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Scoopy’s Notebook, Week of Feb. 23, 2017

"One book to rule them all": Julie Menin has five great books for New Yorkers to read, but only one will have the honor of being the official selection of "One Book, One New York."
“One book to rule them all”: Julie Menin has five great books for New Yorkers to read, but only one will have the honor of being the official selection of “One Book, One New York.”

One love, one book: Sometimes — though not always — it’s great when “everyone is on the same page.” That’s exactly what the “One Book, One New York” campaign, spearheaded by Julie Menin, the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, is aiming to achieve — namely, getting as many New Yorkers as possible to all simultaneously read one great book. It’s being dubbed, “the ultimate book club.” Menin recently invited us to Three Lives & Company Bookstore, at 154 W. 10th St., to tell us how it all works. Basically, from a shortlist of 50 books, five finalists were announced earlier this month. City residents now have a chance to vote for which one they would like all Gothamists to read. To vote, go to nyc.gov/onebook. The winner will be announced in March. Personally, we usually decide whether or not to dive into a book after reading its first page, and seeing if the writer can, in the words of the immortal (or immoral) Charles Bukowski, “lay down a line.” But to help folks in making their choice, celebrities — including Bebe Neuwirth, Larry Wilmore, Danielle Brooks, William H. Macy and Giancarlo Esposito — make video pitches for their pick on the campaign’s home page. Then, from March through May, New Yorkers will be encouraged to read the victorious volume, and there will also be public programming and promo ads to tie in with the campaign. The finalists are a mix of onebook-herothree women and two men, four fiction titles and one nonfiction. They include “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” by Junot Diaz; “Americanah,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; “Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehesi Coates; “The Sellout,” by Paul Beatty; and the 1943 classic “A Tree Goes in Brooklyn,” by Betty Smith. All five tomes have a connection to the New York City region — whether through their plots or authors — and deal with issues of race or immigration or both, definitely timely subjects at this moment. “I just think, in the unfortunate political climate that we’re in right now, these are the kind of discussions we want to have,” Menin said. June will see a “big conversation” with the selected author, Menin added. She hopes the “One Book” campaign will be an annual affair. It’s a dual initiative, she explained, noting, “It’s part literacy. It’s part economic development.” In short, independent bookstores, as we all know, have been struggling to survive in New York. “The Bronx has no bookstores,” Menin noted. “Staten Island has one. There are 60 independent bookstores left in the city.” Having thousands of people go in and buy the “one book” — and hopefully the four other books, too — will be a big shot in the cash register. Troy, a manager at Three Lives, which stocks all five titles, said the picks are “solid choices” in the view of the store’s staff. “Many of us have read these books,” he said. There will also be 4,000 copies of the numero uno novel or nonfiction book at local public library branches. Menin’s agency used to focus on film, TV and radio broadcasting, but has been expanded to include music, advertising, publishing, digital media and real estate as it relates to creative content. New York, after all, she noted, is “the publishing capital of the world.”

Good riddance: Well, another alt-right blogger has crashed and burned. Milo Yiannopoulos has been canned by Breitbart News and Simon & Schuster has yanked his book deal after the race-baiting right-winger recently shockingly condoned child sex abuse on a podcast. At a recent Chelsea forum organized by state Senator Brad Hoylman on the rise of hate in America, Yiannopoulos was blasted as a dangerous “gateway drug” to the alt-right. “He got his comeuppance, that’s for sure,” Hoylman told us on Wednesday. “I hope that as more attention is paid to these figures of the alt-right, we can expose them for who they truly are: grotesque peddlers of hatred who want to wreck our multicultural society. Along with Donald Trump, who’s brought Steve Bannon and others out of the shadows and into the Oval Office, they’re responsible for the waves of bigotry we have seen washing across our country since Nov. 8.”

A note on notes: Stan Patz, the father of Etan Patz, contacted us last week to point out that a photo of a sheet of handwritten notes that we ran with last week’s article on the conviction of Pedro Hernandez in Etan’s death were actually not written by Hernandez, as our caption incorrectly stated. Instead, Patz explained, those notes were actually written by a detective who was attempting to record Hernandez’s initial confession to law enforcement officers in the Camden, N.J., prosecutor’s office after the suspect was arrested on the tip of a relative. “The problem is that [the detective] was trying to be too helpful with his suggestions, like ‘I am here voluntarily,’” Patz noted. “For that reason, the note was never a prominent part of the case. It may not have shown up in the second trial. This was part of a larger issue — the lack of a video recoding of the entire six-plus-hour interview.” As to last week’s conviction 38 years after his 6-year-old son’s disappearance, Patz said, “We finally have a measure of closure,” though he added, “Now we have to see what the appeals process will entail.”