Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Almost all Americans are familiar with the iconic image of the sailor-nurse couple kissing in Times Square after the announcement that World War II was over.

The difference between those Americans, and George Galdorisi and Lawrence Verria, is that the latter needed to know the identities of the people in the picture. And that’s why we now have their book, The Kissing Sailor: The Mystery Behind the Photo that Ended World War II.

It’s published by the Naval Institute Press, which starts describing the book thusly:

On August 14, 1945, Alfred Eisenstaedt took a picture of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square, minutes after they heard of Japan’s surrender to the United States. Two weeks later LIFE magazine published that image. It became one of the most famous WWII photographs in history (and the most celebrated photograph ever published in the world’s dominant photo-journal), a cherished reminder of what it felt like for the war to finally be over. Everyone who saw the picture wanted to know more about the nurse and sailor, but Eisenstaedt had no information and a search for the mysterious couple’s identity took on a dimension of its own. In 1979 Eisenstaedt thought he had found the long lost nurse. And as far as almost everyone could determine, he had. For the next thirty years Edith Shain was known as the woman in the photo of V-J DAY, 1945, TIMES SQUARE. In 1980 LIFE attempted to determine the sailor’s identity. Many aging warriors stepped forward with claims, and experts weighed in to support one candidate over another. Chaos ensued.

Perhaps it’s anticlimactic, but for those who won’t read it, they discover that the sailor was 89-year-old George Mendonsa of Rhode Island, who is described as “part of Bull Halsey’s famous task force [who] survived the deadly typhoon that took the lives of hundreds of other sailors.”

The nurse, they say, is Greta Zimmer Friedman of Maryland, also an 89-year-old. Friedman is described as “an Austrian Jew who lost her mother and father in the Holocaust [and] barely managed to escape to the United States.”

Even the man who snapped the legendary photograph has an I-shouldn’t-be-alive story: Alfred Eisenstaedt was a German soldier who was nearly killed in Flanders in World War I.

Fate, it seems, brought them all together that day, and the authors are quite confident they have correctly identified all of them via “forensic analysis, photographic interpretation and other technical means.”

As for the authors themselves, Galdorisi is a retired Navy Captain and naval aviator; Verria is a Social Studies Chair and well-regarded teacher at a Rhode Island High School.

Greg Mortenson | Central Asia Institute

If you thought Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson was finally coming clean about everything, think again.

CBS is reporting that the suit brought against him by two Californians, which demanded a full refund for everyone who purchased Three Cups on the grounds that details of his journey were falsified, has failed.

According to the story, US District Judge Sam Haddon said the claims of falsification in Mortenson’s book were “overly broad, flimsy and speculative.”

Mortenson has responded to the news by commenting that the verdict “confirms his faith in the U.S. justice system,” adding that

“At times, facing so much was overwhelming and devastating, however, my attorneys always offered steadfast encouragement to stay positive and keep the high ground, even when subjected to false allegations, vicious name-calling and slander,” Mortenson said.

It might have been a fresher breath of air for Mortenson and his fans sometime last year, but in early April 2012 the Montana state attorney general ordered him to pay $1 million in restitution for abusing the finances of his Central Asia Institute (CAI) charity, using millions for “family vacations, clothing and online shopping,” as well as using a private jet to get him around.

Moreover, CAI, which was among other things set up to raise and distribute money to build schools in Central Asia, was buying his book(s) for purposes of proliferation, and after years Mortenson had failed to reimburse the Institute for the royalty kickbacks those purchases netted him.

Prior to the conviction and fine, Mortenson remained defiant that he was not guilty of wrongdoing, either in his capacity as an author or as a philanthropist. Post-conviction, he was understandably more humble, if evasive, citing stress and other physical and psychological ailments as the cause of his misdeeds.

As CBS notes, he has never been proved to be lying about the details of Three Cups, but his story—which earned him millions in book sales, speaking gigs, donations and even government medals—has already begun to unravel.

The details of a famous photograph in the book, in which he is ostensibly being kidnapped and detained by armed Taliban, were later claimed by those men to have been falsified. They said they were not Taliban, that he was never kidnapped, and finally that they were mulling a defamation lawsuit in response.

Moreover, Mortenson has admitted that many of the events discussed in Three Cups “were compressed over different periods of time”; a truth readers might have liked him to have been up front about in his book.

And Into Thin Air and Into The Wild author Jon Krakauer has made something of a personal crusade out of debunking Mortenson’s alleged empire of lies. He’s written extensively on Byliner about the matter, having done his own research which contradicts the Three Cups narrative.

Finally, as I’ve written in previous articles, Mortenson has been highly evasive about attempts to clarify his narrative, having dodged several reporter interviews and once even threatening to call security if 60 Minutes’ staff didn’t leave his book signing.

It’s important to note that the dismissal of this civil suit does not mean details in Mortenson’s books were not falsified, or that the true-or-false drama is over. Judge Haddon dismissed the charges because they were too vague; it is still possible for others with insider knowledge of Mortenson’s account to come forward and confirm or deny his harrowing tale.

A year ago I might have been more patient with Greg Mortenson, but seeing second- and third-parties contradict his account, watching him dodge interviews at all costs, seeing him wax indignant about accusations against him only to ‘fess up and then externalize his fault when they prove to be true—that makes me a bit more trepidatious about trusting a guy who will apparently only admit wrongdoing when officially convicted by the authorities.

A new study released by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) will hearten some companies and worry others.

Perhaps its largest takeaway, as noted in a press release, is the growing preference for tablets over dedicated e-readers as the platform of choice on which to read e-books. In just the last 7 months (since August 2011), the number of people preferring to consume digital literature on their dedicated e-readers (e.g., Amazon’s base Kindles; Barnes & Noble’s base Nooks) dropped a whopping 14 percent, from 72% to 58%. As a corollary, tablet share of the preferred e-reader market jumped from 13 percent to more than 24 percent.

It’s still a majority, but if the lead can drop by 20% (in relative terms) in the space of about half a year, it’s not unthinkable that we may see tablets claim the top spot for e-reader of choice in just the next year or two.

By now, readers surely think Apple’s iPad is primarily responsible for this trend; indeed, a look at its sales figures over the past few years would seem to make such a conclusion justifiable. But in fact, Apple’s tablets account for just one percent of the absolute growth—it is non-Apple tablets, like Amazon’s full-color Kindle Fire, that are claiming the rest of the market.

“The movement from dedicated e-readers to multi-function tablet devices is an important one for publishers to understand, as it allows them to deliver a richer, more interactive e-book experience,” said Angela Bole, BISG’s Deputy Executive Director. “One of the strengths of this study is that it can plot such evolution, preparing publishers for what e-book readers want and expect from them next.”

Read the rest of the press release here.

Maybe you’re like me, and you’re not surprised at any of this. I still recall buying a separate cell phone, camera, MP3 player and navigation system—to name just a few disparate capabilities—and yearning for the time somebody would just consolidate them all into one. Now we have it, and it’s called an iPhone.

In the same vein, ever wonder why people just want a single universal remote rather than having a half a dozen separate ones? Apps have much the same function on tablets; consolidating many capabilities on one platform.

To me it seems inevitable that dedicated e-readers go extinct; their functions rolled into tablets which can (hopefully) accommodate valuable “dedicated” technology like Amazon’s anti-glare E-Ink.

Barnes & Noble has gained another ally in the fight to gain market share from Amazon, or perhaps just to stay alive.

That ally, according to PC World, is Seattle-area neighbor Microsoft.

The two companies have struck a deal to pool resources to create new e-book-related products and services, and improve existing ones. Microsoft will inject $300 million into a new subsidiary of the heretofore dwindling Barnes & Noble empire in exchange for a 17.6% equity stake “in the new company,” though it’s not clear whether that is in the subsidiary or B&N at large.

On their end, consumers can expect a Nook app for Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 operating system (expected to be released this fall), much like Amazon has already offered a Kindle compatibility app for the Apple iOS and Windows platforms, to name a couple.

The app is said to employ the “Metro” look, which is Microsoft’s name for the user interface (UI) in the upcoming OS.

Also, on the heels of Apple’s NY media event in January, in which the company discussed the release of iBooks 2 and textbooks for the iPad, the new partnership has expressed its intentions to compete with Apple by creating Nook-based textbooks.

No announcement yet on whether future editions of the Nook will stick with the modified Google Android platform it uses now, or if it will switch to a Microsoft-created OS.

Tor UK, the British cousin of Macmillan’s American science fiction publishing imprint “Tor,” have announced that it will be dropping DRM restrictions from the e-books it sells. PC World reports that “the decision…was made alongside similar moves by its U.S. partners, including Tor Books and Forge.”

DRM, for the unitiated, stands for Digital Rights Management, which is highfalutin talk for the irksome restrictions which come bundled with your current e-books preventing you from reading your iTunes ebook on a Kindle (or vice-versa), or transferring either to your PC, Mac, Kobo, Nook, Android and more.

I’m going through one such hassle right now, as I try to transfer a book I (accidentally) purchased on one iTunes account to another compatible device linked to a different iTunes account. With my considerable technical knowledge I got as far as replicating the book, but after hours of effort ran up against an unknown and insurmountable permissions problem during the last stage of the transfer.

Digital music ownership rights have long been an unclear enterprise—at least to the extent that buyers and sellers have vastly different ideas of which rights ownership affords them—and now e-books enter the fray. PC World thinks the recent unbindings from DRM “could set a precedent for the rest of the industry”; making this “a watershed moment.”

To the justifications and details, PC World continues:

“We know that this is what many Tor authors passionately want,” said Jeremy Trevathan, Pan Macmillan’s fiction publisher. “We also understand that readers in this community feel strongly about this.”

Tom Doherty, president and publisher of Tom Doherty Associates in the U.S. — which publishes Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen — added that authors and readers are “a technically sophisticated bunch,” and DRM is a constant annoyance to them.

“It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another,” he said.

Opponents of DRM have preemptively responded to criticism that the move will spark a deluge of e-book piracy by noting that pirated copies of originally DRM-encrypted books are already freely available “on the dark side of the Internet,” adding that retaining DRM for paying customers only penalizes and restricts the law-abiding e-book crowd.

Read the rest of the article here.

Actress Farrah Fawcett (b. 1947) passed on nearly two years ago, but ex-lover and fellow actor Ryan O’Neal is hoping the marquee actress is still fresh in your mind.

The 71-year-old O’Neal, who was romantically involved with Fawcett for nearly 20 years between the late 1970s and 1990s (his third marriage; her second), now resides in Malibu, California and has written a memoir of their time together.

It’s called Both of Us: My Life with Farrah, and will be released on May 1^st. Here’s what publisher Crown says:

Ryan O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett. He was the handsome Academy Award–nominated star of Paper Moon and the classic romance Love Story. She was the beautiful, all-American Charlie’s Angel, whose poster adorned the bedroom walls of teenage boys everywhere. One of the most storied love affairs in Hollywood history, their romance has captivated fans and media alike for more than three decades. In a tragic turn, the world lost Farrah after a tragic battle with cancer in 2009, but in his intimate memoir Both of Us, Ryan brings their relationship to vivid life.

Fans of each other from afar, Ryan and Farrah met through her husband, Lee Majors, and fell passionately in love. Soon, however, reality threatened their happiness and they struggled with some serious matters, including the disintegration of Farrah’s marriage; Ryan’s troubled relationship with his daughter, Tatum, and son, Griffin; mismatched career trajectories; and raising their young son, Redmond—all leading Ryan and Farrah to an inevitable split in 1997.

Ryan fought to create a life on his own but never stopped longing for Farrah. Eventually he realized that he had lost his true soul mate. Older and wiser, he and Farrah found their way back to each other and were excited to start a new life together. But their bliss was cut short when Farrah was diagnosed with cancer and passed away just three years later.

Ryan’s deep love for Farrah and his devotion to preserving her memory are evident in Both of Us. Drawing on decades’ worth of personal records and keepsakes, he has included never-before-seen photographs, letters exchanged between him and Farrah, and his own diaries, making this a poignant and compelling memento for her fans. Written with candor and emotional honesty, it is a true Hollywood love story.

Fawcett died of cancer in 2009, having been diagnosed in 2006. The couple had split up in 1997, but many don’t know that O’Neal was also diagnosed with (prostate) cancer in 2001. Like many Hollywood couples, their relationship was a volatile one, having reached both the highest highs and the lowest lows, but O’Neal remembers it fondly.

In their writeup, USA Today discussed O’Neal sitting on the beach outside his Malibu home reminiscing about their time together:

“She used to come out here every night and take a picture at sunset,” O’Neal says in a tone barely audible above the waves. “We have years worth of beautiful sunsets. They are some of our most peaceful times.”

The 18 complicated and often turbulent years the two spent together were not always the stuff of peaceful sunsets before their relationship crashed and burned in 1997. But the love between the 1980s glamour couple — which captured the attention of a Farrah-mad nation and the tabloids alike — has stood the test of time.

Read excerpts here.

The death of decades-old pop diva Whitney Houston—which the LA coroner has now said owes to a combination of cocaine, heart disease and drowning—sparked a national outpouring of grief and remembrance.

Now, her mother, noted gospel singer Cissy Houston, is planning to rise above the fray of salacious and often poorly thrown-together Whitney bios with her own memoir of raising Whitney.

Whitney Houston and mother Cissy

The NYT reports that the 78-year-old mother, who met with publishers at New York’s 5-star St. Regis Hotel to kick off a bididng war, promises to be honest in her forthcoming tome, telling publishers “It’s going to be the bad, it’s going to be the good.”

Yet it’s also said that she appeared “reluctant” to cover the topics of her 48-year-old daughter’s drug addiction and death, which, while far from encapsulating Whitney Houston’s career, were nonetheless defining elements in her roller coaster life. That’s why the Times further reports:

How much Ms. Houston is prepared to disclose — and how candid she will be about her daughter’s troubled marriage and long pattern of drug use — could determine the amount of money a publisher would be willing to spend on the book. Bidding could easily go into seven figures, said the people who attended the meetings.

Further, in her pitch to publishers she mentioned she wanted to “set straight” all the “lies” about her daughter in the media.

This could be construed in a number of ways, but frankly, I’m of the opinion that someone who kicks off a bidding war by announcing they’re going to talk about everything, then expressing reservations about the most important and in-demand elements of “everything”—even before promising to “dispel” negative media myths about a family member who was claimed by a drug addiction—is not yet ready to be honest.

I could be wrong, of course, and I expect the publishers will straighten that out before they agree to any million-dollar deals.

The book will be ghostwritten.

Read the whole NYT article here.

Readers who can’t wait for Cissy’s memoir to hit can pre-order Whitney’s friend Bebe Winans’ book The Whitney I Knew, out July 31^st.

Paul Ingrassia, a former Detroit bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, believes he has identified the 15 cars which best embody the distinct spirit and challenges of America.

Publisher Simon & Schuster says this about the book:

From the assembly lines of Henry Ford to the open roads of Route 66, from the lore of Jack Kerouac to the sex appeal of the Hot Rod, America’s history is a vehicular history—an idea brought brilliantly to life in this major work by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Paul Ingrassia.

Ingrassia offers a wondrous epic in fifteen automobiles, including the Corvette, the Beetle, and the Chevy Corvair, as well as the personalities and tales behind them: Robert McNamara’s unlikely role in Lee Iacocca’s Mustang, John Z. DeLorean’s Pontiac GTO , Henry Ford’s Model T, as well as Honda’s Accord, the BMW 3 Series, and the Jeep, among others.

Through these cars and these characters, Ingrassia shows how the car has expressed the particularly American tension between the lure of freedom and the obligations of utility. He also takes us through the rise of American manufacturing, the suburbanization of the country, the birth of the hippie and the yuppie, the emancipation of women, and many more fateful episodes and eras, including the car’s unintended consequences: trial lawyers, energy crises, and urban sprawl. Narrative history of the highest caliber, Engines of Change is an entirely edifying new way to look at the American story.

According to this and other, unofficial descriptions, it would seem Ingrassia believes the following cars are among the important cars in question:

• Ford Mustang
• Chevrolet Corvette
• Pontiac GTO
• Chevrolet Corvair
• Volkswagen Beetle
• Toyota Prius
• Ford Model T
• BMW 3 Series
• Jeep
• Honda Accord

You’ll see that’s just 10 of 15—the rest obviously appear within the book. You’ll notice as well that several are not American-made, or at least American-developed (many Asian and European automakers locate production facilities in North America for that market), but Ingrassia still believes they characterize a unique element of the American essence.

Do you agree or disagree with the 10 cars above? Let me know in the comments.

The book is out May 1^st.

British publisher Peter McGee, with the German magazine Zeitungszeugen (“Witnesses”), recently raised the hackles of the Bavarian government when he promised to publish excerpts from Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf in his periodical.

The manifesto is not explicitly banned, but as the WaPo once reported the government “has used its ownership of the copyright to prevent its publication so far.”

It has owned those copyrights since they were granted by Allied forces in 1945.

Here too they were successful in pressuring McGee to rethink publishing those excerpts, and he agreed to black out the passages he once intended to use.

While it was still green lit, the plan simultaneously drew the ire of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, who called the would-be act “a moral offense to the memory of all Nazi victims.”

But now, according to the LA Times and others, the Bavarian government intends—with the newfound support of the Central Council of Jews—to publish Mein Kampf one last time before their copyright ownership expires in 2015.

But it won’t be allowed to stand on its own: the Independent reports that “the state’s version would contain additional information which would debunk and ‘demystify’ the manifesto” for the purpose of “[making] it clear what nonsense it contains and what a worldwide catastrophe this dangerous body of thought led to.”

In other words, expect some sort of annotations aiming to dissect the book as you read it.

Mein Kampf, which is German for “My Struggle” and already widely available online and in other countries, will be released in 2015 in print form, e-book and audiobook.

Very recently Amazon released its new Kindle Touch, which has garnered a respectable 4-star average review on its website. Even more recently—last week, in fact—they announced that they had begun shipping their Kindle Touch 3G, which allows readers to upload and download content without an Internet connection, no monthly subscription fee required (a step up over the more data-hungry iPad).

Even though the new Kindle Touch 3G ($189, or $149 with ads) is not color like the also-recently-released Kindle Fire ($199), it is now being described as their flagship tablet/e-book reader. It’s possible the lack of color has to do with the retention of their E-Ink technology, which prevents glare and offers the same look and feel of an actual book. It’s more than can be said for the other tablets and e-readers on the market now, which foist on users the same computer vision eye strain issues suffered as a result of backlighting. Kindle VP Dave Limp says it’s “the most full-featured e-reader available” and is for readers “who want the top of the line e-reader.”

CNET is pretty chuffed with the device, giving it an “Excellent” 4-star rating culminating with this:

Add everything up and it’s clear the Kindle Touch offers the most features in an e-ink e-reader, with lots of audio options, the X-Ray feature, and Amazon Prime free loaners leading the list. For many people, the audio extras won’t seem important, but for some, they’ll be a key differentiator.

On the downside, the dearth of physical page-turn buttons may be a real issue for some, especially lefties. And the Touch is a tad heavier than the superslim entry-level Kindle. But there’s very little not to like here.

Despite its own 4-star review, PCMag seems more ambivalent, concluding that:

You now have several good choices for ebook readers at bargain prices. Essentially, it depends on how much of the experience you want on the device itself. If you just want to read, don’t care about audiobooks, and you’re willing to shop for and organize your collection on a PC or Mac, the entry-level Kindle gets you there for less money.

Deciding between the Kindle Touch 3G and Nook Touch is tougher. We’re leaving the Editors’ Choice with the Nook Touch, largely because you can get an ad-free experience with a touch screen for just $99.

The consensus I’m getting from users and the reviewer-pros is: this really may be the best device on the market right now for reading e-books, but what its competitors (e.g., B&N’s Nook) lack in features they at least make up for in price and a standard, ad-free user experience.

For more information, here is Amazon’s official video promo for the new product:

And here’s CNET’s video review of the device: