Sunbelt in the News

Click Here to listen to Ron Pastore, author of Jesse James' Secret, on Coast to Coast radio.

Click Here to read the full article at USA Today online.

Is there hope for small bookstores in a digital age?
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

RHINEBECK, N.Y. — Don't tell Suzanna Hermans that cozy, well-stocked bookstores such as hers have no future during a digital age in which e-books are just a click away.

"I know people think of independent bookstores as struggling underdogs," says Hermans, co-owner and manager of Oblong Books in this picturesque Hudson Valley town. "But if I was struggling, I wouldn't be expanding." She's about to break through a brick wall to enlarge her children's section "for my customers of the future."

By emphasizing service, her store's popularity as a community gathering spot and even a new — and somewhat counterintuitive — plan to help her customers order e-books, Hermans, 26, is betting that her small store will continue to buck prevailing winds in the book business.

Click Here to see cycling guide author Nelson Copp interviewed by Whitney Southwick on NBC San Diego.

Click Here to read this article at SignonSanDiego.com

Picturing paradise: La Jolla book zooms in on the local
The author says San Diegans have strikingly close ties to their neighborhoods

By John Wilkens

Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 9 p.m.

Born in France, Olivier Dalle has traveled much of the world: Africa, Asia, South America. He lived in the Middle East for four years, in Washington D.C. for three.

When he moved to San Diego in 2003, he was struck by how deeply people care about their individual neighborhoods here - more so, he said, than they do about the city as a whole.

“It seems that since the United States is such a large and in many ways standardized country, with very similar large retail chains and suburb homes everywhere, people cherish their local neighborhood cafes, family restaurants and stores with an intensity that I have not seen anywhere else,” he said.

He’s confident enough in that idea that he’s self-publishing a series of coffee-table books about the San Diego region. The first one, which came out last year, is about his own particular slice: La Jolla. It’s filled with pictures and prose — not so much about the history or favorite tourist spots, but about the neighborhood’s feel, its character. And its characters.

There’s a page about Joseph Klatt, a blind real estate agent who is familiar to locals because he walks in the village regularly with his Seeing Eye dog. There’s a page about Bo Fellows and his car collection, which sprawls out of his driveway and onto nearby streets. There’s one about the 16 chimes at St. James Episcopal Church.

“Our books really focus on the local point of view, what it is like to live or work in the place today,” Dalle said.

But not many residents have the eye for detail that Dalle, the writer, and Paul Burlingame, the photographer, brought to the project. And not many have the time to do what they did to find those details: Slow down, walk around, watch.

“Curiosity was the main factor in the development of this book,” Dalle said.

Now 40, Dalle traces his own curiosity to a trip he took at age 17 with a friend in France. They traveled by train and boat to the other side of the country. “The sense of freedom and of leaving one’s limited personal life to be fully absorbed in an unknown place made a lasting impression on me,” he said.

A year later, he took a road trip throughout Italy and Greece, and the summer after that he was in West Africa. “The travel bug has never left me since,” he said.

In 1999, while living in Cairo, he did his first neighborhood book. Most books available at the time focused on the pyramids and other ancient ruins, or on Islamic fundamentalism and the tension with Israel, he said. He and a collaborator chose instead to highlight everyday people and places. Eventually he did three books on cities in the Middle East.

Being an outsider helped him see things in a different way, he said. That was a lesson he had to relearn after coming with his wife Aline to La Jolla — his day job is teaching French at Palomar College — and settling down. Settling down and settling in.

“You get used to the city or neighborhood where you live to the point where you truly never look at anything with curiosity or attention,” he said. “One great thing about this book on La Jolla is that we rediscovered the novelty. We walked around aimlessly, sat down somewhere and just observed, opened up our senses again.”

Choosing what to highlight in “La Jolla/92037” was difficult, he said. Some people and places were obvious: Dr. Seuss, artist Niki de Saint Phalle, mystery writer Raymond Chandler, the Mount Soledad cross, the Cove, the seals.

Others were the product of their reopened senses. In this town of luxury automobiles, they did a page on the local bus line, the 30. In this town of mansions and millionaires, they included a piece on Jane, a homeless woman.

“There’s this general idea that La Jolla is a sort of paradise, but the residents of La Jolla continue to live regular lives, with all sorts of regular moments of happiness or sadness, worries and desires,” Dalle said. “How can you live in paradise? That was one of the questions we wanted to answer in this book.”

The book is in coffee-table format, but it’s more quirky than glossy, more playful than polished. A key thematic device uses numbers to explain La Jolla. The “92037” in the title is the community’s Zip code. There are statistics about the people living there, what languages they speak, what their houses cost, how long their average daily commute takes.

Other numbers jump off the pages, graphically and otherwise: 17 on the entry about Chandler (the number of people who attended his funeral), 27 for Seuss (the number of publishers who turned down his first book).

Two more books are in the works for fall publication, one on Hillcrest and one on Tijuana. Other writers and photographers are working on those. Dalle hopes to launch two titles each year about the region.

He’s sold about 1,000 copies of the La Jolla book, he said. When he went to a store in Del Mar and asked them to carry it, the response reinforced his belief in the intensity of neighborhood loyalty. “No thanks,” the owner told him. “Come back when you have a book on Del Mar.”

john.wilkens@uniontrib.com (619) 293-2236

Click Here to read a review of Nelson Anderson’s A Heart Attacks Survivor’s Guide by The Midwest Book Review...

Click Here to read a review of Nelson Copp's Cycling the Palm Springs Region by the Espresso...

Click Here to read the article on Surf Angel by Ocean Magazine...

Click Here to read the article on Marshal South written by Diana Lindsay Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles in Desert Report...

Click Here to read a review of Eric Peterson's Life as a Sandwich by the Espresso...

Click Here to see Gaetano Cicciotti Cicciotti's Kitchen: Italian Family Favorites-Quick, Easy, and Delicious on NBC Channel 7/39 Morning Show...

Click Here to see Bernard GuillasFlying Pans: Two Chefs, One World on San Diego Channel 6...

Click Here to read Chef Ron Oliver's Flying Pans: Two Chefs, One World recipe for Isla de Vieques Vanilla Spiced Shrimp on the San Diego News Network..

Click Here to see Chefs Bernard Guillas and Ron Oliver give the San Diego News Network a sneak peek of their new cookbook Flying Pans: Two Chefs, One World.

Click Here to see Terry and Heather Kraszewski's Surf Angel on KUSI's Surf Report. .

Click Here to read a review of Jeff Garcia's Santa Claus and the Molokai Mules: A Hawaiian Island Surfing Adventure by the Midwest Book Review..

Click Here to read a review of Myrtha Trujillo's Mision Mujer on La Bloga.

Click Here to read an interview with Eric Peterson Life as a Sandwich in San Diego City Beat Magazine.

Click Here to read a review of Joey Seymour's San Diego's Finest Athletes in San Diego Jewish World.

Click Here to see Joey Seymour, author of San Diego's Finest Athletes, on San Diego's CW Channel 6.

Click Here to here Flying Pans authors Chefs Bernard Guillas and Ron Oliver interviewed on These Days.

Click Here to see Flying Pans by Chefs Bernard Guillas and Ron Oliver featured in the November issue of Ranch & Coast Magazine.

Click Here to see Flying Pans by Chefs Bernard Guillas and Ron Oliver featured in the November issue of 944 Magazine (page 20).

Click Here to read Chef Bernard Guillas and Chef Ron Oliver's review on there new book Flying Pans, reviewed by Maria Desiderata Montana. Link to www.signonsandiego.com

Click Here to read Chef Bernard Guillas and Chef Ron Oliver's review on there new book Flying Pans, reviewed by Maria Desiderata Montana. Link to www.sdentertainer.com

Click Here Oasis of Stone reviewed in MexConnect.