Congratulations go out to Peter Morton Coan, whose book Toward a Better Life: America’s New Immigrants in Their Own Words was just picked up by Prometheus Books.

Long before Arizona passed its highly controversial immigration law last week, immigration has been one of the nation’s hottest and most contentious issues, with a recent CNN/Gallup poll showing that 69 percent of Americans favor less immigration. And rarely a day goes by without major newspapers & periodicals running immigration related pieces. Even President Obama couldn’t escape this issue as last year his aunt was accused of being an illegal alien and was subjected to an immigration hearing to determine her status.

When we think of immigration, we often think of Ellis Island, but while 16 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island in its 62 years of operation, since then more than 75 million immigrants have crossed our borders, including as many as 10 million illegally. Today nearly a quarter of the US population are immigrants, more than at any time since World War II. More than 900,000 immigrants became U.S. citizens in 2008 while the INS detained or deported more than 40,000, another record.
Peter Morton Coan’s previous book, Ellis Island Interviews, was an attempt to record the stories of the last surviving immigrants who came through Ellis Island from 1892-1954. The book offered the accounts of immigrants’ lives in their own words, oral histories told by the men, women and children who lived them. Toward a Better Life will utilize the same approach and will be the first book to offer a comprehensive anthology of oral histories about American immigrants from the Ellis Island era right up to today.

Clearly this is a story for our time. What all immigrants share in common is the desire for freedom: to improve one’s lot in life. Few subjects remain as controversial and emotionally charged – and central to being an American – as immigration, and in the great tradition of Studs Terkel, Toward a Better Life will provide a forum for immigrants of all kinds to tell their stories in their own words.

Men are complex creatures. Half the time we can’t remember our wedding anniversaries or our childrens’ birthdays, but we have no trouble remembering Derek Jeter’s slugging percentage with two outs and runners in scoring position or quoting obscure lines from The Big Lebowski. We can’t find the time to mow the lawn or shop (online) for our wives’ birthday presents, but somehow we still find 18 hours a week to analyze our fantasy football teams. And every one of us still thinks – in his own self-deceiving way – that we’re just as cool as we ever were.

Of course, the only thing worse than a clueless man is a clueless man with a bruised ego, so what to do? Enter Dan Consiglio’s Of Course You’re Still Cool, Honey: And 75 More Lies to Keep Your Aging Man Happy, which combines “oh, that’s unfortunate…” photos of guys being guys with witty, satirical lies that any woman can use to keep the goofy man in their life happy. The result is hilarious, even if a little painfully close to home.

Adams Media, a division of F+W Media, Inc. will publish Of Course You’re Still Cool, Honey next year. In the meantime, Dan’s first book, The New Dad A-Z will be coming out from Andrews McMeel next month. Congratulations, Dan!

Congratulations go out to Mark Stephen Meadows on the sale of his fascinating book We, Robot to Lyons Press.

When the Terminator said, “I’ll be back” he wasn’t kidding around. In fact, he’s been waddling about on the battlefields of Iraq since 2007. The problem, though (aside from the fact that he’s a robot assassin), is that he still needs some debugging; when he gets stuck or falls over – as he does from time to time – he can’t figure out who the bad guy is, and so he starts shooting at his friends.

In December of 2008 the US Navy’s research division received an extensive report titled Autonomous Military Robotics: Risk, Ethics, and Design.  The authors of the report discuss a rather mysterious 2008 event in Iraq in which several American-made robots armed with machine guns malfunctioned and opened fire on ‘friendly’ US soldiers. The authors also point to a 2007 incident when an autonomous “robotic cannon deployed by the South African army malfunctioned, killing nine ‘friendly’ soldiers and wounding 14 others.” The authors outline how hard it is to stop potentially fatal chains of events caused by autonomous military systems, or even systems in cities, homes, and schools that “…process information and can act at speeds incomprehensible to us.” They then coolly conclude, “It would be naive to think such accidents will not happen again.”

What was probably logical, and most interesting about the report, was the advice that was given to address the ethical and moral problems that can occur on the robot-occupied battlefield; give the robots a sense of ethics and morality. But the report takes a turn for the bizarre when the authors offer Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics, from the science fiction novel, I, Robot to solve the problem. They offer science fiction as a guiding light by which the US Navy can navigate the rather foggy waters of ethics, war, and autonomous robots. When roboticists for the military begin to rely on science fiction as a solution for their work, we have something worth noticing.

Science fiction has always influenced engineering (the term “Robot” came from Science Fiction) but now science fiction is taking the lead, directing robotics research. While robots have always been the children of science fiction, they don’t just live on faraway battlefields anymore. Science fiction has guided engineering fact. This means that we can now look at science fiction and determine where engineering will go. By doing this we can not only learn more about the world of robots that are emerging and surrounding us but we can also understand where this powerful technology is at, predict what is coming, perceive new industries, learn new trends, and anticipate new problems.

We, Robot will introduce readers to the latest discoveries in robotics and artificial intelligence by looking at science fiction universes (Blade Runner, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, etc) and robot residents (Wall-E, Iron Man, Terminator, Robocop, HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I, Robot, to name a few), and will show readers how close they are to becoming a reality. It will also categorize them by which will appear earlier than others, which won’t happen for another 50 years, and which ones just won’t happen at all. Through a discussion of robots loved and hated by millions it will provide an informed, entertaining, and often surprising look at what to expect in the next decade as well as in the next year.

Congratulations go out to Mike Kimel and Michael Kanell on the sale of their book The Facts: How Democratic & Republican Presidents Really Perform on the Issues that Matter Most, to Black Dog & Leventhal.

One of the most vexing things about discussing any aspect of politics is that there’s so much information (and disinformation) out there that it seems almost impossible to pin anything down. Even economists (i.e. people who should theoretically know) often can’t answer the most basic of questions, such as which president produced the most growth (nope, not Reagan - he was 3rd), or which president has been the worst with the national debt. And when you start to look at other issues, such as which presidents had the highest crime and abortion rates, which presidents performed best with the value of the dollar, or with health insurance and home ownership - you can forget about reaching any kind of consensus.

That’s where The Facts comes in. The authors have come up with a terrific concept wherein they look at more than 40 different issues people care about. They go back half a century (beginning with the Eisenhower administration) and use only government sources for the stats they provide. They also provide all their sources and show readers exactly what they’re doing. They even encourage the reader to get involved and look at the numbers for themselves, and once the book is published they’ll even have a website that will serve as a repository for all the information in the book. That way there’s no massaging of the numbers and no political bias whatsoever. Then they rank the presidents and talk about who did well, who did poorly, and why.

A lot of very fascinating things come out in the book. For instance, the presidents who produced the greatest growth (Real GDP per capita) were JFK & LBJ, followed by Clinton and then Reagan (who were just about tied, with Clinton getting the edge) and then Carter (yes, Carter). And overall, when you look back as far as Ike, Democratic presidents have performed much better in producing growth than Republicans, which most people find surprising. There are a lot of other fascinating things as well, such as the Clinton administration actually having one of the lowest abortion rates.

Mike Kimel taught both Economics and Advanced Statistics in the Graziado School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University for five years, ran the internal consulting group and developed competitive strategies for a Fortune 500 telecom company, and worked for a Big 4 accounting firm. His co-author is Michael Kanell, an economics writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Kanell has been a journalist for 25 years and has appeared on CNBC and NPR.

Black Dog & Leventhal has also brought in a fantastic illustrator named Nigel Holmes, who has produced beautiful & informative graphics for clients such as Wired, CNN, Discover, Time magazine, the Atlantic, Details, and dozens of others.

Congratulations go out to Douglas Gayeton on the sale of his beautiful book, SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town, which has been acquired by Welcome Books, publishers of a  number of  fantastic illustrated books such as  American Farmer and The Oxford Project.

PBS originally contacted Douglas when he was living in the Northern Italian town of Pistoia (near Florence) and asked if he’d be interested in documenting Italy’s burgeoning Slow Food movement. Gayeton told PBS that most Italians didn’t know what Slow Food was, but since their lives exemplified the principles that define the movement, why not document the lives of the people of Pistoia?

Gayeton added handwritten notes to the resulting photos, initially to remind him of the things he’d seen and heard, but he quickly realized that telling his subject’s stories with words and phrases added enormous power to the images themselves. PBS agreed and the resulting website was named Best Broadband website of the year. You can see some of the photos here: http://www.gayeton.com/photoworks/ When you see the images you may notice that each one is not a single picture, but is instead made up of many different images (sometimes dozens) taken over a period that sometimes stretched out over several weeks. It produces an effect that some critics have called “flat film” for its ability to compress time and add an almost narrative flow to the final image.

Douglas’ images were also featured in a retrospective at Slow Food Nation, the Slow Food movement’s first ever event in the US, where over the three days of the event more than 50,000 people passed through the exhibit. Both Alice Waters (bestselling author and famed founder of Chez Panisse) and Carlo Petrini (the founder of the Slow Food movement), will contribute to SLOW, which will be the definitive book capturing both the rapidly disappearing charm of small town life in Italy and the principles that define the Slow Food movement.

Douglas and his terrific editors at Welcome Books are already well underway on the book, which will be published this Fall and distributed by Random House. Congratulations, Douglas!

Since Publishers Weekly let the cat out of the bag here I wanted to pass along my congratulations to Kevin Poulsen on the sale of his book Kingpin: How One Hacker Took over the Billion Dollar Cyber Crime Underground, which was acquired by editor Julian Pavia over at Crown (a division of Random House).

For anyone not already familiar with Kevin Poulsen, he’s the the editor and lead writer for Wired.com’s “Threat Level” blog, the 24th most popular blog in the world and picked as one of Time magazine’s Top 25 Blogs of 2008. Poulsen is also one of the world’s best known (reformed) hackers himself, having already been the subject of a book about his life called, Watchman: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen, published by Little, Brown in 1997.

For the January 09 issue of Wired, Kevin wrote a fantastic feature article about Max Butler, a former $100/hour security consultant and frequent ally of the FBI’s computer crime squad, who had not only turned to crime, but in an almost unbelievably audacious move had completed a hostile takeover of the entire worldwide market in stolen credit cards, leaving him in sole control over a billion dollar criminal underground.

When I first spoke to Kevin about the possibility of digging more even more deeply into Butler’s story and covering it at book length, he said that not only had he already been thinking about it, but also that in all the stories he had seen through the years this was the first one he had ever wanted to write a book about. Forget everything you know about hackers. No longer are they isolated loners cracking websites from their parents’ basements, or misguided geniuses breaking into the Pentagon for kicks. Today they are fully formed criminal enterprises planning and executing cybercrimes on a scale never seen before.

This modern, international world of electronic organized crime has not had a proper treatment in book form and Max Butler’s story provides a perfect vehicle for exploring this culture. Kingpin will detail exactly how Max Butler did it, as well as how the FBI finally caught him, and what in his early life had led him to that point. Kingpin will also will also provide a never before seen exploration into the worldwide market in organized cybercrime and fraud that impacts 1 in 3 Americans and costs companies billions of dollars every year. Kevin’s Wired feature was terrific (check it our here if you haven’t seen it) and I certainly can’t read the book!

Congratulations go out to Chris Guillebeau, the creative force behind The Art of Nonconformity on the sale of his book to Perigee (part of Penguin Putnam).

In June of this year, Chris Guillebeau wrote a short booklet called A Brief Guide to World Domination and released it online as a pdf. Within weeks tens of thousands of people downloaded it, the New York Times wrote about it in its Shifting Careers column, Seth Godin endorsed it, and literally hundreds of bloggers got behind it. The booklet has now been downloaded more than 100,000 times in over 60 different countries.

The book will greatly expand upon the ideas first sketched out in that booklet with the goal of challenging readers’ assumptions about how we live and work, as well as to inspire them to create their own ideal life, live where they want, do work that’s deeply meaningful to them, and to change the world in a positive way at the same time.

For many that may involve leaving their 9-5 behind to travel or volunteer, or moving to some exotic locale in order to do the kind of work they’ve always dreamed about. However, unlike some other titles I’ve seen that offer the promise, but come up short on showing readers exactly how to make it happen, Chris’ book will provide a complete, detailed road map showing readers how to actually achieve their goals.

Chris can show readers the way because he lives that way himself, having spent four years in West Africa doing volunteer work and traveling to more than 100 countries around the world, with the goal of visiting every country in the world by the time he’s 35 – all while running his own micro-business and making a positive contribution to the world around him.

Chris wrote a blog post about the sale of the book and his plans going forward, which you can read here. Congratulations, Chris!

Congratulations go out to Jon Jeter, whose book Flat Broke in the Free Market will be released by W.W. Norton in May. Jon’s terrific editor over at Norton (Alane Mason) just informed us that Jon has received a starred review in this week’s Publisher’s Weekly, which says “Jeter’s stinging criticisms are a catalyst for a truthful and painful discussion about who a ‘global economy’ helps and who it destroys.” Check out the complete review at Publisher’s Weekly. It’s the fifth book from the top.

After Dr. Linda F. Palmer gave birth to her son in 1995 she found herself having to deal with his severe health complications and was astounded by the lack of accurate or helpful information from doctors or books. So Dr. Palmer dug into the scientific and medical research herself and discovered huge conflicts between what’s found scientifically and what’s standard protocol in pediatric offices. That research also led to the writing of a book called Baby Matters that Dr. Palmer initially published through a small press and then later self-published, selling more than 7,000 copies along the way.

The book garnered rave reviews, with people such as Katie Allison Granju, author of Attachment Parenting (Atria) calling the book:

“An instant classic. A must-read for all parents. Dr. Palmer’s book is the best book on the hard science behind attachment parenting that I’ve ever read. I plan to make it a baby give for every pregnant friend. I wish I had read this book before I became a mother. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It’s the most exciting new book on parenting that I’ve read in a number of years.”

Baby Matters provides parents with solid scientific evidence that supports natural parenting practices, rebuts cry-it-out parenting and the frequent usage of various drugs and vaccinations in children, reveals common (yet seldom diagnosed) food intolerance symptoms – even foods from mom’s diet – and tells parents how to treat them. The book also discloses the real causes of ear infections, colic, reflux, ADHD & SIDS, and describes exactly how breastfeeding and formula feeding can produce vastly different mental and physical health outcomes for a baby. Already a favorite among lactation consultants, Baby Matters is one of the most powerfully persuasive and informative “why-to” healthy parenting books to date.

We’ve just resold the rights to re-publish the book to SourceBooks, Inc., and a new edition of the book will be published in Fall 2009 under the title, The Baby Bond: The New Science Behind What’s Really Important When Caring for Your Baby. Congratulations(!) go out to Linda on the sale of the book, along with our thanks and best wishes as she continues in her mission to provide parents with the best information possible in caring for our children.

A few months back I received a query and a copy of a self-published book called A Tongue in the Sink, by an author named Dennis Fried, Ph.D. I took a look at the book and thought the writing was funny and insightful, but when I read the query that came along with it I noticed a sort of off-hand comment the author made, saying that he had previously self-published a book called Memoirs of a Papillon that had sold 20,000 copies. So like any good agent I immediately called him and said, “That’s the book I want to see.”

Dennis sent me a copy and I immediately fell in love with it. As a book ‘barktated’ to its human by a 7 pound dog named after a butterfly, you’d expect it to be cute, and probably a little too cute. However, as Genevieve covered the tragedy of doorbells in commercials, how to measure the intelligence of humans (the results are not encouraging), finding a reason for cats, bending your human to your will, converting your house into an agility course, dominating the doggie park, and flunking out of obedience school with style, her snarky sense of humor absolutely won me over.

For me a good test of how much I love a book is how relentlessly I tell my wife little bits and pieces of it. And after reading her at least 12 or 15 sections from Memoirs of a Papillon and laughing ourselves silly, she finally snatched it out of my hand and read it for herself (definitely a more efficient way of getting to the material, but a lot less fun for me…). Simon & Schuster ended up feeling the same way and snapped the book up immediately via their Simon & Schuster Entertainment division. It will be released as a small hardcover next year under the title Small Dog, Big Life. Pick it up if you get a chance. I guarantee you’ll enjoy it.