Nonfiction

Okay, I'm starting to sound like a WWF announcer (are you ready ruuuuuuumble?) but it is funny that the same Nobel season in which the Swedish chair of the literature prize committee asserted that Americans were not up to European standards saw the first award of the week, for Medicine, go to the French researchers whose claim to discovering the AIDS virus was embroiled in dispute with an American researcher, Robert Gallo, who was not included in today's award. I make no claims to being able to adjudicate the science of the controversy (despite growing up in a National Institutes of Health family, where my dad and Gallo both worked), but it does seem that despite Gallo's "disappointment" at not joining his French colleagues, the controversy (which required at one point an agreement between President Reagan and Prime Minister Chirac) has cooled and the scientific consensus has settled that Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier do have the legitimate claim to first scientific dibs here. Even Anthony Fauci, a high-profile administrator at NIH, "agreed there's no doubt the French scientists first identified the virus. He said they, and zur Hausen [who shared the award for his work on cervical cancer], deserved the Nobel. Fauci said that if additional researchers could have been included, Gallo 'would have been an obvious choice to be added to that list.'"

If you want to return to the bitter days of this '80s scientific controversy (carried on amid the general panic, anger, and shame surrounding the AIDS crisis), NBC's Robert Bazell has a short summary, and you can also visit our contentious customer review section for John Crewdson's Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo (whose take on Gallo is obvious from its subtitle). Gallo and Montagnier also wrote their own versions of the discovery and dispute: Gallo in Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery and Montagnier in Virus: The Co-Discoverer of HIV Tracks Its Rampage and Charts the Future. --Tom

The sign outside my local elementary school last spring wished students a "great summer" in a typical Travis Heights way: "Whatever Higher Power(s) You May Or May Not Believe In...YEE HA!"

Gender neutral, faith neutral, God neutral...that's my neighborhood here in Austin, Texas. In 2000, George Bush came in behind both Al Gore AND Ralph Nader in Travis Heights. When 70 percent of Texas voted in favor of a ban on gay marriage, my precinct voted 90% against. In my zip code, 90% of the federal election contributions this year went to Democrats.

Oh, and one more thing. Travis Heights Elementary is exactly one block from the house where liberal writer Molly Ivins lived. (If Molly were still alive and writing, our zip code would be bright blue on the Amazon book map.)

To the cable television boys who finger paint on the electoral map, Texas is always solid red. (The CNN guy never taps his digit down in our direction.) But here, in the neighborhood where I live, we're bluer than Vermont. And that's the point about all those red and blue state maps. They are good for showing what has been a remarkably static division in the Electoral College. But they miss how people are living and, I suspect, buying books.

The divisions state to state are real, but they are nothing compared to how Americans are sorting themselves from community to community. Statistician Bob Cushing and I traced the votes at the county level from 1948 to 2004 in our book The Big Sort. We could see that majorities, Republican or Democratic, were piling up in communities. The last five presidential elections have been as close as any in the last 100 years. But an increasing number of people live in counties where elections aren't close at all, where either one party or another wins in a landslide.

So, in 1976 — the nearly dead-even contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford — about a quarter of all voters lived in a county where one side or the other won by 20 points or more. By 2004 — the nearly dead-even contest between John Kerry and George W. Bush — almost a half of all voters lived in places, like Travis Heights, where 20 points or more decided the election.

When you look at local voting results over time, you see that counties tip Republican or Democratic, and then they keep tipping as more Republicans move into Republican counties and Democrats cluster in Democratic communities. (Or, at the same time, counties grow increasingly lopsided as members of the minority party decamp for more politically hospitable environs.)

One half of U.S. voters live in counties that have remained unchanged in their presidential preference since 1980; 60 percent live in counties that have not changed since 1988; and nearly 73 percent live in counties that have not changed since 1992. Orange and Los Angeles counties in California are side by side, but local political majorities have been growing in opposite directions since 1976, a phenomenon found in two-thirds of U.S. communities.

Our sense is that people aren't moving to be around others who feel as they did about the Iraq War or single-payer health plans. People are clustering around others who live as they do — people who have similar lifestyles, who read similar kinds of books. And every four years those ways of life align with political party.

Marketing folks have known for some time that demographic factors have little meaning these days. People don't define themselves as "single, male, college-educated, 25 to 35 years of age." They think of themselves as environmentalists, car-racing enthusiasts, or, as one woman told me, "I'm an ocean-oriented person." They know that to learn about another's politics you consider the way they live, not their age, race, or level of education. In a radio talk show in Minneapolis, three callers told me they realized they had moved into a community with political opposites when they saw their neighbors using lawn chemicals. (It was a public radio show, in case you couldn't tell.)

Politics these days aren't about issues. People don't line up with a party because they agree with a set of policy position papers. One political scientist described the choice of a political party this way: You have a choice of attending one of two parties being held in two rooms off the same hall. You look into each room and you look at the people — how they appear, their gestures, what they're wearing. You get a vibe and then you join with the group you think is most like you.

You might even look at the books they are reading.

That's how people pick neighborhoods these days. It's also how they pick churches and civic clubs. It's the reason people with college degrees are clustering in particular cities and why some places are succeeding economically while others are slipping further behind.

That's The Big Sort. And it plays out more in culture, in books, than in politics. --Bill Bishop

See the whole Red-Blue Roundtable.

The big message of our Red State, Blue State book is that the "culture war" between red and blue America is real, but it is concentrated among upper-income voters.  Richer Americans tend to be more politically involved and more ideological in their voting patterns.

Here are some maps from our book showing our estimate of who would've won each state in 2004 if only the votes of rich, middle-income, or poor voters were counted. For each scenario, we show the states (red if Bush would've won in that income category, blue if Kerry would've won) and then a scatterplot of estimated Bush vote vs. state income.

Among the rich, you see a strong red-state, blue-state divide, with Kerry winning rich voters in only four states--the cultural elite of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California--and Bush winning the other forty-six. Going to lower-income voters, you see Kerry winning in a mixture of rich and poor states.

So, what does this say about Amazon book-buying patterns? Or, more to the point, what do Amazon book-buying patterns tell us about the electorate? I assume Amazon purchasers are mostly in the upper third of income, and so I'd expect to see pretty strong red-state, blue-state divisions. And, indeed, the colors of Amazon's red-blue map of book purchasers looks a lot more like the voting patterns of the rich than the poor.

For example, look at Nevada, whose Amazon purchases are going 2:1 Red to Blue. Nevada as a whole is split evenly between the two parties, but higher-income Nevadans have gone Republican in recent elections.

Higher-income, more politically involved citizens drive our political discussions, on both the left and the right, and so I think the Amazon data are telling us something. But let's not forget that the geographic distribution of political attitudes is different among other segments of the population. --Andrew Gelman

See the whole Red-Blue Roundtable.

I think we're moving well beyond red states vs. blue states. Back in 2004, this artificial construct actually defined the election and the nation. We saw in our polling huge differences in demographics, attitudes, and behaviors between citizens of the red states and citizens of the blue states.

This could very well be the year when the old red state vs. blue state paradigm disappears. Frankly there are other demographics that I’m watching, notably the Equinox Voters -- the Spring Aheads, who are the economic winners in key new- economy states like New Hampshire, North Carolina, Florida, New Mexico, and Colorado vs. the Fall Backwards, the victims of the old-economy who are bouncing from lower paying job to lower paying job in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri.

People are buying fewer hardbound books: first and foremost that's a statement on the economy and technology -- other forms of reading cost significantly less. Right-wing books have their devoted following, thus an Ann Coulter or Bill O'Reilly is assured strong sales. While the left has its devoted followers, they seem to show up mainly on the blogs and online.

Those differences still persist but are moving into the background because of the rise of the political center and a growing need by Americans of all stripes for problem solvers not ideologues. That is what over 80% of voters tell us they want -- a problem solver, a competent manager of government, someone who can work with the opposition, and someone who can command the military. Not one of those is ideological or partisan. The most interesting thing to watch this year is not the hyper-partisan rhetoric, but instead the way both major candidates are appealing to the middle. Something worthy of note: there is always a centrist political party waiting to be formed. If either party tilts too far toward its base, the center could rise. Frankly, had this election been about Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee vs. Hillary Clinton, I think a centrist like Mike Bloomberg running on the characteristics I just noted had the potential to do very well. --John Zogby

Halloween and even Christmas decorations are starting to appear this fall, but it's still the season of red and blue: yard signs, cable TV graphics, and, most of all, maps, maps, maps. We've been following our own electoral map of Amazon customers' book reading at the same time that we've been watching the polls predict the final red and blue presidential tally. But even as we were constructing that snazzy map (have I mentioned that it's snazzy? Uh, yes.), we were wondering: how well do those "red" and "blue" labels describe us now (if they ever did)? And what connection does our book-buying map (which has been very red for the past couple of months) have to the election maps (where the polls have been turning more and more blue recently).

So we've brought together some people who might actually know more than us about those questions (we may be bookselling professionals but we're certainly amateur demographers). This week we're hosting a Red-Blue Roundtable on Omnivoracious, featuring four authors and bloggers who have looked at that supposed red-blue divide, and who will be talking about it here, along with taking a look at our book-buying map and, of course, next month's election. I've started them off with a few questions of my own along those lines, but please step in with your own comments and questions as well. They'll be posting here all week, and you'll be able to find the discussion collected here. Joining us will be:

• John Zogby, one of the world's best known pollsters, as the president and CEO of Zogby International. His new book, The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream, argues that we are moving beyond the red/blue divide toward a "new national consensus."
• Bill Bishop, a longtime reporter and the co-editor of The Daily Yonder, a web-based publication covering rural America. In The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, he sees a country that is becoming polarized less by red and blue states than by "way-of-life segregation" in which we choose to live in microcommunities that match our own ideologies.
• Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. He has just written Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, which parses voting data to show that many of our assumptions about red and blue states are wrong, and that the real red/blue divide is not between rich blue states and poor red states but between rich and poor voters within those states.
• Valdis Krebs, the founder and chief scientist at Orgnet.com. His innovative network analysis has been used by clients including IBM, Google, and Boeing, and covered by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Business Week. He's been tracking red/blue book buying at Amazon even longer (and no doubt more wisely) than we have, using our people-who-bought-this-also-bought recommendations to map a network of how Amazon book purchasers organize their political reading. He blogs at thenetworkthinker.com.

We're thrilled that all four of them can stop by this week during a very busy political month, and we hope you'll join in the discussion too. --Tom

As the resident former New Yorker on the Books Editorial team (I was born and raised in Madison County--the geographical center of New York State, attended a SUNY school on the shores of Lake Ontario, and spent my graduate school years in Manhattan's Morningside Heights) I was enlisted with today's impossible assignment: assembling the 31 Books of New York for our State by State Project. Based on the state's electoral votes 31 titles seems generous, but I've signed up for a Sisyphean task (swapping in a giant apple for a boulder) trying to winnow a list of even 31 for a state that hundreds upon hundreds of writers call home.

I tried to take a cue from New York magazine's 40th anniversary canon: the book had to be "unmistakably New Yorky." They had the benefit of limiting their picks to the past 40 years, though, while we're looking at everything from Washington Square to Lush Life (both among my honorable mentions). Certain books immediately sprang to mind--Bright Lights, Big City, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Catcher in the Rye (that's the camera shy Salinger's Catcher in the Rye author photo, later removed from future printings, gracing our authorial state quarter today--what I wouldn't give for a Jerome David Salinger coin to carry around in my pocket!)--and within 10 minutes I had a longlist of over 100 books. And as for "unmistakably New Yorky," it was painful for me to leave Don DeLillo's panoramic Underworld, with its "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" prologue (and it's iconic cover, which took on new meaning after 9/11), on the bench (let alone Great Jones Street). I'll admit it's a pretty NYC-centric lineup, but I tried to represent upstate and beyond the boroughs as best I could. Here it is... one man's books of New York.

• Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney ("You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning." With that killer opening sentence, Jay McInerney kicked off a 200-page second-person-plural tour through a young Manhattanite's dark, downward spiral, and joined the bold-faced names among the Page Six crowd as part of the Literary Brat Pack. Over lunch in Seattle Jay offered that Brightness Falls is his favorite among his own books, but his debut remains my personal pick. Part of the of-the-'80s Vintage Contemporaries Original lineup, the book, features iconic New York cover art, where, like in DeLillo's Underworld, the World Trade Center towers stand forever in memory.)
• The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (One wrong turn in the South Bronx sends WASPy Master of the Universe Sherman McCoy on a dizzying journey through the landscape of New York. Wolfe spared no one in first novel, turning his satirical eye on tabolid reporters, DAs, Wall Street bankers, clergy, politicians, and an entire city. While the film adaptation tanked, Julie Salamon's  The Devil's Candy offers a thoroughly entertaining behind-the-scenes chronicle of a its colossal failure.)
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (Stewart O'Nan claimed Catcher for his Pennsylvania list, but you can't have the Books of New York without J.D. Salinger. Beyond Holden wandering through Central Park and wondering where the ducks go in the winter, Salinger's eccentric Glass family, as seen in Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction, were also New Yorkers, raised on the Upper East Side.)
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (In Ellison's classic--his debut, and his only novel published while he was alive--a young, nameless black man struggles with his identity in the streets of New York. In 2003, an Invisible Man sculpture was unveiled as part of the Ralph Ellison Memorial in Harlem.)
• Time and Again by Jack Finney (Gramercy Park and the gothic Dakota building play central roles in this time-travel mystery that shifts 90 years between two eras of life of New York.)
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (An American tragedy played out over a New York summer. "I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it--overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.")
• The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever ("The Chekhov of the Suburbs" turned Westchester County into Cheever Country.)
• The Fortress of Solitude by Johnathan Letham (The Bard of Boerum Hill's Motherless Brooklyn could also be here, but the City is a character itself in this time-capsule tour of Brooklyn from the '70s through the '90s.)
• The Alienist by Caleb Carr (A well-researched historical thriller about a serial killer loose in 1896 New York, with Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt part of the team on the case.)
• Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Stanford White, and Sigmund Freud are just a few of the historical figures woven into the historical tapestry of Doctorow's New York story.)
• Ironweed by William Kennedy (This Great Depression-set story is part of lifelong Albany resident William Kennedy's "Albany Cycle.")
• Side Effects by Woody Allen
• The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
• Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante (Full disclosure: though he probably couldn't pick me out of a lineup, Sante was my thesis adviser at grad school, but connections aside, his debut about New York's "bad old days" (1840-1920), remains one of my favorite New York books.)
• Here Is New York by E.B. White
• Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley (The city lost a great writer last year with the passing of the author and activist, who was made New York's first State Writer in 1989.)
• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
• Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
• The Andy Warhol Diaries by Andy Warhol
• Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Soul of a City by Jonathan Mahler (A kaleidoscopic account of a historic summer in the city: Reggie Jackson, mayoral politics, blackouts, punk rock, the Son of Sam, Studio 54.)
• The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
• Frank O'Hara: Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara
• The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scences at The New York Times by Gay Talese
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
• The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead (Whitehead offers a multi-layered, metaphysical tour of the city. "No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge... when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.")
• Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr.
• The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud (A tale of the "the smart, sophisticated, anxious young people who think of themselves as the cultural elite.")
• Whitman: Poetry and Prose by Walt Whitman
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
• Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin
• The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker edited by Robert Mankoff

And here's who I left on the bench:

• Underworld by Don DeLillo
• Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
• A Drinking Life by Pete Hammill
• The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
• Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
• Washington Irving: History, Tales, and Sketches by Washington Irving
• Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell
• New York: The Big City by Will Eisner
• JR by William Gaddis
• The Leatherstocking Tales (Vol. 1) by James Fenimore Cooper
• Washington Square by Henry James
• Lush Life by Richard Price
• Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation by Peter L. Bernstein
• Passing by Nella Larsen
• Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick
• Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer by Ben Katchor
• Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz

As former Mayor Ed Koch might say, "How am I doing?" Did I represent the Empire State well or do I deserve a big Bronx cheer for any glaring misses? --BTP

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey