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KLMNO THE RELIABLE SOURCE Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger
try not to cry because this isn’t about me, it’s about her. And if I am crying, then it becomes partly about me and I don’t even want to be mentioned in the story except that I didn’t stumble walking down the aisle.”
“I am going to
Getting some serious grooves on
While Russian President
Dmitry Medvedev was in Washington with President Obama on official business, his staff went on a more personal quest: music for his vinyl collection. Two
Russian Medvedev THE WASHINGTON POST
WALKING HISTORY: Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who as a U.S. district judge ended the 1995 Major League Baseball strike, chats with Paul Pelosi at the second annual Congressional Women’s Softball Game, a charity fundraiser.
— Bill Clinton on Chelsea’s wedding (sometime this summer), at the Time Global Forum Sunday in South Africa.
HEY, ISN’T THAT . . . ? Josh Brolin and Sean Penn hanging
Penn, in town and hanging.
at Bis Bar in Hotel George late Thursday night. Brolin (blue short-sleeve shirt, jeans, cowboy boots) and Penn (white button-down shirt, jeans, cowboy boots) ordered fries and Bass ale, were chummy with bar patrons. Brolin
finished the night at the Irish Times; Penn in town for the launch of Huffington Post’s new political newsletter.
The newest Supreme Court justice didn’t take the field, but she did turn out to watch the event in Glover Park — a game between female lawmakers and reporters to raise funds for a breast cancer charity. Hanging out in the congressional-side dugout, she greeted friends and fans and happily signed her autograph whenever asked — on programs, wristbands, a T-shirt. Then someone asked her to sign a softball. “Oh, I can’t sign that,” she told them,
S
“because of the baseball case.” She added that she would sign anything else — just not a ball. In 1995, Sotomayor was the U.S.
district judge who ended the seven-month Major League Baseball strike, with a ruling in favor of players and against team owners, who she said were undermining the collective bargaining process. Sotomayor was hailed as a hero for salvaging the season, and it was one of the landmark accomplishments President Obama cited when he announced her as his nominee to the high court: “Some say that Judge Sotomayor saved baseball.” The justice didn’t exactly explain why she wouldn’t sign a ball, but given
onia Sotomayor was a big hit at the Congressional Women’s Softball Game earlier this month.
judgment call
A THE WASHINGTON POST
that history, we could hazard a guess: Because the ball might end up on the sports memorabilia collectibles market? Just wouldn’t look right, you know? We asked the court’s spokeswoman; she confirmed that that was the source of Sotomayor’s hesitation. So, what exactly would a Sotomayor
signature ball fetch on the collectibles market? Surprisingly, not that much. “Since it’s a rare item, we’d put in up
for auction,” said Brandon Steiner, owner of Steiner Sports Memorabilia. Assuming Sotomayor signed just a couple of balls, they could sell for $500 to $600 each. If she did only one, it could go as high as $3,000. By contrast, a Babe Ruth ball goes for $75,000 to $80,000; a ball autographed by the Yankees’ Derek Jeter can be had on the Web site for $514.99.
Still, Steiner thinks there’s a market for a ball signed by the associate justice: “People would buy because she played a role in baseball history.” He proposed a limited edition of 500 signed balls — which might sell for $50 to $100 each — with proceeds going to charity. “We’d be more than happy to help her expedite that, by the way.”
Sounds like a swing — and a miss.
women who said they worked for Medvedev walked into Som Records on 14th Street Thursday looking for
Duke Ellington, B.B. King and Jimi Hendrix recordings — Medvedev, 44, is a big jazz and rock fan and collects rare records. Owner Neal Becton told us he was out of Ellington discs, but sold the women three Hendrix records, two by King, plus music by Gil Evans, Blossom Dearie and Mark Murphy. The women, who got instructions from someone via cellphone, paid the $150 tab in cash — two $100 bills.
MONDAY, JUNE 28, 2010
ANN CAMERON SIEGAL
Vinyl is popular among high school and college students and at least one high-profile leader of a former Soviet state.
GOT A TIP ? E-MAIL U S A T RELIABLESOURCE@WASHP OST . COM. FOR THE LA TEST SCOOPS, VISIT WASHINGTONP OST . COM/RELIABLESOUR CE BOOK WORLD
Putting the dead on the psychiatrist’s couch “T
by Anna Mundow
he Liar’s Lullaby” is the third novel by Meg Gardiner to feature Jo
Beckett, the forensic psychiatrist whose plucky outlook may at times remind readers of Nancy Drew in her prime. She’s the kind of woman who finds that “hanging fifty feet off the ground, with nothing but a void between her and a broken neck, always cleared her head.” And we would not be surprised to learn that, like Nancy, Beckett drives a nifty roadster. This sleuth is not, however, a fearless amateur but a renowned professional, the kind of scien- tist who goes rock climbing be- fore dawn and is “at her desk by eight,” eager to probe the psy- chological condition of the latest corpse to have landed there. Gardiner’s previous Jo Beckett novels, “The Memory Collector” and “The Dirty Secrets Club,” es- tablished our heroine as an in- valuable adviser to the San Fran- cisco Police Department, for which she performs “psychologi- cal autopsies in cases of equivo- cal death.” In other words, “she analyzed victims’ lives to dis- cover why they had died. She shrank the souls of the depart- ed.” The deceased in “The Liar’s
Lullaby” is Tasia McFarland, a once-renowned singer-songwrit- er who is killed while attempting
THE LIAR’S LULLABY By Meg Gardiner Dutton. 353 pp. $25.95
an acrobat- ic concert stunt. Poised to fly over her 40,000 fans on a zip line while waving a pistol, Ta- sia tells her terrified manager, “Fame can’t protect me ...
Just
Samuel Colt.” With-
in minutes she is shot dead in midair, but by whom? Herself? A lunatic fan? A right-wing zealot? The White House may even be involved. For Tasia is not just an- other washed-up celebrity; she is the ex-wife of the president of the United States. After this explosive opening, the novel itself becomes some- thing of a high-wire act with sus- pects and subplots whizzing back and forth between action- packed chapters, defying not so much gravity at times as logic. The main point, it seems, is to keep everything and everyone in motion. If Jo’s irrepressible sis- ter, Tina, is “the human version of caffeine,” then Meg Gardiner’s fiction is perhaps the literary version, jolting rather than coax- ing the reader through occa- sionally frenzied scenes. The resulting stylistic schizo-
phrenia in Gardiner’s writing is particularly apparent in the de- scriptions, which range from overblown to soft-core with a lit- tle New Age philosophizing in between. At one point the crowd is “swept up” in a performance “like wheat pulled forward by a prairie wind.” Jo glimpses her boyfriend’s “molten core” and “the warrior he had been,” but Gabe is also a sensitive soldier who reads Kierkegaard. Jo and Gabe’s love affair is
predictably tested and strength- ened by the mystery surround- ing Tasia’s death. As Jo begins to investigate the singer’s life and mental state, likely suspects promptly materialize. There is a pathetic loner and obsessed fan
Tasia is not just another washed- up celebrity; she is the ex-wife of the president of the United States.
who could have stepped out of a Thomas Harris novel. There is that right-wing zealot who calls himself Tom Paine and whose Tree of Liberty” Web site at- tempts to rally followers against
the enemy in the White House. There is Tasia’s rock star ex- boyfriend, her ex-husband and her ex-husband’s weaselly chief of staff. Each has a secret to pro- tect, and any one of them might have committed murder. Jo’s assignment, however, is to probe the dead, not the living. “Being of Coptic descent, with a basting of Japanese Buddhism and a thick shellac of Irish Catholic education, Jo believed that death didn’t equate to anni- hilation,” we learn as she pre- pares to watch the videotape of Tasia’s death, having first “slipped her emotional chain mail into place.” The secrets of Tasia’s life lead
Jo to the truth of the singer’s death, and Gardiner charts that course skillfully. With the eye and ear of a keen reporter, she can capture the speech and manner of a self-important po- litical staffer or a cynical cop, the pretentious ranting of a cy- ber-patriot or the e-mail venom of a deluded stalker. The frantic conclusion of
“The Liar’s Lullaby” is certainly more outlandish than elegant, but perhaps this is fitting. In Jo Beckett’s world of tough, pas- sionate women and manly yet sensitive warriors, elegance would seem outdated.
bookworld@washpost.com
Mundow is a literary correspondent for the Boston Globe and a contributor to the Irish Times.
DISNEY PIXAR VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
THE GANG’S BACK: Jessie, Buzz, Woody and the rest of the toys not only dodged danger but carried “Toy Story 3” to the top of the movie chart for a second week.
TOP 10 FILMS
The cartoon heroes of “Toy Story 3” crushed new releases from Adam Sandler and Tom Cruise to lead the box office for the second week. Here are the top movie ticket sales Friday through Sunday, with estimated
weekend receipts, and total receipts since the movie opened. The number of weeks opened is in parentheses.
Weekend Total in millions of dollars
1. Toy Story 3 (2) 2. Grown Ups (1) 3. Knight & Day (1) 4. The Karate Kid (3) 5. The A-Team (3)
6. Get Him to the Greek (4) 7. Shrek Forever After (6)
8. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (5) 9. Killers (4)
10. Jonah Hex (2)
59.0 226.6 41.0 41.0 20.5 27.8 15.4 135.6 6.0 62.8 3.0 54.5 2.9 229.3 2.8 86.2 2.0 44.0 1.6 9.1
SOURCE: WWW.BOXOFFICEMOJO.COM
DOONESBURY by Garry Trudeau
CUL DE SAC by Richard Thompson
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