Tag Archives: Boston Globe

The Monday Movie: SPOTLIGHT

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spotlight-mv-10I was reading a memoir by a bestselling fiction author, in hopes of making it the Monday Book. But 1) it was the most boring book I’ve read since grad school and 2) I was trying to finish an afghan on a tight deadline so that led to an allnighter with Netflix.

SPOTLIGHT is a movie about the Boston Globe breaking the cover-up of sexual predator priests by the Catholic church, not just in Boston, but internationally. It’s an amazing movie. The journalists are not unbelievable heroes. The tedious build-up of info includes research details I remember from my days behind the desk. I LOVE the scene where they realize they can use annual directories of priests to figure out who is on “sick leave” and other code names.

There’s also an intense moment where the “good guy” reporters confront the “bad guy” lawyer who’s making money off hushing up the scandals, and discover he sent them the names of 20 predator priests five years before, hoping to get off the gravy train and redeem himself. The Globe buried the story. Spoiler alert: the guy who buried the story then is leading the charge now, but not for redemption. He literally doesn’t remember  burying the story.

“Just doing my job.”

Spotlight had me riveted, and now I want to read the books (by the journalists and by Robert Sipe, a psychotherapist who wrote about the problems and was hachet-jobbed by the church). The icky details are handled with sensitivity, and the story of Spotlight centers around how they carefully built the story.

You really want to see this. It deserved its best picture Oscar last year and it is now available on Netflix.

 

Observations on the Boston Globe’s article about Bookstore Ownership

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Jack’s weekly guest blog

“Oh, some poo’er the giftie gi’e us, tae see oorsels as ithers see us” (Robert Burns)

(Oh that some power the gift would give us, to see ourselves as others see us.)

Over the last few months it’s been interesting to read the number of articles about the resurgence of independent bookstores around the country and see how Wendy’s book and our experiences have fit in. And to sit back and watch, with small “we told you so smirks” playing on our faces, how many people who thought just three years ago that bookstores were “dinosaurs” are now eating crow served up by brontosaurus waiters and waitresses.

Yes, we might be gloating slightly on that point….

On Sunday past the Boston Globe ran an article on wealthy retirees looking to ‘fulfill their dream’ of running a bookstore someday by buying ready-made shops that had gone ‘belly up’. (I’m sure many of them worked with their communities to support the previous owners, like folks elsewhere.)

It wasn’t clear from the article whether these were new-book stores or used-book stores and that has a certain bearing on their success potential, as does whether they are in buildings with mortgages or rents. As Wendy said in her talk for Books TV, “my advice to people wanting to open a bookshop starts with: don’t pay rent for a separate building. And you need to like people as much as you like books.”

That’s another key element, liking people, because you need to invite them in for community events –not just author signings, but actual hub activity. Invite all sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons tied to books. Give them needlework nights, game nights, astronomy nights, illustrator nights, nights of fun and flaming passion – well, fun, anyway.

While we were in Nashville at Southern Festival of the Book we chatted with Ethan Watters, author of Urban Tribes. He  is from San Francisco and was telling us about someone who had bought an existing bookstore out there planning to do just that–make it into a ‘community hub’ and thus keep it alive and thriving. This is an approach dear to our heart and also, we believe, one the great ‘unique selling points’ (MBA-speak; excuse me) of bookstores. It’s why we matter. It’s why we’re thriving.

The Globe article might focus a bit more on wealthy people in upmarket areas than on the small town shops Wendy and I saw in our 2011 Booking Down the Road Trip, or have heard from in the community of independent bookstore owners banding together since then, but our observations remain the same: those prepared to work hard and find fun in that will love running a bookstore. And they will understand one our favorite sayings: there are those who are rich, and then there are those who have a lot of money.

I do wonder, with a sympathetic grin, if those buying bookstores know what they’re letting themselves in for. We didn’t, when we started. Which leads me to another Scots saying: “Weel ye ken noo!”