Book Bits

(The New York Times)

Next year, two previous “Jeopardy!” champions, Tom Nissley and India Cooper, will compete in the show’s Battle of the Decades, a tournament featuring winners from the 1980s through the 2000s. The publishing world recently gave the pair reason to meet ahead of the game.

Cooper, a freelance copy editor who lives in Madison, Ind., worked on Nissley’s new book, a trove of literary trivia and history called “A Reader’s Book of Days.” Nissley won more than $235,000 during an eight-game “Jeopardy!” winning streak in 2010.

In an email interview, Cooper said it was a “complete coincidence” that she worked on the book. She and Nissley communicated electronically, rarely discussing their experiences behind the “Jeopardy!” buzzer. “Once we’d introduced ourselves and exchanged the secret handshake, it was mostly about nurturing the book,” Cooper said. “We can’t talk to each other right now (show policy), but I sometimes chortle at the thought that we might first meet in person as opponents in the second round.”

Cooper originally appeared on the show in 1991, and is currently working to get back into fighting shape, with her husband manning the flash cards. “We did world capitals this morning; next up, U.S. presidents,” she said. “And I’m trying not to panic about how much I don’t know. Lists are very soothing.”


Schlesinger’s Syllabus

Among the correspondence in “The Letters of Arthur ­Schlesinger, Jr.,” reviewed this week by George Packer, is a letter from September 1991 to the editors of “The Reader’s Companion: A Book Lover’s Guide to the Most Important Books in Every Field of Knowledge.” Schlesinger wrote to recommend “books I think Americans should read to achieve ‘cultural literacy’ about our own nation.” Here’s his list:

“Essays,” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Speeches and Writings,” by Abraham Lincoln
“Democracy in America,” by Alexis de Tocqueville
“The American Commonwealth,” by James Bryce
“The Irony of American History,” by Reinhold Niebuhr
“The Shock of Recognition,” edited by Edmund Wilson
“An American Dilemma,” by Gunnar Myrdal
“The Promise of American Life,” by Herbert Croly
“Pragmatism,” by William James
“The Education of Henry Adams,” by Henry Adams
“The American Language,” by H. L. Mencken



Duly Noted

This week, the Book Review introduces Author’s Note, an occasional series of first-person essays by celebrated authors on topics ranging from the deeply personal to the purely literary. To get us started, Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, writes about the intersection of the life and work of the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy.