Donna Summer, the Boston-born mezzo-soprano singer who ruled the charts in the 1970s and was known to the world as the “Queen of Disco,” has succumbed to cancer today at her home in Key West, Florida.

She was 63.

Surprisingly, TMZ is reporting that “sources are telling us Donna believed she contracted it by inhaling toxic particles after the 9/11 attack in New York City.”

They note as well that her family claims to be “at peace celebrating her extaordinary life and her continued legacy,” but elsewhere some are speculating they’re not at peace as they would have you believe:

The reference to 9/11 sounds like her survivors are preparing some sort of lawsuit against the City of New York, but in the meantime, RIP to the late-’70s-era icon.

It’s not known at what point Summer became aware of her affliction, but she was said to be working on an album at the time, confirming that its effects on her professional life were not obvious to the public.

Summer, who was the first artist to enjoy three straight double #1 albums in the US, is best known for songs like She Works Hard for the Money, Last Dance, Hot Stuff and Bad Girls.

Summer released an autobiography, Ordinary Girl, in 2003. Last year, in 2011, biography Craig Halstead released his own update, called For the Record. Other Donna Summer tomes, including new ones, can be found here.

Enjoy a later performance of “MacArthur Park” from Summer, live in Holland:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Most of us have heard of the Atkins Diet. The South Beach Diet. The Paleo Diet. Gluten-Free diets. Many of us have even watched movies (“Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead,” for example) which, intentionally or otherwise, incorporate their principles to one degree or another.

At their core, these nutrition paradigms feature an aversion to carbohydrates and other blood-sugar-spiking agents, and as many people experience success the scientific explanations are legion.

One man who hopes to explain it succinctly is Dr. William Davis, a Wisconsin-based cardiologist who has just written Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health.

From the description:

Every day, over 200 million Americans consume food products made of wheat. As a result, over 100 million of them experience some form of adverse health effect, ranging from minor rashes and high blood sugar to the unattractive stomach bulges that preventive cardiologist William Davis calls “wheat bellies.” According to Davis, that excess fat has nothing to do with gluttony, sloth, or too much butter: It’s due to the whole grain wraps we eat for lunch. After witnessing over 2,000 patients regain their health after giving up wheat, Davis reached the disturbing conclusion that wheat is the single largest contributor to the nationwide obesity epidemic—and its elimination is key to dramatic weight loss and optimal health. In Wheat Belly, Davis exposes the harmful effects of what is actually a product of genetic tinkering and agribusiness being sold to the American public as “wheat”—and provides readers with a user-friendly, step-by-step plan to navigate a new, wheat-free lifestyle.

Sure enough, the only time I’ve experienced success with drastic fitness management techniques has been by switching to a protein-heavy, carbohydrate-averse diet paired with regular exercise. It wasn’t as strict and avoidant as Paleo, but it was also more concerted than simply avoiding carbs on an ad hoc basis. This is significant because I have attempted other regimens which were far more extreme in their diet and/or exercise component, but the composition of carbohydrates, I feel, severely limited effectiveness.

Indeed, these types of observations have struck a serious chord with readers of Wheat Belly, which has found its way back up Amazon’s best sellers despite having been released a year ago. In fact, after hundreds of reviews, the book’s 4.5-star rating is a rare achievement in the health world, particularly considering how strongly people feel based on their own experiences.

See the promo video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

YouTube is littered with success stories of Wheat Belly adherents—take a look for yourself.

Police Sketch of the Zodiac Killer | Handout, SF Chronicle

For more than 40 years the infamous “Zodiac” killer has walked free, notwithstanding decades of evidence and leads and theories. For most people, interest in the case subsided after the last murder in 1969, but the story has enjoyed brief resurgences, such as the 2007 movie of the same name.

The Zodiac killer, for the uninitiated, was an unknown male responsible for the murders of at least 5 people in the late 1960s in northern California’s Bay Area. As the police investigation proceeded, the serial killer would play cat-and-mouse games, periodically taunting them with puzzles and coded correspondence.

His identity, and therefore justice, has eluded law enforcement for decades, and because of the nature of the case and the investigation theories and alleged suspects abound even today.

One of the latest such scenarios comes from Lyndon Lafferty, a former California Highway Patrol officer who claims in a new book—The Zodiac Killer Cover Up—that he has a pretty good idea about the elusive truths in the case.

Lafferty, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, is sensitive to the fact that law enforcement as well as the general population are skeptical about the Zodiac theory du jour:

“Look, I know what most people think of Zodiac theories, and there have been so many over the years that if a person walked into the Vallejo Police Department right now and said he was the Zodiac, they’d tell him to get out,” Lafferty said. “But I do feel that we have a very credible case.”

But without naming names, Lafferty says he knows the identity of the killer. He claims the Zodiac killer is now a 91-year-old alcohol man living in Fairfield, a large town about 40 miles outside of San Francisco. He also says the man “was motivated to kill by jealousy over his wife’s affair with a prominent local man.”

According to the LA Times, Lafferty claims that “he and other lawmen investigated the suspect in the early 1970s but were stymied by ‘power brokers’ in Solano County.”

You can judge for yourself with The Zodiac Killer Cover Up:

Alexandria VA

Every few months Amazon will come out with an interesting list based on its sales figures. Apparently this month’s contribution to those interesting annals are the “Most Well-Read Cities in America.”

Amazon says the rankings were “determined by compiling sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format since June 1, 2011, on a per capita basis in cities with more than 100,000 residents.”

In other words, these large cities buy—and presumably read—more than other large cities.

In descending order (ending with the best-read city), here is that list:

20. Richmond, VA

19. Atlanta

18. St. Louis

17. Cincinnati

16. Bellevue, WA

15. Columbia, SC

14. Orlando, FL

13. Seattle

12. Knoxville, TN

11. Pittsburgh

10. Salt Lake City

9.   Washington, DC

8.   Gainesville, FL

7.   Arlington, VA

6.   Miami

5.   Boulder

4.   Ann Arbor, MI

3.   Berkeley, CA

2.   Cambridge, MA

1.   Alexandria, VA

And in addition to raw sales-and-reading data, Amazon compiled additional information about the subjects each city was inordinately interested in.

Included in those drill-downs:

• Boulder was inordinately interested in “Health, Fitness & Dieting”
• Berkeley ordered the most travel-related books
• Cambridge topped the list for most Business/Investing books ordered—or what Amazon says suggests “the most budding entrepreneurs”
• Alexandria was most interested in Romance books

E.L. James | Handout

Oh good!

Fifty Shades of Grey, the kinky erotica series that has taken the English-speaking world and its best seller lists by storm, is making a foray into young adult literature.

Just what your fifteen-year-old daughter needed: more print-porn.

And while it’s true that her forthcoming young adult tome is set to be a “paranormal novel” rather than kink, you’ll recall that author E.L. James began writing it as Twilight fan fiction. When it piqued the interest of some influential people, she changed the character names and other details to avoid copyright infringement—and probably accusations of coattail-riding. In other words, her X-rated spinoff WAS the young adult-oriented Twilight, with high-gloss leather switched out for plainclothes.

In all seriousness, it’s unlikely to be kink, and she tells USA Today

“I’ve got several more good ideas but how do you follow this?” she says referring to Fifty Shades. “I’ve set the bar quite high in terms of storytelling.”

Like her books or not, taking a wildly popular existing story, changing character names and injecting niche sexual material, then congratulating yourself for having “set the bar quite high in terms of storytelling” is a controversial proposition, to put it as charitably as possible.

You’ll recall also the British Ms. James’ other accomplishments, including $5 million in exchange for movie rights to the book, thousands of instant fans flocking to her book signings worldwide, massive Internet buzz, cracking just about every best seller list in the English-speaking world.

See the James “catalogue” here.

Amazon seems to get what Amazon wants—except in the case of Harry Potter e-books.

But after several weeks of being left out, Amazon is now able to sell the Harry Potter e-books directly (or will be on June 19^th).

As I reported back in March, like a lot of cutthroat, eye-of-the-tiger companies, Amazon makes a habit of seeking exclusivity deals with authors and publishers to  prevent having to ever compete with another retailer selling the same book—and this in addition to relentlessly petitioning the same entities to cede ground (via rights, financial deals) as a condition of Amazon continuing to carry their books. If you don’t comply, you run the risk of having the famously successful online retailer drop your book from its virtual shelves.

Whether she knew about Amazon’s particular arrangements or not, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling was having none of it. Not by Amazon, nor by any others. Once she released the e-book versions of her wildly popular Harry Potter books, she was determined to retain all rights and profits by selling them at her interactive “Pottermore” website.

Although it wasn’t exactly hassle-free for those with online accounts at Amazon or Barnes & Noble, the books did come with personalized watermarks in place of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection that has irritated readers since the dawn of digital literature. This meant readers could move a book around between devices: from the PC to their Kindle, or perhaps to their Nook or iPhone/Droid.

Initially, this level of control would not have been possible with the types of agreements Amazon et al. typically enforce; of course, J.K. Rowling is no ordinary author. You can imagine that an author who had moved nearly 500 million copies of her books, and whose net worth approached $1 billion—and all this before she released the e-book versions of the Potter series—draws a lot of water.

And indeed, Amazon was surely horrified to find themselves on the “carved-out” end of the negotiations this time. For weeks they had a sad placeholder page for the Potter e-books, and were reduced to being affiliates who may (or may not) have gotten a percentage of converted traffic they referred to the Pottermore website.

Yet as ABC News reports, the books are now available on the Kindle (free to borrow for Amazon Prime members) at around the $9.99 price point Amazon typically charges for new books. The exception would be the first three books in the seven-book series, which are going for the lower price of $7.99.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has explained that the reason the books are now available directly from Amazon is because the company “purchased an exclusive license” to offer them directly.

Casey Anthony with attorney Jose Baez | Joe Burbank/AP Photo

Casey Anthony now joins O.J. Simpson in the annals of people the public strongly suspects are murderers, but who were nonetheless let off the hook for one reason or another.

In fact, a 1999 Gallup poll indicates that a full 74% of those surveyed believe Simpson either “Definitely” or “Probably” committed murder, in contrast to a paltry 21% who believe he did not.

And for her part, a similar Gallup poll conducted after Casey Anthony was acquitted found that a full 64% of Americans believe she “Definitely” or “Probably” murdered her daughter Caylee.

It’s fortunate for us that our justice system does not decide on the basis of mob rule, but there is no doubt that the guilty go free sometimes. Simpson and Anthony are two figures the public believes to be in that category.

Naturally, Anthony’s defense attorney José Baez departs from the public’s own verdict, and he’s counting on you to do the same.

He’s releasing a memoir of his experience with the case, and even the title is loaded: Presume Guilty, Casey Anthony: The Inside Story.

The Washington Post says that he “is promising the book will be about what happened off the record, and it will describe who the real Anthony is.”

He’ll have a lot of explaining to do if he hopes to acquit her in the court of public opinion: apart from the 64% of Americans who believe Anthony murdered her daughter, USA Today reports that women—the most likely readers of such a book—are “more than twice as likely as men, 28% vs. 11% to think Anthony definitely murdered 2-year-old Caylee. Twenty-seven percent of women said they were angry about the verdict, compared with 9% of men,” something the newspaper’s interviewees attribute to “the maternal instinct.”

Baez’s own past does little to assuage the skepticism of the majority: ABC News details his checkered past in this article, enumerating his background of “child support battles, bad checks and bikini business,” as well as having “declared bankruptcy” and “defaulted on student loans.”

For these and other reasons the heretofore-unknown attorney was refused entry to the Florida bar for 8 years, a verdict the State Supreme Court summarized at the time by saying he showed “a lack of respect for the rights of others and a total lack of respect for the legal system.”

Offered a chance to clear his name by ABC’s investigative team, Baez “declined several requests…to comment”.

But, if you’re more charitable than most Americans, Presume Guilty will be out this July.

Today, children’s author Maurice Sendak passed away from a stroke at the age of 83 in Danbury, Connecticut.

Sendak was the author of the beloved book Where The Wild Things Are, a book originally published in 1963 which enjoyed a resurgence in popularity after it was adapted for the silver screen in 2009.

As the Christian Science Monitor poignantly points out, Sendak “didn’t think of himself as a children’s author, but as an author who told the truth about childhood.”

And while his name may not have been as well known to the general population as Hollywood’s A-list, his curmudgeonly demeanor struck a comedic chord with some audiences, including viewers of Stephen Colbert “The Colbert Report.”

See the videos below for a hilarious example of Colbert’s interviews with a colorful Maurice Sendak:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

His last book was Bumble-Ardy, published last year.

See the rest of Sendak’s books here.

A recent CS Monitor story worries that a new Obama biography coming soon from award-winning historian David Maraniss could threaten the “carefully crafted narrative about his life.”

That book is called Barack Obama: The Story, and is out June 19^th. The description reveals this:

The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama’s white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future.

The Monitor claims that:

Obama’s books have given him nearly complete control over his life narrative, write reporters Glenn Thrush and Dylan Byers. The president portrays himself as a searching, rational, multicultural product who struggled to find his place in a world of black and white.

But that depiction of himself may be more fragile than you think. They point to a Politico story which mistakenly claimed that the President had employed a writing style which resulted in his having “mashed ex-girlfriends together” (as characters). The writer of the Politico article issued a retraction and revised the article, but by then it was too late. The conservative Drudge Report website, which Quantcast says nets more than 12 million visitors per month, had been running the story and driving traffic to it the whole while, sparking claims of a disingenuous—even downright dishonest—biographical narrative from political opponents.

The worst possible case is captured by Politico in another, remedial article when they ask “Was Obama’s journey entirely spiritual and intellectual? Or was it also grounded in the lower realms of ambition and calculation?”

Elsewhere, “The problem is that Obama doesn’t want to be nailed down. He is a control freak when it comes to messaging his own life – he won’t utter any words he thinks he couldn’t have written himself.

Vanity Fair has excerpts of the possibly controversial new book; you can read them here.

For the politically-minded, the big new book out right now is Jose Rodriguez’s Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, released just a few days ago.

The Puerto Rican-born Rodriguez retired from the CIA in 2007, having served since 1976. Described by colleagues as “one of the best” field operators in the world, the 64-year-old’s career in the agency culminated with him serving as Director of the highly secretive National Clandestine Service department of the CIA. His specialties included the Latin fields, and al-Qaeda in the years following the 9/11 attacks.

Here’s the hook:

While the American public is aware of the CIA’s use of highly controversial “enhanced interrogation techniques,” few know the man who, in the wake of September 11, led all U.S. counterterrorism operations and oversaw the use of those procedures—procedures that obtained vital and timely intelligence and helped safeguard the nation from future attacks.

[A]s the shock of 9/11 faded, the support that the intelligence community enjoyed and deserved gave way to shortsighted and potentially dangerous political correctness. One by one, the tools needed to successfully fight terrorism were banished, and the men and women who volunteered to carry out our nation’s orders in combating al-Qa’ida found themselves second-guessed, hamstrung, and investigated— including Rodriguez himself. In effect, the United States has chosen to willfully and unilaterally disarm itself in the war on terror. In Hard Measures, Rodriguez convincingly argues for the techniques used, and uncompromisingly details when these techniques were necessary, why they worked, and how, ultimately, they contributed to the capture of the world’s most-wanted terror operatives, including Usama bin Ladin. From law school student to CIA recruit to his role as America’s top spy, Rodriguez’s full story is one of utmost importance—a rare, insider’s look at an issue that demands attention. Above all, it’s a reasoned, imperative, and fully informed case for hard measures, and an explosive and gripping account of the real war on terror— where it’s been and where it’s headed.

As you can imagine, the narrative has already pleased some and rankled others, depending on their feelings about “enhanced interrogation” and more. Huffington Post writers have already registered their disapproval with the measures employed by the CIA and other agencies in the interest of keeping Americans safe; the conservative National Review, by contrast, lends their support to Rodriguez and the alleged necessity of Iraq War-era antiterror protocols.

And it’s got time yet, but 26 Amazon reviews has yielded a 3.5-star rating. Of course, as is typically the case with polarizing political tomes, the star rating is more an indication of which political party is writing more reviews. 3.5 then suggests broader-than-usual appeal.

Those who need to do a little more try-before-you buy can watch the 60 Minutes interview between Rodriguez and, it should be noted, an openly disapproving Leslie Stahl below.

Click here to view the embedded video.