Books

The Ku Klux Klan was rising again. Segregation was the law and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was not even born yet. Amid the terror and oppression, civil rights pioneer W.E.B. DuBois published a groundbreaking book in 1924 that challenged the stereotypes of African Americans and documented their rarely recognized achievements.

"Purple in the grays. Vermillion in the orange shadows, on a cold, fine day." -- Pierre Bonnard, from his notebooks -- Manhattan in a winter storm seems galaxies away from Bonnard's bright interiors. I carry an exhibition catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Elie Wiesel's office in Midtown.

Publishers and authors now have the power to silence the Kindle 2 e-book reader. Amazon.com Inc. reversed course Friday on the device's controversial text-to-speech feature, which reads digital books aloud in a robotic voice. The company gave rights holders the ability to disable the feature for individual titles. The Kindle 2, which shipped this week, is a faster and smaller version of Amazon's gadget. It can hold more than 1,500 books and has 25% more battery life than its predecessor.

Two of three respondents to a British poll have lied about reading books they have not, and George Orwell's "1984" tops the literary fib list, according to results published Thursday. Commissioned by the organizers of World Book Day, an annual celebration of reading in Britain, the study also shows that the author people really enjoy reading is J.K. Rowling, creator of the bestselling Harry Potter wizard series. The main reason for lying given by the 1,342 people surveyed was to impress others.

Layoff notices, bank failures and plummeting stock markets seem to fill every minute of our newscasts and every corner of our consciences. What a time to be selling a book with this cheery thesis: The disastrous war in Iraq probably must continue to prevent further disaster. You'd have to be hopelessly out of touch, a tad delusional -- or a crackerjack journalist on a mission -- to come out with a winner like that, as Thomas E. Ricks has.

"How will Manny do this year? I think Manny will thrive." So said a woman who should know, psychologist Jean Rhodes, speaking by phone from a restaurant near Fenway Park. "Los Angeles, the way it's relaxed out there, the way people give him space, the fans . . . perfect fit." Here in L.A., where he has been charming and superlative and nothing less, we like to think we know Manny Ramirez, like to believe we have a fix on him. But honestly, we don't.

Three weeks after the release of Amazon.com's Kindle 2, Sony Corp. -- the first major company to introduce an electronic book device, the Sony Reader -- said it would offer customers half a million public domain books that have been optimized by Google Inc. These books, which will join the 100,000 or so available for purchase at the Sony bookstore and other sites, will be free and searchable by title, author and topic.

Cage fighting. It's a concept that, to most people, evokes brutality, violence, lawlessness, outlaw behavior. It certainly doesn't suggest anything redeeming. Two men entering an octagonal ring surrounded by chain-link and beating each other until one can't stand up anymore; that's not a sport, that's gladiator stuff. That's the end of civilization. These people don't know Pat Miletich, Iowa-born former mixed martial arts champion and hero of sportswriter L.

Producer-director Brett Ratner is adding publisher to his list of credits. The Hollywood hyphenate intends to release three books today through his publishing company, Rat Press. The softcover books -- on Marlon Brando, Robert Evans and Jim Brown -- are the first in a series of planned releases of out-of-print books about filmmakers and filmmaking.

Here's how Lawrence Weschler sees it: "The world as it is," he writes in his 2004 collection of essays and reportage, "Vermeer in Bosnia," "is overdetermined: the web of all those interrelationships is dense to the point of saturation. . . . If I were somehow to be forced to write a fiction about, say, a make-believe Caribbean island, I wouldn't know where to put it, because the Caribbean as it is is already full -- there's no room in it for any fictional islands.