The Kennedy Detail
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Monday, December 13, 2010

BNN Book Awards For 2010

High-quality English language analysis and editorial writing on the news.




Well everyone else has book awards, so I decided that BNN should. Of course there is no tangible prize, I am currently out of ink in the printer and my wife just used up our supply of stamps sending Christmas cards, so the winners don’t even get a certificate mailed to them even if I could print it!

Of course because this is my own personal award system, I get to choose the authors and categories, no votes were cast so no ballot stuffing could occur. I have been objective. There was no favoritism shown being my friend or quoting me did not help what so ever! This is perfectly objective…..

On a more serious note, I have read well over 100 books this year, and if I didn’t read it, it didn’t go in the hat. Did you know that some book awards are handed out, and no-one even bothered to read the darn thing? The numbers are not in yet, but based on previous years I can guess that 2010 saw 300,000 new book titles.

I hardly scraped the surface with my measly reading habits! How can I come up with book awards based on only 100 or so books? Well my answer to that is name me a book award that reads everything in print. I also have a rule, I don’t do the rich and famous. These books are mostly Ghost Written and have little to do with reality. In my opinion 2010 represented a great year of reading for me. All of the books I read were notable and exceptional. Every single author deserves an award, alas there is not enough space to mention them all.

What surprised me was the incredible high quality of the Print On Demand books. Reviewers and traditional publishers have long bashed the POD sector because of the lack of formal processes, agents, editors, etc. The bashing needs to stop, I saw as many typos and other issues in the Trad Books! POD is no longer the orphan step child of the publishing world.

2010 was an interesting year, I saw many authors publishing their second or third book. I also heard from many authors who are actively writing a new book in spite of their insistence that they were done!

So the BNN awards go to:

Best JFK Book

This one took a bit of mulling over. So much has been written about JFK that he is not so much a figure in history, he is an industry. But the king of the hill this year has to be Gerald Blaine his book The Kennedy Detail. It has provoked a good deal of grumbling from some factions of JFK ‘experts’. Personally I thought it was a great read and adds some significant data about the assassination. This book is what a friend of mine refers to as ‘living history’, a book written by someone involved directly in an event. Gerald Blaine was one of the select few secret service agents assigned to protect JFK

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