Let’s re-emphasize what’s actually going on here. The major players in an industry which faces massive headwinds, book publishing, are deliberately overpricing their most promising and fastest-growing revenue stream, specifically to dampen e-demand and reduce “cannibalization” of “higher-margin” hardcover and trade paperback editions. Mr. Trachtenberg points out that under the “retail model,” by which Amazon was charging $9.99 for new e-bestsellers, it was the retailer who took the loss; the author and publisher still received roughly half of the full hardcover price. But under the current “agency model,” the publisher retains 70% of an e-book price which it alone can set, and the retailer gets the rest. No more “loss leaders,” and essentially no more $9.99 bestsellers.

But look closer at the Follett. Dutton’s suggested retail price for this 985-page tome in hardcover is $36. Under the “retail model,” it collected $18 per e-copy, just as it did for a hardcover, and Amazon could give it away if they liked. Of course, that’s no way to run a business: “How do we do it? Volume!” What Amazon was trying to do was to jump-start a nonexistent e-book market and worry about coaxing it into profitability later; they’ve always been forward-thinking in that way. But under the “agency model,” Dutton gets 70% of $18.99, the highest price I’ve encountered for a commercial trade e-book, which is $13.30 per e-copy, and all retailers receive the same $5.70 (I rounded both numbers to the next penny). $13.30 — and remember, this is the absolute Beluga of e-pricing — is $4.70 less than $18. But who’s counting?

My point exactly.

Now let’s consider Apple’s motives. It’s a wonderful company, but it’s no less ruthless just because its antagonizer-in-chief has passed away. When Apple was the “first mover” in digital music, it used the leverage of its huge installed iPod base to oppose the big record labels by dampening the retail price from $15-$16 for a whole CD to 99 cents for an individual song (boy, that price rings a bell. And it’s increased since then, too). But in e-books, Apple found itself, uncharacteristically, in Amazon’s wake (Steve Jobs had infamously sniffed at the Kindle’s launch: “People don’t read any more”). So now what it had to do was eliminate Amazon’s price advantage – and, amazingly, in a reversal of its effect on the music business, it succeeded in propping up the retail price of e-books! Justice is now looking into whether preventing discounting constitutes illegal collusion among the major publishers (as are European authorities), and I don’t know much about the law so can’t speculate, but it does sound fishy, and it protects retailers (guaranteed profit) at the expense of consumers (higher prices).

I have some friends in the book biz who’ve read my previous musings and have some pretty good arguments that nobody seems to be considering. For example, it’s an age-old fact that for big bestselling authors like Mr. Follett, or Stephen King or John Grisham or Danielle Steel or Nora Roberts, publishers pay way too much up front as an “advance (against earned royalties),” otherwise known as a “guarantee.” First, it’s necessary because everybody else is waving huge paychecks around, and you have to be there to compete. Second, a major author can be a tentpole for the rest of your list: if you, Ms. Retailer, want the new Grisham, you’ll have to hear about all the other great stuff we have. Third, there’s the intangible prestige factor, as authors and agents want to be with the house that publishes XXX. But these millions represent a nonrefundable sum which has to “earn out” before a book realizes its true potential for perennial profit down the road. (I’ve heard that Mr. King has a deal which plays down the guarantee in favor of a larger participation on the back end, like major movie stars sometimes do.) A surprise hit like THE HELP is very profitable immediately, but big bestsellers from well-known authors always start out deep in the red, and I’d love to know what Kathryn Stockett’s agent has in mind for her next contract.

That means you have to scramble for every penny you can find during the hot new-release period with the ads and the DAILY SHOW spots, very much like movie studios do. My question is: why aren’t the big publishers doing so?

Mr. Trachtenberg quotes a publisher as saying people are realizing the advantages of e-books and are willing to pay a premium for them. I’ve heard that too from some consumers. But $18.99? (P.S.: Book prices never go anywhere but up.) He shares more ominous quotes from others. A reader says it’s hard to justify a $10-$15 e-book when you can pick up a used print copy for $2 or $3 on Amazon. If that was the Ken Follett, the author and publisher made no money on the used-copy resale, when they could have received $18 for a “retail-priced” e-book. Also, the ability to self-publish and shop online is hitting the major publishers from the low end. As an industry consultant says, some e-buyers may opt for “five-star-reviewed” self-published mysteries or romances which are going for $2.99 or $3.99. Plus, if it’s digital it’s stealable, and remember that millions of otherwise law-abiding kids believed downloading from Napster was justifiable because CD prices were too high.

I think it’s fair to say that most e-reading devices have been purchased since “agency pricing” went into effect about two years ago, so possibly it’s only the early adopters like me who recoil against $12.99 and $14.99 books, or e-editions which cost more than paperbacks. Most new e-reader owners may think that’s the going rate you pay for not having to lug the physical book around, being able to read it on damn near every mobile device there is, etc. Yet as a “veteran,” I’d still be willing to wait, even a whole year, so the publishers have time to sell every hardcover they possibly can, if they’d only then give me a fairly-priced e-edition so I could fairly pay the author and publisher instead of ignoring them.

As it is, I have a list of backlist books that I’ll never buy in print editions; I just want to read them once. Every month or so I check on them, and every so often a publisher will experiment with a temporary lower price (this is why the publishers will probably survive any accusation of price-fixing; each one is free to charge whatever it likes). Either I will get the price I want, or the publisher will lose a sale which I would guess is sorely needed. It’s as simple as that.

You might have trouble believing this, but by the early Nineties, STAR WARS had fallen off the top-of-mind cultural map. People still loved the movies, but thanks to home video, they’d seen them as many times as they wanted, often to the point of gluttony. As a production company, Lucasfilm had been concentrating on the third Indiana Jones feature, which was released in 1989, and on a television series based on a younger version of the character. Industrial Light + Magic and Skywalker Sound, its visual and audio effects divisions, were very busy, but mostly with commissioned work from outside. Lucas Licensing, the arm which had made George Lucas’s fortune when he presciently retained merchandising rights to STAR WARS and its characters, was also doing much of its work for others; I seem to remember that a sports league, maybe even the NFL, was a client at the time. All these LFL people were savvy and shrewd professionals, but without new product to drive demand, the STAR WARS brand lay fallow.

In publishing, the STAR TREK brand had stayed alive for decades for Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books – new novels were still being written about the characters in the original Sixties television iteration! – but that fire was periodically stoked by new tv series and feature films, which would in turn inspire new groups of novels in a virtuous circle. In addition, STAR TREK had the luxury of being an episodic story: the characters would begin in stasis, something would happen to threaten the calm, they’d solve the problem and get back to normal. In other words, you can watch episodes of the original series in any order you like (except for the pilot, which uniquely is a two-parter), and they’ll still make sense. With the exception of some two- or three-show “arcs,” the latter STAR TREK series also followed this template, making it far easier to publish episodic novels, since the only requirement was to fix anything you broke by the end of the book.

STAR WARS, in contrast, has never been a group of disparate episodes, but rather one long story. There is a preferred order in which to experience the original movie trilogy – indeed, on initial viewing it’s even necessary. Nowadays there are six movies, and if you were brand new to the concept, you’d need to watch them all in order. So if you want to add to this saga, it’s much, much harder now. But there was only the trilogy when Bantam suggested to Lucasfilm, “just let us play with some time after the third film.” (At this point, George was still maintaining that his planned epic was a nine-film saga.) It was Lou Aronica who wore them down. Del Rey Books, the original STAR WARS novelizers (the first one came out before the film!), had rights to anything pertaining to the completed films, but that wasn’t what Lou was proposing. He said, “Let’s continue the story with your characters, only in book form.” Also, please remember, Lucas Licensing wasn’t doing much STAR WARS business at the time. Finally, LFL’s Lucy Autrey Wilson (see below) took a flyer on Lou’s suggestion — and turned on a revenue stream that is still flowing today.

In one sense, it was a courageous decision on Lucasfilm’s part. What if Lou’s project bombed? That would tarnish the brand, which was still one of the best-loved trademarks in the world, and a licensee losing money on STAR WARS would have a chilling effect on other potential partners in the future.

But that’s not what happened.

When HEIR TO THE EMPIRE landed in bookstores, it was an instant sensation. It went straight to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there. We heard that at a couple of megastores, customers were actually helping the staff uncrate cartons to get at their copies. It turned out that after eight years, there was a huge pent-up demand for new STAR WARS stories, untapped by anyone else. We had put a bargain price on the first printing to help get the book kicked off (I have a copy with the original low-price-promoting “belly band” still affixed: wonder if it qualifies for Sotheby’s yet?); at each reprint we nudged the retail price up a little bit, until it cost as much as a regular hardcover. The torrent of customers remained at full strength. As with the smash success of New Line Cinema’s THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING years later, the initial hardcover publication of HEIR TO THE EMPIRE alone earned back Bantam’s entire guarantee to Lucasfilm for the whole literary trilogy and thus started paying royalties: all else – a paperback reprint, an audio version, and two more new books – was gravy, after normal overhead. (Editing, proofing, buying paper, printing, binding, shipping, distributing, etc. You incur such costs with every single book, even the Holy Bible. Well, you might retain the original edit there.)

In other words, STAR WARS was white-hot once again. Or maybe it had never cooled off at all; it was just that nobody was obliging with new stories. And, of course, Timothy Zahn hit a homer, crafting a terrific cosmic-scale epic that had the look and feel of STAR WARS. There is a direct causal link between the publication of this novel and LFL’s three prequel movies.

The entrance to Skywalker Ranch. Yes, security is watching you.

Soon Galoob, Hasbro, Dark Horse Comics, and other licensees got on – or, for some, back on – the STAR WARS train, and Bantam eagerly contracted for more books. From the beginning, Lou and Betsy Mitchell, who edited the Zahn trilogy, had a clear idea of how the program might differ from Pocket’s STAR TREK franchise. First, they would put a lid on frequency of publication, in order to make each release an important event (and give each book a better chance of making the New York Times bestseller list; every single Bantam STAR WARS novel did exactly that). Hardcovers would henceforth be self-contained stories, while paperback original tales would appear in the form of trilogies, to be completed within a year. For authors, they insisted on finding established sf pros who happened to like STAR WARS; the pro part came first. (Tim Zahn was a Hugo winner, for example.)

By the time Betsy left Bantam and I inherited her list (see Part III), she and Lou had mapped out the first wave of the new STAR WARS cycle. I came aboard for the second book of our first paperback-original trilogy, DARK APPRENTICE by Kevin J. Anderson, and I worked on the STAR WARS property (alongside the other sf projects detailed in Part III) for about five years thereafter. My colleague Janna Silverstein was already working on forthcoming hardcovers by Dave Wolverton, Kathy Tyers and Vonda McIntyre, and I had the rest. (When Janna’s first SW entry, Dave’s THE COURTSHIP OF PRINCESS LEIA, hit #1 ahead of a new release by Danielle Steel, who did and does sell books by the palletload for Bantam’s sister company Dell, Ms. Steel — obviously mistaking it for a traditional romance — icily asked her publicist, “Who is this Princess Lee-ah?”) Not long afterward, Janna herself left for an opportunity out west, and I pretty much became the STAR WARS guy, spending about a third of my time on Lucasfilm properties. (I also edited Indiana Jones novels, and a trilogy by George and Chris Claremont based on WILLOW.)

The Main House, where George Lucas's office is located.

Working in somebody else’s universe is different from whole-cloth worldbuilding, and some authors don’t care for it: I was turned down more than once by people I’m sure would have done a great job. You have to follow guidelines set down by the copyright holder – which, to reemphasize, isn’t you – who has final and ineluctable approval over whatever you do. There’s a great deal of inventiveness possible in shared-world storytelling, but it’s all at the pleasure of the licensor. No means no, and if that loss of freedom bugs you (note that we only invited established authors who were accustomed to owning their copyrights), this part of the business isn’t for you. For example, we wanted to do a novel telling the backstory of Yoda. If you’re a STAR WARS fan, wouldn’t you want to read that? Me too. But George Lucas declined, saying he wanted Yoda’s origins to remain mysterious, and he was true to his word: in the three prequel movies we don’t find out much more than we’d already inferred. End of story. Another disadvantage is that royalties on “work-for-hire” projects are either shared with the licensor, as was the case with STAR WARS (at least while I was there), or not paid at all (a flat fee is the only remuneration), so you earn less on each copy sold. Most of the royalty on STAR WARS books went to Lucasfilm, but the volume was so great that STAR WARS authors still received handsome checks, and just as important, their work was almost certainly read by more people than ever before. They got a smaller piece of a mammoth pie. If you were already a major bestseller, you could probably make more money with your own stuff, but only a tiny few authors are able to use that kind of math. And then there’s the intangible: some authors just love STAR WARS. Look who agreed to novelize THE PHANTOM MENACE: the hugely bestselling Terry Brooks! I’m not saying the dough didn’t flow, or that Terry didn’t possibly bring some of his own readers to the event, but clearly there was a desire on his part to work in George’s galaxy. (By now the property was back where it started, at Del Rey – a storied imprint launched by Terry’s first novel, THE SWORD OF SHANNARA; the publisher surely used this opportunity to promote him further – and I have no idea how his agreement was forged. I’m only observing from the outside.)

When you play in somebody else’s sandbox, you begin with a core group of characters already fixed in the minds of the readers, so the only players you have to fully flesh out are the ones you’ve invented. To some authors, that’s a great standing start; it’s actually possible to build a nice career on work for hire. To others, it’s delimiting and dilutes their own creativity. What we were looking for were writers who could successfully straddle those two points of view, and bring all their creative skills to a new kind of playdate. End of sandbox metaphor. (Once an editor, always an editor.)

All this may sound simple to you: just watch a couple of movies and start your engines. Trust me: if you think it’s easy, that’s only because you haven’t tried it. This stuff can’t be tossed off. You start with research, as with most any other project, and an expanding universe like STAR WARS reminds me of the apocryphal schoolkid’s complaint: “History’s lots harder now, Grampa! There wasn’t so much of it back when you were in school!” With STAR WARS, this is literally true: the story gets longer and more complex with each new fictional addition. Lucasfilm was able to send “Care Packages” to new writers, but they comprised an ever-tougher batch of information as time went on, and you had to be a quick study, because the assumption had to be that your audience had read everything that had gone before. Otherwise, you would hear from the fans. On the first STAR WARS book to appear after Betsy left, Kevin Anderson’s JEDI SEARCH, our cover artist had mis-drawn a battle ribbon on the uniform of a military woman. It didn’t take a week for the first letter to arrive correcting us. (Lots of heraldry had already been invented by West End Games’s designers for their roleplaying edition of STAR WARS.) Doggone it, how could Bantam be so stupid?

If your first reaction is to laugh or sneer at such fan nerdosity, your heart’s in the wrong place. We considered ourselves stewards of STAR WARS’s fine reputation. That’s a requirement for any effective work for hire, or in fact any genre which has ardent devotees, including mystery and romance. Fans can tell when they’re being patronized, and they hate it. So rather than making fun or blowing it off, that instant we added West End’s designs to our Care Packages for artists, to try and make sure it never happened again. The attention to detail was so intense that when we hired Mike Stackpole to do a series of novels based on LFL’s X-wing “flight simulator” video game, he spent enough time with the software so that his first novel depicted the actual first few training missions in the game itself. Most readers couldn’t know that, only gamers, and only if they were able to lift out of the story long enough to notice. But we knew.

At ILM, Han Solo in carbonite, where we left him in SHADOWS OF THE EMPIRE.

This is not to say we didn’t have a good time or joke around. Our publisher could do a brilliant Wookiee growl. In his former position as publisher of Pocket Books, he’d worked on STAR TREK long enough to pick up a few Klingon phrases, including one he translated as, “license to print money.” The Lucasfilm folks had perfectly normal senses of humor too, but we never allowed that to bleed into the work itself unless it served the story. Humor is part of the mix that makes STAR WARS so enjoyable, and our writers cracked some good ones, as had the original screenwriters. (For a property like MEN IN BLACK, humor is so important that it’s part of the sell.) But bringing new work into a franchised universe is, in one way, like performing a farce: from THE PRODUCERS to ANIMAL HOUSE to NOISES OFF, the distinctive elements only work if every character takes the situation absolutely seriously.

There were times when it felt like I’d crammed so much arcana about, say, Boba Fett, into my brain that it filled up, leaving no room for everyday stuff like my own phone number. But you simply cannot know it all, not if you want to occasionally leave your reading room and interact with other people. Fortunately, we had tremendous colleagues at Lucasfilm. Howard Roffman, a talented attorney and marketing wizard who came on board during THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, was now the head of Lucas Licensing, and Lucy Autrey Wilson, who retired early this year, was its director of publishing, our key contact with LFL and a tough negotiator at contract time. Lucy was one of Lucasfilm’s first employees and can remember typing up pages of the STAR WARS – guess we’d better get used to calling it “Episode IV” – screenplay on an IBM Selectric while most of the rest of LFL was in Tunisia shooting; her name rolls by in the end credits. Working directly on our books was the amazing Sue Rostoni – also just retired this summer – and her cohort Allan Kausch. I watched Sue become a very, very good editor before my eyes; at first she would nitpick at facts she knew were wrong, and then as she gathered more confidence, was able to cut right to plot holes and uncharacteristic behavior even at the outline stage, saving everybody hours and hours in the bargain. So each of my STAR WARS books was looked at very carefully by two editors; Sue could overrule me on a point of “fact,” but you could count our disagreements that deserved a conversation on the fingers of one hand. Plus she edited comics, too, and I have no idea how you do that. I don’t remember Sue ever missing a deadline by so much as a day; that’s one of the hallmarks of a real pro. Allan was the historian of the STAR WARS universe. He had a huge horizontal timeline stretched along the wall behind his desk, and kept notebook after notebook of cross-referenced characters and events from the books, movies, comics, games, animated spinoffs, you name it. Allan was dear to my heart because he was a Dickhead. I mean, of course, a devotee of Philip K. Dick, one of the most influential science fiction writers ever. Allan helped unearth some long-lost work and used love and persistence to get it published. (He has most recently edited a collection of Michael Moorcock’s nonfiction that will go on sale next spring.)

What was George Lucas’s personal involvement in all this? If you guessed zip, you’d be wrong. Obviously he didn’t use his valuable time reading manuscripts, but he did lay down fictional parameters. At first, we set our stories five years after the end of RETURN OF THE – oops, Episode VI. Then we began asking permission to “fill in mortar” at earlier places in the saga. We were not to disturb the filmed story, which came to be known as “canon,” and we never did: our books supplemented or added to it, but to our knowledge we never printed anything that challenged any fact or motivation in the movies. Quite the contrary, in fact. For example, Kevin Anderson emphasized the point that in Episode IV, Han Solo had every right to brag about his ship making the Kessel Run in “less than twelve parsecs” (the parsec is a unit of distance, not time, but it sounded to non-scientists like the latter): the Millennium Falcon was so agile that it could move closer to heavenly bodies and black holes for a more direct line, thus reducing the distance traveled (and finishing faster, too). So there, fanboys! No, from the beginning we’d give the Lucasfilm people our ideas, then they’d prepare a one- or two-page checklist of the most important, story-affecting points, allowing George to answer YES or NO. “Can Han and Leia get married?” YES. “Can they have kids?” YES. “Can Han join the
Empire?” NO. (Just kidding about that last one.) We even contributed to the canon. In his first book, Tim Zahn gave a name to George’s planet-sized city that was Headquarters of the Empire (West End Games had it listed as the generic “Imperial Planet”). Tim called the place Coruscant (it means shiny or glittering), and when it came time to depict the location in the Special Edition of Episode VI in 1999, George simply retained Tim’s proper name, and we were thrilled. We had all been pronouncing it core-us-KANT with the hard C; when our audio people needed to confirm the word before recording HEIR TO THE EMPIRE, George responded, core-us-SANT with a silent C, so buddy, that’s how you utter the word to this day, including the actors from Episode I on.

George's parking space at the Main House. He's not here today -- but he might be at the Presidio, where ILM and Lucas Licensing have both moved.

These books sold. They sold, and they sold, and they sold some more. It didn’t take long before the Locus bestseller list was casually topped by Bantam’s STAR WARS books, all the time. They ran rings around sf books that didn’t have the benefit of a media tie-in, with Pocket’s STAR TREK books in a rejuvenated second place. Charlie Brown, Locus’s publisher, finally decided that to indicate which “serious” sf books were selling would require a separate bestseller list, and now you have disparate Locus lists for media, gaming, etc. Our STAR WARS publishing program caused that to happen. I once asked Charlie how you could tell which books were “science fiction” and which were “other.” “Check the copyright,” he said, in the most concise definition I’ve yet heard.

We had great fun with a nifty idea. One day, Lucas Licensing mused, “We have these partners. Let’s put them all together and see what happens.” We all decided to tell the same story, “SHADOWS OF THE EMPIRE,” set between Episodes V and VI, so Han Solo is frozen in carbonite, but we get to use Darth Vader. We sent Steve Perry (I already loved his work; see this “interview” with “the Emperor”) out to Skywalker Ranch to powwow with them. We pubbed Steve’s novel, Hasbro did action figures, Dark Horse did comics, West End did games, etc., etc. It was a movie tie-in with everything except the movie. This was so close to what STAR WARS fans wanted in their heart of hearts that they said, in their thousands, give us more movies! And in the fullness of time, that’s exactly what happened. So much for the view that books don’t matter.

But STAR WARS matters too. I’ll never forget taking a bunch of quietly-sneering-but-still-starstruck sf authors to Skywalker Ranch for dinner during the 1993 Worldcon in San Francisco. Bantam rented a bus or two, and we all made the 45-minute afternoon ascent over the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County, off the highway at the Lucas Valley Road exit (pure coincidence, as it turns out), and up Zorklike twisty turns into the Lucasfilm property. David Brin (one of my cherished but still inherited authors – see Part III) had learnt to play the “Darth Vader Theme” on his harmonica, and he serenaded us as we pulled up. We enjoyed a tech demo reel and then a wonderful catered dinner in an unutterably beautiful solarium setting. Our LFL hosts were jazzed to meet such notables as Marion Zimmer Bradley, at least at the tables I visited as one of the Bantam co-hosts. Amazingly, the adulation tended to flow back toward the writers. This was a phenomenon most of them had never expected of the evening, but trust me, it was genuine. I’m sure that’s part of the reason why you continue to see big, big, Hugo-winning names take up STAR WARS stories, because the respect really does run both ways.

STAR WARS, and books based on it, remains a magnificent, uplifting milieu that looks to become a permanent cultural icon. I’m proud that books re-lit the torch, and glad that I got to help carry it part of the way.

NEXT: I work in pop culture, and on some cool fiction.

Earlier Installments:
Part I   Part II   Part III

Now I’ve seen the end result, which I guess I must reveal is officially called POM WONDERFUL PRESENTS: THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD, and while it has its moments, it feels artless and repetitious: gosh, see how ubiquitous product placement has become? We understand all this within five minutes as Spurlock tries to persuade advertisers that they’ll become his partners (an uphill battle, considering that he made his reputation by trashing McDonalds for an entire film). Problem is that he keeps on saying, gosh, see how ubiquitous…

Probably because of SUPER SIZE ME, none of the usual suspects will go anywhere near Spurlock, no Coke or Mickey D’s. (Full disclosure: my wife was working for a neuromarketing firm which was invited to participate, but declined — to my way of thinking, wisely. She’s now at a different company, the move non-Spurlock-related.) So, using the advice of some genuine heavy hitters in advertising and product placement, he turns his attention to second-tier brands, and damn if he doesn’t convince about 15 of them to get on board. As they say in the ad biz, Spurlock gives great meeting, and his thoughts about promoting his partners in the film are very inventive; he would make one hell of an adman himself. We also see some genuine spots, from storyboard to actual production, that he produces for his most generous partners. Pom Wonderful, the pomegranate juice marketer, ponies up $1 million for naming rights, thus the title, but that money is tied to some very strict effectiveness requirements. They are joined by Ban deodorant, the convenience store chain Sheetz, Jet Blue, Hyatt hotels, and a host of others — including Mane ‘n’ Tail shampoo, actually used for both horses and human beings, which Spurlock discovers in a drug store and finds just so funny that the stuff makes it into the film without payment.

Spurlock himself can convey irony and likability at the same time, so while an interviewee talks about incongrous placement in a scene, he says, “Yeah, who would do a thing like that?” and lifts up a Pom Wonderful for a nice Cokelike swig. Quentin Tarantino complains that he was refused several times by Denny’s, which is where he wanted to open both RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION (to him, that’s where the characters are), but after reading his scripts, the chain said no dice. Q and Spurlock are sitting outside at a large round white table. There’s nothing on the table except a single stick of Ban.

Pounding the same thought gets tiresome, though you do have to marvel at what Spurlock is actually achieving — that’s really him welcoming real Jet Blue passengers on a pre-flight video — and the spots he creates actually make the brands look hip enough to know what they’re doing by participating in this stunt. The movie slags as Spurlock goes to an eerily blank Sao Paulo, where the city has banned all outdoor advertising, and Florida’s Broward County school system, where he becomes a customer. But then you get chats with Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, who is quite amusing as he accepts some obvious swag: a pair of shoes from Spurlock’s partner Merrell.

The self-reference keeps you watching, Spurlock is very clever, but in essence he is shooting fish in a barrel. Once he attunes you to the product placement all around you, it’s easy to spot, and that only takes a few minutes. The only wonderment left is his cheerful determination to get this damn movie underwritten by anybody besides himself.

Out walked Martin Scorsese to introduce his fall picture, HUGO.

Mr. Scorsese explained that our screening was indeed of something unfinished. The sound mix and score by Howard Shore were both temp tracks: Mr. Shore is recording the full orchestration in London right now. Some green screens were visible. The first long swooping, panning shot isn’t done yet; we saw a pre-viz. The press was warned: no reviews, this is just for your enjoyment. But I know exactly why NYFF and Scorsese went to all this trouble: (1) it delivers the goods, and (2) there could be no more appropriate venue for this movie than a film festival. So, not a review, but a report; you can judge for yourselves around Thanksgiving. (My first amazement was how little time before release — a date that may have been staked out long ago — they have to complete all this stuff on such an effects-heavy picture.)

It’s based on an illustrated novel for young readers by Brian Selznick (a relative of the moviemaking Selznick family) which I haven’t yet read, and I’m going to assume you haven’t either, so I’ll be careful not to spoil. A boy lives in the walls and the clock tower of a Paris train station in the early Thirties. His late dad, a clockmaker, taught him lots of secrets and the kid is a natural, but he makes do by stealing. A series of incidents turns the story into a love letter to the early days of movies.

It’s the best example of live-action 3-D I’ve ever seen, and that includes AVATAR: at last, even softly lit scenes are bright enough to discern. Certain setups are just breathtaking in the extra dimension: the light from a movie projector bursting toward us, a closeup on a staring Doberman (it’s just funny!), a security guard intimidating a boy by leaning closer, closer… The film is stuffed with British character actors, none of whom attempts a French accent: Jude Law, Richard Griffiths, Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lee, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ray Winstone, on and on.

This one is for the whole family and will probably get a PG rating, maybe even an inappropriate -13 if the MPAA drops the ball (there are a couple of intense scenes, but any thoughtful kid will love this, trust me). Mr. Scorsese is justifiably proud, and I’m so glad I got to see it with enough film fans to fill up Avery Fisher Hall. I’m gonna suggest it when a niece and nephew visit us around opening day.

11/1/11: Now I’ve read — and seen; the many illustrations work like a movie storyboard — the source novel, and what a wonderful job all concerned did to bring it to the screen, every fillip and tear with very few exceptions. (That light from the projector bursting toward us? It’s in the book.) Here’s one film to which the author can point proudly and say, “Yep, that’s my book up there, all right.”

11/11/11: It got the PG.

1/8/12: I saw the completed film, again in 3-D, at AMPAS’s New York screening room, to which they let a few FSLC folks in. Now the full bravura opening shot, realized at ILM at the last minute, was here, along with the full score, end credits, etc. Afterward, Mr. Scorsese and Sir Ben Kingsley did a beautiful q&a — both are extremely well-spoken gentlemen. I felt the event was an Oscar-voter attempt at keeping this picture top-of-mind, especially since Weekly Variety’s list of top 16 Best Pic contenders shamefully did not include HUGO! The film itself was just as spectacular on second viewing, and my wife, who missed the NYFF “work-in-progress” screening noted in the main post, was happily flabbergasted. Too bad for those AMPAS voters who have to depend on “screeners”: I’ve seen my share of them, and this picture will lose much of its well-designed ability to overpower. Still, the cast and crew have every right to say to themselves, job well done.

Look at a movie that a lot of people love, and you will find something
profound, no matter how silly the film may seem.

That sentence, written by America’s most popular film critic and proprietor of the best movie website in existence*, so artfully sums up a Master’s thesis upon which I slaved for a year and a half that my first reaction was jealousy. Then appreciation. Finally something like awe. It also encapsulates the whole of Roger Ebert’s lovely memoir, LIFE ITSELF, in which little incidences, even silly at times, combine to form a warm, soothing sensibility that spreads from the ephemeral flicker of a magic lantern into…life itself.

Gene Siskel (l.) and Roger Ebert in the mid-Nineties.

Did you notice that Ebert used the term “movie”? If not, it’s probably because you didn’t share his generation’s twin discoveries: (a) the cinema grew up in the rest of the world long before it did in America, and (b) our tossed-off studio melodramas nevertheless served as worldwide cultural icons, a function they still fulfill. We received, and we gave. The typical academician tends to refer to this kinetic, dynamic art form as “film.” But to Ebert, Pauline Kael, and other populist critics (perfectly conversant on world cinema, thank you very much), they were nothing more aesthetically threatening than “the movies.” That casual but respectful aspect informs all of Ebert’s multivoluminous criticism – and his richly enjoyed life.

My thesis was on “fantasy films” (in Ebert’s non-academic parlance, “monster movies”) from the late Forties to the early Sixties. I labored to show how they tracked the public’s increasing unease over the Red menace and the atomic bomb; they were popular because they reflected something in the audience, even though they were produced for no more noble reason than to make a buck. To Ebert: well, duh! He’s always been easy to like in his affable persona as an intelligent Everyman who insists on cutting to the chase, as it were. But here he reveals a remarkable layer of serious literary power – this is easily the best thing he’s ever written – which may have come his way due to what many, but not the author, might judge to be a personal tragedy.

In 2006, Ebert was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in a salivary gland, the disease reappearing after a span of almost twenty years. (This after successfully removing a thyroid tumor.) He needed an operation, but was anxious to get back on the air; he had learned (“all by myself, with nobody to blame”) of some pioneering work being done in neutron radiation, and — against his doctors’ advice – unwisely decided to try ”a shortcut that would avoid plastic surgery and a healing period.” Surgery after surgery followed, and Ebert finally lost the ability to eat, drink and speak. But not the ability to see and hear (the senses he needs to absorb a movie), and not his epistolary gift (the charming, personal way he tells us about it). Since it was revealed in a full-page Esquire magazine photo, Ebert’s deformed but still expressive face (“you don’t like it, that’s your problem”) has become second nature to his many admirers, and though he now requires an announcer to read his reviews on tv, he appears every week, usually in full smiling regalia to give the famous “thumbs-up” sign, but only when it’s deserved. There is no corresponding summative look at the critic for “thumbs down.” Still, his recuperation bravely managed by his superstrong, cosmically devoted wife Chaz, against all odds Roger Ebert has actually struggled back onto the air.

Roger Ebert in early 2011.

If you lose certain senses, do the ones you still have become heightened? There’s reason to think so. With Ebert’s communicative powers limited to the use of fingers on a keyboard, he began to write harder than ever: wouldn’t you? He started a blog, which quickly turned personal, and he writes that much of this book sprang forth from that experience. There are 55 rather short chapters, and one can see him fall into the rhythm of the blog post, a form of “first-person confession,” as he puts it, that he had scorned before his surgery.

“I was born inside the movie of my life,” he writes, and the first remarkable thing about this book is the arresting detail Ebert can remember from early on. He can certainly call up more about his early life than I can about mine, though there are some coincidences. As young lads, we both had dogs named Blackie. Our first cars were both 1954 Fords, though Ebert’s was closer to the showroom (he’s seven years older than I am). We were each formed by the newspaper life. But I doubt I could conjure my own earlier days with such minute accuracy.

Of course, Ebert’s journey eventually leads to the movies, and there’s plenty of that here. I’ve always found him to be among the most joyful of our film critics. He wants to like every movie he sees, and if anything he’s been too generous over the years, in my opinion. Still, I’d rather read someone who occasionally errs in that direction than undergo the genuine nastiness of, say, John Simon (whom Ebert himself views with “repugnance”) or Rex Reed – and, let’s face it, Ebert has written enough pans to fill two books called I HATED, HATED, HATED THIS MOVIE and YOUR MOVIE SUCKS.

Ebert is so easy to read because he follows the advice given him by Pauline Kael: “I go into the movie, I watch it, and I ask myself what happened to me.” He doesn’t show off his knowledge of film history or technique – though he is an expert on both subjects – like a coffeehouse boor who’s just discovered the French New Wave. He simply writes about what happened to him, even in his highly commendable biweekly series of essays on classic films he calls “The Great Movies,” which have so far been collected in three books.

Individual pictures have given Ebert great pleasure, but this book shows that the real benefit of the movie beat is the people you get to meet. Here are wonderful moments with Woody Allen, Werner Herzog, Lee Marvin, Martin Scorsese (whom Ebert pegged as a great one early on), John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and two people especially close to the author: Russ Meyer and Gene Siskel, whose relationship to Ebert was complicated and fascinating. Covering the movies also gives you a reason to travel, and Ebert knows London as well as a native; his early book THE PERFECT LONDON WALK is still guiding amblers today. Cannes, Venice, Paris, Rome – Ebert can close his eyes and imagine street corners and specific shops and hotels as he fantasizes “Being By Myself in a City Where No One Knows Who I Am and No One Knows Where to Find Me.”

Then there is the indefatigable Chaz, his wife of two decades, who literally saved Ebert’s life. He writes that he was unfit for marriage as a young man, partially due to Chicago-barroom-style alcoholism, which threatened to derail his promising career (“I believe I came closer than many people realized,” he writes) before he quit drinking in 1979. Without her, he insists his illness would have withered him away.

A great gourmand (and, like all good Midwesterners, slavishly devoted to Steak ‘n’ Shake, the heartland burger chain; it even gets its own chapter), Ebert insists that it’s not so much the taste of food, but the social aspect of dining that he misses: “Unless I’m alone, it doesn’t involve dinner if it doesn’t involve talking.” That yearning for communication is what pushed him into the world of blogging, and eventually led to this beautiful book, which I can’t recommend highly enough. “Maybe that’s why writing has become so important to me,” he explains. “You don’t realize it, but we’re at dinner right now.”

*This one is the second best.

As best we can tell, because books aren’t identical, like boxes of Tide. Each one is different in so many ways: trim size, page count, paper stock, press run, etc. But “a back-of-the-envelope calculation,” as Mr. Trachtenberg puts it, shows that on a generalized Everybook, the publisher retains more money on the e-edition than on the print version. He also notes that electronic books don’t require inventory or shipping expense, or reserves for returns. Yet prices of new releases in digital format have been rising since the start of the year, and by now he’s seeing negative reviews of e-books on Amazon that have nothing to do with the content. Just the price.

There was a time when Amazon could set a $9.99 price for new e-releases, because the company was trying to establish its Kindle as the e-book standard. To do that, however, Amazon had to be prepared to lose money on every sale. Retailers generally pay half of the cover price using the “wholesale model,” so on a $30 book Amazon would remit $15 to the publisher. By selling for $9.99, it’s losing $5.01 on each copy sold. Retailers call an item priced below cost a “loss leader”: its purpose is to increase traffic in general. (Loss-leading can certainly go too far: a couple of years ago there was an absurd pre-Christmas price war in physical bookselling that briefly reduced Stephen King’s $35 doorstop UNDER THE DOME to $9.00. Remember the old joke: “How do we do it? Volume!”)

You might think this would be just fine with the publishers; who cares if Amazon is selling for less than it’s getting? But having watched Steve Jobs undercut record labels and set $.99 as the de facto standard for a single downloaded song (he’s raised that price since then, but the point is that the “album-model” labels were accustomed to selling 10 songs at a time, whether you wanted them all or not), publishers were worried that the price of an e-read was being devalued just as it was cutting into hardcover sales, and their previously ineluctable power to begin the calculations with a suggested retail price was being threatened. They actually ran into Jobs’s embrace when the iPad appeared and Apple offered to sell e-books using an “agency model,” under which the publisher sets the price and the retailer, acting as sales agent with no discounting ability, coughs up 70%. The Apple bookstore itself hasn’t made much noise. But because all the big publishers have now adopted its agency model, Apple has, for all practical purposes, ended the age of the $9.99 e-bestseller price point. Amazon still discounts physical books – they continue to be sold via the wholesale model – thus driving the retail price downward. But it has no control over the price of the corresponding e-book, and as that price point rises to compensate for fewer physical books being shipped (it’s strictly Return To Sender at Borders these days, dude), the disconnect is becoming increasingly evident. For example, Amazon will sell you a copy of Dick Cheney’s new $35 tome for $19.20, but the e-version will cost you $16.99.* Does that make sense to anyone besides the publisher? Mr. Trachtenberg reports that it is beginning not to.

Some caveats. It takes dough to bring out a major release. Vice President Cheney did not write his book for nothing (sit down there, you in the back!). It also had to be edited, set in type, proofread, “sold in” to whatever booksellers remain, promoted so we’ll all know about it, and in the case of physical books, printed, bound, shlepped back and forth, and so on. Bringing out the first copy is a tremendous expense, and I don’t begrudge the publisher for clawing every possible dime out of an initial release. Also, some authors are using e-distribution to self-publish at very low price points, a couple bucks a shot, because they don’t have that tremendous overhead. A few talented, prolific writers are making some money that way, but in 99 out of 100 cases, they are self-published for another very good reason. You still need big publishers because they hire sharp-eyed editors, so you won’t have to read those other 99 books.

But Mr. Trachtenberg’s piece is only concerned with new releases, what the industry calls the “frontlist.” Our math will really start to look funny a little later, when the book has had its hardcover run and goes into paperback — increasingly, “trade” paperbacks at about half the retail price of the hardcover; “mass market” books, or the identically-sized ones on cheaper paper that spin around on racks, are continuing to lose ground as a publishing format. To get the paperback version, mind, again we have to print, bind, shlep, etc. Even if the hardcover was a flop and the publisher decides to “strip and re-bind,” using the innards of returned copies for paperback pages, it still ain’t free. But the printed paperback will be sold to the retailer and customer at a drastically lower price. However, guess what: in most cases the e-price won’t budge an inch. Thus, Amazon continues to sell C STREET by Jeff Sharlet in hardcover discounted to $17.63. Now there’s a paperback edition for $10.75. Yet the e-price remains $12.99 – more than the paperback reprint. I don’t mean to knock this particular book or publisher, because they’re far from alone. Shop around and you’ll see. Forget the hardcover: “agency-priced” electronic books cost more than their own paperback reprints.

In other words, there’s no digital equivalent of “waiting for the paperback” at the six largest publishers. They offer a cheaper print alternative, but still calculate their lower-overhead electronic editions based on full hardcover retail price, even a year or more later, when most of the production expense has already been amortized. As with movies and records, you pay full freight if you want to be one of the first, if you want to enjoy a new release while everybody’s talking about it. But those other forms of entertainment will give you a break if you wait a while, until their marketing spotlight has turned onto something else. And, as we’ve seen, the book business does that too – except for the e-book format.

Well, as Mr. Trachtenberg points out, the customer is starting to notice all this. And I’ll concede that the publishers are having to make this up as they go along. As one of them said while mulling the agency model, “we have no idea how to set prices.” They’re not Procter & Gamble, they’re publishers. But if they don’t come up with some kind of sensible e-backlist policy, as the e-price rises to greet the hardcover price, the fastest-growing segment of their business will begin to look too rich for our blood.

10/4/11: Today I bought C STREET for my Kindle, and one other recently backlisted nonfiction book from a different publisher, for $9.99 each. If you’re experimenting with dynamic pricing, mates, please accept my congrats — and, more importantly, my dough.

12/16/11: After waiting patiently for more than a year, I bought my e-copy of Keith Richards’s LIFE today for $9.99. That’s plenty fair in my book: you wanna save, you gotta wait. Props to the publisher. (Just for fun, click the link above and see if the Kindle price is still $9.99 when you read this. You’ll know something I don’t.)

*A-version will cost you nothing.

Earlier glimpses so I make sure I don’t forget ‘em: Mayor Bloomberg ordered all mass transit to cease at noon today, Saturday; first time in history. (I wonder if, like Standard & Poor’s, he’s overcompensating for a previous institutional gaffe, for him last winter’s blizzard.) NYC airports have essentially shut down, all are permitting only outbound flights, and those only as weather allows. My gym was open this morning, but not the Starbucks on the corner: closed today and Sun. That is deadly serious, and maybe even instructive for folks who aren’t paying attention. The NYTimes, busily building its paid firewall, opened everything regarding the paper’s so-far-exemplary coverage of the impending disaster to anyone who can log in. Classy. Linda sez she’s not at all sure we’ll lose power, but we took all the precautions anyway, even filled our tub with water so we can make the toilets flush without electricity. (We live on the 21st floor, where you need Con Ed’s help to pump the water up and defy gravity, but adding water to the tank and flushing employs Prof. Newton’s discovery just fine. I learned that little trick during the 2003 multi-state blackout.)

6 am Sunday: Power’s still on, but the storm basically just got here. Very heavy wind and rain. One rubber seal in the kitchen window is bad; water was leaking inside until Mr. Fix-It stuffed a towel in the offending corner. Damn, I’m good.

10 am. The center has passed over us, and Irene has been downgraded to a tropical storm. Take that, Irene. Con Ed’s juice still flowing.

6 pm. All that’s left is a little wind. Good night, Irene.

9 am Monday. It’s a beautiful, sunny late summer day. High 80, blue sky, visibility forever. Gorgeous. Reminds me of the weather on 9/11/01.

Each of the eight chapters begins with a tight closeup on a single human being and pulls back to place that person in the context of something wider, like a reverse zoom in the movies. Thus we see that great changes, sometimes sinister ones, issue forth from living individuals, that utter innocents can become victims in an eyeblink. It’s a vantage point that tends to fade when you’re looking at, say, a list of troop movements from the comfort of a Washington office – made somewhat less comfortable by the paranoia that permeated the Bush administration.

We begin with Mark Stroman, a young Dallas racist who was unhinged long before 9/11, but was swept away in the riptide of rage that followed it. He hated most minorities, but the very worst were “sand niggers,” “Ay-rabs.” The author guides us through the virulent cowboy-revenge posture that swept American culture right after the attacks; whether or not the cruel and vulnerable Stroman heard this or that broadcast or snippet of commentary, he was right in tune with the times. The attacks drove him over the edge, and he went on a rampage, first murdering an Indian convenience store owner. “For legal reasons, I can’t tell you about the others,” the author writes. “I can’t even tell you how many others there were.” But they were all Asian immigrants, and no money was ever taken. We visit Stroman on death row, and find him utterly unrepentant: if allowed to do so, he would undoubtedly continue.

A rickety Indonesian boatload of desperate international refugees sought asylum in Australia, but had the bad luck to try it in October 2011 and was stopped by a Royal Australian Navy frigate. The right-wing coalition leading the country began to mold public opinion, conflating protecting Australia’s borders with the War on Terror. Through a bizarre chain of communication lapses, the government believed, and managed to convince Australians, that the refugees had thrown their children overboard to force a rescue, something all the sailors present knew to be untrue. The boat was shunted off to Papua New Guinea, out of the reach of Australian law yet administered by Australians, so untouchable by the host country. This is the same kind of legal no-man’s-land that exists at Guantanamo Bay, which in fact set a precedent using Haitian boat people in the 1990s.

On June 30, 2002, an AC-130 SPECTRE gunship obliterated a wedding party in Deh Rahwood, Afghanistan, killing 48 and injuring 117, first with 105mm cannon and then with 25mm and 40mm machine guns fired on fleeing revelers. The party was targeted on a tip that an uncle of the bride’s, the Taliban’s #2 leader, might be there. He wasn’t. The AC-130 crew claimed it responded to anti-aircraft artillery. Apparently the soldiers hadn’t been briefed on the Afghan custom of firing rounds into the air as part of a celebration. This was only the first of several wedding ceremonies to be lethally disrupted the same way: lousy intelligence, “anti-aircraft fire.” But it’s the most important to us, because Mr. Streatfeild introduces us to the decimated family.

Remember those aluminum tubes that “proved” Iraq’s nuclear intentions? A blowsy bit of “intelligence” that had been repeatedly swatted away by everyone with any expertise, yet to their shock and horror, it reappeared after 9/11 and helped justify our invasion of Iraq. We watch the discovery unfold, learn why it is technologically impossible for these tubes to be used as centrifuge rotors – as every engineer knows – and sigh as the discredited “evidence” rises from the dead in the American confusion and panic after 9/11. So hungry for war are our leaders that the CIA’s hapless WINPAC (Weapons, Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control) unit, which had been beating the drum loudest, is reduced to arguing, well, maybe these are the wrong-sized tubes for WMD, but maybe the Iraqis plan to upgrade them; and finally, they knew we were monitoring, so they deliberately ordered the wrong tubes to confuse us! The administration leaks its mushroom-cloud theory to the New York Times, then uses this very story to bolster credibility in a bit of circular logic that would confound Lewis Carroll, ending after the invasion with if we can’t find anything, that only shows you how sneaky they are!

Al Qa’qaa is a 1,100-building complex ten times the size of Central Park, located in the desert near Yusifiyah, southwest of Baghdad. On April 3, 2003, less than two weeks after the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Al Qa’qaa was bombed and its guards fled, leaving the Middle East’s largest explosives plant unprotected. About a week later, the US 101^st Airborne, en route to Baghdad and glory, bivouacked just outside the facility, apparently unaware of what it was. By now, it had already been looted of trucks, air conditioners, equipment and the like. But Al Qa’qaa was also stuffed with missiles and explosives. All of it had been vetted by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, who had specifically warned Americans about this location, along with the other weapons sites they examined. It did no good. The invaders were utterly unprepared for the scope and scale of looting (some of it, astonishingly, while Coalition troops passively stood by), and failed to protect anything, with one exception: the facilities of the Ministry of Oil. Through its indifference, the coalition squandered any local support it might have initially gained, and looted Iraqi munitions found their way around the world – and into the hands of the newly-empowered insurgency, which obtained about 90% of its explosives right under the Coalition’s nose. Alongside the U.S.’s flustered, ever-shifting denials and conflicting attempts to explain, the author interviews one of the founders of the Iraqi Islamic Army, who casually recounts what he did with some of the ordnance that the Americans asserted did not exist.

Suspects have been secretly “rendered” – that is, snatched abroad and relocated to face justice – since the Reagan administration. But it was under George W. Bush that most safeguards regarding the American rendition program were loosened or eliminated: “suspects” could now be pre-emptively kidnapped, even when there were no charges against them, and “rendered to interrogation,” to “black” CIA sites outside the country where no judicial process was even planned. Like the Australians had, the U.S. decided that during a “War on Terror,” treaties requiring humane treatment of prisoners did not apply even to its own citizens when held abroad. But its program of “extraordinary rendition” blew up when Khaled el Masri was abducted in Mallorca, whisked to a black site called the “Salt Pit” in Afghanistan, and held for 149 grisly days without trial. The reason we know about the case of “the Egyptian” is because this time, the CIA snatched the wrong guy. Mr. Streatfeild expertly tells the story from the captive’s point of view, then from inside the informal gang of planespotters and journalists which pieced together the secret U.S. program.

Uzbekistan’s brutal president Islam Karimov became a vital strategic Coalition ally as we planned the invasion of Afghanistan. In exchange for a shopping list of American goodies, he provided the “undisclosed location” that was the staging area for our assault (it’s where the convoy which destroyed the Deh Rahwood wedding party came from) – a U.S. airbase deep within central Asia, even inside the former Soviet Union – and hosted an unknowable number of CIA renditions. Unfortunately, despots around the world seized on this unholy alliance to further enslave their own people; they loved Bush’s “with us or against us” stuff, and used the Global War on Terror to justify any punishment they chose on anyone they chose to declare a “terrorist.” And in Uzbekistan, things went from bad to worse.

Finally, the single most heartbreaking fallout from 9/11 damaged the World Health Organization’s massive effort to defeat polio, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), the largest public health project in history. Begun in 1988, GPEI vaccinated more than 2 billion children in 200 countries and was on the verge of stamping out the poliomyelitis virus once and for all. Even in warring zones, “Days of Tranquility” halted hostilities so children could be inoculated (the Taliban and the Northern Alliance both helped with the effort in Afghanistan). Then came 9/11, the invasion of two countries, vicious and untrue Internet rumors about contaminated vaccine and the West’s secret intentions, and general mistrust of Muslims. Nigerians were the first to refuse vaccines, then polio vectors were traced to Mecca, where the annual Haj brings together about three million Islamic pilgrims, ripe for contagion. Al-Qaeda and other ultra-right-wing Muslims forbade vaccination as blasphemous and Western. Most polio victims were now Muslim, and because 9/11 turned the world upside down, especially with regard to this particular faith, the virus’s relentless spread now threatens to undo GPEI’s quarter century of miraculous work. On July 2, 2007, Australia’s first polio case in 21 years was diagnosed. He was an unvaccinated foreign-exchange student from Pakistan, traveling lawfully, with a visa.

Each of these stories is told in exquisite detail, using crisp, economical language. I guarantee that no matter how closely you paid attention to the contemporary media (in fact, you might be less informed if you did), you’ll still learn something from this important book. Mr. Streatfeild does not attach blame to any person or country: there’s plenty to go around. The politicians, the military, the media, the citizenry, we all share in collective overreaction to a barbarous act, and willful disinterest in the true responsibilities of a free and just people. “Al-Qaeda doesn’t threaten our existence,” the author writes. “It never did. Our reaction to it just might.”