Austin American-Statesman from Austin, Texas • E4

NATIONAL BEST-SELLERS THE NEW YORK TIMES FICTION 1. Girl Who Kicked the Stieg Larsson 2. Red Philippa Gregory 3. Kathryn Stockett 4. Carl Hiaasen 5.

Rembrandt Daniel Silva 6. Away Jennifer Weiner 7. James Patterson and Maxine Paetro 8. Excellent Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P.

Kelner 9. Nora Roberts 10. Janet Evanovich NONFICTION 1. My Dad Justin Halpern 2. Obama Laura Ingraham 3.

Andrew Morton 4. Big Michael Lewis 5. Chelsea Bang Chelsea Handler 6. for Mary Roach 7. Malcolm Gladwell 8.

Into Kendra Wilkinson 9. of the Summer S.C. Gwynne 10. Anthony Bourdain PAPERBACK FICTION 1. Girl With the Dragon Stieg Larsson 2.

Girl Who Played With Stieg Larsson 3. Chris Cleave 4. Barbara Kingsolver 5. David Nicholls 6. the Stephen King 7.

for Abraham Verghese 8. Art of Racing in the Garth Stein 9. Friends Jennifer Weiner 10. Paulo Coelho Rankings reflect sales for the week that ended Aug. 7 at thousands of venues where a wide range of general interest books are sold nationwide.

LOCAL BEST-SELLERS ba RNES a NO bl a ORET FICTION 1. Girl With the Dragon Stieg Larsson 2. Girl Who Kicked the Stieg Larsson 3. Red Philippa Gregory 4. Girl Who Played With Stieg Larsson 5.

Chris Cleave 6. Rembrandt Daniel Silva 7. Kathryn Stockett 8. David Nicholls 9. Nevada Barr 10.

Year of the Margaret Atwood NONFICTION 1. Pray, Elizabeth Gilbert 2. of the Summer S.C. Gwynne 3. Meals in Crappy Little Jennifer Schaertl 4.

Trips From Austin, 5th Paris Permenter 5. Finder 2.0,’ Tim Rath 6. My Dad Justin Halpern 7. Mentor Tony Dungy 8. Big Michael Lewis 9.

Malcolm Gladwell 10. Obama Laura Ingraham AND YOUNG ADULT BOOKS 1. Fowl: The Atlantis Eoin Colfer 2. Hunger Suzanne Collins 3. Erin Hunter 4.

Stephenie Meyer 5. Suzanne Collins 6. Rick Riordan 7. and Beverly Cleary 8. Tall Jeff Smith 9.

Grade, Here I Nancy Carlson 10. Wendelin Van Draanen Rankings for the week that ended Aug. 7 for hardcovers and paperbacks combined. Books statesman.com austin360.com ST WC SUNDAY, AUGUST 22, 2010 E4 CALENDAR RE ad INGS Borderlands Community of Poets reading 4 p.m. today.

Featuring Ken Jones, Chuck Taylor, Lowell Mick White and Hedwig Gorski. Barnes Noble Sunset Valley, 5601 Brodie Lane. Free. 444-0731. Judy Collins.

3 p.m. Friday. Reads and signs copies of the purchased at BookPeople. Show receipt to get wristband for signing line; arrive at least a half-hour before event to line up. Book People, 603 N.

Lamar Blvd. Free. 472-5050, www.bookpeople.com. Phoebe Kitanidis and Anastasia Hopcus 1 p.m. Saturday.

Read and sign (Kitanidis) and (Hopcus). BookPeople, 603 N. Lamar Blvd. Free. 4725050, www.bookpeople.com.

Compiled by Samantha Stiles; By Jody Seaborn Americ A n-St A te A St A ff A merican attitudes toward the death penalty have been evolving since the beginning, when dozens of offenses were punishable by death and executions were carried out in public. Like many Americans today, hardly any of the founders were ambivalent about the death penalty, though a few Thomas Jefferson, for example sought to limit its use, and one in particular, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who considered capital punishment offspring of monarchical argued for its abolition. In the briskly paced, clearly written and evenhanded Punishment on University of Texas professor David Oshinsky, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his 2005 book, An American ef ciently surveys the divisive history of the death penalty in America. Only 125 pages long, his book is a useful primer on the constitutional issues and passions that de ne capital punishment, and on the contemporary legal cases that have shaped its use. The landmark case at the center of book, Furman v.

Georgia, began in 1967 when William Furman, a 24-year-old African American with a criminal history, killed a 29-year-old white man named William Micke after Micke discovered Furman burglarizing his house. Furman claimed that he accidentally red his gun when he tripped while trying to run away and that he intended to kill Micke, but an all-white jury found him guilty in a trial that lasted less than a day and sentenced him to die in electric chair. By the early 1970s, opponents of capital punishment thought the Supreme Court might be ready to declare the death penalty unconstitutional, a violation of the Eighth prohibition against and unusual and the 14th demand for process under The court had indicated a willingness to apply standards of to capital punishment, and evidence left little doubt that the death penalty was racially biased used in the South, where it was most often imposed, as a means of racial control. It was and two words that would prove key to the death future. For every defendant sent to death row, there were dozens of others guilty of identical crimes who had received lesser sentences.

With the help of the Legal Defense Fund, case reached the Supreme Court in 1971. In June 1972, a fractured court declared, 5-4, death sentence unconstitutional. Justice Potter Stewart, a centrist supporter of the death penalty who had been appointed to the court by President Eisenhower, the words that would come to de ne Furman and the controversy as a Oshinsky writes. Stewart found sentence to be and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and concluding the Eighth Amendment cannot tolerate the in iction of a death sentence so wantonly and so freakishly The justices in the Furman majority found the procedure, not the punishment, unconstitutional, and they essentially challenged the states to go back to the drawing board and write clearer, fairer death penalty statutes. At least 35 states eagerly obliged, and by 1975 more inmates sat on death row than ever before.

The death penalty returned to the court in 1976 in the form of another Georgia murder case, Gregg v. Georgia, which was the lead case in a grouping of ve Southern cases under review. The court ruled, 5-4, against new statutes in North Carolina and Louisiana that mandated the death penalty for specified crimes but upheld, 7-2, amended laws in Georgia, Florida and Texas that separated capital trials into guilt and punishment phases, and allowed and encouraged jury discretion. The death penalty in these three states was no longer applied arbitrarily and capriciously, the court found. post-Furman law was unique; it asked jurors to consider whether a defendant represented continuing threat to one critic Oshinsky tells us, a single other example the whole range of civilized law outside of this one statute that explicitly makes a (execution) depend on a prediction of that future Yet hundreds of defendants would be executed in the coming years by juries that answered yes to this hypothetical question with precious little Concerns about inconsistency contributed to the decision in Furman; a preference for individuality informed Gregg.

And on and on this even tortured would go, as Oshinsky describes it. Furman, rather than banning the death penalty, paved the way for its vigorous return and its contin ued litigation. In 1977, the court ruled that the death penalty for rape was unconstitutional. The court in 1986 prohibited the execution of insane people and, in 1988, the execution of juveniles 15 and younger. In 2002, the court said executing people who are mentally impaired was unconstitutional, reversing a 1989 decision, and in 2005 it declared that sentencing defendants to die for offenses they committed before age 18 was cruel and unusual.

In the mid-1960s, only 42 percent of Americans told pollsters they supported the death penalty. By the time of the Furman decision, which came after several years of riots, rising crime rates and exploitative politicians promising law and order, a strong majority supported capital punishment, whatever its aws and however freakish its imposition. Oshinsky notes, to support the death penalty in overwhelming numbers, despite a stream of reports and ndings that portray the current system as racially biased, weighted against the poor, marred by substandard defense attorneys, expensive to maintain and prone to wrongful In his majority opinion in Gregg, Stewart wrote that the death was not over. Capital punishment constitutional and satisfying need for retribution was far from the brink of extinction. Awaiting the court in the years ahead was, to quote Harry Blackmun, a justice who would grapple with the issue until he flung up his hands in frustration, a constant tinkering the machinery of Jody Seaborn is the books editor.

445-1702 Execution evolution Capital Punishment on Trial: Furman v. Georgia and the Death Penalty in Modern America David Oshinsky University Press of Kansas; $29.95, $14.95 (paperback) Oshinsky clearly reviews divisive past of U.S. capital punishment Pat Sullivan ASSO ci A te re SS blues, Howard is to Texas science ction and fantasy. He is the birth of a very loose subgenre (or maybe more like a worldview) you might call And as the 32nd ArmadilloCon, own science- ction and fantasy convention, takes off Friday, it seems a good time to talk to some authors who make Texas science tion like no other. as Howard the very rst Texan to write fantastical stories? No.

Bill Page, an amateur historian who works as the library program coordinator at Texas University, has compiled an exhaustive list of pre-Howard sci- and fantasy writers. were actually quite a few before Page said. they were mostly minor writers, and in most cases their works have been Take, for example, Nap, or: Five Hundred Years by Aurelia Hadley Mohl (1833-1896), published in the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph the week of Dec. 25-29, 1865. may be the rst science- ction story written and published in Page said.

story describes a far-future utopia and brie mentions air travel, radio and television, and colonies on the moon and various also John D. Rullman (1846-1914), who wrote, Page said, in Celestial in which a cowboy visits dwellers on the sun and one or two and Sutton Elbert Griggs (1872-1933), an African American minister and author whose 1899 novel, um in a plot to seize Texas and Louisiana from the U.S. as a homeland for African according to Page. But Howard was the biggest gun. Mark Finn has devoted a nice chunk of his career to gur ing out why.

book, and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. published by Austin imprint MonkeyBrain, tries to unpack Howard and his profoundly fecund mind. (Howard wrote more than 300 stories in 12 years, some of them 67,000 words long. He also wrote 800 poems and about 5,000 pages of correspondence.) me, Howard launches this notion of taking two separate concepts and creating a Finn says. genre-busting really was unique for the time.

His character Solomon Kane was a Puritan ghting French pirates and slaying vampires. You look at the political commentary in some of the Conan stories and he combines it with these Lovecraftian (Howard corresponded often with horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.) And then the Texas habit of telling stories that might not be altogether true. best tall tales are always told by the guy who can recite these outlandish events with the utmost Finn says. was totally that MonkeyBrain owner Chris Roberson a respected writer of science ction and comic books in his own right thinks a weird Texas genre starts with Howard, but not all fantasy and sci-fi writers in Texas are part of it.

ArmadilloCon When: Friday-Aug. 29 Where: Renaissance Hotel, 9721 Arboretum Blvd. Cost: Info: www.armadillocon.org Continued from 1 Weird: genre-busting was notable for his time blues, Howard is to Texas science ction and fantasy. He is the birth of a very loose subgenre (or maybe more like a worldview) you might And as the 32nd ArmadilloCon, own science- ction and fantasy convention, takes ArmadilloCon When: Where: 9721 Arboretum Blvd. Cost: Info: Continued next page.