A Dangerous World Of Hackers And Ninjas

Nick Harkaway is the author of Angelmaker.

The moment I opened the book, I was snared by the now-iconic first line: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." I knew that color; the U.K. had only four TV channels and they didn't broadcast through the night. When nothing was on, the cathode ray screen was a kind of numinous anthracite, the closest thing it could manage to black. If you want to be clever about it — at the time it was a comparison way beyond me — you could call it "darkness visible." Neuromancer lives in that space: It is contradiction, bifurcation, penumbra.

The protagonist, Case, is a burnout. He was a hacker, but he crossed the wrong people, and they crippled his nervous system so that he could no longer work with cyberspace (Gibson made up the word; this book heavily influenced how people imagine data online). Case is living on his luck, and that luck is running out; he's been to the best doctors and they can't fix him, so he's a middleman now, brokering deals for drugs and illegal software.

Until Molly comes along, and her boss, Armitage, offering a deal: Make a run in cyberspace, a really major hack. He'll get cured, get paid. Sweet deal. But in the grand tradition of crime thrillers, the job is more complicated than it seems, and Case is going to be crossing some dangerous people and some very thick red lines.

Despite the breakneck urgency of the action, the hard-boiled story drips with laconic cool. I had never met that before: Hammett, Chandler and Elmore Leonard came later for me. Neuromancer introduced a demimonde of back alleys, sodium streetlamps and the kind of club where you can buy firearms with your whiskey. It whispered of transgression, of sex and booze, and license.

Nick Harkaway is also the author of The Gone-Away World.

Courtesy of Rory Lindsay

The other fictions that framed my world were basically benign. I'd seen Tron and loved it. I was a Star Wars fan. I liked hobbits and the Three Musketeers. But Han Solo wouldn't last 10 minutes in Night City; Frodo would be hooked on a drug with a seven-syllable name inside of an hour. This was a world between the primary color fictions I'd seen and the dangerous nuclear age reality I lived in: In the 1980s it was pretty much established that Britain would burn in the first exchanges of a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Inevitably, I fell for Molly, the street samurai with mirrors over her eyes and razors in her fingers. In my mind she had a husky, Lauren Bacall voice made from coffee and cigarettes — and I was right. If Bacall's character from To Have and Have Not taught English to Michelle Yeoh's martial artist from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you'd get someone like Molly.

Even now, she's a rarity. More often than not, Molly is what's missing from contemporary stories of any sort: a woman who is complete unto herself. She didn't need a male senior partner. In fact, she was more connected and streetwise than Case, and more alert to the danger they were both in. Wherever she went, Molly was in charge. In 1985, you could look a long time without finding that anywhere else.

And in a middle-class British school, you could go even longer without hearing the name Marcus Garvey, the Pan-African and black nationalist political leader who influenced Martin Luther King, Haile Selassie and Malcolm X — and the orbit-dwelling Rastafari nation Case and the others encounter in their search for answers. A decade before Google, I had to look Garvey up in the encyclopedia.

Add that to ninjas, amphetamines, extreme body modification, catsuits, gangs, governmental misdeeds, high decadence, Strangelove-esque soldiers and psychotic computers: Neuromancer was and is a treasure house of dangerous ideas.

And yet at the same time, it is secretly a very gentle book. Amid all the grime and grim, it's not hard to know where to put your sympathy or your trust. The bad are bad, the good are good. So despite all this, it's not an unsuitable book for a kid, just a challenging and eye-opening one. And unlike so many improving and notionally educational books, it's stylish, adult, exciting and fun. It's a door to a greater world.

PG-13 is produced and edited by the team at NPR Books.

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Diana Vreeland's Rise To 'Empress Of Fashion'

Diana Vreeland had a troubled childhood; her mother often told her she was ugly. But she later became editor-in-chief of American Vogue and one of the country's most revered fashion icons. Her life is captured in the new biography, Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland. Host Michel Martin talks with author Amanda Mackenzie Stuart.

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A Child Of The Slums Becomes A 'Queen' Of Chess

Simon & Schuster

A Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl's Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster

by Tim Crothers

Hardcover, 232 pages | purchase

close The Queen of KatweA Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl's Dream of Becoming a GrandmasterTim Crothers

Phiona Mutesi is a teenager living in Katwe, the biggest and possibly toughest slum in Uganda's capital city. She's also a rising star in competitive chess.

Her story is told in the book The Queen of Katwe: A Story of Life, Chess and One Extraordinary Girl's Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster.

But when she first started the game, Mutesi wasn't hungry for glory; she was just hungry. A local chapter of a Christian charity hosted a chess program, and it lured Mutesi, her brother and other children with the promise of a meal.

"Our family didn't have money, and we were yearning to get some food. We didn't have food at home," she tells NPR's Michel Martin. "My brother knew about chess, and he could go to the chess program to get a cup of porridge."

The kids in Katende's chess group were all struggling. "Almost 97 percent of the children don't go to school at all," says Mutesi's coach and mentor, Robert Katende. "When you're in a survival situation, the parents or guardians have to choose whether to waste their money on education or to find a way to feed the family."

Mutesi herself had never seen or heard of chess. There isn't even a word for it in her native language. But Katende says she was a natural talent. "She has a special — I call it — a gene." He also acknowledges that her difficult life in Katwe helped develop Mutesi's competitive streak. "I notice that she's very aggressive, because, you know, it's like, when you're determined."

Despite these obstacles, after this year's Chess Olympiad in Istanbul, Turkey, Mutesi qualified for an official World Chess Federation title: Woman Candidate Master.

Katende says Mutesi's success is an inspiration for everyone around her. "She's really transformed her entire family, because they have come to realize that they can make it in life, they have gained hope," he says. "So many children are now coming on the program, and they're optimistic that maybe one day they can also get out of the slum."

Mutesi says her dream is to conquer the world of chess and then make the world better for her community. "I want to be a grandmaster," she says, "and I want to be a doctor so I can help my family — and I want to help slum kids."

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Dec. 31-Jan. 6: A Whodunit, A Mountain Survival And A JFK Affair

Fiction and nonfiction releases from P.D. James; Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel; Jim Davidson and Kevin Vaughan; and Mimi Alford.

P.D. James' novel is "a glorious plum pudding of a whodunit," says NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan. It's also the veteran British mystery writer's tribute to one of her favorite authors, Jane Austen. Or, as Corrigan puts it, "Think Pride and Prejudice meets Clue." The two authors have much in common: Corrigan observes, "Money, one of Austen's chief themes, certainly lies at the heart of many a crime in James' mysteries." But more profoundly, James "ferrets out the alternative noir tales that lurk in the corners of Pride and Prejudice, commonly thought of as Austen's sunniest novel. Ruinous matches, the Napoleonic Wars, early deaths, socially enforced female vulnerability: Austen keeps these shadows at bay, while James noses deep into them."

Humorist Dave Barry is one of the men responsible for Talk Like a Pirate Day, while Alan Zweibel is a former Saturday Night Live writer best known for Roseanne Roseannadanna's trenchant commentaries. They cannot claim to have produced the great American novel together, but their comic adventure, Lunatics, "is almost certainly the best novel ever written about a forensic plumber and a pet store owner who, together, managed to destroy and then repair much of the known world," according to NPR's Robert Siegel. In the novel, the two characters collide in a swiftly escalating series of events that will send them running for their lives, pursued by the police, soldiers, terrorists, subversives, bears and a man dressed as Chuck E. Cheese.

"This well-plotted survival tale about climbing partners and a deadly fall into a crevasse will certainly slake your 127 Hours craving," writes critic Rachel Syme. Written 19 years after the fact, The Ledge recounts a mountain climbing accident on Mount Rainier. After taking an 80-foot tumble that fatally pulled his best friend, Mike Price, down with him, author Jim Davidson climbed out of a crevasse with his lifeless partner still attached to a rope. Syme writes, "With the help of award-winning Denver Post journalist Kevin Vaughan, Davidson transforms his horrific experience into a graceful, poised narrative that spares no gory detail but never feels mawkish."

Now a grandmother, former White House intern Mimi Alford details an 18-month affair with President John F. Kennedy in her memoir Once Upon A Secret. Alford writes that her affair began when she was19, in the summer of 1962, with an invitation to the White House swimming pool. "Suffice it to say that Alford writes that she was a virgin when she and the president consummated their relationship, and it happened in Jackie Kennedy's bedroom," writes NPR's Eyder Peralta. Her last meeting with the president was seven days before his assassination. She writes: "He took me in his arms for a long embrace and said, 'I wish you were coming with me to Texas.' And then he added, 'I'll call you when I get back.' I was overcome with sudden sadness. 'Remember, Mr. President, I'm getting married.' "

Charlotte Abbott edits "New in Paperback." A contributing editor for Publishers Weekly, she also leads a weekly chat on books and reading in the digital age every Friday from 4-5 p.m. ET on Twitter. Follow her at @charabbott or check out the #followreader hashtag.

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2012 In Review: 4 Great Graphic Novels We Haven't Told You About Yet

Ok, same drill as last Friday's post about my favorite ongoing comics series of 2012: We've highlighted a lot of great graphic novels over the past year, many of which belong on "Best of 2012" lists. But instead of ginning up new ways to tell you those books are good, I'll simply link you back to what we've said before about Building Stories, Sailor Twain, The Underwater Welder, The Hypo, Marbles, Are You My Mother, God and Science: The Return of the Ti-Girls, and Drama, Crackle of the Frost, Little White Duck, and Gloriana.

So I figured I'd use this space, as the last hours of 2012 tick down to midnight, to play catch-up and highlight four of this year's great graphic novels that we haven't gotten around to covering. This, like last Friday's list of ongoing series, consists of more personal choices - the books I found myself pressing into friends' hands over and over again.

In his 2010 graphic novel The Wrong Place, Belgian artist Brecht Evans used vibrantly colorful ink washes to convey the chaotic scrum of urban life. We followed his main character through a cityscape in which every dance club, art gallery, wine bar and apartment building offered up cut-away-views of the figures who joylessly toiled and rutted within.

In The Making Of, Evans uses similar techniques to expose and satirize the pretentions and preposterousness of the art world. Struggling artist Petersen travels to a small village for its first biennial, only to find to his horror that the local art community is much less sophisticated than he imagines himself to be. As he rallies them behind his grand project, all the while offering condescending lectures on the nature of art, tensions mount. Evens playfully underscores Petersen's obtuseness by repeatedly arranging the book's characters and landscapes in tableaux that evoke familiar works by Picasso, Chagall, Van Gogh and others, only to have Petersen completely ignore them. A funny, smart and gorgeously rendered book.

To describe the plots of Lilli Carré's short stories, which combine steel-trap plotting with the emotional logic of dreams, might make them sound formulaic. A critic awakes from an accident to find he has been robbed of his powers of discernment. A woman finds a doppelganger is taking over her life. A girl hears a phantom marching band in her head and longs for it to stop – until the day it suddenly does.

But these aren't the steel-trap ironic twists of Serling and O. Henry. Carre offers up her characters and situations with a detached, non-judgmental and entirely un-ironic deftness. Her artwork is elegant, deceptively simple, and not a little bit creepy, filled with discomfiting undercurrents that carry storylines down weird and twisty turns.

"These hot winds," muses one character, moments after dropping her child off at school, "what a bother. I suppose I could give in just for a minute or two...." and promptly, unceremoniously, allows herself to be lifted into the air. The whole collection has the feel of a dream in which remembering how to fly is as simple as forgetting that you can't.

In the first volume of Shimura Takako's Wandering Son, we met fifth-grader Shuichi, a boy who wants to be a girl, and his friend Yoshino, a girl who wants to be a boy. In that first book, their secret was shared by only one mutual friend, and the world in which they could be themselves was small and relatively safe.

In Volume Two, however, the outside world begins to intrude, and the stakes rise considerably. The events depicted are the familiar, everyday traumas of school life –locker room taunts, inappropriate crushes, etc. – but in Shimura's quiet, closely observed telling, we feel how much Shuichi and Yoshino's secret adds layers of tension, confusion and dread. Translator Matt Thorn reminds us in a brief essay that Wandering Son is not the kind of manga in which a happy ending is guaranteed, and that transgendered children in Japan face very different cultural challenges than those in the West. You'll thus be grateful for the moments of realistic, untempered joy Shimura allows her two protagonists here, as you wait with nervous anticipations for the travails that lie ahead for them in subsequent volumes.

Maggie is a smart, self-assured tomboy whose world is in flux. Her mother has disappeared. After years of being homeschooled, she's entering high school, where, she soon learns, her three older brothers have lives of their own. Plus there's that whole thing with the ghost she keeps seeing in the town's graveyard.

Faith Erin Hicks has a knack for finding affinities between the familiar reality of high school, with its tribulations that bedevil many a YA protagonist, and the supernatural world, which exists on the level of symbols and metaphor (she showed as much in the sharp-eyed and clever The War at Ellsmere in 2008). Her latest graphic novel finds Hicks exerting even greater control of her gifts; here, the parallels she draws do more than simply advance the plot, they show us something crucial about Maggie. The lesson she learns by novel's end isn't a particularly tidy one, because the world is a good deal more complex than she realized. That's what makes Friends With Boys my favorite coming-of-age tale of the year.

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Death Of The (Predatory) Salesman: These Days, It's A Buyer's Market

The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink

Hardcover, 260 pages | purchase

close To Sell Is HumanThe Surprising Truth About Moving OthersDaniel H. Pink

The familiar image of the salesman in American culture hasn't always been a flattering one. Just think of Alec Baldwin as the verbally abusive "motivator" of two real estate salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Daniel H. Pink, author of the new book To Sell is Human, says that this relentless, predator-style approach to selling has become outdated. He believes that the art of sales has changed more in the past 10 years than it did in the previous century.

Pink joins NPR's David Greene to talk about the effect the Internet has had on selling and why he believes almost all American white-collar workers are now in sales.

On why the brutal, Glengarry Glen Ross style of selling has become outdated

"Well, most of what we know about sales was built for a world of information asymmetry — the seller always had more information than the buyer. Twenty years ago, when [David] Mamet wrote that play that [was] made into a movie, when you walked into a Chevy dealer, the Chevy dealer knew a heck of a lot more about cars than you ever could ... you didn't have the adequate information. And so this is why we have the principle of caveat emptor, buyer beware. You gotta beware when the other guy knows a lot more than you.

"Well, something curious has happened in the last 10 years in that you can walk into a car dealership with the invoice price of the car, something that even the salesmen/women at car dealers didn't know too long ago. And so in a world of information parity, or at least something close to it, we've moved — caveat emptor is still good advice, but equally good advice for the sellers is caveat venditor, seller beware."

On why he thinks "we're all in sales"

"There's an idea out there that salespeople have actually been obliterated by the Internet, which is just not supported by the facts. In 2000 ... about 1 in 9 American workers worked in sales. That is, their job was to convince someone else to buy something. So then, what's happened over the last 12 years? Explosion of new technologies. Today, 1 in 9 American workers works in sales. But I think what's interesting is that if you look at that other 8 in 9, they're in sales, too. That is, a huge percentage of what white-collar workers do on the job is what I call nonsales selling — persuading, influencing, convincing other people to part with resources. Pitching ideas in meetings, asking the boss for a raise, trying to raise money from investors. And so, at some level, we're all in sales now."

Daniel H. Pink is the author of five books about the changing world of work, including A Whole New Mind and Drive.

Rebecca Drobis/Courtesy of Riverhead Hardcover Daniel H. Pink is the author of five books about the changing world of work, including A Whole New Mind and Drive.

Rebecca Drobis/Courtesy of Riverhead Hardcover

On why the best salespeople are "ambiverts," not extroverts

"We have this myth that extroverts are better salespeople. As a result, extroverts are more likely to enter sales; extroverts are more likely to get promoted in sales jobs. But if you look at the correlation between extroversion and actual sales performance — that is, how many times the cash register actually rings — the correlation's almost zero. It's really quite remarkable.

"Let's think about a spectrum, and say, on a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 is extremely introverted, 7 is extremely extroverted: The 6s and 7s — the people who get hired, the gregarious, backslapping types of the stereotype — they're not very good. OK, now, why? ... They're just spending too much time talking. ... They don't know when to shut up. They don't listen very well; they're not attuned to the other person; they sometimes can overwhelm people.

"Now ... does that mean that introverts are better? No. The 1s and 2s, they're not very good either. They often are not assertive enough. They're skittish about striking up conversations. What this new research — and it's very exciting, it's accepted for publication but actually not published yet — [says] is the people who do the best are what social psychologists call ambiverts. ... Not totally extroverted, not totally introverted. The 3s, 4s, and 5s. They know when to shut up; they know when to speak up. They know when to push; they know when to hold back. And so the best people at convincing, persuading others, whether in a traditional sales environment or in these other kinds of environments, are these ambiverts."

On the link between improvisational theater skills and selling

"One of the abilities that matters most is this ability of improvisation — that is, if your perfectly attuned, superclear pitch goes awry, as it will, how do you respond? And the principles of improvisational theater help us out on that, things like saying 'Yes, and' instead of 'Yes, but,' ... It's constructive rather than deconstructive.

"[In one improvisational exercise] I had to sit face-to-face with this actually pretty senior executive at a television network, and he had to tell me something that was bothering him, and I had to look him in the eye when he told me that, but I couldn't respond to him for 15 seconds. ... The idea ... is that we tend to move too quickly, and what the best salespeople of any kind know is that it's really about listening; it's really about understanding the other person's perspective, hearing what they're really saying, and one really profound way to do that is to slow down."

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Listen Up! Audiobooks For Every Taste

iStockphoto.com

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the holiday rush — too swamped, even, to spend an afternoon reading those books you got for Christmas, we have some recommendations for you — but these are audiobooks, so you can listen while you multitask.

Robin Whitten is the editor and founder of AudioFile magazine. Her list of the year's best audiobooks begins with a selection that might while away the hours on a long family road trip. "Toothiana is one of William Joyce's books that's in the Guardians of Childhood series," she tells NPR's David Greene. "He has the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and St. Nicholas, who all become superheroes through these various books."

"It is so inventive and imaginative, and it's great for storytelling," she adds. And that storytelling quality is part of what makes a good audiobook. "Oftentimes, episodic stories and mysteries ... in fiction, it's easier to see how audiobooks and the audio medium work."

There is a nonfiction selection on Whitten's list: Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, which chronicles the third president's life in an immersive style reminiscent of good fiction. Whitten adds that the book also benefits from the voice of a good reader. "You can be that involved [with the book] as you see the words on the page, but in audio, the narrator helps place you there."

Some audiobooks have celebrity narrators — for example, Colin Firth can be heard reading The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. "For a lot of people who've never really considered or been interested in an audiobook, they think, 'Oh, I love Colin Firth, I love his voice' ... and so they may try something," Whitten says. "And they also may not really know who Graham Greene is ... but they're attracted to it, so they're going to give it a try." Firth's voice is beautiful, she adds, "and he has a really special way of being inside the story, which is actually a personal, I think, a personal favorite of his ... it's in your head, as if he's telling just you."

Fiction

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Read by Holter Graham

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
Read by Edoardo Ballerini

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Read by Simon Vance

Biography and History

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
Read by Alex Jennings

Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley
Read by George Guidall

Nonfiction and Culture

Abundance by Steve Kotler and Peter Diamandis
Read by Arthur Morey

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens
Read by Simon Prebble

Mystery and Suspense

An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer
Read by David Pittu

The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny
Read by Ralph Cosham

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