Books

Phil Jackson never liked to compare Kobe Bryant to Michael Jordan. Believe me, I tried everything. Sometimes I'd ask him after random Lakers practices or before games against Charlotte, the team Jordan owned. Or after games in Chicago, where nostalgia hopefully would add to the mix. There would be a little nugget here, a tiny nibble there, but nothing that mattered. It's coming out now, though, in Jackson's 339-page memoir co-written with Hugh Delehanty and available Tuesday: "Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success.

Bernard Waber, 91, the author of such children's favorites as "The House on East 88th Street" and "Lyle, Lyle Crocodile," died Thursday at his Long Island, N.Y., home after a long illness, according to a statement from his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Waber debuted as an author in 1962 with "The House on East 88th Street. " The book introduced readers to the lovable Lyle, first spotted in a bathtub in an Upper East Side brownstone. Lyle's story continued in "Lyle Finds His Mother," "Lyle and the Birthday Party" and other works.

Often considered the most popular entertainer of the 20th century--his extravagant performances set still-unchallenged attendance records--Liberace (dubbed "Mr. Showman" in tribute to his flashy theatricality) sued a London columnist in 1956 for implying he was gay. He won.

Phil Jackson never liked to compare Kobe Bryant to Michael Jordan. Believe me, I tried everything. Sometimes I'd ask him after random Lakers practices or before games against Charlotte, the team Jordan owned. Or after games in Chicago, where nostalgia hopefully would add to the mix. There would be a little nugget here, a tiny nibble there, but nothing that mattered. It's coming out now, though, in Jackson's 339-page memoir co-written with Hugh Delehanty and available Tuesday: "Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success.

Anyone who has booked a last-minute flight knows you pay more when you wait. But you also pay more if you book too early. What's too early? What's too late? Pity the poor fare geek trying to hit that elusive sweet spot. Discount travel site Cheapair.com has crunched a year's worth of booking data and found some answers to these and other eternal travel questions, including: - Best time to book a domestic flight? Seven weeks in advance. - Best time to book an international flight?

Michele and Russell Poland's credit was shot, but they managed to buy their suburban dream home anyway. After a business bankruptcy and a home foreclosure, they turned to a rare option in this era of tightfisted banking - a subprime loan. The Polands paid nearly $10,000 in upfront fees for the privilege of securing a mortgage at 10.9% interest. And they had to raid their retirement account for a 35% down payment. Most borrowers would balk at such stiff terms. But with prices rising, the Polands wanted to snag a four-bedroom home in Temecula near top-rated schools for their 5-year-old son. By later this year, they figure, they'll be able to refinance into a standard loan.

You've heard about the "Wheat Belly" diet, right? Well, technically, it doesn't exist. Dr. William Davis points out that the word "diet" does not appear on either the cover of his bestselling "Wheat Belly" book published in 2011 or on the follow-up, "Wheat Belly Cookbook," which was published last month and already tops bestseller lists. And that omission is intentional, Davis said. "Wheat Belly" is about stripping your plate of a substance that contributes to heart disease, causes joint pain, inflammation, foggy thinking, bloating and much more, Davis said.

You can do a lot with smartphones these days, but unless you're downloading the best apps for your device, you aren't really using it to its full potential. So if you aren't sure what to download, just make sure you have these 10 apps on your iPhone or Android device. Google Maps This app comes preinstalled on Android devices and should be the first app downloaded on iPhones. Besides top-notch design, the app is the best free voice navigation app for driving directions.

Trial judges are, on the books, elected officials, and even the vast majority of those whose names never appear on a ballot are subject to election challenge every six years. Should voters not call them to account for their performance, as they do with any other politician, on election day? Should they not encourage opponents to challenge incumbent judges? Or are judges different from members of Congress or city councils? Judges are most definitely different. The last thing we want or need in California is trial judges who sit on the bench with one eye on justice and the other on how any particular ruling is going to play with the public.

Reading Rudolph Wurlitzer's novels is like watching a road movie backward. In his 1969 underground classic, "Nog," the narrator drifts across an amorphous terrain on which his shifting identity molds itself like soft clay. Rather than buttressing his sense of self, the journey seems to dissolve it, until what remains is something close to undifferentiated consciousness. "Flats" and "Quake," which followed "Nog" in rapid succession, mine much the same territory, a post-cataclysmic landscape in which heroic storytelling has been blown to bits.

By the time she was 10, Samantha Mae Coyiuto was a published author in the Philippines. By the time she was 16, she had four children's books published. Now she's 18 and goes by just Mae and is a student at Pomona-Pitzer, where she plays for the women's tennis team, ranked No. 10 in NCAA Division III. Playing mostly No. 2 in singles as a freshman this year, Coyiuto is 21-5, best on the team. No one else on the team has more than 13 singles wins. She rarely plays doubles but is 4-1 when she does.

Question: As a human resources consultant, I sometimes receive travel inquiries from one of my clients. Here is one: An employee, using a company credit card, purchased a $1,200 airline ticket for a business trip. The ticket is in her name and is nontransferable. She then resigned from the company, and the company (which is paying for the ticket) contacted the airline. The airline initially told them there was no problem but later said no changes (regardless of fees paid) could be made to the ticket and even added the comment "Guess you just gave your former employee a nice trip.

Somewhere between her Chilean family's life-or-death political realities and its intuitive, fantastical imagination is where Isabel Allende writes. Where she lives is the Bay Area, arriving in California about 25 years ago with a famous surname she's gone on to burnish, novel by novel. As perhaps befits an emigre author, Allende's books are routinely translated into two dozen languages. Here she muses in English about what the future of the written word holds for authors like her, and for the readers who love them.

Can a value-hunting traveler truly be loyal to loyalty programs? Name : CooBoutique.com What it does: Rewards you with cash back for booking luxury hotels through its website and rewards points for sharing with your social network. What's hot: Cash is hot. I liked seeing how much cash other users were getting for their bookings as I was searching for hotels in the U.S. And when I looked up the member page (free), I saw that I could earn as much as 4% on my bookings.

Jason Segel is taking his goofy sensibility and packaging it for middle-schoolers in the form of a three-book deal with Random House, the company announced Wednesday. The first installment of "Nightmares!," co-written with “The Eternal Ones” author Kirsten Miller, is due out next year, the publisher said in a news release . Segel first turned his inspiration, an adventure about kids who have to save their town from fear, into a screenplay, according to CBS News . That got stuck in turnaround, but the "How I Met Your Mother" actor bought back the rights recently and converted the screenplay concept into a three-part book series.

Before her panel at the L.A. Times Festival of Book, journalist and author Amy Wilentz dropped in at our video booth to talk about how she came to write her latest book, "Farewell, Fred Voodoo. " Written after Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake, this book, she explains wryly, "is about what happens when outsiders come to help you. " Wilentz's history of traveling to and writing about Haiti goes back more than 20 years, she tells L.A. Times staff writer Carolyn Kellogg. "I didn't want to go back," she says.

In brief remarks Wednesday to the annual meeting of the Assn. of American Publishers in New York, First Lady Laura Bush called books her "greatest love affair" and warned that a "nation that does not read for itself cannot think for itself." Bush, a former librarian whose advocacy of books and literacy have long made her popular in the publishing industry, cited such fictional characters as the Brothers Karamazov and "an intriguing man named Gatsby" and worried that many Americans had never heard of them.

SEATTLE -- For all of Neal Stephenson's achievements, his most impressive may be his ability to attract a following equal parts hacker and literati. His popularity is all the more anomalous because his books are always long and often difficult. His last project, "The Baroque Cycle," was a fictional trilogy about the birth of capitalism and the history of science, set partly in 17th century London, stretching almost 2,700 pages and written with a fountain pen. His ambitious new novel, "Anathem," imagines a world dominated by casinos, shopping malls and tire shops -- except for the walled monasteries where the devout gather to contemplate big issues in the shadow of a clock that runs for thousands of years.

A.S. King won the L.A. Times book prize for young adult literature with "Ask the Passengers" on Friday night. Wearing the same high green boots Saturday morning, she stopped by our video booth at the L.A. Times Festival of Books to talk with features editor Alice Short about the inspiration for her young adult novel. "'Ask the Passengers' was born out of 25 years of thinking about being a questioning teenager. It also was born of a habit I've had since I was a very young girl. I used to lay in my backyard -- my yard was in the middle of a cornfield -- so I would lie there in the afternoon and watch the airplanes fly overhead," King says.

Take a walk in certain corners of Southern California this evening and you might find someone trying to give you a book. It will be free. And it will also be a very good book. Shirley is going to the pier and beach in Venice, to give away copies of “My Antonia” by Willa Cather, to fishermen and surfers and anyone else who's interested. Hope, from Beverly Hills, is going to her nearest Department of Veterans Affairs facility to pass out copies of Sandra Cisneros' “The House on Mango Street” to veterans.