"There's something hugely wrong in my life and I'm helpless to change it."

That's the theme of this beautifully written book, and perhaps that's why I didn't enjoy it as much as Shields' more distant-from-real-life, Pulitzer Prize winning "The Stone Diaries."

The book follows Canadian novelist Reta Winters through a time in her life when everything is going splendidly. She has a new book deal, she's in love with her husband of two decades, she has great friends, a cozy home, and is the mother of three beautiful daughters. Yet her oldest daughter, Norah, has inexplicably dropped out of college, renounced all worldly possessions and cut all ties with her family to become a street urchin. And so Reta muddles through her life while always keeping Norah in mind, visiting her street corner and the homeless shelter where she sleeps to bring her food and "gifts."

We travel with Reta as she attempts to keep the status quo when the figurative alarm bells are going off.

Shields is able to aptly inject humor into a routinely sad daily life. The novel was entertaining, yet frustrating. And when I got the happy ending that I hoped for throughout the novel, I felt somehow cheated.

...but then, none of mine are bound in marble and velvet:

Most expensive new book arrives in NY from Italy
NEW YORK (AP) -- It's billed as the world's most expensive, most beautiful new book.
Valued at well over $100,000, a 62-pound handmade tome depicting the life and work of Michelangelo has arrived at the New York Public Library, fresh from publication in Italy.
The velvet- and marble-bound book will be on public display next Tuesday.
Publisher Marilena (Mah-ree-LAY'-nuh) Ferrari jokes that she created the extravagant book because she's "crazy." It takes six months to make each book, using Italian artisan skills dating to the Renaissance. The copy on display was donated to the library, but more than 20 books have been sold.

Reviewed: “Dealing with Difficult People,” from The Results-Driven Manager series, Harvard Business School Press, 2005, $14.95, 139 pages.


Managing conflict at work is kind of like Kenny Rogers says in “The Gambler”: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em. Know when to fold ’em. Know when to walk away, and know when to run.”

Learning what to do — as a manager — during disputes in the workplace is the topic of “Dealing with Difficult People,” a tidy little collection of articles from the “Harvard Management Update” and the “Harvard Management Communication Letter.”

Full of short and to-the-point articles and helpful suggestions, the slim book is a guide for senior to middle managers for dealing with difficult employees. It offers useful information for management types as well as anyone who needs to brush up on conflict resolution in the workplace.

As someone who avoids conflict like the plague, I particularly enjoyed the chapter called “Don’t Just Do Something — Sit There.”

“If a dispute doesn’t interfere with an employee’s performance, does not disrupt the work environment, and is not a violation of company policy, then ‘benign neglect’ is probably a suitable approach for a manager,” said David Lipsky, director of the Institute of Conflict Resolution at Cornell University.

Managers should look at such situations as “an opportunity for your staff members to develop their problem-solving skills.”However, the book notes, there are certain situations in which a manager should definitely intervene:

•When the disagreement is between an assertive employee and a timid, less vocal person.

•When an argument between two employees has broadened to encompass additional staff members.

•When the conflict involves illegal conduct, such as sexual harassment or civil rights violations.

However, the laissez-faire approach to management isn’t always the best tack, per the chapter “Don’t Avoid Conflicts — Manage Them”

“Ducking conflict,” Monci J. Williams, author of the chapter, advises, “may actually make it harder for us to achieve our goals.”Managers, when they see a conflict brewing, “may notice that both parties repeatedly assert their own needs and wishes, and tell each other why the other guy is wrong. The experts call this the ‘attack/defend spiral,’ and it’s where most of us flame out.”

The solution, according to the Harvard experts, is to use “neutral ‘opening’ and ‘informing’ statements to encourage the other person to open up. Comments such as ‘I know we’ve both been very concerned about X, but I also know that Y is very important to you; I’d like to understand that better’ encourage the other person to talk about her concerns and wants.”

(But doesn’t that take for granted a civilized and polite workplace?)

Also noted is “When to Walk Away from a Fight,” in a chapter written by Rebecca M. Saunders.

During a work-related argument, “If the other person is fidgeting, leaning forward, or shaking a finger in your face, then back off politely,” Saunders writes. “If both parties insist they are right and refuse to back down, the cost can be high — angry words and hard feelings that never go away can make the workplace unpleasant for everyone.”

It’s important to “take a breath and decide if it’s worth escalating or not,” she said.

And, like “The Gambler” says, “Now every gambler knows that the secret to survivin’ is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep.”Remember to play your cards right when dealing with difficult folks at work.

I love a good poker metaphor.

When Mercury Online Editor Eileen Faust suggested I blog about this book, I had to laugh. The title "Leather Man" to me conjures an image of the gaunt, older fellow my family so nicknamed because he likes to sun himself every single day of the summer, with no sunscreen or shade, wearing only a Speedo, all the while chain-smoking cigarettes, and, I'm pretty sure drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, on the beach next to my mom's lakehouse in Western Pa.

Leather Man has been sunning himself to a bronze crisp in the same spot, on a tri-fold lounger, for probably my entire lifetime. Incidentally, he has a similarly sun-worshipping lady friend we call "Leatherette." I saw them both last over Labor DAy, in their usual spot beside the lake. I joked with my mom, as we sat in the shade playing cards, that Leather Man is probably only in his mid-40s, but looks about 90.

Eileen, however, was talking about this intriguing book on a Connecticut legend, the Old Leather Man, who supposedly roamed around in a crude leather outfit. Incidentally, Eileen is a fan of folklore, and just last week explained to me what the New Jersey Devil was (is?) in her home state.

Book chronicles hunt for lore on 'Old Leather Man'

By LESLIE HUTCHINSON

Record-Journal of Meriden
SOUTHINGTON, Conn. (AP) - The first known photograph of the Old Leather Man was taken without his consent.
It shows a blurry image of his silhouette complete with walking stick, hat and leather bag. The photo was taken in Forestville by a photographer who concealed himself behind a blanket and then snapped the picture when the Old Leather Man was offered a plug of tobacco.
The image was published in the Meriden Daily Republican in May 1885.
That photo and 19 others of the Old Leather Man can be found in a new book by Dan W. DeLuca of Meriden called "Historical Accounts of a Connecticut and New York Legend." It contains pictures, memories and newspaper reports of the wandering man who walked a circuit between the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers in the late 1800s.
DeLuca said he's recently determined that the Old Leather Man stayed in a rock shelter in Southington on land that is now the YMCA's Camp Sloper, near East Street.
The shelter was secure enough for the Old Leather Man to survive the four-day long "Blizzard of 1888," when an estimated 50 inches of snow fell. A newspaper article written three days after the blizzard confirmed that he had weathered the storm.
"The Old Leather Man put in an appearance yesterday morning, stopping for breakfast at W.M. Fowler's. He was headed east and looked as well as he usually does," the Penny Press of East Berlin reported on March 17.
Facts about the early life of the historical figure are not known, but the Old Leather Man became well known to residents of Connecticut and New York around 1856, according to DeLuca's research.
The author writes that "Old Leathery," as he was sometimes called, started his famous clockwise circle of travel around 1883, making ".... A regular route of 365 miles every 34 days, until he died on March 20, 1889."
DeLuca has spent the past 20 years researching the Old Leather Man, whose real name is not known. He discovered the first-known photograph at the Hamden Historical Society and was able to connect it to a specific date because he had read a newspaper report about the blanket trick in Forestville.
"There was only one with that image. I knew when I found the photograph exactly what it was," DeLuca said.
The most iconographic photo of the Old Leather Man — which is the cover illustration for DeLuca's book — was taken by a 19-year-old photographer from Branford, James Rogers.
"He grew up seeing the Old Leather Man come through town and he got up the nerve to start talking to him," DeLuca said. Rogers was one of the first photographers for whom the historical figure posed.
DeLuca's research was greatly helped, he said, when the son of historian LeRoy W. Foote donated his father's collection of Old Leather Man artifacts to DeLuca.
The son, Wayne H. Foote of Middlebury, said his father's interest in the historical figure began in 1940. LeRoy Foote's research was an offshoot of his interest in caves, Wayne said, that grew to include the Old Leather Man's rock shelters.
"I'm happy if the effort my father made in his hobby continues (DeLuca's) historic research," Wayne Foote said.
"I like to walk and wander," he continued, "and I often think of the Old Leather Man."
LeRoy Foote and his wife, Sarah, gave talks about the historical figure and created a slide show that was presented in several towns, Wayne Foote said.
LeRoy Foote also had replicas made of the Old Leather Man's coat, hat and walking stick that were used in the show. After LeRoy Foote's death, his wife continued the presentations with some help from Wayne Foote.
"I would put on the hat and coat for a dramatic affect at the end of the show," he said.
DeLuca compiled about 400 pages of research and presented it about two years ago to editors at Wesleyan University Press.
"With (LeRoy) Foote's information and photos, and what I've put together, it cleared up a lot of little things I didn't know," DeLuca said. DeLuca talked with the editors about the possibility of publishing the book.
"They said 'yes' almost immediately," he recalls.
"I was afraid that others after me wouldn't do this," DeLuca said. "If everybody in every single town talked to the old-timers, we could uncover more information and more shelters."
The Old Leather Man's shelters that are accessible to the public are listed in the back of the book. The list includes Mount Higby and Hubbard Park in Meriden, Fann's Shelter in Hamden and two along the Mattatuck Trail near Watertown.
A review of the book by Connecticut State Archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni is complimentary of DeLuca's research.
"The Old Leather Man was an enigma in the later 1880s and remains so today," wrote Bellantoni. "Dan DeLuca has compiled his decades of research into a most comprehensive account, with photographs and maps of this mysterious, punctual and unique character's travels through New York and Connecticut."
"Historical Accounts of a Connecticut and New York Legend" was expected to arrive in stores by the second week of November.

John Ashbery's poems were required reading in a Modern Poetry class I had my sophomore year in college. I took the class because it fulfilled a requirement and I thought for a journalism major/English minor, poetry would be just so easy. Such naivety! I'd never heard of Ashbery before, but never forgot his talents since.

An apropos excerpt from Ashbery's "Soonest Mended," from The Double Dream of Spring:

None of us ever graduates from college,

For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up

Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.

John Ashbery - movie fan and canonical poet
By HILLEL ITALIE
AP National Writer

NEW YORK — White-haired and round-faced, with a kind smile and a wry, modest air, the award-winning poet stands before hundreds on a cloudy fall night.

John Ashbery first appeared at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y as an emerging writer more than 50 years ago. He is now 81, limps to the podium and takes deep breaths between each poem. But he is neither solemn nor sad. As he recites from an early work called "He," the words seem to slip out the side of his mouth, as if each line were a wisecrack, a naughty aside whispered during a dull cocktail party.

____

He wears a question in his left eye.

He dislikes the police but will associate with them.

He will demand something not on the menu.

He is invisible to the eyes of beauty and culture.

____

Ashbery is the first living poet to have a full volume of his work released by Library of America, publishing's unofficial canon maker, and his reading is an hourlong summary of poems inspired by dreams, pronouns, Richard Strauss, and Peaches and Herb's "Reunited." He concludes with some recent material, including "They," consisting entirely of movie titles, from "They Were Expendable" to "They Knew What They Wanted."

The new poems, he explains, are to "prove that I'm still writing them."

First published in 1957, obscure for many years, he was raised to the very heights in 1976 with "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," winner of publishing's three biggest honors: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. Critic Harold Bloom, one of the poet's champions, has proclaimed that we live in "the Age of Ashbery."

His work, like a mountain top, is easier to take in from a distance than to actually set foot upon. His poems have baffled as often as they have inspired, ignoring grammar, narrative and, at times, logic of any kind. But admirers say the beauty isn't so much in the reading as in the rereading, aloud, when the music of the words reveals the message, how "the conscious is to you what is known/The unknowable gets to be known."

"He has enlarged the vocabulary of American poetry," says critic Helen Vendler. "He does not let any conventions of expression stand in his way."

Author of numerous poetry collections and plays, along with fiction and essays about art, Ashbery writes of love, music, the seasons, the city, the country and popular culture. He is surely the greatest poet ever to compose a hymn to Warren Harding, the brief "Qualm," in which he forgives the late, scandalized president as not "a bad egg/just weak/He loved women and Ohio."

Ashbery does not identify himself as a storyteller — or philosopher — and does not claim to "mean" anything. But there has been a theme in his work since his mid-20s: the passage of time, the tricks of memory and how the present continuously changes, or erases, the meaning of the past.

So he may boast about "strutted opinion doomed to wilt in oblivion," even as he acknowledges that "I grew/To feel I was beyond criticism, until I flew/Those few paces from the best." He notes, in "The Skaters": "The carnivorous way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving/Nothing but a bitter impression of absence." In "A Wave," he considers death and asks, "As children leaving school at four in the afternoon, can we/Hold our heads up and face the night's homework?"

Ashbery was born in Rochester, N.Y., in 1927 and grew up on an apple farm in the nearby village of Sodus, where it snowed often enough to inspire his first poem, "The Battle," written at age 8 and a fantasy about a fight between bunnies and snowflakes. He was so satisfied with the poem, that he didn't write another until high school.

Meanwhile, he found new meaning in life, or Life. An article in Life magazine about a surrealist exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art so impressed him that he kept rereading it for years. His mind broadened further at Harvard University, where he met fellow poet and longtime comrade, Kenneth Koch, along with Richard Wilbur, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Frank O'Hara and Robert Creeley.

"Kenneth Koch and I especially saw a lot of each other," Ashbery said in an interview in the living room of his Manhattan apartment, a few days before the reading. "We talked a lot about poetry and helped shape each other's ideas about it."

His first book, "Some Trees," was a relatively conventional collection that came out in 1956, with a preface from W.H. Auden and the praise of O'Hara, who likened Ashbery to Wallace Stevens. But in 1962, he unleashed the truly abstract, collagist "The Tennis Court Oath," with such lines as, "You are freed/including barrels/heads of the swan/forestry/the night and stars fork."

Cracked critic John Simon: "Mr. Ashbery has perfected his verse to the point where it never deviates into ... sensibility, sensuality or sentences." Even Ashbery now says he went too far.

"Some (poems) were written in a period of almost desperation, when I was living France, had nobody to read my poems or give me an opinion on them. And at the same time, I fell out of touch with American speech, which is really the kind of fountainhead of my poetry," he says.

"I actually went through a period after 'The Tennis Court Oath' wondering whether I was really going to go on writing poetry, since nobody seemed interested in it. And then I must have said to myself, 'Well, this is what I enjoy. I might as well go on doing it, since I'm not going to get the same pleasure anywhere else.'"

Ashbery was never part of the reigning poetry fad, the Beats, but he was a member of an identified movement, joined with friends O'Hara and Koch as "New York Poets," although Ashbery would joke that all they had in common was living in New York.

He says a turning point came with his collection, "Rivers and Mountains," published in 1966. For years, he had been pulling apart the art of verse, now he would stitch it back. The evolution continued with "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." He usually works quickly and rarely revises, accumulating words in his mind so they stream onto the page. But for "Self-Portrait," he found himself struggling, having to set work aside and then come back to it.

"I had very low expectations," he says. "The poems cost me much more effort than anything I had written before."

Ashbery's burden seemed to remove some weight off the readers. David Lehman, a poet and critic who has written at length about Ashbery, says "Convex Mirror" was just accessible enough to please general poetry fans and unconventional enough for specialists. He believes Ashbery's influence continues to grow as the world itself becomes harder to understand, and more like an Ashbery poem.

"It seems as though almost from the start he's been ahead of everyone else," Lehman says. "A poem he wrote in 1980 may have baffled the reader who read it then. But 10 years later, the poem suddenly seems very clear, as though he's anticipated something that's happened."

Ashbery remains a prime source for young poets, including Mark Bibbins, whose first collection, "Sky Lounge," came out in 2003. The 40-year-old Bibbins remembers reading Ashbery, "on a whim," as an undergraduate at Hunter College.

"I experienced the combined jolts of discovery and recognition that great art provides," says Bibbins, who teaches poetry at the New School in Manhattan. "The poems felt so strange and expansive, yet at the same time welcoming and intimate — contradictions one feels all the time in New York City, where John and I both live.

"He has remained relevant by being irreverent and wise, by keeping time with time."

Poetry, Ashbery once wrote, means "living in a state of alert and being ready to change your mind." Ashbery's style is as boundless as the content. He writes short poems, epics, nursery rhyme, rhyming couplets and free verse, formal lines such "A perjorative lover, alone and palely loitering," or, neighborly talk, like, "Honey, it's all Greek to me."

Ashbery says he just reread an essay by Auden in which the poet called the Oxford English Dictionary "his most treasured reading" and praised the language as large, yet lenient, noting how Shakespeare would invent new words simply by turning a verb into a noun or an adjective into a verb.

Ashbery is a longtime breaker of rules, but he has so far honored the boundaries of his own name. Ashbery remains just Ashbery, a proper noun, the last name of one of the world's most admired poets. But why not pretend that the poet is an adjective, Ashbery-like, or a verb, "to Ashbery." The poet even offers a definition.

"To confuse the hell out of people," he says.

Prolific Shillington native John Updike has updated the story of his quarter-century year-old riotous novel "The Witches of Eastwick." As a fan of Updike's work, especially the "Rabbit" books, here's one I will be reading in the near future.

Perhaps you remember the movie verison of "Witches," starring Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, Cher as the witches and Jack Nicholson as the salacious "D."

Can't quite get that cherry-pit launching scene out of my head...

Similarly, this sequel left a bad taste in the mouth of AP reviewer Henry Jackson.

However, this is Updike, and Updike does brooding and melancholy well. I look forward to glimpsing the "moments of brilliance" Jackson speaks of.

The aura has vanished from Updike's witches

By HENRY C. JACKSON

Associated Press Writer
"The Widows of Eastwick" (Alfred A Knopf. 308 pages. $24.95), by John Updike: Even the most wicked witches age. And, as it turns out, a sorceress' decline is by turns as painful, lonely and even common as that of any unmagical being.
The aura has vanished from the three witches of Eastwick that John Updike crafted in a wondrous, taboo-filled novel of the same name 24 years ago. In its sequel, "The Widows of Eastwick," Alexandra, Jane and Sukie are still here but, like the author, they are fading — and sometimes gracelessly.
All three are widows now. Having long ago fled the bedlam they left behind during the ill-fated pursuit of Darryl Van Horne in seaside Eastwick, R.I., the once rollicking coven slowly reconvenes, bonding over their mutual losses but mostly reliving past debauchery.
Since they left Eastwick, contact among the three has faded. Alexandra retreated to the southwest, living remotely with a sculptor husband. Jane moved with her own beau to Connecticut, remaining sharp and cynical. Sukie, once Eastwick's gossip columnist, married a wealthy man and became a second-rate romance novelist.
They take steps to dull their pain, such as they feel it. Alexandra, the most emotive and mournful of the trio, travels to Canada alone, then to Cairo with Jane, who has maintained more of her wicked edge and is less apologetic about the past. When Sukie's husband dies, she joins the ladies in their travels, falling somewhere between on the emotional scale.
If it sounds melancholy, it is. All the reunions feel forced: The witches with each other and then later, inevitably, with Eastwick; Updike with the protagonists and their sexual exploits; the reader with the whole bawdy ensemble.
What's odd is that Updike seems to know this. It seems even to be the point. This is supposed to be sad, regretful. His typically descriptive prose is forlorn throughout.
It's a tone he sets early, as when he describes Alexandra's discovery of her husband's cancer:
"They had joined the legion of elderly couples who fill hospital waiting rooms, as quiet with nervousness as parents and children before a recital. She felt the other couples idly pawing at them with their eyes, trying to guess which of the two was the sick one, the doomed one; she didn't want it to be so obvious."
The plot of "Widows" moves slowly, like an aged thing. Even this feels fairly deliberate. Decline is never as rapid as we'd hope, Updike seems to intone. We have too much time to look back, and that can punish. Even the witches seem to get it:
"How lovely, being remembered," Sukie says to Alexandra at one point. Alexandra's reply says it all: "It can be, or not."
Updike, of course, need not worry about being remembered. He will be recalled fondly — though probably not for this novel. One of the most prolific and gifted writers of his generation, he has nothing left to prove.
There are moments of brilliance, but he, like the witches, is ebbing.
Toward novel's end, Alexandra speaks to the daughter of a former lover, Joe. It's an apt coda — whether intentional or not. (With Updike, one always suspects intent.)
"'How has it been for you,' she asked. 'Being in Eastwick for this summer?'
"'It was ... useful,' Alexandra decided. 'It confirmed my suspicion that I belong elsewhere. There was less here than I remembered.'"

Amazon, my go-to site for cheap and used books, has picked their top 100 books for the year, and sadly I have read none so far and never even heard of most of them... If you can recommend any of these (or others!), please let me know.

Here's the first 25:

1. "The Northern Clemency," by Philip Hensher
2. "Hurry Down Sunshine," by Michael Greenberg
3. "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America," by Rick Perlstein
4. "The Forever War," by Dexter Filkins
5. "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel," by David Wroblewski
6. "The Likeness: A Novel," by Tana French
7. "Serena: A Novel," by Ron Rash
8. "So Brave, Young and Handsome: A Novel," by Leif Enger
9. "The Lazarus Project," by Aleksandar Hemon
10. "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America," by David Hajdu
11. "The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America," by Thurston Clarke
12. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," by Stieg Larsson
13. "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves," by M.T. Anderson
14. "Sitting Bull," by Bill Yenne
15. "Netherland: A Novel," by Joseph O'Neill
16. "Home: A Novel," by Marilynne Robinson
17. "Duma Key: A Novel," by Stephen King
18. "Lush Life: A Novel," by Richard Price
19. "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto," by Michael Pollan
20. "The Underneath," by Kathi Appelt
21. "Knockemstiff," by Donald Ray Pollock
22. "A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes," by David Tanis
23. "Pravda: A Novel," by Edward Docx
24. "2666: A Novel," by Roberto Bolano

25. "Alinea," by Grant Achatz

Always a good idea to have something to read in case you get caught waiting in line. These voters did. At top, Corrie Masterlee came prepared for the weather and the wait as she read a book in line to vote at Bayview Elementary school in Norfolk, Va., Nov. 4. (AP Photo/The Virginian-Pilot, DELORES JOHNSON) At near top: Kate Winters uses a flashlight as she reads a book while waiting in line before polls open in Matthews, N.C., Tuesday, Nov. 4. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

Some patriotic/inspirational reading suggestions from today's Washington Post, in an article by Derek Kravitz:

FICTION
If you're in the mood for fiction, try Robert Penn Warren's classic "All the King's Men," the 1947 political thriller about Southern populist politician Willie Stark, modeled after Louisiana Gov. Huey Long. (Both Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain are reportedly fond of the book).
For more recent tales, there are Larry Beinhart's "American Hero," the 1995 political satire about a staged Hollywood-style war (the film "Wag the Dog" was based on the book) and Joe Klein's "Primary Colors," the fictional novel based on the goings-on behind the 1992 presidential campaign of former President Bill Clinton.
And in memory of the late Tony Hillerman, the New Mexico author who died earlier this month at 83, there's the 1971 political novel "The Fly On The Wall," which follows reporter John Cotton as he becomes embroiled in a political scandal involving a senatorial candidate.
(Children who are stuck in long lines can also check out Doreen Cronin's and Besty Lewin's "Duck for President," about farm animals seeking higher power.)

Check out non-fiction, autobiographies and what the presidential candidates are reading after the jump:

NON-FICTION
Want to relive recent history? Try Barton Gellman's "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," (review) the Post reporter's revealing look at Vice President Dick Cheney and his role in the Bush administration. Or Bob Woodward's "The War Within," (review) the fourth and final installment of the acclaimed journalist's behind-the-scenes look at the president and the Iraq War.
For one take on what the world might hold for the next president, check out Thomas L. Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded," (review) The New York Times columnist's tome on global warming and population growth.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
To brush up on your candidate's life story, you can thumb through Obama's two books -- his personal 1995 memoir "Dreams From My Father," and the Illinois more political 2004 book "The Audacity of Hope." Joe Biden penned "Promises to Keep," which chronicles the Delaware Democrat's life and senatorial career.
For McCain, there's his autobiography "Faith of My Fathers," which chronicles his life and torture in a North Vietnamese POW camp and the Arizona senator's three books on character: "Character is Destiny, "Why Courage Matters" and "Hard Call."
WHAT THE CANDIDATES ARE READING
McCain has a particular affinity for the character of Robert Jordan, the young American fighting the Spanish fascists in Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom The Bell Tolls." At the end of the book, a wounded Jordan faces the possibility of torture or suicide as the attack nears.
Both Obama and McCain's reading habits have been thoroughly examined. If elected, Obama would be one of the most "literary presidents in recent memory," writes Salon.com's Laura Miller, noting that "Obama the reader blossomed as an undergraduate at Occidental College in California and, especially, during the two monkish years he spent finishing up his degree at Columbia University in New York."
Also, check out a few books that the candidates have been seen carrying under their arms in recent months: Obama was spotted with Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars" about the CIA's role in the War on Terror and Fareed Zakaria's "The Post-American World" and McCain was seen with Robert Kagan's "The Return of History and the End of Dreams" and Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front." For more books that the candidates have recommended or been seen reading check out Amazon.com's Election 2008 page.