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.

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?

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.

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.

Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion. She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another's hair. Past a cellphone blaring rap songs. And past a substitute teacher sitting in a near-daze. Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework. "No wonder you're going to Harvard," a girl teased her. Around here, Khadijah is known as "Harvard girl," the "smart girl" and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago. What students don't know is that she is also a homeless girl.

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.

Casey Kasem, who gained a national radio audience after "American Top 40" launched in 1970, and his wife, Jean, are listing their Westside estate for sale at $42 million. With 12,000 square feet of living space, seven bedrooms and nine bathrooms, the home has been the site of intimate interviews and sleepovers for as many as 20 youngsters a night. The yard has served as the site of elaborate celebrity-studded gatherings and paintball battles. The syndicated radio host bought the property for Jean Kasem in 1989 as a gift.

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.

E.L. Konigsburg, who was one of the few children's authors to twice win the Newbery Medal, died Friday at a hospital in Falls Church, Va. She was 83. Konigsburg had a stroke the week before she died, said her son Paul. She won the Newbery Medal, one of the top honors for children's literature, in 1968 for the book "From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" and again in 1997 for "The View from Saturday. " Her first book, "Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth" was also a Newbery honor book in 1968 but lost out to "Mrs.

Is it any surprise that on a warm spring day, thousands of Southern Californians went in search of a good book - and a chance to meet the person who wrote it? Not to Susan Burton, a retired school librarian from Fontana, who was among the crowds that converged Sunday morning on the USC campus for the final day of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. "I think this is a fabulous place to be," she said as she stood in line with a friend to hear a discussion about crime writing with former L.A. Deputy Dist.

Name your favorite, the one book that most sticks in your mind. Over nearly four years, photographer Catherine Wagner made that request of friends, acquaintances and outright strangers. She kept a tally on her iPhone and turned the top vote-getters into the spine of her latest work, "trans/literate," an homage to books - the cardboard and paper sort that some predict won't survive the 21st century. The list of titles and authors reads like an exceptionally weighty version of English 101. "Most people went back to their teenage years, to high school or college," Wagner said.

SACRAMENTO - California has been flooded with revenue this tax season and is on track to finish the fiscal year with a surplus of billions of dollars, according to officials. State coffers contain about $4.5 billion more than expected in personal income tax payments. Nearly $2.8 billion of it arrived April 17, the third-highest single-day collection in California history, according to government figures. Business taxes have also rebounded and are likely to be $200 million ahead of projections.

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.

Festival of Books What: Rob Roberge is on the panel "Fiction: True Grit" in conversation with Frank Bill, James Greer and Joshua Mohr, moderated by Jim Ruland. Where: Annenberg Auditorium, USC When: 2 p.m. Sunday Price: Free. Tickets are available online. There is a $1 service fee applied to each ticket reserved. Information: latimes.com/festivalofbooks