolff and Dave Eggers, and filmmaker Gus Van Sant.

Although Albert stared straight ahead when the verdict was read, and said she expected the decision, she was quick to condemn it. "This goes beyond me," Albert said. "Say an artist wants to use a pseudonym for political reasons, for performance art. This is a new, dangerous brave new world we are in."

She said that Antidote had succeeded in exposing more of her life story during the trial, and will try to make more money off of it.

"They made my life public domain. It's about commerce," she said. "They're going to try to hijack my copyrights, which is like stealing my child."

Laura Albert is a con artist, pure and simple. The verdict was more than fair.

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It's been four years since William Gibson's last novel, Pattern Recognition, which brought his visions of the future into the weirdly futuristic present and which put him as high on the bestseller and best of the year lists (it was my favorite book of 2003) as he's ever been. His new novel, Spook Country, which comes out on August 7, stays in the recognizable present, and shares a character with Pattern Recognition, the possibly malevolent Hubertus Bigend (who, like me, just turned 40). As of today, you can (sort of) get an exclusive early look at the book: we've posted his original proposal for the novel. I say "sort of" because none of the major characters outlined actually ended up in the final book, although you can see their echoes in the characters who did. But what did survive is perhaps the main force in the book, as Gibson writes in the proposal, "a single large and blankly enigmatic object: a shipping container." They are vintage Gibson: both the evocative idea and the book it became. --Tom

Up High in the Trees by Kiara Brinkman, a review from Washington Post Book World by Ron Charles.

Which American writers do you think should be read more in Germany?

Denis Johnson is still not as well known in Germany as he should be. Everybody talks about Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon, but the real No. 1--Johnson--is still only a writer's writer in my country.

Johnson's the real No. 1 for me too right now, but I'm not sure that he isn't more than a writer's writer in his own country either. Perhaps that will change when Tree of Smoke, his big Vietnam novel, comes out this fall. I had to put it aside halfway through (in the "1967" chapter) for pressing required reading, but it's still living intensely in my mind for when I return (soon).

In case you didn't see their announcement post earlier this week, the Penguin Classics Reading Group has selected Excellent Women by Barbara Pym for their summer read. You can find the full blog post in our Reading Group topic, which also includes a list of titles you can vote on for the Fall pick.

Many of you may have subscribed to the Penguin Classics blog for their earlier picks, Fifth Business and Kristin Lavransdatter. Since then, we've changed the look and feel of Amazon blogs, which you know now as Amazon Daily, and we wanted to give you some quick tips on how to continue participating in the book club.

• If you'd only like to read the Penguin Classics blog, you can customize your Amazon Daily view so you see only their posts. Go to "Customize Amazon Daily" in the top right corner of the Daily page. You'll see a list of all our blog topics. Uncheck all the topics except for Reading Group (it's akin to pulling out the sections of the Sunday paper that you don't want to read). This way, you'll only see posts from Penguin Classics in your Amazon Daily.
• If there are other topics you're interested in as well, feel free to keep those checked in the menu of topics. When you visit Amazon Daily, just go directly to the Reading Group topic, listed in the right column of the page under the heading "Books," to find the latest posts from Penguin Classics.
• Bookmark the Reading Group page in your browser so you can visit easily whenever you're online.

If you haven't been a part of earlier Penguin Classics reads, you can visit their blog and check out some of the lively discussions around the first two books. --Anne

Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life by Hugh Brogan, a review from The New Republic Online by Mark Lilla.

Wired reports on librarians who refused to comply with the Patriot Act.

Life in an FBI muzzle is no fun. Two Connecticut librarians on Sunday described what it was like to be slapped with an FBI national security letter and accompanying gag order. It sounded like a spy movie or, gulp, something that happens under a repressive foreign government. Peter Chase and Barbara Bailey, librarians in Plainville, Connecticut, received an NSL to turn over computer records in their library on July 13, 2005. Unlike a suspected thousands of other people around the country, Chase, Bailey and two of their colleagues stood up to the Man and refused to comply, convinced that the feds had no right to intrude on anyone's privacy without a court order (NSLs don't require a judge's approval). That's when things turned ugly.

The four librarians under the gag order weren't allowed to talk to each other by phone. So they e-mailed. Later, they weren't allowed to e-mail. After the ACLU took on the case and it went to court in Bridgeport, the librarians were not allowed to attend their own hearing. Instead, they had to watch it on closed circuit TV from a locked courtroom in Hartford, 60 miles away. "Our presence in the courtroom was declared a threat to national security," Chase said.

Forced to make information public as the case moved forward, the government resorted to one of its favorite tactics: releasing heavily redacted versions of documents while outing anyone who didn't roll over for Uncle Sam. In this case, they named Chase, despite the fact that he was legally compelled to keep his own identity secret.

Eventually, the gag order was rescinded by the government after the Patriot Act was renewed. And it all turned out to be much ado about nothing. The librarians refused to comply with a law they found invasive, but no criminal acts were ever discovered in connection with the affected library records.

It's amazing how brave those librarians were. Most people would have folded at the first sight of an FBI badge.

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Author P.B. Kerr is heading for Hollywood: Stephen Spielberg just bought the film rights to his childrens' fantasy series, Children of the Lamp.

The director's production company Dreamworks is to make a big screen adaptation of Children of the Lamp, which was penned by Philip Kerr for his son William to try and wean the ten-year-old off his PlayStation.

The man behind blockbusters such as ET and Indiana Jones plans to turn the story of a group of genies who pass for humans, but have the power to grant wishes, into a trilogy with two more books to be converted into films. More than a million books have been sold in the series and, as the successor to popular fantasy series such as the Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter, he is about to reach a worldwide audience.

However Mr Kerr, 51, a former copywriter for Saatchi and Saatchi, who is married to another novelist, Jane Thynne, only ever thought he would be writing the children's books for his son. "I actually was writing an adult book at the time. My older boy was not much of a reader and did not enjoy reading. He had shunned reading for video games and television," he was reported as saying. "It seemed to be time for me to do something about that. I put aside the book I was working on and started to write this book for children. I wrote it really quickly and did not think I was going to get published."

Kerr was a well-known adult thriller writer when he turned to writing for teens. We absolutely love the Children of the Lamp books and have devoured every one when they come out. If you missed this amazing series, check out the first book, The Akhenaten Adventure. You can visit the author's website PBKerr.com.

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Refused Diana Review Printed

When the London magazine, The Spectator refused to print celebrity biographer Sarah Bradford's harsh review of celebrity magazine editor Tina Brown's , The Diana Chronicles , London newspaper The Guardian simply "couldn't resist" the opportunity. Bradford--who penned the bestselling bio Diana last year-- found Brown's account "overblown and overhyped." Our 25 customer reviews offer widely varying opinions of Brown's book. We'll let you be the judge.






Big Read Initiative Doubles in Size 
The National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) has just announced that it is giving a big boost to the national Big Read program by providing $1.5 million in new grants to over 200 communities across the U.S. Publishers Weekly quotes NEA chairperson Dana Gioia on the The Big Read initiative: "By joining the Big Read, these cities and towns are showing that reading is necessary to the cultural, civic, even economic fabric of their communities." The list of titles from which participating communities can choose for a city-wide read this fall/winter features these great American novels and a few modern classics:

• Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• My Antonia by Willa Cather
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
• A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Oprah's Book Club) by Carson McCullers
• The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin Classics) by John Steinbeck
• The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
• The Age of Innocence (Norton Critical Editions) by Edith Wharton.

Harry Potter I goes for $18,000 The Associated Press reports that a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (published as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Book 1) in the U.S.) just flew off a London auction block and into the hands of a anonymous buyer for $18,000. One wonders how many Galleons that would be in Wizarding money? Since only 500 to 1,000 copies of J.K. Rowling's debut were first printed back in 1999, they are rare are increasingly valuable to collectors.  --Lauren

In this novel, a young Korean-American woman must battle her parents to grow up.

Nazik al-Malaika was an early exponent of the free verse movement in Arabic.

For most black authors, the writing life rarely unfolds the way it does for so many white writers you could name.