Word: bookers
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...honoring the contributions of their forebears without alienating the broader, multiracial audiences they need to win. I've spent part of the past year tracking dozens of these rising stars and have concluded that anyone who thinks Obama is unique is not paying attention. Consider Newark, N.J., mayor Cory Booker. His troubled city is into its third generation of African-American political leadership but not necessarily the good kind. Its previous two black mayors--Kenneth Gibson and Sharpe James--became ensnared in fraud and corruption prosecutions (Gibson was ultimately acquitted; James was not). Booker, 39, is something else entirely...
...Booker shares the metabolism of Washington mayor Adrian Fenty, a triathlete who recently waved away an ambulance after he tumbled from his bike near a city freeway. Fenty, 37, has demonstrated a Zelig-like ability to appear wherever cameras are rolling--whether at crime scenes or neighborhood block parties. But his boldest move came when he engineered a city-hall takeover of Washington's struggling public schools. He hired a no-nonsense outsider, Michelle Rhee, to reform the crumbling system; it's a huge gamble politically, but the city's future could depend on its success...
...Dorian Gray idea gained impetus when Bourne read Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories and learned that Wilde's novel (which Booker describes as a "black fairy tale") headed the list of classic tragedies. And then there was the accidental death earlier this year of the actor Heath Ledger. "You have this beautiful, talented being dropped into another world - Hollywood - where everyone wants to get in with you," says Bourne. "Would he have died if he'd stayed in Australia, I wonder, or was he a victim of modern celebrity...
...Through all this, Amis had few allies save the very high-profile McEwan, who won the Booker Prize for the 1998 novel Amsterdam and whose book Atonement resulted in last year's Oscar-nominated film. In November 2007, he wrote a letter to the Guardian arguing that "vilification" was not the appropriate response from those who disagreed with Amis' writing...
John Banville is an Irish writer of austere, erudite, literary novels. A Booker winner, he's famous for being relentlessly highbrow. Benjamin Black writes mystery novels; his slender, nasty The Lemur (Picador; 132 pages) appears this month. The funny thing about Black is that he and Banville are the same person...