According to the book, Michelle prepared divorce papers in 2000 following Barack’s disastrous attempt to win a House seat in Chicago — in fact, as she was upset that he ignored her advice not to take on the four-term incumbent Bobby Rush.

Their marriage — in its eighth year at the time — was “on the rocks” with Barack so depressed some of his friends feared he was suicidal, author Edward Klein has claimed in his book, titled ‘The Amateur’.

“After Obama’s humiliating defeat he was broke and deeply in debt and it looked as though he might be finished in public life. During the dark days that followed his defeat, he turned to Michelle for comfort.

“But she was in no mood to offer him sympathy. After all he had refused to listen to her warnings about taking on the formidable Bobby Rush. He had put his family in a precarious financial position. And he had dashed Michelle’s hopes of creating a stable and secure future.

“As a result their marriage was on the rocks, and Obama confided to friends that he and Michelle were talking about divorce. Michelle actually had divorce papers drawn up,” the author wrote, citing a friend of the Obamas.

The claims mark the second time the Obamas have faced allegations they were on the verge of divorce after reports in 2010 suggested they were having difficulties, the ‘Daily Mail’ newspaper reported. The couple appear to have worked out their differences, however — Barack Obama ran for a Senate seat in Illinois and won it in, assuming office in 2005 and restoring his wife’s faith in him.

The couple have admitted that in the past they did go through a rough patch but that they patched things up and grew closer together. The Obamas have now been married for 21 years and have two children, Malia, 13, and Sasha, nine.

Fuentes wrote more than 20 novels and several collections of short stories. His most famous novels include “The Death of Artemio Cruz,” “The Old Gringo” and “The Crystal Frontier.”

“The Old Gringo” was the first U.S. bestseller by a Mexican author and was made into a 1989 movie starring Gregory Peck and Jane Fonda.

Dividing his time mainly between Mexico City and London, Fuentes dovetailed literature and social and political commentary. He remained active and energetic to the end, and was working on a new book.

Along with compatriot Octavio Paz, Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, Fuentes brought Latin American literature to a global audience in the second half of the 20th century. His work was translated into two dozen languages.

“He left an enormous body of work which is an eloquent testimony to all of the big political problems and cultural realities of our time,” Vargas Llosa said of Fuentes in a message posted on his daughter’s Twitter account.

Local media said Fuentes died in a Mexico City hospital after suffering a hemorrhage at home, although some originally reported heart problems.

He won major literary prizes, including Spain’s coveted Cervantes award. He was often seen as a strong candidate for a Nobel Prize, but it eluded him. Paz, a close friend until the two fell out in 1988, is the only Mexican to have won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Born in Panama in 1928, Fuentes spent much of his early years in the United States, Chile and Argentina, following his father’s diplomatic postings. He went on to study law and published his first novel at the age of 30.

A dapper dresser and elegant public speaker, Fuentes was an open critic of Mexico’s entrenched political system under the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled the country for 71 years before it was ousted in 2000 elections.

He was also a frequent critic of the U.S. role in the civil wars of Central America in the 1980s and lambasted the effects of U.S. immigration policy on Mexican migrant workers in his mid-1990s novel, “La Frontera de Cristal” (The Crystal Frontier).

“They know they need migrant Mexican labor, without which their harvests, services and many aspects of life would go to ruin,” Fuentes once said, calling U.S. policy a farce.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon and other political and cultural leaders, including British author Salman Rushdie and new French President Francois Hollande, also paid tribute to Fuentes. His remains will lie in Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts on Wednesday to allow people to pay their last respects.

“I profoundly regret the death of our beloved and admired Carlos Fuentes, writer and universal Mexican,” Calderon wrote on his Twitter account.

“Carlos Fuentes was one of the most brilliant writers of the 20th century in Mexico,” Mexican writer and essayist Enrique Krauze said.

PROLIFIC
The prolific Fuentes said he never suffered from writer’s block. He told Spain’s El Pais newspaper during a recent visit to Buenos Aires that he had just finished one book and was already starting another.

“My system for staying young is to work a lot, to always have a project on the go,” he said in the interview, published on Monday. “Here among my books, my wife, my friends and my loves, I have plenty of reasons to keep living.”

Fuentes also wrote plays and essays and spent some years as a Mexican diplomat, mainly in Europe.

His critical eye was at work from the start of his career.

His first novel in 1958, “La region mas transparente” (Where the Air is Clear), was not only a look at life in Mexico City, now ironically one of the most polluted cities in the world. It also examined how the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917 had created a new and wealthy elite but did nothing for the impoverished and indigenous masses.

Fuentes said he always wanted to be a writer, inspired by the tales of Mexico told to him by his grandmothers.

“I think that I became a writer because I heard those stories – all the stories that I didn’t know about Mexico, about my own land,” he said in a 2006 interview with The Academy of Achievement, a U.S group that highlights the work of leaders in various fields.

“They were the storehouse of these great tales of migrants, revolution, highway robberies, bandits, love affairs, ways of dressing, eating – they had the whole storehouse of the past in their heads and their hearts.”

Fuentes is survived by his wife, journalist and television presenter Silvia Lemus, and a daughter. His other two children died before him.

“Blooms of Darkness” by 80-year old Israeli Aharon Appelfeld was awarded the 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize at a ceremony in London.

It tells the story of Hugo, who is brought by his mother to a local brothel, and his deepening relationship with Mariana, one of the women who work there.

The book shows how the best of human nature can come to the surface even in the most horrific circumstances, Appelfeld said.

“I wanted to explore the darkest places of human behavior and to show that even there, generosity and love can survive; that humanity and love can overcome cruelty and brutality.

The prize awards 5,000 pounds ($8,100) each to the author of the Hebrew work, and its translator Jeffrey M Green.

“As the relationship between Hugo and Mariana evolves, this deceptively simple narrative does something extraordinary, carrying the reader to a liminal territory in which deep sensuality exists alongside unfathomable brutality,” said Hephzibah Anderson, journalist and one of the prize’s judges.

Born in 1932 in what is now Western Ukraine, Appelfeld was deported to a labor camp when he was seven years old.

He managed to escape, and was picked up by the Red Army in 1944, eventually making his way to Italy and finally reaching Palestine in 1946, aged 14.

At 80, Appelfeld is the oldest author to win the prize, following on from the youngest ever winner, Santiago Roncagliolo, who at 36 won the Prize last year.

The prize is run by the Booktrust, which is an independent reading and writing charity in Britain. Booktrust also present the Orange Prize for fiction, the Roald Dahl Funny Prize and others in an effort to promote reading and writing.

To pay homage to this great inventor, Oatmeal has created one of the most amazing and touching comic strip called ‘Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived?’

The strip shreds apart the halo around Thomas Edison and claims that ‘Edison is a good example of a non-geek who operated in a geek space. He was not a geek, he was a CEO.”

“When most people think of Thomas Edison, they think of the man who invented the light bulb. Edison did not invent the light bulb, he improved upon the ideas of 22 other men who pioneered the light bulb before him. Edison simply figured out how to sell the light bulb. His goal was to publicly smear Tesla’s AC and convince the public that was too dangerous for home use. In short: the only thing Edison truly pioneered was douchebaggery,” the comic suggests.

Not just Edison the comic strip gives Tesla the rightful credit for inventing Radio, X-Rays, recording radio waves from outer space, earthquake machine, remote control, neon lightning, wireless communications….and the list goes on.

Oatmeal reveals that  even after all this Tesla didn’t become the ‘rich and famous’ because the world he lived in demanded results which were ‘practical’ not  ‘revolutionary’.

The black and white comic has taken the Twitter world by storm, with tweeple going gaga over Tesla and the comic. Here’s a look at few of the tweets:

@mpesce
Oh dear. The Oatmeal tells the truth about Tesla – and Edison

@Oatmeal
Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived

@Werner
I really love @oatmeal’s ode to Tesla: “Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived

He is planning to pen down a memoir on his political life and the 56-year-old claims he has enough fodder to make it to the bestseller list.

“I am now thinking of writing a book and I am sure it will be a bestseller because I have had access to so much ‘comedy’ when I was in politics and in government,” Parrikar announced at a centenary function organised by the Gomantak Maratha Samaj.
Goa CM Manohar Parrikar to pen a ‘hilarious’ memoir

The tough-talking IIT-Mumbai alumnus is seen by some as a silver lining on Goa’s jaded political canvas, populated by either ageing, overtly corrupt and petty machinating leaders or power-hungry local satraps who mushroom in one election and disappear in the next.

While Parrikar over the last two decades has been the only acceptable, educated and engaging face within the state BJP who cuts ice across regions and communities in Goa, his failings have perhaps been his ability to put his foot in the mouth coupled with a touch of arrogance.

The chief minister claims that his book, when published, would have its readers in splits because the stories about Goa’s dynamic power corridors are hilariously comic.

“When you read that book you will keep laughing. The things I have seen in the government are so comic!” Parrikar said.

Perhaps one such tragic-comic moment in the recent past for Parrikar was when, as one of the top contenders for the post of BJP national president in 2009, he likened then party president L.K. Advani to rancid pickle.

Parrikar’s comment triggered a furore in the party ranks and he lost out in the presidential race to the less cavalier Nitin Gadkari.

Publishers based in Goa are pretty much gungho about Parrikar’s memoirs.

Khalid Ahmad, who runs Goa’s biggest publishing company Broadway books, says if a book on Nitish Kumar by Goa-based editor Arun Sinha could work, Parrikar’s attempt too would become a bestseller.

“Chances of his book clicking are good. People have faith in him,” said Ahmad, who publishes two to three titles every month.

Parrikar incidentally would not be the first Goan chief minister to pen down his memoirs. Back in the 1990s, former chief minister and presently a member of the elite Congress Working Committee (CWC) Luizinho Faleiro wrote a book called “My Goa”.

“It did not do very well. ‘My Goa’ sold around 600-odd copies I think then. I was the distributor for the book,” Ahmad said.

Parrikar himself is optimistic about the success of his still incomplete and unpublished book and even ‘decided’ what he would do with the money he rakes in from the sales.

“I will not keep the money which comes in for the book. I will probably donate it somewhere,” the chief minister said.

Jason Fernandes, a doctoral researcher and a regular Op-Ed columnist from Goa, says he certainly would line up to buy Parrikar’s book.

“Without a doubt Parrikar will go down in the annals of Goan history as one of its more prominent figures,” Fernandes said.

When asked if Parrikar, still in active politics, would have the gumption and rigour to be candid in his book, Fernandes said: “…this is precisely why we should wait in eager anticipation for this book”.

From Marlène Dietrich to Sophia Loren, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman and Elizabeth Taylor, the tome Stars in Dior reveals the most glamorous and elegant outfits worn by the stars of the silver screen.

With a preface by French film journalist Serge Toubiana, this art edition also includes actresses of the present like Natalie Portman, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Monica Bellucci, and of course, Charlize Theron, spokesmodel of the house’s “J’Adore” fragrance. The South American actress apprears in the work in a photo by Alexi Lubomirski.

Stars in Dior will be available from Rizzoli Editions this September priced at $65.00.

The book, The Amateur, written by Edward Klein, the former editor of the New York Times Magazine, portrays the First Lady as jealous of the access and influence the talk show host had over her husband. It also suggests Mrs Obama criticised Winfrey’s weight, the Telegraph reported.

Klein has claimed that despite an initially warm relationship, the friendship became fractured soon after Obama’s election victory.

According to the book, Valerie Jarrett and Desiree Rogers, advisers to Mrs Obama, became concerned at how close Oprah, whose support for Obama in 2008 was seen as vital, was becoming to the First Family.

The book mentions about an alleged disagreement the pair had over Mrs Obama’s childhood obesity campaign. The author has asserted that Oprah had offered to feature the campaign on her television show but was rebuffed by Mrs Obama.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the latest allegations, however a spokesman has earlier said that Klein had made up stories to sell his book.

“Nobody in their right mind would believe the nonsense in this one,” a spokesman said.

More than 2,000 people had signed up on Facebook by Saturday afternoon to take part in a “Test Walk with Poets and Writers” on Sunday in which the writers will stroll down Moscow boulevards to a camp set up by protesters.

Akunin said on Facebook that the event would test the authorities’ reaction after police detained more than 400 people on May 6 when a sanctioned opposition rally ended in violent confrontations on the eve of Putin’s inauguration Monday.

“Since it turns out that it is banned to walk along boulevards and public gardens, a group of desperate citizens, mainly writers, decided to go on a battle march,” he wrote, jokingly calling the participants “kamikadze.”

Moscow police have promised that they will not arrest people on the walk, scheduled to run from noon to 10 pm, as long as they do not break the law.

“If its participants do not breach the law, there is no basis for stopping such acts,” a police spokesperson told the Interfax news agency.

In a new tactic, protestors have set up a peaceful sit-in in a park with several thousand gathering on Friday evening. So far police have stood aside, but government spokesman Dmitry Peskov said this week that the event would be broken up because it was illegal.

Akunin, whose period detective novels have been translated into many languages, has attended opposition rallies and took part in a celebrity group that encouraged people to act as vote monitors at the presidential polls.

The 12 walkers leading the protest also include journalist and poet Dmitry Bykov, known for his satirical monologues on current affairs, and rock musician Andrei Makarevich, who backed billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov in the presidential polls.

Putin was inaugurated for his third term as Russia’s president on Monday.

Many opposition activists maintain the Russian strongman who has dominated the country for the past 12 years cheated his way to victory in March presidential elections.

The website, thisyathat.com, was launched on March 25 and compares prices of books on popular portals like Flipkart, uRead, HomeShop18 and stores like Landmark and Crossword, among others. Aneesh Satnaliwala, who founded the website with Shiv Kapoor and Gaurav Ragtah says, “The original idea for the website came from a discussion I had with Shiv.

In May 2011, we had an unpleasant experience ordering from an e-commerce store. Two days after receiving a book we found it at a cheaper price on another website. We realised that there are many different players in the online retail space and almost all of them have different prices and delivery time for the same book. Also, some of them offer the convenience of cash on delivery (COD), while others don’t”.

On ThisYaThat.com, you can either pick from the top-selling books across different categories or do a custom search. If you opt for the latter, enter the book title, the author name or the ISBN number. You can then see an updated list of prices and delivery times across a variety of online sellers and find out which of these sellers offer COD. The website offers real-time results, removing the need for sales alerts. Co-founder Shiv Kapoor says, “We have just added a small but important update to the site —the ability to browse bestsellers on the homepage.

This was one of the most requested features by our users. Our goal is to be the simplest and most intuitive way to buy books in the country. We will continue to add whatever helps us reach that goal.”

You Are Unique by APJ Abdul Kalam
uRead.com:        R197
Bookadda.com:     R231
Flipkart.com:     R242
Crossword:        R199
Landmark:         R276

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
uRead.com:        R530
Bookadda.com:     R538
Flipkart.com:     R629
Crossword:        R899
Landmark:          R611

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
uRead.com:        R235
Bookadda.com:     R243
Flipkart.com:     R239
Crossword:        Not listed
Landmark:         R259

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
uRead.com:        R207
Bookadda.com:     R234
Flipkart.com:     R245
Crossword:        R350
Landmark:         R234

The Immortals of Meluha by Amish Tripathi
uRead.com:        R115
Bookadda.com:     R117
Flipkart.com:     R137
Crossword:        R195
Landmark:         R127

Also out there
IndiaBookStore.net also offers a simple search engine for books across major Indian online stores. Meant to ease the process of finding the best deals and checking stock status and availability across stores, the website features the usual bookstore suspects like Flipkart, Crossword and Landmark. However, the interface isn’t user-friendly and needs tweaking.

As Satyamev Jayate has shown, daughters are not exactly much loved in India. Not at least when they are born. Or about to be born. Most fathers would actually prefer them unborn.

Luckily, I always wanted daughters and grew up with three. The experience was life-altering. So when I read Soumya Bhattacharya’s delightful collection of columns on fatherhood (reading them one by one in a newspaper is not quite the same experience) I was reminded of those years of my life. Trying to bring up a daughter (I brought up two at the same time) is exciting and much as I would like to believe otherwise, they brought me up better than I could have ever brought them up. My mother brought up my eldest daughter as I was in the midst of a somewhat messy divorce at the time and my ex-wife brought up my son. If this appears to suggest that Rina my present wife (no, not Rina my past wife) had nothing to do with the bringing up of my daughters, you are totally wrong. She believes it was she who brought them up. Both my daughters agree. At least, in her presence.

I guess I tried to make them who they are today. And they most certainly made me who I am. It was a runaway experience. Like Oishi, the central character of Soumya’s book, my daughters had no clue that I was trying to bring them up. In fact, they were deeply sympathetic and tried to hold my hand at every stage. If I pretended to be stern, they would cower and pretend to be frightened but I always knew they went inside their room to laugh their guts out. They knew exactly how much I loved them. So they were never scared of me. They were scared of Rina. For girls, even when they are in their pre-teens, know the difference between an indulgent father and a mother anxious to discipline and make them do well in studies.

Soumya’s book reminds me of those times. Bringing up Oishi reads like the most charming experience on earth and Soumya reinforces it with wit, warmth and wisdom, in descending order. The book never reads like a collection of journalistic pieces. It teaches you nothing at all about parenting. Nor does it provide you any answers to life’s questions. But it captures how beautiful the relationship between a father and a daughter can be, given half a chance. The point is: how many of us give it that chance?

The book is actually about three things. Two people who love each other — father and daughter in this case — try to figure each other out. Because of the difference in age, they see the world very differently. Oishi believes in tooth fairies and Santa Claus (actually she doesn’t but that’s another story.) Her father believes he needs to bring her up. But the relationship between the two is so riveting that the whole idea of parenting goes for a toss. They laugh, they argue, they seek. But neither of them tries to teach anything to the other except Sharapova’s backhand with a plastic tennis racket and a balloon that never bursts. And, oh yes, how to cheat in board games. Oishi wants to win every game and her father wants her to do so without figuring that he is giving the game away, which maybe easy in chess but not in snakes and ladders. So, both cheat, one to win and the other, to lose. This best sums up their relationship.

The second thing about this book, perhaps its most amusing part, is the art of reading and writing English as it ought to be. Soumya is constantly provoked by the improper usage of the English language (and reminds me of Malcolm Muggeridge’s comment that the last Englishman alive will be unquestionably a Bengali). He wants Oishi to be correct to a fault when it comes to language in a world driven by Hollywood and Corporate Speak. I would have loved to add journalism and social media to that list. Ever since Rupert Murdoch entered our lives, we seem to have lost sight of both journalistic ethics and the English language. The British Parliament is trying hard to correct the former. But language tends to walk down an irreversible course. Once corrupted, it’s almost impossible to set it right.

The third premise of this book is the celebration of sloth. Bertrand Russell’s adulation of idleness as a socially responsible goal seems to inspire Soumya who appears to endorse the fact that the morality of work is the morality of slaves and the modern world can well afford to do without it. The British industrial revolution ended more than a century back. So did the Empire. To still celebrate work as the very purpose of our existence, as Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic once did, seems horribly anachronistic. This is where the book shines, in its appraisal of what makes indolence the new aspiration of civilisation. Read this charming book.

Oishi is a lucky girl. She will grow up to read a book about how she brought up her father, as all pretty girls do, even as he kept mumbling about Rashomon and John Updike in his sleep. Yes, she is lucky. I quoted Lorca and Paul Eluard in my sleep and my daughters have never touched poetry since.

Pritish Nandy is a Mumbai-based filmmaker and writer

Soumya Bhattacharya is editor, Hindustan Times, Mumbai

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said Thursday that armed Hamas men cut off electricity, confiscated cameras and dispersed the event near Gaza City. Participants said that speakers at Wednesday night’s gathering had been critical of Hamas.

A number of Arab poets, writers and bloggers attended the conference. Among the participants was Alaa Abdel Fattah, a prominent Egyptian blogger who played a major role in last year’s uprising there.

Hamas officials declined to comment.

Even in the age of e-books and tablets, banning a book from a public library still carries weight because libraries still play such a vital role in providing people access to books.

“When a book is removed from the shelf, folks who can’t afford a Nook or a Kindle, the book is no longer available to them,” said Deborah Caldwell Stone, the deputy director of the American Library Association’s office for intellectual freedom.

“Fifty Shades of Grey,” a novel about bondage, wild sex and yes, love, has been called “mommy porn” because of its popularity among middle-aged women. It has become so well-known that “Saturday Night Live” performed a skit about it, joking that a Kindle with “Fifty Shades” uploaded on it was the perfect Mother’s Day gift.

This week, the steamy books hold the top three spots on the New York Times best-seller list.

Libraries in Wisconsin, Georgia and Florida have all either declined to order the book or pulled it from shelves. Other states may soon follow.

“It’s semi-pornographic,” said Don Walker, a spokesman for Brevard County, Fla., where the library put 19 copies of the book on the shelves then pulled the novel after reading reviews about it. Some 200 notices had to go out to people on a waiting list to read it.

Librarians in at least four Florida counties have declined to buy the book – even though hundreds of people have requested it. Reasons range from not having the money to poor reviews.

“It doesn’t suit our community standards,” said Cay Hohmeister, director of libraries for Leon County – where Florida’s capital, Tallahassee, is located.

In Gwinnett County, Ga., a suburb northeast of Atlanta, all 15 library branches will not carry the book.

“We do not collect erotica at Gwinnett County Public Library. That’s part of our materials management collection policy. So, E L James’ three books in the trilogy fit that description,” said Deborah George, the county library’s director of materials management.

A copy of “Fifty Shades” sits on George’s cluttered desk. Wedged in it are nearly a dozen yellow sticky notes at various pages of sultriness.

In a nutshell, here’s the plot: Anastasia Steele, a virgin who has just graduated college, meets Christian Grey, a rich and impeccably handsome young entrepreneur. Grey shows Steele his “playroom,” full of whips, ropes and sex toys, and asks her to sign a contract to be his “submissive” sex partner. Before Steele signs, the pair romp mostly around Seattle – where the novel is set – performing a stunning array of erotic activities. As the sex gets more daring and Steele’s emotions more tangled, drama ensues.

Here’s one of the milder excerpts from the book:

“But last night, in the playroom, you…” he trails off.

“I do it for you, Christian, because you need it. I don’t. You didn’t hurt me last night. That was in a different context, and I can rationalize that internally, and I trust you. But when you want to punish me, I worry that you’ll hurt me.

His gray eyes blaze like a turbulent storm. Time moves, and expands and slips away before he answers softly.

“I want to hurt you. But not beyond anything that you couldn’t take.”

Books with sexual content, and just as controversial as “Fifty Shades,” have long been – at least for a time – banned during their debuts. Gwinnett County, Ga., carries about a million books in its system, including the steamy passages from Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” and Vladimir Nabokov’s provocative “Lolita.” These and other novels have gone on to reach best-seller lists quickly, and some are taught in public classrooms.

Library collections should be diverse, the American Library Association said, but should also reflect what people want to read. And decisions on what to buy shouldn’t be based on content alone – budgetary constraints, shelf space and bad reviews all come into play.

A book’s provenance also can make a difference. Some libraries have policies against acquiring self-published books or books published by non-traditional means.

The “Fifty Shades” trilogy took a non-traditional route to its paperback form: the author self-published in e-reader form, and many people felt comfortable reading it on tablets because those devices kept the novel mostly private, unlike a hardcover book. It was also published by a small press in print-on-demand trade paperback editions.

Because of the books e-popularity, Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc., acquired the rights and published them April 3. So far, the books have sold 3 million copies in all formats, the publisher said, though it wasn’t clear how many were in paperback.

Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Random House, said Brevard County is engaging in censorship by taking the book off the shelves.

“We believe the Brevard County Public Library System is indulging in an act of censorship, and essentially is saying to library patrons: `We will judge what you can read,’” Bogaards wrote in an email.

Caldwell Stone said other libraries are in a gray area – no pun intended.

“All libraries have to make these kinds of decisions,” Caldwell Stone said. “It’s so hard to judge the decision to acquire or not acquire the book.”

To be sure, most major libraries in Florida and across the country are carrying the novel. The Pinellas County, Fla., library system has 30 copies and more than 650 people on a waiting list. Broward County carries 26 copies and has more than 730 people waiting.

Reviews of the book have been mixed. While The Guardian of London called it “jolly” and “eminently readable,” the U.K. newspaper The Telegraph said the writing was “appalling,” “hackneyed” and readers would have to wade through “pages of treacly clich?.”

Hohmeister said those kinds of reviews went into her decision not to buy the book for libraries around Tallahassee.

“It has not received what we would consider good reviews,” she said. “It doesn’t meet our selection criteria.”

Author Rosie Sultan, who has written a novel called ‘Helen Keller in Love’” inspired by a recent biography that suggested Keller became secretly engaged and tried to elope with the man she loved.

“I, like many people, had not really thought of her as a woman — with normal romantic and carnal desires,” ABC News quoted Sultan as writing in a blog for the Huffington Post.

Sultan picks up the story in 1916 when Keller is in her 30s, world-famous and an outspoken opponent of World War I and vocal supporter of women’s rights and contraception.

When her famous teacher and companion, Anne Sullivan, falls ill, Peter Fagan, a 29-year-old Boston Herald reporter is sent to be Keller’s private secretary.

In Sultan’s novel, the two fall in love as Fagan learns to finger-spell into Keller’s open palm and shares her passion for politics.

Soon, Keller is caught between loyalty to her family and teacher — who strongly believe, as did most of society then, that women with disabilities should not marry or even have sexual desires — and her yearning for love with Fagan.

After writing the book, Sultan said that perhaps Keller’s real untold story is how “her triumph over multiple disabilities and her enormous celebrity had trapped her within a constricting saintliness and an image of purity. Though she could speak up about equality, the rights of others — even, occasionally, sexuality — she was not granted the rights she sought for others.”

Rowling was handed a framed parchment certificate of her accolade Tuesday.

“I am prouder than I can say to be given the freedom of the City,” dailystar.co.uk quoted the popular writer as saying.

The freedom traditionally permits the recipient to be drunk and disorderly on the streets of the city without fearing arrest, and to drive sheep over London Bridge – but these privileges are mainly symbolic in modern times.

Shin, who was born in one of the six sprawling Gulag style no-exit political prisons located 55 miles (88 km) north of Pyongyang, is the new North Korean labour camp hero in award-winning writer and veteran journalist Blaine Harden’s latest bestseller, “Escape from Camp 14″.

The book has been hailed by the international media as one of the most “important and harrowing accounts of the North Korean Gulag”.

“The prisons were set up to eliminate perceived wrongdoers and scare everyone in the country. The persistence of concentration camps in North Korea is without precedent in world history. They have lasted as long as the Soviet Gulag,” Harden told IANS on e-mail.

One of the most militarised nations in the world, North Korea is ruled by a military dictatorship.

Harden said the “most recent estimates by the South Korean government is that there are about 150,000 prisoners in six labour camps”. But the US puts the number at 200,000, he said.

Shin, who survived torture and starvation, escaped from the notorious Camp 14 on a bleak winter evening in 2005 by clambering through a high-voltage fence using his dead friend Park’s body as a human shield to prevent electrocution.

He walked for a month through the snow, stealing his way through obscure towns – and then in the intrepid boxcar rail to the China border.

From there, Shin eventually reached South Korea, followed by a brief jaunt to America, where he spoke about his experiences with the help of a non-profit group, ‘Liberty in North Korea’.

However, the terror-stricken years in Camp 14 haunted his psyche.

The book explores Shin’s grisly existence of surviving on corn ears, cabbage, roasted rats, his beatings and torture burns in a rivetting yet simple journalistic narrative.

Harden said “in the last eight months, Shin has moved back to South Korea (from the US)where he has begun webcasting with other North Korean defectors”.

“A couple of times a week, he does a 90-minute programme that involves an interview and talking about his experiences. This has given him professional poise as a speaker – and a mission for his life. His emotional balance seems to have improved greatly in recent months,” he said.

Harden said “the camps have operated very much the same way since the 1960s – and are as bad as before”.

“In North Korea, paranoia was a natural response to real conditions and it helped these people (camp inmates) survive,” says clinical psychologist Kim Heekyung in the book.

But North Korea remains unfazed in the face of international outcry.

“It does not respond to (trade) sanctions because a major patron is China, which continues to provide it with fuel, food and goods. The North Korean leadership has staunchly resisted the kind of market reforms that had remade China,” Harden said.

The state controlled economy, “however, essentially collapsed after the1990s, with the end of subsidies from the former Soviet Union”, Harden said.

“In the place of state system for food distribution, there is now a scruffy system of street markets that is tolerated by the North Korean government because it has become the primary means for people to find food and clothing and other essentials,” he said.

Harden said China puts up with North Korea “apparently because it wants a buffer between its border and a US-allied South Korea – and because it does not want to deal with a flood of poor starving North Koreans in the event the government at Pyongyang were to collapse,” the writer said.

The book, “Escape from Camp 14″ has been published by Pan Macmillan.

He was 83.

“He died on Tuesday in Danbury, Connecticut. The cause was complication from a recent stroke,” Erin Crum, at HarperCollins in New York, told AFP.

Critics say it is impossible to imagine children’s literature without Sendak, whose whimsical works penned throughout a 60-year career have been read by millions and translated into dozens of languages.

Although the 1963 “Where The Wild Things Are” is the best known, he penned and illustrated nearly 50 books, including the acclaimed “Little Bear” series.

Memorable works include “Pierre” about a mischievous, quarrelsome child whose constant refrain throughout the book is “I don’t care!”

Other perennial favorites are “Really Rosie,” “In the Night Kitchen,” and “Outside Over There.”

He won the prestigious Caldecott prize for children’s literature, the Newbery medal, the international Hans Christian Andersen Award, a National Book Award, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and a National Medal of Arts.

President Barack Obama read “Where the Wild Things Are” to children at the annual White House Easter egg roll on April 9, mimicking the monsters in a loud voice.

The apex court on May 4 had postponed the hearing of Nupur’s bail petition in the Aarushi-Hemraj murder case. The court had also deferred hearing the review plea filed by Nupur and Rajesh Talwar to quash trial proceedings against them.

Nupur Talwar, a dentist like her husband, was brought to court from the jail where she has been staying for nearly 10 days, after two different courts rejected her request for bail.

An official at the jail said that she is planning to write a book called ‘Story of an Unfortunate Mother’, through which she hopes the truth will manifest.

Aarushi Talwar, 13, was found with her throat slit in her bedroom in May 2008.  The initial suspect was the family’s missing domestic help, Hemraj, a man from Nepal.   But he was discovered dead on the Talwars’ terrace hours later.  The murder weapons used to kill Aarushi and Hemraj were never found.  In 2010, the CBI asked for permission to close the case because it did not have enough evidence to formally charge anyone with the double murder.  Despite that statement, the CBI said it believed that Rajesh Talwar was guilty.  The judge handling the case in Ghaziabad then said that the Talwars would be tried for murder, criminal conspiracy and destruction of evidence.