What's In Store
From Data to Fiction
by Randy Dotinga

Fascinating numbers, pesky words and fictional pursuits round out this month's reviews.

The Data Almanac 2006, edited by Dr. Philip Truscott and Dr. Brent Boyer. Qstat USA Inc., 2006. 419 pages. Paperback. $49.95

Judging by looks alone, The Data Almanac 2006 is a loser. The lame cover photo appears to have come from the bargain bin at the ACME Stock Photo Gallery, and the list price—$49.95—is ridiculous for a 419-page paperback. But look inside and you'll find story ideas galore.

• Where are people the most likely to die of a car accident? The twin Texarkana cities in Texas and Arkansas.
• Bakersfield, Calif., is home to the nation's smallest homes—maybe to keep the air-conditioning bills down?—and Washington D.C. has the largest.
• The most Irish metropolitan area in the country is easy to guess—it's Boston—but can you figure out No. 2? Surprise: It's Albany-Schenectady-Troy in New York.
• Don't visit Baltimore if you're rodent-averse: Charm City, it turns out, is Rat Central, full of more of the critters than anywhere else. Your physician is twice as likely to die of suicide as the rest of the U.S. population and young singles should flock to Memphis: More than two-thirds of those aged 18-40 there aren't married.

All these tidbits come from a wealth of charts in The Data Almanac, a treasure trove of statistics from the U.S. Census and the American Housing Survey. You can drill down to even more data by using the program on the enclosed CD-ROM, which allows users to analyze data from all over the country.

There are some caveats. Annoyingly, the CD-ROM is only for Windows, leaving Mac users in the dust. And the data is several years old, with some numbers dating back to 2003.

That being said, The Data Almanac makes for great bathroom reading at the very least (America's smelliest city? Gary, Ind.). At the best, you might turn up the perfect tidbit to grab an editor's attention.

And that $49.95 cover price? Ignore it. You can pick up a copy of The Data Almanac for as little as $4 online.

 

Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies: A Guide to Language for Fun and Spite, by June Casagrande. Penguin, 2006. 192 pages. Paperback. $14.

Grammar guru June Casagrande seems to be a bit conflicted about the rules-happy grammarians who litter our landscape these days. Are they good guys or bad?

On the one hand, she calls them "meanies" in her book's title and deliciously considers the proper way to describe an insect's tragic journey into the rear ends of word cops William Safire and James Kilpatrick. (The correct way: "A bug crawled up Kilpatrick's and Safire's behinds and died." Please make a note of it.)

But in the preface, she sends a mash note to crusty grammarians like Safire and Richard Lederer: "You guys rock."

Which is it, June? Are they really a bunch of fuddy-duddies or the coolest word nerds this side of Will Shortz?

Casagrande's indecision aside, this book is lively and useful, full of helpful tips on who/whom, that/which and sentence-ending prepositions. My only quibble is with the ridiculous $14.95 price. Grammar Snobs is just 192 pages long, 42 chapters each start on a new page, meaning the true page count is perhaps around 160. The paperback's tiny size doesn't help matters. Hey, you people over at Penguin: Could you ask Casagrande whether there's a hyphen in "rip-off"?

Gotham Writers' Workshop Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York's Acclaimed Creative Writing School, edited by Alexander Steele. Bloomsbury, 2003. 291 pages. $14.95.

While they may not be very good at creating short and sweet book titles, the folks at the Gotham Writers' Workshop are an optimistic bunch. As they put it in Gotham Writers' Workshop Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide From New York's Acclaimed Creative Writing School (whew!), these educators truly think "anyone can write." "We truly believe writing is a craft that can be taught," they declare on the first page of this instructional guide.

The chapters explain what fiction is and tackle topics like plot, character, voice and theme. At times, the advice is a bit simplistic (guess what? You don't have to attribute every line of dialogue) or bizarre (hey, authors! try to imagine what's in your character's garbage can).

But the biggest problem is that there are no major names among the contributors, most of whom write for obscure literary magazines. A high-profile author or two would make the advice a lot more credible.

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Randy Dotinga is a senior book critic with The Christian Science Monitor.