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Sunday Morning News

What Are the Summer's Hottest Books?

Aired June 25, 2000 - 9:30 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: This is the first big weekend of summer 2000, and if you're at the beach or just in the back yard relaxing, it's time to make your summer reading list.

But the biggest book of the summer isn't even out yet. You'll have to wait until July 8 to get a copy of the new Harry Potter book.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: I wonder how many people are watching us at the beach or in their back yard. I...

PHILLIPS: Good question.

O'BRIEN: Anyway, Tom Clancy's new tome won't come along even until August. To help us sort out the summer's best books, let's go to Seattle, Washington, and the books page editor for Amazon.com, James Marcus.

James, thanks for getting up early on our behalf.

JAMES MARCUS, AMAZON.COM: Pleasure to be here.

O'BRIEN: There's a certain 7-year-old in my house who is very anxious to talk about this next installment in the Harry Potter series, which is sort of being released under a shroud of secrecy, isn't it?

MARCUS: Oh, yes. The book has been rigorously embargoed. We don't know the plot, we don't even know the title of the book. There has been a rumor that Harry, having attained the age of 14, is more interested in girls. I hear a rumor that he does some day trading at the end of the book. But unsubstantiated, pure rumor.

This, in any case, will be the most hotly anticipated book, not just of the summer but of the 21st century. At Amazon.com, we've already had in the neighborhood of 250,000 pre-orders for the book before publication. And on July 8, I believe the publisher is rolling out almost 4 million copies.

O'BRIEN: Is that a record?

MARCUS: Yes, that seems to be a record for a first printing, so...

O'BRIEN: That's amazing. MARCUS: ... you know, that is going to be the book of the summer, a big day for booksellers, but very much a big day for readers as well.

PHILLIPS: Now, James, this one looks interesting, "White Teeth." Now, it talks about multiculturalism, and I think of that as a very serious issue when we're talking about race and family and community. But this is a comedy.

MARCUS: "White Teeth" is a debut by a very precocious British writer. Zadie Smith is 25 now, I think. The book is very much a big canvas, multicultural comedy set in north London. She takes on sort of every conceivable hot button urban issue. There's, you know, race, gender wars, assimilation, migration.

But it's all delivered with such antic and intelligent style that you never feel like issues are being lobbed at you. It's just a big, very funny, sprawling story that just keeps unfolding, and this book will have legs throughout the summer and a considerable bite, we already have seen.

O'BRIEN: All right, from legs to flags, "The Flags of Our Fathers," an amazing image that we can't forget, this enduring image of Iwo Jima. And how many times have you looked at that and wondered who those people were? And I guess that that's what this book is all about, in some ways.

MARCUS: The author's father -- James Bradley is the author. His father is one of the soldiers in that photo. And he didn't, evidently, talk to his family much about his wartime experiences, but when he died in 1994, James Bradley began to sort of look at his father's experiences at the battle of Iwo Jima and throughout the war.

And what he came up with is a fascinating hybrid of a family history plus a group portrait of the other five soldiers and Marines who are in that picture, incredibly vivid account of an incredibly bloody battle at Iwo Jima.

And I think a moving and very surprising meditation on heroism itself, which is celebrated in the book. But there's also a sense of the kind of price that heroism can extract for a man and a family, and it's a very moving, surprising book, again, and I think it brings something of its own to the current cultural interest in the Second World War and the wartime generation.

PHILLIPS: On to a real funny writer, David Sedaris. For all the NPR lovers, this ought to be a good one to get this summer, "Me Talk Pretty One Day."

MARCUS: I mean, David Sedaris is winning, whiny voice is known to millions of listeners. In this book he writes about his childhood, he writes about his rather zany career. But the heart of the book is a period he spent in France, where he struggled very unsuccessfully with the culture and the cuisine and very much with the verbs and nouns and adjectives of the French language. The title is sort of his attempt to say something intelligent in his French class, and again, I think there's a serious theme, maybe, underlying the book. He's writing about the apparent inability of humans to ever communicate with each other. But it's delivered with such comic panache that I defy anybody to read this book and not laugh out loud. It's just too good.

O'BRIEN: I'm curious about this next one. Is this one funny, "Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain"? Now, this is based on a true story, is that correct?

MARCUS: No, it's actually a work of nonfiction based around a totally bizarre fact, which is that when Albert Einstein died in 1995 (ph), the pathologist who did the autopsy took the brain out and brought it home. How he got it past the guy in the lobby is anybody's guess. But it was at his house...

O'BRIEN: He had a bowling bag, (inaudible).

MARCUS: That's possible. He had it at his house in a Tupperware full of formaldehyde for almost 40 years. And...

PHILLIPS: Morbid curiosity.

O'BRIEN: Yes, and then there was a desire to have the brain back on the part of Einstein's granddaughter, so the pathologist, now 84, drove across the country from New Jersey, I think, to California in the company of Einstein's brain in the back seat, and in the company of a journalist, Michael Padernedi (ph), who recorded the whole journey.

And you have a kind of a classic American road narrative, but it's all refracted through Einstein and his life and his thought. And it is a wild book, which I think, you know, is going to be a tremendous sleeper this summer, really much stranger than fiction in this case.

O'BRIEN: Yet another use for Tupperware, I guess.

PHILLIPS: Oh, Miles.

MARCUS: (inaudible) it's a remarkable innovation, isn't it?

PHILLIPS: I can't wait to read that one.

All right, number six, always a good read, Tom Clancy. He's out with "The Bear and the Dragon."

MARCUS: I think a lot of time Clancy's audience wondered how he would adapt to the cold -- the ending of the cold war, rather. But there's still a lot of international mayhem with or without the Berlin Wall. And Jack Ryan is back. He's now been elected president in his own right. And, you know, there's a meltdown of the Asian economy. I think there's an insurrection in Liberia. The Russian situation looks very, very messy. So Jack dispatches his favorite black-ops guy to straighten things out, but needless to say, he's drawn into a more hands-on relationship to the whole thing, and, you know, it's Tom Clancy. There'll be suspense, there'll be great international thrills and chills, there'll be guns and ammo. And I think you'll see this on every other beach blanket this summer. This is probably the other big book.

O'BRIEN: Well, it is a formula, but it's a formula that obviously works.

MARCUS: Very much a proven one, yes.

O'BRIEN: All right.

PHILLIPS: James Marcus, Amazon.com, thanks for being with us.

MARCUS: A pleasure to be here.

PHILLIPS: All right.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com

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