The Nine

40 Watts From Nowhere, A Journey Into Pirate Radio by Sue Carpenter
2004
Scribner

When law office receptionist Sue Carpenter first asked how she might start her own radio station, everyone laughed. Getting on the air (legitimately) in San Francisco was a multimillion-dollar ambition. But in 1995, with the help of a few subversive techies and pirate-radio gurus, Sue built her first transmitter in her hilltop San Francisco apartment and launched KPBJ, enlisting friends as DJs. A few months later, Sue landed a magazine job in Los Angeles, took her transmitter with her, and established KBLT.

From these humble beginnings KBLT emerged as one of L.A.'s best-loved radio stations, staffed with more than a hundred DJs and supported by major music labels eager to reach a different kind of audience. The station expanded its playlist from indie rock to an eclectic mix of jazz, hip-hop, electronica, and countless other styles. In the three and a half years before the FCC finally caught up with Sue, KBLT went from interviewing unknowns to hosting live performances by the Red Hot Chili Peppers -- without ever leaving Sue's apartment.

40 Watts from Nowhere is Sue's frank and hilarious account of her bizarre double life during the height of California's pirate-radio boom: journalist by day, counterculture icon by night. It's an amazing true story, one that will instantly appeal to music fans -- and free spirits -- everywhere.



The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler
January 2004
Alfred Knopf

From the inimitable Anne Tyler, a rich and compelling novel about a mismatched marriage—and its consequences, spanning three generations.

They seemed like the perfect couple—young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only twenty minutes away), walked into his mother’s grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

Pauline, impulsive, impractical, tumbles hit-or-miss through life; Michael, plodding, cautious, judgmental, proceeds deliberately. While other young marrieds, equally ignorant at the start, seemed to grow more seasoned, Pauline and Michael remain amateurs. In time their foolish quarrels take their toll. Even when they find themselves, almost thirty years later, loving, instant parents to a little grandson named Pagan, whom they rescue from Haight-Ashbury, they still cannot bridge their deep-rooted differences. Flighty Pauline clings to the notion that the rifts can always be patched. To the unyielding Michael, they become unbearable.


An Almost Perfect Moment by Binnie Kirshenbaum
February 2004
Ecco

On the cusp of the great age of disco, and in a part of Brooklyn a million miles away from Manhattan, livesfifteen-year-old Valentine Kessler and her long-suffering mother, Miriam.

Valentine -- Jewish, pretty, and a touch flaky -- is an unremarkable teenager except for two things: she is a dead ringer for the Virgin Mary as she appeared to Bernadette at Lourdes, and her very being, through some inexplicable conspiracy of fate, seems to shatter the dreams and hopes of people around her.

John Wosileski, Valentine's lonely math teacher who adores her from afar, embraces the martyrdom wrought by his unconditional and unrequited love. Joanne Clarke, the bitter and sad biology teacher who schemes to be John's wife, reviles Valentine to eventual self-destruction. Valentine's best friend, a former figure-skating champion, humiliates her for the crime of being "different."

Written in a naturalistic voice that echoes that of the characters, An Almost Perfect Moment is a dark and sharply comic novel about star-crossed lovers, mothers and daughters, doctrines of the divine, and a colorful Jewish community that once defined Brooklyn. Sagacious, sorrowful, and hilarious, it raises questions of faith and plays with the possibility of miracles with one eye on the caution: Be careful what you wish for.



Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch, Tales From a Bad Neighborhood by Hollis Gillespie
March 2004
Regan Books

When Hollis Gillespie almost ran a neighbor over with her car in her down-at-the-heels Atlanta neighborhood, he yelled at her the insult that became the title of this memoir. Hollis Gillespie is a "bleach-haired honky bitch," and her memoir, written as a collection of interlinked stories, explorres her unique world. From her childhood as the daughter of an alcoholic traveling trailer salesman and a mother who made bombs for a living and stole pool cues and lawn furniture for fun, to her adulthood wit ha group of unusual and colorful friends, Gillespie consistently finds and elaborates upon the odd, twisted details of everyday life.