AMERICA’S BOOK REVIEW
DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK
DECEMBER 2016
BOOKS FOR EVERYONE Art & Photography Hollywood • History Sports • Nature • Pets Literary • Children’s Food • Inspiration
BEST OF 2016 Our editors select the year’s top books
ZADIE SMITH ‘Swing Time’ chronicles a pivotal friendship
Holiday Catalog
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great gift ideas for book lovers
contents
DECEMBER 2016 N R’ -
columns 18 18 20 22 23 24 26
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Well Read Lifestyles Whodunit Cooking Book Clubs Audio Romance
best books
Our editors have chosen the 50 best books of 2016. Check out our list to see if your favorites made the cut.
W A Y FA R E R T RILOGY
Winner of the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Award
features
gift books
book reviews
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42 FICTION
Holiday catalog Fannie Flagg Cassandra King Queen Victoria Zadie Smith Children’s picture books
meet the author 30 Mary McDonough
Nature Sports History Hollywood Art & Photography Pets Food Inspiration Literary Children’s Teen
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ISBN 9781630269074
Set in China in the late 1800s, the first book in the Wayfarer Series tells the story of star-crossed lovers, Lian, a Eurasian healer, Giacom an Italian and Giacomo, sailor, driven apart by the Boxer Rebellion.
t o p p i c k : Moonglow
by Michael Chabon The Ornatrix by Kate Howard I’ll Take You There by Wally Lamb To Capture What We Cannot Keep by Beatrice Colin
43 NONFICTION
t o p p i c k : The Marches
by Rory Stewart Born a Crime by Trevor Noah The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel George Lucas by Brian Jay Jones
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�e Secret Language f Women
36
Lemon Blossoms ISBN 9781630269098
Angelica Domenico is born in a blossoming lemon grove, a prophetic fusion of sweet blossom and bitter fruit on an island governed by volcanoes and ea earthquakes. An early childhood accident propels Angelica to battle trials in a world where virginity is paramount.
37
47 Lori Nichols In America ISBN 9781630269111
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BookPage is a selection guide for new books. Our editors evaluate OPERATIONS DIRECTOR and select for review the best books Elizabeth Grace Herbert published in a variety of categories. Only books we highly recommend ADVERTISING OPERATIONS are featured. BookPage is editorially independent and never accepts Sada Stipe payment for editorial coverage.
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This heartwarming conclusion follows Marcella, daughter of the central characters of the continent-spanning trilogy, as she comes o f age in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn in the late 1920s.
�e Wayfarer Trilogy is available online & at your favorite bookstore.
k
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3
Fiction
The Whistler
Ann Patchett returns with a highly anticipated novel about two broken families and the paths their lives take over the course of 40 years—through love and marriage, death and divorce, and a dark childhood secret.
The master of the legal thriller takes readers on a high-stakes thrill ride through the darkest corners of the Sunshine State.
Harper $27.99
9780062491794
The Mistletoe Murder
Commonwealth
9780385541190
The Baxters are back!
Crime fiction readers will delight in these four previously uncollected stories from P.D. James, one of the greatest mystery writers of our time.
Doubleday $28.95
Knopf $24
The Other Einstein How did one man discover the theory of relativity on his own? He didn’t. This is a vivid, mesmerizing tale about a brilliant and extraordinary woman, forgotten by history.
Sourcebooks Landmark $25.99 9780451494146
9781492637257
Christmas Caramel Murder Joanne Fluke, the queen of culinary suspense, cooks up the most delicious Christmas gift of all—a recipe-filled Hannah Swensen holiday mystery.
Kensington $20 9781617732287
Two by Two Bestselling author Nicholas Sparks marks 20 years since The Notebook with a powerful new novel of unconditional love.
Grand Central $27
Bestselling author Karen Kingsbury’s beloved Baxter family returns in a life-changing story of two families in the aftermath of loss—and in the midst of an unfolding love story.
Howard Books $19.99
9781455520695
Leave Me
El Paso
News of the World
The irresistible adult debut from Gayle Forman, the bestselling author of If I Stay, is a moving and surprising novel about the joys and sorrows of marriage, motherhood and friendship.
Three decades after Forrest Gump, Winston Groom returns to fiction with this sweeping American epic— part history, part legend—set against the waning days of the wild frontier.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging, itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex novel.
Liveright $27.95
Morrow $22.99
Algonquin $26.95 9781616206178
9781631492242
9780062409201
Small Great Things The #1 bestselling author tackles race, privilege, prejudice and justice in her muchtalked-about new novel, which inspires us to look beyond ourselves this holiday season.
Make the holidays merry with these great listens!
Ballantine $28.99
9780345544957
The Wish From Beverly Lewis, the top name in Amish fiction, comes a new story of friendship. When Leona ignores caution and sets out to visit a friend in the English world, will it lead to her undoing?
Audiobooks are a great accompaniment to your daily routine and make great gifts, even for yourself!
Bethany House $15.99
TryAudiobooks.com $30-$50 9780764212499
Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection
Waves of Mercy The perfect gift for moms, sisters and grandmas, this moving novel recounts the heartaches and joys of two women, generations apart, who meet on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Bethany House $15.99
The first story collection from bestselling author Brandon Sanderson features a new Stormlight Archive novella.
In the 19th installment of David Weber’s bestselling military sci-fi series, Honor Harrington faces the ultimate enemy as the Mesan Alignment is finally revealed with a plan to remake the galaxy.
Tor $27.99
Baen $28
9780765391162
9780764217616
9781476781822
Alliance of Shadows
A Rising Thunder
In this action-packed military technothriller, it’s difficult to avoid entangled alliances. Military weapons experts and authors Larry Correia and Mike Kupari let the bullets fly in book 3 of the Dead Six series.
In the 13th Honor Harrington novel, a brutal attack on the Manticoran home system pits Honor and the Star Kingdom she serves against a technologically powerful enemy.
Series favorite!
9781476781853
Shadow of Freedom
Series favorite!
In the 18th Honor Harrington novel, the shadowy Mesan Alignment launches a bold move to destroy Manticore’s reputation as the champion of freedom.
Baen $7.99
Baen $7.99
Baen $27
Shadow of Victory
9781476736129
9781476780481
Fiction Favorites
The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend In this bestseller, plans between long-distance pen pals go awry, leaving one marooned in a small Iowa farm town armed only with her sense of humor and love of books.
Sourcebooks Landmark $16.99
9781492623441
The Inn at Ocean’s Edge Claire’s visit to a luxury hotel in Maine awakens repressed memories, threatening all she holds dear.
A House Divided
The Martian
Corbin Gage can stand up to anyone—but his own divided house will bring him to his knees.
This is the thrilling novel that inspired a major motion picture from Twentieth Century Fox. As author Douglas Preston raved, “This is Apollo 13 times ten.”
Thomas Nelson $15.99
Thomas Nelson $15.99
The Thebook bookisisbetter! better!
Broadway $15 9781401690267
9781401688882
The Five Times I Met Myself
An Amish Year
9780553418026
it Read ! first
Ready Player One
Spend a year in Amish country with four sweet romances.
Getting what Brock wants most in the world will force him to give up the one thing he doesn’t know how to let go— and his greatest fear is that it’s already too late.
Soon to be a feature film directed by Steven Spielberg, this addictive sci-fi novel follows teenager Wade Watts as he solves lifeor-death puzzles in the virtual utopia known as OASIS.
Thomas Nelson $12.99
Broadway $16
Thomas Nelson $15.99 9781401686116
9781401689773
9780307887443
Married ‘til Monday
Storm Siren In a world at war, a slave girl’s lethal curse could become one kingdom’s weapon of salvation. If the curse—and the girl—can be controlled.
The Dinner Soon to be a major motion picture, this internationally bestselling novel is a dark, suspenseful tale that unfolds over the course of one meal.
With a big anniversary party in the works for his ex-wife’s parents, Ryan has just one weekend to play Abby’s husband—and win back the woman of his dreams.
Thomas Nelson $9.99
Hogarth $15
Thomas Nelson $12.99 9781401690359
Read Readitit first! first!
9781401687069
9780385346856
The Rolling Stones All the Songs
Halo Mythos This official Halo guide is the most comprehensive book ever written about the video game franchise and was created by the game’s developers.
Get satisfaction with this comprehensive visual history of the Rolling Stones and each of their recordings.
Bloomsbury $35 9781681193564
Black Dog & Leventhal $50
Something for
Everyone
9780316317740
Country Music Hair Fifty of country music’s greatest hairstyles, including interviews with famous stylists and artists, are featured in this fun photo book.
Harper Design $16.99 9780062439215
Christmas Greetings from the Presidents
New from Flatiron—perfect gifts for everyone this holiday season! Flatiron
Hamilton: The Revolution
You Are a Badass
9781455539741
Liberty Street $32.95
Reader Favorite
This hilarious, bestselling self-help book is for people who desperately want to improve their lives, but don’t want to get busted while doing it.
Sports Illustrated has assembled the ultimate rankings of everything in college football for a book to end all sports fans’ arguments—and to start many others.
Grand Central $45
Shadow Mountain $14.99
$19.99-$35
Sports Illustrated College Football’s Greatest
This book gives readers an illustrated, behindthe-scenes view of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning musical.
9781629722207
This warm, nostalgic look at presidential holiday messages features rare photos and offers a glimpse into history.
Running Press $16 9781618931757 9780762447695
Bestselling author Michael Lewis examines how a Nobel Prize-winning theory altered our perception of reality
Gifts for
Grunt Bestselling author Mary Roach explores the science of keeping human beings intact and sane under the bizarre and extreme circumstances of war.
Everyone
Norton $26.95
9780393245448
Gem
Wildlife Spectacles
Gem is the definitive visual guide to the world’s most precious gemstones and jewelry, with pages of stunning photographs, natural history and mythology.
Discover just how spectacular animals can be in this musthave book for nature lovers.
Timber Press $29.95
DK $50 9781465453563
9781604696714
American Museum of Natural History Birds of North America
Atlas Obscura Equal parts wonder and wanderlust, this book celebrates more than 600 of the strangest and most curious places in the world.
This updated edition is the ultimate photographic guide to every bird species in the United States and Canada.
Workman $35 9781465443991
DK $40
9780761169086
One of the greatest partnerships in the history of science. A revolution in psychology, economics and medicine. A story only Michael Lewis could tell. Norton $28.95
The Backyard Birdsong Guides
The Travel Book Journey through every country in the world with Lonely Planet’s bestselling gift book, now better than ever with all-new images and a fresh, new design.
Reader Reader Favorite Favorite
These interactive handbooks feature audio clips of bird calls from all over North America and make perfect gifts for beginning birders.
Lonely Planet $50 9781786571205
Cornell Lab $34.95
9781943645015 9781943645008
Hidden Figures
History Bridge of Spies
This true story follows the AfricanAmerican female mathematicians at NASA who provided the calculations for some of America’s greatest achievements in space. Soon to be a major motion picture from Fox.
Morrow $27.99
9780062363596
Reader Favorite
Frontier Grit “Compact, informative, briskly paced, emotionally rich and eye-opening microbiographies… Will change truncated views of the West.” —Booklist
“Riveting. Unlocks one of the most fascinating espionage mysteries of the Cold War.” —Ben Macintyre
Broadway $15
Shadow Mountain $19.99
9781629722276
9780767931083
Reader Favorite
The Devil in the White City
Pearl Harbor: 75 Years Later
“A dynamic, enveloping book. Relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel.” —The New York Times
In this lavishly illustrated collector’s edition, Life magazine presents photographs of the surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor that led the U.S. into World War II.
Crown $28
Life $35
9781618931764
9780609608449
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The boldest installment yet in the multimillion-copy blockbuster Killing series
Reader Favorite
“An enthralling, gripping account of the bloody battles, huge decisions and historic personalities that culminated in the decision to drop the atomic bomb... A masterful, meticulously researched work.”
Indestructible “This is a beautifully told story of a family separated by war, and of an extraordinary father driven to avenge his family. . . . A superbly told tale of love, honor, courage and devotion.”—Alex Kershaw, author of Avenue of Spies
“A deftly crafted investigation of a social wrong committed by the medical establishment, as well as the scientific and medical miracles to which it led.” —The Washington Post
Broadway $16 9781400052189
Hachette $28
From bestselling historians Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard comes this epic retelling of the final days of World War II—from the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos to the day the bomb was dropped.
—General David H. Petraeus
Holt $30
9780316339407
The perfect Christmas gift for your favorite cook It’s dinner with a side of entertainment! Discover mouth-watering recipes along with enjoyable stories, tips and inspiration from Amish and Southern life.
COOKING
Shiloh Run Press $16.99 each
Thug Kitchen 101
Scratch
The creators of the bestselling cookbook series Thug Kitchen are back to deliver the hilarious shove you need to take a leap into healthy eating.
Maria Rodale shares her delicious, triedand-true family recipes that will inspire you to return to the kitchen and cook real, organic food.
Rodale $26.99
Rodale $35 9781623366346
9781581573275
Grand Central Life & Style $40
Dinner Made Easy with Six Sisters’ Stuff
9781629722283
Shadow Mountain $21.99
Christy Jordan, the voice of Southern cooking for a new generation, shares 197 recipes for sweet things to eat and drink.
Workman $16.95 9780761189428
The Food Lab
Gone with the Gin
This prize-winning, bestselling cookbook, which is illustrated in full color, includes techniques and recipes behind the science of cooking popular American dishes.
The ultimate cocktail book for die-hard silver screen aficionados featuring 50 delicious drinks paired with winking commentary on history’s most quotable films. So go ahead, make my drink.
Norton $49.95 9780393081084
9781455584710
Sweetness
“A handy recipe guide that offers a cornucopia of ideas for those with a hungry tribe to feed.” —Library Journal
Countryman Press $35
treasured favorites
Mario Batali takes a delicious, deep dive into American regional cooking with 250 recipes—from San Diego Fish Tacos to Boston Cream Pie.
9781623366438
Art of the Pie “McDermott, a selftaught baker whose workshops have taught hundreds how to make a proper pie, shares that knowledge in one of the best books written on the topic.” —Publisher’s Weekly, Starred Review
Mario Batali: Big American Cookbook
Running Press $15 9780762458608
The All New Ball Book of Canning and Preserving Learn to preserve your favorite foods with innovative and fresh flavors for the modern pantry with this definitive guide to jams, jellies, pickles and more!
9780848746780
9781421589893
The Pokémon Cookbook
A Cozy Coloring Cookbook
Create delicious dishes—from desserts to pizza—that look like your favorite Pokémon characters by catching a copy of this new cookbook this holiday season.
Color your way to calm while cooking delicious food—all with one book!
Rodale $15.99 9781623368326
VIZ Media $14.99
Oxmoor House $22.95
Hearth & Home Veranda Retreats With all the style, quality, and elegance you’ve come to expect, this entry in Veranda magazine’s bestselling series of home decorating books invites you into the world’s most stunning houses.
Hearst $60
9781618372123
Better Than New
Artisan $27.95
9781579656676
Moments of Mindfulness
A first-of-its-kind product that’s perfect for creatives of all ages, this book features 30 pull-out, ready-to-color cards and envelopes for sharing thoughtful notes and warm wishes throughout the year.
This pocket-size volume by bestselling authorillustrator Emma Farrarons offers more hand-drawn scenes ready to be colored— now including creative prompts to encourage mindfulness.
Experiment $9.95
9781615193493
Storey $16.95
9781612128856
The star of HGTV and DIY Network’s “Rehab Addict” shares her story for the first time in this inspirational memoir, which includes the private struggles and personal victories not shown on TV.
Color-Your-Own Greeting Cards
John Derian Picture Book
Paint by Sticker: Masterpieces
The must-have gift book of the holiday season is this lush, oversized tome featuring 350 of worldrenowned decoupage artist John Derian’s bestloved images, taken from 18th- and 19th-century illustrations.
This activity book encourages everyone to channel their inner Vermeer and create 12 iconic works of art using stickers.
Artisan $75
Workman $14.95 9781579656478
9780761189510
Spiritual encouragement for the Christmas season
Inspired Living
Give a gift to help someone dig deeper in their faith with award-winning products from B&H Publishing Group.
B&H Books $12.99-$49.99
Punching Holes in the Dark
Think Better, Live Better
Sometimes we cannot see much evidence of the kingdom that is already here. How do we find it and share its message of hope with others in the darkness?
Bestselling author Joel Osteen shares how reprogramming your thoughts to remove negativity will lead to a more blessed, fulfilled life.
Abingdon $16.99
FaithWords $24
9781426749582
9780892969678
The Broken Way
The gift they’ll open over and over!
From The New York Times bestselling series come three new titles that will inspire, entertain and enlighten. They’re the perfect gift for the holiday season!
Chicken Soup for the Soul $14.95 each
Sometimes, in our own pain, it’s hard to see the purpose—but everything changes with the right perspective. Allow bestselling author Ann Voskamp to take you on a journey through heartache and to the abundance on the other side.
Zondervan $22.99
9780310318583
The CEB Women’s Bible This Bible invites you into a deeper conversation with Scripture. Its features and reflections, with contributions exclusively from women, are ideal for small-group and personal study.
Bibles
Common English Bible $49.99 9781609261887
Draw close to God through Bible art and journaling Experience Scripture anew with inspiring full-color illustrations and reflect on the precious truths of God’s word with your own artistic expressions and journal entries.
Zondervan $29.99-$44.99
Reader Favorites
Fun and colorful Bibles for kids This holiday, put them on a lifelong path to reading and loving God’s word with these beautifully illustrated children’s Bibles, perfect for story time or for building early reading skills.
Harvest House $19.99-$24.99 9780736967211 9780736965521
Inspirational gifts for children These three books are the perfect gifts to help inspire young readers to grow their faith.
Zonderkidz $16.99-$17.99
9780736962131
Deep Blue Bible Storybook Christmas This Christmas edition contains eight Nativity stories retold for children ages 3-6, with background information about the book of Matthew and the book of Luke.
Abingdon $9.99
9781501833151
Kids
ABC Animals! In this romping, stomping journey from A to Z, all the animals come alive thanks to the excitement of Scanimation.
Workman $16.95 9780761177821
A Night of Great Joy Bestselling illustrator Mary Engelbreit presents a beautiful picture book that tells the story of the Nativity through the performance of a children’s Christmas pageant.
Usborne touchyfeely holiday gifts 9780310743545
Zonderkidz $16.99
These delightful, festive books feature simple, repetitive text and include textures on every page. They make the perfect seasonal gift for young children!
Usborne $9.99 each
River Rose and the Magical Lullaby
Train This innovative picture book tells the story of a train—and includes an actual threedimensional miniature train that travels on a special track across and through each spread. 9780761187165
Workman $22.95
9780062427564
Mo Willems presents the 25th book in his Elephant and Piggie series with an important message for readers: thank you! Next up, he’s teaming with Dan Santat and Laurie Keller to kick off a brand-new early reader series.
Hyperion Books for Children $9.99 each
Join the lovable duo of Little Elliot and Mouse as they take on an amusement park full of all sorts of fun rides—some maybe a little scary!
Grammy Awardwinning artist Kelly Clarkson makes her picture book debut with this rollicking, rhyming story of a little girl’s dream trip to the zoo.
HarperCollins $18.99
Treats for early readers
Little Elliot, Big Fun
Holt $17.99 9780805098273
Children Just Like Me This book profiles 44 children from 36 countries around the world through their own words, in a celebration of international cultures that shows the many ways children are different but also the same.
This Is Me Actress and bestselling author Jamie Lee Curtis has created a timely picture book about immigration that is as delightful as it is important.
Make her season bright
Workman $16.95 9781465453921
9780761180111
American Girl fans will find everything from new friends to sage advice in these books that encourage exploration, growth and most of all, fun!
American Girl ®
DK $19.99
$12.99-$24.99
9780762455874
The Seven Princesses Princesses of all sizes will delight in this modern-day fairy tale of sibling rivalry, adventure and unconditional sisterly love.
treasured favorites
Running Press Kids $16.95
9780807576427
The Boxcar Children Spanish/English Set Five titles in the series are now in Spanish! This set includes paperback editions of Book #1: The Boxcar Children in both English and Spanish.
Albert Whitman & Company $9.99
The Boxcar Children Books #1-4 Snap up these paperback editions of The Boxcar Children® Mysteries #1-4: The Boxcar Children, Surprise Island, The Yellow House Mystery and Mystery Ranch.
The Boxcar Children Bookshelf This deluxe bookcase contains the first 12 The Boxcar Children® Mysteries, plus activities, a poster and an accordion bookmark with a title checklist.
Albert Whitman & Company $59.99 9780807508558
Albert Whitman & Company $21.99
9780807508541
Kids
AUDIOBOOKS = GIFTS
Listening Library audiobooks are the perfect gift for everyone on your list.
Listening Library $6.99-$40
Gifts for smart and curious kids From incredible Animal Planet facts about the ickiest, stickiest and oddest animals to information-packed nonfiction chapter books on specific subjects, and TIME For Kids’ survey of our nation’s 45 commanders-in-chief, these books will help kids flex their reading muscles while keeping them entertained!
Time Inc. Books / Liberty Street $5.95-$18.95
The Book of Heroes & The Book of Heroines Introduce kids to gutsy gals and daring dudes who have changed the world: legendary leaders, awesome athletes, super scientists, peacemakers and other worthy role models.
National Geographic $14.99 each 9781426325533
9781426325571
The Secret Keepers It’s a race against time in the heart-pounding new adventure from Trenton Lee Stewart, the bestselling author of The Mysterious Benedict Society series.
Build. Invent. Create.
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers $18.99 9780316389556
Fablehaven Book of Imagination
The Land of Stories: A Treasury of Classic Fairy Tales
Now it’s the reader’s turn to tap into the imagination in the first activity book for Fablehaven fans, which includes games, puzzles, essay prompts and even an origami dragon!
Shadow Mountain $14.99
From the #1 bestselling author of The Land of Stories series comes a deluxe illustrated fairy-tale collection that’s perfect for new and old fans alike! 9781629722412
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers $25.99
Sourcebooks Fire $17.99
9781492620945
DK $19.99-$24.99
Replica Bestselling author Lauren Oliver weaves together the stories of Gemma and Lyra—one a girl, and one a Replica, raised in a research facility.
A Dutch teenager is drawn into the dangerous search for a lost Jewish girl in this riveting World War II thriller that stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page.
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers $17.99
9780316260602
Labyrinth Lost
9780316355919
Maker Lab has 28 kid-safe projects that will get young inventors’ wheels turning, while 365 Things to Do with LEGO® Bricks has games, activities and LEGO building projects for every day of the year.
Girl in the Blue Coat
Teen & Young Adults Bruja magic runs in Alex’s blood, but a curse meant to banish that magic leads her to a land in-between that is as dark as Limbo and as strange as Wonderland.
© 2016 The LEGO Group
HarperCollins $19.99 9780062394163
The Sun Is Also a Star
Dan and Phil Go Outside
This holiday, celebrate the idea that love always changes everything with a romantic and unconventional new love story from Nicola Yoon, the bestselling author of Everything, Everything.
Dan and Phil’s more than 10 million YouTube subscribers will love this hilarious new full-color book, featuring never-beforeseen photos and stories.
Delacorte $18.99
9780553496680
Random House Books for Young Readers $19.99
9781524701451
columns
WELL READ
LIFESTYLES
BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL
B Y S U S A N N A H F E LT S
A literary breakup
Gifts for artistic types
Literary feuds can become the stuff of legend. Often sparked by equal measures of arrogance and insecurity, and fueled by wit and vitriol, the best provide great sideline entertainment for fans and detractors alike. Mary McCarthy telling Dick Cavett that “every word [Lillian Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’ ” prompted a lawsuit that only ended because the cantankerous plaintiff died. The ever-fractious Gore Vidal launched one feud by claiming, “Truman made lying an art form—a minor art form” and another when he compared Norman Mailer to Charles Manson (Mailer later punched Vidal at a dinner party). A somewhat less-known, more rarefied battle destroyed the once companionable relationship between the novelist Vladimir Nabokov and the eminent American man of letters Edmund Wilson. In The Feud (Pantheon, $26.95, 224 pages, ISBN 9781101870228), journalist Alex Beam chronicles the imbroglio, which came to a head when the Russian writer published his by-most-accounts turgid translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and Wilson dared to rake it over the coals in The New York Review of Books. But, as Beam—a former Moscow correspondent and current columnist for The Boston Globe—makes clear in this slender, yet thoroughly researched and sprightly told account of the events, the rivalry was long percolating. It was spurred by many factors, not least of which were Nabokov’s monumental ego and Wilson’s envy watching the Lolita author’s literary star ascend as his own slid down. The men became friends soon after Nabokov arrived in the U.S. in 1940, a refugee from both Bolshevik Russia and Nazi-over-
Foraged Flora (Ten Speed, $40, 272 pages, ISBN 9781607748601) is a moody feast for floral designers or anyone who wishes to fall under the spell of evocatively lit blossoms and leaves, stems and branches. Laurie Frankel, who shot the breathtaking photographs within, deserves a nod for her talent and keen eye. Moving chronologically through the year, each chapter offers large and small arrangements featuring seasonally available blooms. The dreamy visions displayed here may spur creative
to appear aged, the book feels precisely matched to certain other recent old-is-new-again lifestyle trends. In other words, cozy up under a Pendleton blanket, spark some Paine’s balsam incense and enjoy this earnest paean to the great outdoors, which, in addition to cabin-building advice, contains tips for landscaping a wooded area, creating rustic furniture and cooking in the great outdoors.
journeys, or at least open your eyes to a newly beloved flower.
TOP PICK IN LIFESTYLES
18
run Europe. Wilson, a cultural mandarin who held sway over public literary tastes from his perch at The New Yorker, did much behindthe-scenes maneuvering to get the émigré writing assignments and to promote his work among the literary establishment. Wilson was a Russophile, and he cherished the opportunity to discuss the language and its literature with this native son, although the two sparred over politics because the American was a supporter of the Soviet Union. Things slowly soured between Wilson and Nabokov. The Russian took umbrage over the fact that Wilson, America’s pre-eminent critic, rarely reviewed his books, and Beam suggests that for the most part Wilson did not like Nabokov’s fiction. Wilson was upfront in telling Nabokov that he did not like Lolita, and he may have been a bit dismayed by its extraordinary reception, especially because his own “sex” novel, Memoirs of Hecate County, failed to spark a similar response among critics or readers. Things got uglier when Wilson championed Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which Nabokov loathed. Their friendship cooled, but ice turned to fire when Nabokov published his translation of Onegin. Many critics panned it, but it was Wilson’s full frontal attack that pitted the former friends in a fierce public clash that, to quote this book’s subtitle, saw “the end of a beautiful friendship.” Beam goes into exacting detail about the subtleties involved in translating Pushkin’s famously untranslatable text. These explications may not interest all readers, though he does enliven them with a soupçon of Nabokovian wordplay. What will interest readers, though, are the well-drawn, often unflattering portraits of two prickly, self-assured giants of 20th-century literature, engaged in childish, if sharp-witted, verbal fisticuffs.
Though the subject matter isn’t identical, I can’t help but think “It’s a guide of rustic sewing of comedian, woodworker and ideas for modern pioneers,” writes guy-who-played-Ron-Swanson David Butler in Parson Gray Trade Nick Offerman’s newest book—folQuilts (Chronicle, $29.95, 176 lowing the successful Paddle Your pages, ISBN 9781452134482), a col- Own Canoe and Gumption—as lection of quilt patterns that “celethe modern-day corollary to Your brates reckless artistic abandon, for Cabin in the Woods, at least while I’ve got them side by side. Both those of us not seeking perfection, but empowering curiosity.” The books advocate a close relationhusband of designer Amy Butler, ship with wood; both stretch from there to explore the accouterments David specializes in “gritty techniques” such as staining, fading, of such a life; both sparkle—in a dyeing and sandpapering the heck manly fashion—with the charm out of his materials to pleasing, of their author’s personalities. distressed effect. Upon opening Good Clean Fun (Dutton, $35, 352 pages, ISBN CABIN FEVER 9781101984659) to a random page, I found a tongue-in-cheek Beard Seldom does the saying “Everything old is new again” apply to Length Virility Chart. That might books. A notable exception can be tell you everything you need to know. If not? Here’s where you found in Your Cabin in the Woods learn how to make whisky coasters, (Black Dog & Leventhal, $19.99, a “scrappy birdhouse,” a “slumber 288 pages, ISBN 9780316395502), jack bed” and even a kazoo. These by Conrad E. Meinecke. First published in 1947 as Cabin Craft and and other projects are contributed by Offerman’s woodshop buddies Outdoor Living, Meinecke’s guide to creating the ideal rustic domiand family members, packaged cile is written for “the novice who up with much mirth, fun collage wants to play a big part in building illustrations and what Offerman his own cabin—who wants to be calls “wood porn.” Woodworking resourceful.” With its original retro craftmanship cannot get more fun illustrations and pages designed than this.
MODERN QUILTING
FANNIE FLAGG BY DEBORAH DONOVAN
IN PERFECT TIME FOR THE
Satisfying small-town story
B
estselling writer Fannie Flagg returns to a fanfavorite locale, Elmwood Springs, Missouri, in her latest saga steeped in small-town life. Peopled with a memorable cast of characters, Flagg’s chatty historical novel spans nearly 150 years in the life, growth and eventual decline of this small farming community in southern Missouri.
It all begins with Lordor Nordstrom, a young Swedish immigrant. In the early 1880s, Lordor finds a large tract of land in Missouri that is perfect for his long dreamed-of dairy farm. He places an ad in Swedish-American newspapers, hoping to attract other farmers from his homeland, and soon the small community begins to thrive. Lordor also donates a piece of land for the local cemetery, Still Meadows—a peaceful plot with a magnificent view of the town below. By 1889, Lordor realizes it’s time to start a family, so he advertises for a mail-order bride. Katrina Olsen, who left Sweden five years earlier and is eager to escape her job working as a housemaid in Chicago, answers his ad, and they become a successful team, working hard to expand their dairy and raising two devoted children. Chapter by chapter, Flagg introduces a growing number of characters: friends and neighbors of the Nordstroms and their children, their siblings, wives and ex-wives, husbands and ex-husbands. There’s 18-year-old Lucille Beemer, who comes from Philadelphia in 1901 to teach the growing school population; Gustav Tildholme, who has a lifelong crush on Lucille, but never gets a chance to tell her; Elner Shimfissle, who sings to her chickens to make them lay bigger eggs; Ander Swensen, who learns the dairy business from Lordor; the Nordstroms’ daughter Ingrid, who becomes the first female to attend Iowa’s famed School of Veterinary Medicine—and many more. One by one these characters make their way up to Still Meadows. There, though deceased, they are still able to communicate with
one another and learn about how the world is changing, as each newcomer delivers the latest news, from airplane travel, to World War II, the atomic bomb and the advent of television. The Whole Town’s Talking joins previous Elmwood Springs novels, which include Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven and Standing in the Rainbow. Though it’s sometimes hard to keep track of the many characters, Flagg’s humor shines through as she chronicles their successes, disappointments and even a mysterious murder or two. Flagg was nominated for an Academy Award for the screen adaptation of her novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, and her latest has a cinematic quality as well. The interwoven lives of these completely engaging characters twist and turn in unexpected ways, making this chronicle of a closeknit community a pleasure to read.
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columns
WHODUNIT BY BRUCE TIERNEY
No after-dinner snooze with these holiday mysteries
T
he season’s best suspense novels share a striking commonality: The main characters are saddled with names that practically guarantee choruses of snickers behind their backs, from Flavia de Luce to shady character Junior Bender.
First up is Alan Bradley’s witty and slyly charming Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d (Delacorte, $26, 352 pages, ISBN 9780345539960), the latest outing for reader-favorite Flavia, a Nancy Drew-esque sleuth in rural England. Summoned home for the holidays from a snooty boarding school, Flavia wastes no time in becoming embroiled in a rather grotesque murder, in which the victim has been crucified, upside down, in the manner of St. Paul. Flavia is a precocious child, with a talent for amusing and insightful description; in a note about her detecting methodology, she points out that her mind works in a very un-Sherlock Holmes-like manner: “In reality, analytical minds such as
KIRKUS REVIEWS
LIBRARY JOURNAL
my own are forever shooting wildly off in all directions simultaneously. It’s like joyously hitting jelly with a sledgehammer.” Be that as it may,
Message (Ballantine, $20, 176 pages, ISBN 9781101886380) is an altogether more portentous sort of holiday adventure. Set in Palestine
it works for her, and generates more than its fair share of entertainment for the reader as well.
around the turn of the 20th century, the story combines elements of religious mystery, highbrow Brit romance (understated, naturally), a soupçon of the supernatural and a denouement that will hang in your memory long after you have turned the final page. Lady Vespasia Narraway and her commoner (but by no means common) husband are on holiday in the Holy Land when they meet an enigmatic, elderly man who turns up dead shortly after entrusting the Narraways with a piece of parchment “upon which the future of mankind depends.” They must deliver it to Jerusalem, but there are forces in play dedicated to stopping the parchment from reaching its anointed destination. Perry’s prose reads like a Victorian-era mystery, and her characters have that larger-than-life quality that permeated so many classic films from the golden age of cinema.
DANGEROUS PILGRIMAGE Anne Perry’s A Christmas
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Two women, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, shared the mantle of “doyenne of British suspense” until James’ death two years ago, and Rendell’s just a few months later. Fortunately for James’ legions of fans, there are some literary delights left in the vaults. The Mistletoe Murder: And Other Stories (Knopf, $24, 176 pages, ISBN 9780451494146), a small collection of her holiday-themed short
stories, is what you might expect from James. There are overtones of Agatha Christie, albeit with a more modern sensibility; the perfect prose you have come to anticipate and admire; and red herrings and twists galore, often up to and including the final sentence of each story. And the focal point of the book, the novella for which the volume is named, is a classic variation on the locked-room mystery with a slick last-possible-moment twist that surprised and tickled even this jaded reader.
TOP PICK IN MYSTERY And then we have the antithesis of the classic Christmas story, Timothy Hallinan’s gripping yet wickedly funny Fields Where They Lay (Soho Crime, $25.95, 384 pages, ISBN 9781616957469). Burglar and underworld sleuth Junior Bender has found precious little joy in Joyeux Noël over the course of his life. This year promises to be no different: Junior’s girlfriend has left him, with few words of explanation and no forwarding address; a Russian mafia dude has hired him to look into a crime and has made it clear that failure on Junior’s part will be treated most harshly; and Junior still has not been able to find the perfect gift for his teenage daughter. His investigation takes him to over-the-hill Edgerton Mall, whose main claim to Christmas fame is “two Santas, no waiting.” The anchor superstores have fled, leaving the mall with a small contingent of struggling mom-and-pop shops. In the midst of all this, Junior finds an unlikely friend and ally, a kindly Jewish Santa Claus by the name of Shlomo, who shares yet another mystery with Junior, a poignant one dating back to the final days of World War II. And somewhere amid all this suspense and uncertainty lies the true meaning of Christmas, assuming that Junior can stay alive long enough to see it.
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columns Holiday treats
More than just a cookbook, RECIPE REVIVAL is a mouthwatering
walk down memory lane, filled with classic Southern Living recipes alongside their new modern variations! You’ll get: • 200 delicious recipes from 50 years of Southern Living • Then & Now featuring the history of ingredients, pantry items and cooking trends • Complete menus for cocktail parties, brunch, holiday gatherings, and more! • Entertaining tips & food trivia
Available wherever books are sold ©2016 Time Inc. SOUTHERN LIVING is a trademark of Time Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.
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Is there any time of the year more associated with food than the holidays? We think not. These books will help you fill the table for your seasonal gatherings. We start things off with dessert and the master maven of all kinds of cooking, Dorie Greenspan. Cookie craving and creating seem to be part of her DNA; she even dreams of cookies and gets up at any hour to make those dreams into reality. With Dorie’s Cookies (Rux Martin, $35, 528 pages, ISBN 9780547614847), we enter Greenspan’s lusciously illustrated “Cookie Verse,” filled with her fabulous recipes for turning “little lumps of dough” into sweet and savory wonders. Some are easy, like Chocolate-Raspberry Thumbprints, and some need more time, like her Brown Butter Madeleines. Meringue Snowballs and Matzo Morsels are perfect for the holidays, while Classic Brownies are picnic perfect. For cocktails and company, there’s Strawberry Shortcake Cookies and Parmesan Galettes. So many cookies, so little time, and every bite is divine.
ANTHONY’S APPETITES Anthony Bourdain, gonzo gastronome and former bawdy bad boy of the foodie scene, has entertained us as a chef, writer and global chronicler of daring dining for years. But he’s taken on a new role as a doting dad who delights in cooking for his 8-year-old daughter. Appetites (Ecco, $37.50, 304 pages, ISBN 9780062409959), Bourdain’s first cookbook in a decade, is his ode to feeding his family and friends, a collection of his “imperfect memories” of childhood favorites and some of the greatest
COOKING BY SYBIL PRATT
hits from his travels, peppered with off-color language and wildly offbeat, entertaining photos.
MARIO AMERICANO With 26 restaurants, 10 cookbooks and TV shows galore, it’s apparent that Mario Batali doesn’t do things in a small way. Mario Batali—Big American Cookbook (Grand Central Life & Style, $40, 512 pages, ISBN 9781455584710) is a big-hearted doozy with over 250 recipes, from Yankee Pot Roast to Texas Caviar. Avoiding the trendy takes, these dishes reflect their cultural and culinary heritage. Divided by American region, you’ll find breakfast specials, preserves, mains, sides and more. Molto Mario, molto Americano.
TOP PICK IN COOKING Poole’s: Recipes and Stories from a Modern Diner (Ten Speed, $35, 304 pages, ISBN 9781607746874) is instantly inviting and down-home delicious. It’s filled with recipes inspired by Ashley Christensen’s Southern roots and the meals her diner-dining dad cooked, now made with local ingredients at Poole’s Diner, her restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina. Christensen doesn’t indulge in theatrics; the food she serves at Poole’s is familiar and straightforward, but meticulously thoughtthrough and balanced. Her header notes are wonderfully chatty, sharing bits of her background and food philosophy as she guides us from her fabulous take on Pimento Cheese to Oysters Rock-a-Billy, Braised Pork Shanks and Sweet Potato Hummingbird Cake. This is comfort food at its best, then elevated a notch or two.
BOOK CLUBS BY JULIE HALE
Domestic quandaries In her uproarious collection of stories, American Housewife (Anchor, $15, 208 pages, ISBN 9781101970997), Helen Ellis skewers traditional notions of domestic bliss—and has loads of fun along the way. The leading lady in “Dead Doormen” is at first glance an expert housekeeper and loving partner, but the life she shares with her husband in their Manhattan penthouse turns out to be decidedly disturbing. When the two female neighbors in “The Wainscoting War”—a story that’s presented as a
series of increasingly heated (and hilarious) emails—fail to agree on how to decorate the shared hallway in their apartment building, they go head to head in a territorial showdown. In the all too timely “Dumpster Diving with the Stars,” a writer, an ex-Playboy playmate and a pair of Scientology actors come together on a reality TV show. Fiction fans will recognize the book’s cast of characters—the jealous wife, the uppity neighbor—but thanks to Ellis’ gift for black humor, the females in this smart, provocative collection transcend type.
STRANGER IN TOWN The Little Red Chairs (Back Bay, $15.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9780316378246) by Edna O’Brien is an electrifying novel about a quiet Irish town that’s infiltrated by evil. Dr. Vladimir Dragan, a good-looking, sophisticated writer and healer, wakes up the sleepy village of Cloonoila when he arrives in the middle of winter. Local beauty Fidelma McBride is drawn to him, betraying her marriage as a result. But the town’s favorable perception of the doctor is destroyed when he’s arrested and his true identity as a Bosnian war criminal is brought to
light. The doctor’s dark past horrifies everyone in the village, especially Fidelma, who suffers violence at the hands of his associates. Fidelma eventually moves beyond this bleak chapter in her life, escaping to London to work in a homeless shelter. O’Brien’s tense, politically charged novel—her first in a decade—was inspired by the real-life case of Radovan Karadžić, the Serb leader who was tracked down and convicted of war crimes after many years in hiding. O’Brien’s portrayal of a quiet village forever altered by a mysterious newcomer haunts the reader long after the last page is turned.
TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS Life of Pi author Yann Martel returns with The High Mountains of Portugal (Spiegel & Grau, $16, 368 pages, ISBN 9780812987034), a suspenseful work composed of three interconnected stories. Tomás, a young man in Lisbon in the early 1900s, finds a journal referencing a remarkable object that has the potential to transform the world. Determined to find it, he sets out on an adventure that has far-reaching effects. The narrative moves forward to the 1930s and the story of Eusebio, a Portuguese physician who becomes enmeshed in a mystery connected to Tomás’ search. Five decades later, the novel reaches its finale, as Peter, a politician mourning his dead wife, arrives at his native village in Portugal, where the threads of the story come together. From the three plots, Martel creates an unforgettable portrait of Portugal across varying eras. Mixing history and suspense into a tale defined by human longing, he delivers a work that’s richly rewarding.
Cozy Book Club Picks for Winter Under the Influence
by Joyce Maynard “My to-do list had umpteen items on it, but I let them all go to hell as I tore through Joyce Maynard’s latest pageturner. . . . To-do list? What to-do list? Under the Influence is a riveting read.” — New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb
The Golden Son
by Shilpi Somaya Gowda
“Vivid, heart-warming, and absorbing, The Golden Son succeeds as an immigrant’s tale and love story wrapped into one because of the beautiful writing and compelling characters that illuminate universal truths of loss and identity.” —Heidi Durrow, New York Times bestselling author
Marlene
by C.W. Gortner “Full of Weimar Berlin decadence and the scandal of Hollywood, this is a gloriously entertaining read. Marlene is utterly beguiling.” —New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams
The Other Widow by Susan Crawford
“Susan Crawford has a new, total page-turner with The Other Widow. And just when you think you have all the answers, you’ll be shocked by the twist at the end.” —Kate White, New York Times bestselling author
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William Morrow
Book Club Girl
23
GIVE the GIFT of GREAT LISTENING!
columns
AUDIO BY SUKEY HOWARD
Exemplary audio gifts
MY OWN WORDS by Ruth Bader Ginsburg Read by Linda Lavin with a preface and archival original recordings read by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
TALES FROM THE SHADOWHUNTER ACADEMY by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson, and Robin Wasserman
UAB CD: 9781508226284 / $39.99 UAB EAUDIO LIBRARY: 9781508226307 / $79.99
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THE GIRL WITH THE LOWER BACK TATTOO
THE UNDOING PROJECT
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UAB CD 9781508229117 / $39.99 EAUDIO LIBRARY 9781508229131 / $79.99
by Amy Schumer • Read by the author
THE GIRL FROM VENICE
by Martin Cruz Smith Read by the Zach Appelman
ORDER TO KILL
by Vince Flynn and Kyle Mills Read by George Guidall
UAB CD: 9781508219514 / $39.99 UAB EAUDIO LIBRARY: 9781508220930 / $79.99
THE MISTLETOE SECRET
A CHRISTMAS CAROL
UAB CD: 9781508221890 / $29.99 UAB EAUDIO LIBRARY: 9781508221913 / $79.99
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by Michael Lewis
UAB CD: 9781508221869 / $29.99 UAB EAUDIO LIBRARY: 9781508221883 / $59.99
by Richard Paul Evans • Read by the author
Yes, Commonwealth (HarperAudio, 10 hours), Ann Patchett’s brilliant new novel, narrated by Hope Davis, is autobiographical. But it’s her fabulous, fluent storytelling, her understanding of family in all its cumbersome complexity and delicately nuanced affections and animosities that makes this group portrait so appealing. It all begins with a ginsoaked kiss at a christening party in 1960s Los Angeles that leads to
by Charles Dickens Performed by Patrick Stewart AB CD: 9780743563796 $14.95
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divorce, a cross-country move and a blended but never homogenized family forced into intimacies that shift over the decades. With clarity, smooth prose and a new cache of documents, Jeffrey Toobin tells the still-tantalizing tale that mesmerized a nation in the 1970s in American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (Random House Audio, 18 hours). It’s all here, set in context: how a captive became a bank-robbing comrade, how the jailed Patty became a Hearst again. All read with perfect pacing by Paul Michael. On June 22, 1922, Count Alexander Rostov appeared before a Bolshevik Tribunal, accused of succumbing “to the corruption of his class.” Only his high-ranking friends kept him from being summarily shot. Instead, the handsome, gracious young count became a “Former Person,” sentenced to spend the rest of his life in Moscow’s famed Hotel Metropole. It’s the next 40 years of that life that Amor Towles so skill-
fully evokes in his quintessentially charming second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (Penguin Audio, 18 hours), read with impeccable Rostov grace by Nicholas Guy Smith. Written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution (Hachette Audio, 6 hours) is an irresistibly moving, revelatory account of the hottest, most heralded Broadway show in a generation. McCarter was in meetings, workshops and dressing rooms during the six years of the play’s development, and he talked with more than 40 people close to the show. He details Miranda’s constant rewriting and reshaping and shows how people from different backgrounds came together to make this stunningly audacious show work so wonderfully. Miranda reads the 300 funny footnotes he added to the libretto (on an accompanying PDF, which includes fabulous photos).
TOP PICK IN AUDIO With mastery worthy of Rembrandt, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Macmillan Audio, 10 hours), Dominic Smith’s fourth novel, moves back and forth in time and place from 1631 Amsterdam when Sara de Vos painted her hauntingly beautiful “At the Edge of the Wood,” to 1957 New York when it was stolen from Marty de Groot’s Fifth Avenue penthouse and replaced by a flawless forgery. In 2000, the forger, Ellie Shipley, is in Sydney, Australia. She’s now a renowned expert on women painters of the Dutch Golden Age, awaiting the authentic de Vos painting and the forgery she made decades ago to arrive for an exhibition. Engrossing audio, elegantly wrought, elegantly read by Edoardo Ballerini.
The Vampire Chronicles continue . . .
ANNE RICE prince lestat and the realms
of
atlantis
In my dreams, I saw a city fall into the sea. I heard the cries of thousands.
And all the world was shaken. ..
“a VOLUPTuOUS DREAM” —Boston Globe on Prince Lestat KNOPF
AnneRice.com
columns
ROMANCE B Y C H R I S T I E R I D G WAY
Fa-la-la falling in love during Christmas
T
he holidays can be overwhelming, so why not escape with these five romance novels about love under the mistletoe? From an Amish village to the snowy streets of New York City, these novels will transport you to another place—a place without all those seasonal stressors!
A fairy tale comes true in the engaging Miracle on 5th Avenue (HQN, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780373789344) by Sarah Morgan. Eva Jordan, a bubbly, Christmas-loving partner in a concierge business, is heading to a penthouse in Manhattan, tasked with decorating the upscale apartment for the holidays and filling the freezer with home-cooked treats.
Its resident, crime novelist Lucas Blade, is supposed to be absent, but instead, Eva is surprised to find the man at home. He is battling writer’s block and struggling to come to terms with his grief over his wife’s death three years before. Though at first eager to be rid of the enthusiastic Eva, he finds himself intrigued by the beautiful young woman—and inspired, too. Now he has an idea for his stalled book, and if having her bustling around the house keeps the creative juices flowing, so be it. The brooding, wounded man touches Eva’s heart, and she does her best to cheer him with all things Christmas as well as her friendly companionship. Over meals, through soul-baring conversations and one magical night at a Plaza Hotel ball, the two are seduced by each other. A brief physical union isn’t all that Eva wants, but it’s all that Lucas believes he has to give. If she leaves, can he let her go?
A COUNTRY CHRISTMAS It’s Christmas, cowboy style in
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Carolyn Brown’s Merry Cowboy Christmas (Forever, $7.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9781455534944). Fiona Logan has returned to her hometown of Dry Creek, Texas, for the holidays. She flew the coop after high school, but following a divorce, she needs to regroup among family, including newcomer Jud Dawson, who has joined with her sisters’ husbands in running a
local ranch. She settles in quickly, helping manage a convenience store and starting her own bookkeeping business. Then a crotchety elderly couple loses their home in a fire and joins the household that includes Fiona, her mother and Jud. Jud takes it upon himself to turn around the old man’s attitude while also charming the wary Fiona. Soon Fiona and Jud are sharing kisses, but he’s aware she wants to leave again, and she’s afraid he might be all charm and no staying power. But as the 25th approaches, it’s clear that Jud is serious about their relationship, and Fiona knows she’s fallen for him. When an opportunity to return to the city presents itself, she has to decide if a life with a cowboy is the life she wants. This one is both sweet and hot.
LOVE IN BLOOM The evolution of an Old Order Amish marriage is chronicled in the touching The Angel of Forest Hill (WaterBrook, $14.99, 208 pages, ISBN 9781601427052). When his wife dies after the birth of their
third child, Joel Dienner needs someone to care for his children. Rose Kurtz, a young woman from a distant community, helps run his household for a month, but soon Rose must return home—unless she agrees to become his platonic wife. Rose, who grew up under her mother’s hypercritical eyes, sees this as an opportunity for a new start and marries Joel. Four years pass, and Rose and Joel have become successful parents and warm companions. Rose is devoted to the family, and she and Joel are inching toward a real, intimate marriage when unexpected trouble arrives right before Christmas. Joel’s innate kindness and Rose’s growing confidence in herself make them a couple readers will want to see happy. The scenes of Amish life and the pair’s devotion to their faith add welcome dimension to this beautiful story of love finding its way.
FANGS AND CLAUS Christmas comes with teeth in A Very Jaguar Christmas (Sourcebooks Casablanca, $7.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9781492621805) by Terry Spear. Everett Anderson, jaguar shifter and police official for their kind, has longed for his best friend’s girl for years—even after his buddy dies on a dangerous mission. Everett is afraid to move too fast, but finds an opportunity to work with Demetria MacFarlane when they must return a shifting wolf cub to his family. Since the jaguars didn’t know wolf shifters existed, they’re curious to find the pup’s parents and learn about
this new species. Road trips and hours of research bring Everett and Demetria closer together—and taking care of the little one allows them a glimpse of future family life. But it takes trust and honesty to get past guilt and grief and reach for new happiness. Plenty of action and romantic chemistry between the leads makes this furry holiday treat especially fun.
TOP PICK IN ROMANCE Debbie Macomber pens a charming and uplifting story in Twelve Days of Christmas (Ballantine, $20, 288 pages, ISBN 9780553391732). Aspiring writer and Seattleite Julia Padden hopes to attract attention to her blog by chronicling her attempt to treat her grumpy across-the-hall neighbor, whom she nicknames Ebenezer, to 12 days of kindness leading up to Christmas. Morning-person Julia clearly annoys Ebenezer—real name Cain—every day on their elevator ride, and he has even complained about her singing carols. But as she tries to reform his curmudgeonly ways, she finds herself attracted to the man—especially when she can get him to smile. Soon they’re having coffee together and nursing each other through the flu, and all’s looking up. Julia’s blog becomes so popular that she gets a coveted job, and her romance with Cain heats up, cheered on by his lovable grandfather. But when Cain learns she wrote about him on social media, old pain arises and he feels he’s being used to further her goals instead of being loved for himself. Just when Julia realizes her kindness project changed not only Cain but her as well, she’s lost him. What will it take to heal the breach, and can they have a happy Christmas as well as a happy ending? Great characters and holiday ambience make this a pure delight!
features
CASSANDRA KING INTERVIEW BY ABBY PLESSER
Pat Conroy’s legacy of love and literature
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hen Pat Conroy died in March at the age of 70, the literary community lost one of its most prolific and beloved voices. Perhaps best known for The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides, Conroy was the author of six novels, four memoirs and one cookbook—all written with great heart, an insatiable curiosity about human nature and a deep reverence for the South that raised him. But Conroy wasn’t satisfied with 11 books under his belt. Just two years before his death, he reflected, “I believe I’ve got two long novels and three short ones still in me. But my health has to cooperate, and I need to pay more attention to my health. It is not long life I wish for— it is to complete what I have to say about the world I found around me from boyhood to old age.” As heartbreaking as it is to know that Conroy didn’t get to share those stories with the world, his unmistakable voice comes through loud and clear in A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life. A charming collection of Conroy’s letters, interviews, magazine articles and speeches, A Lowcountry Heart is a true gift to his legions of fans. Conroy speaks directly to his readers in a series of reproduced blog posts, always opening with “Hey, out there” and ending with “Great love.” He writes about books he’s reading, writers he admires,
A LOWCOUNTRY HEART
By Pat Conroy
Nan A. Talese, $25, 320 pages ISBN 9780385530866, audio, eBook available
ESSAYS
the big things going on in his life novel is based on four young men (including a 70th birthday celeteaching high school and forming bration thrown by the University lifelong friendships. King says with of South Carolina) and the little a laugh, “I take full credit for this things on his mind (trying to get in book. Not really, I’m teasing. [But] shape). The Conroy that emerges over the years [Pat] would tell me from these pages is the one we’ve these great stories. Right out of read and admired for decades: college, he taught at Beaufort High honest, effusive, passionate, funny and downright lovable. And that’s precisely the man he was. Speaking from her home in Beaufort, South Carolina, Conroy’s widow, Cassandra King, explains, “Pat is the friendliest person who’s ever lived. He just had such charisma, and he was one of these folks that you felt like you’d known your whole life. Even if you met him for a few minutes, Pat Conroy in his final author photo. he was so personable and so easy to talk to. . . . And I swear to School . . . with three other young god, he talked exactly the way he men. He would tell me that none of wrote. I think that’s why so many of them knew what they were doing us felt like we knew him. His books and they would sneak down to were just him.” each other’s rooms and say, ‘Hey, A novelist herself and Conroy’s you got any lesson plans?’ Every wife of 20 years, King was one of time he would tell me one of these the driving forces behind A Lowstories, I would say, ‘Pat, you’ve got country Heart. “After Pat died, to make that into a book. This is it really began to hit us that this your male friendship book.’ ” was it, and there weren’t going to In a note at the beginning of the be any more of these beautiful, new collection, Conroy’s longtime wonderful books. And you know, it editor, Nan A. Talese, writes, “We broke my heart,” she recalls. “It still are still searching his journals for breaks my heart that he didn’t finmore on this novel, and at some ish the book he was working on. So point we may have something to it sort of became a mission to colshare with you.” In the meantime, lect any of his handwritten notes to Conroy readers can find a different, see what was left and where.” more personal side of the author in Conroy handwrote everyA Lowcountry Heart. thing—a pretty amazing feat con“[It] brings me some comfort to sidering the length of some of his know that this book is out there,” more popular works. When he was his widow says, sure that Conroy diagnosed with pancreatic cancer would be proud of the work done in February, he was 200 pages into to assemble the collection. a new novel. Set in the 1960s, the Conroy would also be proud
of the efforts by King and friends to open The Pat Conroy Literary Center, a “passionate and inclusive reading and writing community” in Beaufort that will honor one of the greatest joys of Conroy’s life: championing other writers. As King explains, “We’re doing this as a living legacy to Pat. . . . He was so encouraging to other writers. He got involved with Story River Books [an imprint of the University of South Carolina Press] and he loved doing that. So I’d just want anyone who has ever loved Pat Conroy’s writings to come see this once we get running. Hopefully it will be the beginning of [next] year.” The last few pages of A Lowcountry Heart are remembrances from friends, who describe Conroy’s passion, wisdom and devotion to the people he loved. As King notes, “He was certainly larger than life. Everything about him. He came into a room and he filled up the room, he had that charisma. So when he loved, he loved—his friends and their kids, they were the greatest, they were the best in the world.” Laughing, she adds, “His whole life was hyperbole. If he didn’t like you, you were the most horrible person that ever lived. It worked both ways.” King says Conroy truly loved writing, and because he wrote everything by hand, he took the time to think things through before he put pen to paper. She says, “There’s a great picture of him where he’s sitting thinking at the [writing] desk, and that’s how I think about him. He was so often just absorbed in what he was doing.” It seems that’s how we should all remember the great Conroy—immersed in the worlds he was creating for his devoted readers, writing the stories he was born to tell.
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features
BEST OF 2016
Our editors pick the year’s top books
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s 2016 draws to a close, it’s time to stand up and cheer for your favorite book! We’re willing to guarantee that our list of 50 titles, which ranges across genres, includes something for everyone. Read on for highlights.
#1 NEWS OF THE WORLD
Captured and later freed by the Kiowa tribe, a terrified 10-yearold girl must be reunited with her family—a mission assigned to wizened war veteran Jefferson Kidd. Enthralling and lyrical, Paulette Jiles’ account of this dangerous journey through Texas in the fractious years after the Civil War offers a crystalline look at the era, the characters and the mysteries of the human heart.
#4 THE MOTHERS
Brit Bennett’s novel was one of the most anticipated debuts of 2016—and it delivered. Secrets, loss and regrets haunt a trio of young characters from their senior year of high school through their early 20s, and it all unfolds under the watchful eyes of the older women in their tight-knit church community. Blending an innovative narrative style with wise and empathetic prose, Bennett emerges as a strong new voice in literary fiction.
#5 COMMONWEALTH
Bestselling novelist Ann Patchett (Bel Canto) tells a tale that’s close to home in her latest. With plenty of autobiographical elements, her story centers on 10 main characters from a blended family, following them across 50 years. A poignant study of time, family politics, love and literature, this might be Patchett’s best work yet.
#10 28
HOMEGOING
It’s rare that a debut
novel is as masterful and moving as this one. Seven years in the making, Yaa Gyasi’s sweeping epic begins in 18th-century Ghana and traces the descendents of two African half sisters alongside the historical effects of colonialism, slavery and Jim Crow. This emotionally complex, poetic tale is not to be missed.
#17 THE GIRLS
In Emma Cline’s first novel, a bored and lonely teen thinks she has finally found her tribe in an enigmatic group of girls and their charismatic leader. But the electric charge of their community soon turns dark as the group hurtles toward a sinister end. This gripping tale perfectly captures the way teen friendships can become dangerously all-consuming.
BRIEF LES#26 SEVEN SONS ON PHYSICS
The concepts of modern physics aren’t over your head, and they aren’t impossible to fathom. Through lucid, luscious prose, Carlo Rovelli achieves the seemingly impossible in this slim distillation of dense science by delighting cosmology-obsessed and non-specialized readers alike. The stars never seemed so within reach.
#28 POND
In this contemplative, slight novel, an Irish woman in an insular town goes about her quiet life. Yet she inspects her world, her past loves, her garden and even the seemingly mundane ritual of
breakfast with such poetry, insight and humor that her small life seems anything but dull.
#37 MAD ENCHANTMENT
Ross King, an author with an unparalleled talent for bringing artistic genius to life in books such as Brunelleschi’s Dome and Leonardo and The Last Supper, succeeds once again with this remarkable portrait of the painter Claude Monet, elderly and grief-stricken but resolute in his determination to complete his masterpiece, the Water Lilies.
#40 DODGERS
Bill Beverly’s debut was an unexpected bright star from this year’s overflowing crime fiction shelves. Fifteen-year-old Los Angeles gang member East, along with three other black boys, is sent cross-country to carry out a hit on a black judge in Wisconsin. Part empathetic coming-of-age story and part propulsive thriller, this one isn’t just hard to put down: It’s inescapable.
#43 WHEN IN FRENCH
Lovers of language, romance and fish-out-of-water comedy shouldn’t miss this charming memoir by New Yorker writer Lauren Collins. A chronicle of her journey to fluency in French, her husband’s native tongue, sits companionably alongside a thoughtful inquiry into the history of language, giving Collins’ experience universal resonance and intellectual weight.
BOOKPAGE TOP 50
1. News of the World by Paulette Jiles 2. Swing Time by Zadie Smith 3. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi 4. The Mothers by Brit Bennett 5. Commonwealth by Ann Patchett 6. My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout 7. Miss Jane by Brad Watson 8. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 9. Evicted by Matthew Desmond 10. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi 11. Truevine by Beth Macy 12. Loner by Teddy Wayne 13. The Nix by Nathan Hill 14. I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This by Nadja Spiegelman 15. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles 16. Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta 17. The Girls by Emma Cline 18. Barkskins by Annie Proulx 19. Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel 20. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith 21. Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt 22. W ork Like Any Other by Virginia Reeves 23. The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies 24. American Heiress by Jeffrey Toobin 25. Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett 26. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli 27. The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney 28. Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett 29. The Fortress by Danielle Trussoni 30. The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson 31. The Wonder by Emma Donoghue 32. American Housewife by Helen Ellis 33. The Vegetarian by Han Kang 34. To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey 35. B ehold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue 36. Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich 37. Mad Enchantment by Ross King 38. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben 39. Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple 40. Dodgers by Bill Beverly 41. A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny 42. The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko by Scott Stambach 43. When in French by Lauren Collins 44. Lab Girl by Hope Jahren 45. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing 46. Mercury by Margot Livesey 47. H ero of the Empire by Candice Millard 48. My Father, the Pornographer by Chris Offutt 49. Will & I by Clay Byars 50. T he Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie Visit BookPage.com/bestof2016 for more best books coverage.
Don’t miss the best book of 2016! A 2016 National Book Award Finalist “A wistful, tender, funny novel.” — The Wall Street Journal
“A book to savor, to read and re-read.”
“A hallmark of DiCamillo’s brilliant writing.”
— The Huffington Post
— New York Journal of Books
“A unique and deeply appealing character.”
“A gem.” — BookPage
— A Mighty Girl
“Raymie Nightingale reminds adults about the profound depth of childhood feelings.”
“A triumphant and necessary book.” — The New York Times Book Review
— Time Magazine
“Not a wasted word or moment.”
“Sad, sweet, funny, charming, and wise.”
— Kirkus Reviews
— Parents.com
“Raymie Nightingale is beautiful, a celebration of life.” — Dean Koontz, best-selling author
“Newbery winner DiCamillo at her best.”
“Raymie’s earnestness is impossible not to fall in love with.” — Entertainment Weekly
— People Magazine
“This coming-of-age story is a fairy tale for our times.” — The Washington Post
“A crystalline ode to childhood friendship that shines as brightly as anything that DiCamillo has written.” — Chicago Tribune
An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller
★ ★ ★ S I X S TA R S ! ★ ★ ★ CANDLEWICK PRESS
meet MARY McDONOUGH features
the title of your new book? Q: What’s
Q: Describe the book in one sentence.
has been the biggest surprise you’ve encountered in Q: What writing fiction?
hat message or idea do you hope readers will take away from Q: W this story?
you remained close to your “Waltons” castmates? Q: Have
your favorite holiday tradition? Q: What’s
Q: What Christmas gift would you most like to receive?
THE HOUSE ON HONEYSUCKLE LANE In The House on Honeysuckle Lane (Kensington, $25, 352 pages, ISBN 9780758293510), the second novel set in the picturesque town of Oliver’s Well, Virginia, three siblings relive their holiday traditions in the first reunion since the death of their mother. Author Mary McDonough starred for nine seasons as Erin on the beloved television program “The Waltons” and now makes her home in Denver with her husband.
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VICTORIA BY TASHA ALEXANDER
England’s leading lady
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wo new books, one fiction and one nonfiction, offer insight into Britain’s Queen Victoria, who reigned during a time of radical change.
British writer Daisy Goodwin’s novel Victoria (St. Martin’s, $26.99, 416 pages, ISBN 9781250045461) is a delicious introduction to the young monarch’s world. Meant as a companion to the PBS series of the same name, which will air in the U.S. in January, it tells the story of Victoria’s personal and political struggles after her ascension to the throne. Goodwin’s engaging style is immediately captivating, and she deftly brings fresh life to a story familiar to many. All historical fiction takes liberties, but Goodwin stays true to the basic facts while imaginatively filling in gaps in the record. Her queen is strong-willed and impetuous: a classic teenager, but one with a great deal more power than her counterparts. She frees herself from the control of her mother and Sir John Conroy, bonds with her first Prime Minister and navigates the difficult world between adolescence and adulthood. Goodwin makes us care about Victoria the girl, even when she behaves badly, because she breathes humanity into her. One notable aspect of Goodwin’s account is her depiction of Victoria falling in love with Prime Minister Lord Melbourne. Readers who wonder if Goodwin is taking liberties here can turn to Julia Baird’s impressive biography Victoria: The Queen (Random House, $35, 752 pages, ISBN 9781400069880) for answers—Baird confirms that the Queen had quite a crush on her Prime Minister. While many biographies can be a slog to read, Baird’s is a delight. She uses her sources well while employing a narrative style that is a joy to read; all history should be this well-written.
Victoria was a complex woman, and Baird presents the queen in all her contradictions. We cringe at her notorious tantrums and cheer when she manages to outmaneuver more experienced ministers. Baird reminds us that some commonly accepted truths about Victoria don’t hold up under scrutiny. For example, Baird argues against the idea that after Albert’s death, Victoria all but abandoned her responsibilities. While her devotion to mourning and excessive displays of grief are well-known, Victoria did not completely remove herself from the business of running the Empire. Much of the difficulty in painting a full picture of the Queen comes from the destruction of many of her letters and diaries, done on Victoria’s orders. Later, the male editors of her correspondence excluded much they deemed unfeminine or inappropriate. Baird does a thorough job of synthesizing the primary sources that do exist, and even manages to dig up new information on the queen’s controversial relationship with her Highland servant, John Brown. A woman of her time, Victoria did not fight for women’s rights and was opposed to women’s sufferage. She was often more interested in intervening in individual situations than pushing for sweeping reforms, yet Baird skillfully avoids judging Victoria by modern standards. Goodwin and Baird have given us two books that complement each other beautifully, offering readers the chance to learn more about one of Britain’s most famous queens. Tasha Alexander is the author of the bestselling Lady Emily series, set in the Victorian era.
ZADIE SMITH
A fleet-footed tale of bad best friends
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hen people talk about multicultural fiction, Zadie Smith’s name is usually first up. The British author burst onto the scene at the tender age of 24 with the brilliant novel White Teeth, a multigenerational story of two London families—one Bengali, one British and Jamaican. In three novels and countless essays since, Smith has explored identity, race, gender and class, and has proven herself one of the most readable and thought-provoking writers of her generation. In Smith’s sophisticated and ambitious new page-turner, Swing Time, an unnamed narrator tries to make sense of her life and choices after being fired from her job as a personal assistant to a world-famous pop star, seeking answers in memories of a pivotal childhood friendship gone awry. “When I talk to women, childhood friendships are dominant in their minds and their imaginations. I didn’t have such a friend myself and I don’t have a sister, so part of this is curiosity . . . it is a part of life I missed out on,” Smith explains during a call to her Greenwich Village apartment, where she and her family—husband and fellow writer Nick Laird and their two children— live during the school year. The narrator meets Tracey at dance school in the early 1980s. Both girls are biracial, both are keen on dance and both are brought to class by their moth-
SWING TIME
By Zadie Smith
Penguin Press, $27, 464 pages ISBN 9781594203985, audio, eBook available
LITERARY FICTION
ers. Tracey’s sassy white mother is content with vicariously living through her gifted daughter, while the narrator’s intellectual Jamaican mother betters herself with books and night classes. The girls supplement their classes by learning dance steps from music videos and VHS copies of old musicals. Smith, who admits to a “love-hate relationship with musicals,” says with a chuckle, “The passions in this book are definitely autobiographical.” Tracey is the more dominant of the two, and through the ups and downs of their relationship, the narrator remains enthralled by Tracey’s physical grace and unshakable self-confidence, things she herself lacks. Yet as the girls grow older, they drift apart. Tracey attends a dance high school and books chorus roles in West End musicals, while the narrator goes to university and becomes a personal assistant to Aimee, an Australian pop star (think Madonna meets Angelina Jolie) whose celebrity and wealth extends to various do-gooder projects in an unnamed West African country. The title Swing Time refers to the 1936 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie, a favorite of the narrator’s. But it also refers to the rhythms of the novel itself, where the action swings from London to New York to the African village where Aimee hopes to build a school for girls, and across the narrator’s relationships with Tracey, her mother and her employer, each echoing the complex power dynamic of the one before. Swing Time is Smith’s first book to be narrated in the first person. “I didn’t really understand the first-person form, but I was curious about it,” says Smith. “It’s really
a new way of looking at other people. “People want to control how they are perceived,” Smith continues, growing passionate as she makes her point. “On Facebook or Instagram, you show others what you want them to see. My experience, though, is there is a lot more going on in the interior. You find out who you are by the things that you do, and it’s not always a pleasant discovery.” “Novels are Swing Time about trying also features a to swim in a change of tone certain mental from Smith’s previous work. climate and “It’s as if all understand black life were it.” squished into one story,” she says, explaining the novel’s almost parable-like feel. “I wanted it to be open that way, to feel very specific but almost as if when you were reading it, you could convince yourself that you were that person, that these things happened to you, that you too were having these childhood memories.” In adulthood, Tracey’s wasted potential leads her to become increasingly paranoid and interested in conspiracy theories, a plot thread that was inspired by Smith’s volunteer work at a London homeless shelter. She found many of the people she encountered there to “be very intelligent, very knowledgeable, but what can happen to smart people when their minds aren’t formally trained is that the mind goes elsewhere,” Smith says. “Almost every conversation I had would end up [being] about
© DOMINIQUE NABOKOV
INTERVIEW BY LAUREN BUFFERD
conspiracies, the illuminati. Instead of dismissing it, I wanted to know what it was about that concept that was so engaging. Novels are not about showing how people are wrong or right—novels are about trying to swim in a certain mental climate and depict and understand it.” Smith’s writing has often sought to bring this sort of understanding to characters whose backgrounds are far from her own, such as Alex-Li Tandem in The Autograph Man, Howard Belsey in On Beauty and the African villagers in Swing Time. She is aware that doing so is a risk—one that can carry a cost. “The first time I read from White Teeth, a man came up to me with a letter from ‘The Bengali People’ and it was a long list of things I’d got wrong in the novel,” she says. “I’m sure there were many, many things. But I just don’t believe there is a kind of expertise in a people. There are costs, no doubt. But I’m hoping the gain is there as well.” The gain is certainly there for the reader. Like Smith’s earlier novels, Swing Time is rich with ideas. Her intellectual fearlessness keeps the story moving forward, even as the novel jumps back and forth in time. A deeply literary story of friendship and identity, Swing Time is the satisfying work of a seasoned author.
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gifts
NATURE BY ALICE CARY
A window into the wild beyond
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ive new books showcase the stunning natural beauty that surrounds us from below and above, whether it’s a delicate feather of a spotted owl or an ethereal vision of an ancient tree basking in the light of the Milky Way.
As the National Park Service celebrates 100 years, the time is right to enjoy the spectacular Treasured Lands: A Photographic Odyssey Through America’s National Parks (Cameron + Company, $65, 456 pages, ISBN 9781944903008). It’s a unique treat, as photographer Q.T. Luong—who is featured in Ken Burns’ recent documentary about the parks—is the only photographer to have taken large-format images in each of the 59 parks. Born in France to Vietnamese parents, this outdoor adventurer fell so in love with the national parks that he left his job as a computer scientist in order to pursue his 20-year quest to photograph each of them. After enduring flash floods, summit overnights without a sleeping bag and a nerve-wracking encounter with a bear in Alaska that forced him to abandon his equipment, the results compiled in this large volume are simply magnificent. Calling the parks our nation’s “greatest treasures,” Luong writes that each “represents a unique environment, yet collectively they are all interrelated, interconnected like a giant jigsaw puzzle.” Because one of Luong’s goals is
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to inspire readers to see the parks themselves, he includes helpful travel tips and notes on his photographic techniques along with the images of each and every park. Whether it’s a Rocky Mountain sunrise or a glimpse of glowing lava dripping into the Pacific Ocean in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Luong’s shots are so luminous that you’ll likely be booking a trip soon.
EYES ON THE UNIVERSE Otherworldly is the best word to describe Beth Moon’s latest offering, Ancient Skies, Ancient Trees (Abbeville Press, $49.95, 116 pages, ISBN 9780789212672). Previously, in her bestselling Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time, Moon spent 14 years photographing the tangled trunks of some of the world’s oldest trees. In this sequel, she continues her journey to even more remote corners of the world, still photographing her beloved trees, but this time under night skies. During what she terms “celestial safaris,” she uses long exposures to capture the night skies and highlight the age of the trees. Her first such journey, to southern Africa, left her speechless—“I don’t think I was prepared to see the enormity of the universe laid out so starkly above me, the Milky Way stretching from one end of the horizon to the other.” Moon focuses on specific species in this collection,
including baobabs, bristlecone pines, junipers, Joshua trees, oaks and more. Not only do the stars beckon, but these trees become pieces of sculpture in their own right as their gnarled trunks and branches reach upward. Her images of quiver trees in Namibia are simply breathtaking, while the massive trunk of a sequoia seems like a ladder climbing to heaven. Ancient Skies, Ancient Trees allows readers to see the world in a new light.
FASCINATING FEATHERS While birds and their feathers surround us, most people rarely give their plumage a thought. “That’s a shame, because there’s no better way to confront evolution’s riot of invention and beauty,” notes science writer Carl Zimmer in his preface to Feathers: Displays of Brilliant Plumage (Chronicle, $29.95, 176 pages, ISBN 9781452139890). National Geographic photographer Robert Clark’s gorgeous homage to these overlooked gems captures both their brilliance and texture in photos worthy of a gallery. Many—like the golden, brown and white tail feather of a superb lyrebird—resemble exquisitely crafted pieces of jewelry, while feathers of a Victoria Crown Pigeon are reminiscent of flowers from an ornamental garden. Another intriguing shot shows all of the feathers (so many!) of a Bohemian Waxwing, best known for getting drunk on rowan berries—sometimes fatally so. Bird lovers and art lovers alike will find Feathers, along with Clark’s brief explanatory notes, to be an illuminating, iridescent delight.
FLIGHT AND FABLES It’s easy to lose yourself in Birds: Myth, Lore and Legend (Bloomsbury, $40, 304 pages, ISBN 9781472922861), an attrac-
tive and hugely informative book. Here you’ll learn that people in 70 countries found ducks to be the world’s funniest animals, prompting psychologist Richard Wiseman to advise, “If you’re going to tell a joke involving an animal, make it a duck.” Discussing a variety of species one by one, Marianne Taylor and Rachel Warren-Chadd’s text blends fact and fable surrounding each. In Babylon, for instance, ostriches were associated with the goddess Tiamat, while Harry Potter’s owl Hedwig is a Snowy Owl, widely considered in northern countries as an icon of bravery and a revealer of truths. And there isn’t actually a species called a seagull, although many (I’m guilty!) mistakenly call the entire family of birds by that name. The discussions are wide-ranging: The mockingbird entry discusses everything from Harper Lee and Charles Darwin to Hopi and Zuni traditions. Numerous illustrations and photographs add to the browsing fun.
A SHEPHERD’S WORLD “When English people dream of rural arcadia, they usually dream of our landscape,” writes James Rebanks. In 2015 Rebanks shared his life as a shepherd in the Lake District of Northern England in his glowingly reviewed The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. Rebanks now offers a visual look into his world with The Shepherd’s View: Modern Photographs from an Ancient Landscape (Flatiron, $24.99, 176 pages, ISBN 9781250103369), which includes intriguing short chapters and 80 color photographs he took of the pasturelands, animals and people that surround him. These images are a wonderful addition to his story, and the new book is filled with soulful observations as well as fun. “Truth be told, I don’t like shepherd’s pie,” he admits. “I know this is a bit like Kim Kardashian saying she doesn’t like shopping, but it’s true.” Truth be told, Rebanks’ two books are an unusually satisfying treat.
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SPORTS BY MARTIN BRADY
Cheer on the holiday with sports heroes
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his holiday season’s essential sports volumes offer a feast of biography and history, ranging from the fairways of the PGA and the ice palaces of the NHL to the fields of pro football, international soccer and beyond.
Golf legend Arnold Palmer passed away in September. Fortunately, the ever-popular Palmer had just completed his own personal memory book, A Life Well Played (St. Martin’s, $22.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9781250085948), in which he affectionately recalls the people, places and things he cherished most in his eventful 87 years. Palmer had his fingers in everything, it seems, from business ventures (car dealerships, golf course design) to media (Golf Channel) to charity work and endless endorsement deals spanning golf equipment to the famous iced-tea-and-lemonade drink that bears his name. Among many other favorite topics, Palmer discusses his native Pennsylvania, his positive career-long relationship with the press, the “Arnie’s Army” that followed him on the golf course in his playing days, his heroes (Dwight Eisenhower, Bobby Jones, Byron Nelson, his dad) and his 45-year marriage to his beloved first wife, Winnie. Eminently readable and delightfully Arnie, A Life Well Played is a must for any of his many admirers.
KICK START Olympic and World Cup soccer star Carli Lloyd has absorbed some deep professional and personal wounds along the road to establishing her champion’s persona. In When Nobody Was Watching (HMH, $26, 256 pages, ISBN 9780544814622), 34-year-old Lloyd frankly lays out her life and career, from her middle-class New Jersey origins to her ascent to the international stage, while pulling no punches in assessing soccer team dynamics, her various coaches
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and the sometimes political nature of relationships within the sport. Paramount among Lloyd’s more serious concerns is her longtime rift with her parents, the result of disagreements over her management. “To become the soccer player I am, I had to grow up, become my own person, and make my own decisions about what to do on the field and in life,” Lloyd writes. Through it all, Lloyd has achieved global recognition and earned acclaim as the first person ever to score a hat trick (three goals) in a FIFA Women’s World Cup final. Lloyd reserves special words in her memoir for her longtime trainer and mentor, James Galanis, and her lifelong best friend and fiancé, Brian Hollins.
HOCKEY’S HEART Hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky’s long career saw him establish astonishing statistical marks and win four Stanley Cup titles. With 99: Stories of the Game (Putnam, $28, 416 pages, ISBN 9780399575471), “The Great One” gives us a widelens journey through hockey history. Gretzky’s number was, of course, 99 during his playing days, but the current 2016-17 season is also the 99th anniversary of the NHL. The coverage here focuses mostly on the development of the pro leagues, the founding of legendary teams and the importance of individual players
(Esposito, Lemieux, Clarke, Orr, Parent, Hull, etc.). On a more personal level, he opines on the future of violence in the game and also provides sidebars on the realities of a long hockey career and the inevitability of retirement. Poignantly, Gretzky pays special homage to the original great one himself, Gordie Howe, who passed away earlier this year.
GREEN BAY GIANT Jeff Pearlman, known for his controversial 2011 book, Sweetness, about the late football great Walter Payton, now presents Gunslinger (HMH, $28, 448 pages, ISBN 9780544454378), his biography of Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre. While Pearlman ably accounts for Favre’s supremacy on the gridiron, his assessment of the private Favre is less than flattering, depicting a good-ol’-boy prone to drinking and practical jokes, not to mention a history of painkiller abuse and infidelity. Some of the more interesting topics covered include Favre’s college victory over Alabama as signal caller for Southern Mississippi, his early pro career with the Atlanta Falcons and his later success leading the Green Bay Packers to a Super Bowl victory. From there, Pearlman reports on
Favre’s difficult retirement and his last seasons quarterbacking the Jets and Vikings. While Favre’s high place in football history is forever guaranteed based on the numbers, Pearlman’s account might be a somewhat troubling read for his subject’s more devoted fans.
AFTER THE GAME Noted FOX Sports broadcaster Curt Menefee has teamed up with sportswriter Michael Arkush to produce Losing Isn’t Everything (Dey Street, $26.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9780062440075), a collection of profiles of athletes whose careers—and sometimes, later lives—were marked by challenges, disappointments and the search for the fortitude necessary to carry on. The 15 “Where are they now?” chapters focus on folks such as Red Sox pitcher Calvin Schiraldi, loser of both Games 6 and 7 of the 1986 World Series; tennis player Aaron Krickstein, whose otherwise respectable career is overshadowed by a famous five-set match he lost to a combative, aging Jimmy Connors at the 1991 U.S. Open; world-class runner Mary Decker, whose considerable achievements were marred by controversy and a devastating fall; and golfer Jean van de Velde, whose startling and unreal meltdown at the 18th hole in the final round of the 1999 British Open has pretty much become the gold standard for professional sports ineptitude. Menefee’s eloquent introduction on the nature of winning and losing sets the reader up nicely for this appreciative and refreshingly different take on the games we follow so intently and the flesh-and-blood, fallible humans who dare to compete— then must face their demons, even when their playing days are over.
HISTORY BY KEITH HERRELL
Captivating perspectives on the past
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ift-buying trends come and go, but for some readers, history books are a sure source of enlightenment and pleasure. Here are five of our favorites this season, sure to brighten the holidays for any history buff.
Looking for the perfect gift for someone who loves all things New York? You can’t go wrong with The Gilded Age in New York, 18701910 (Black Dog & Leventhal, $35, 304 pages, ISBN 9780316353663), which covers the 40-year period known for rampant capitalism and audacious displays of wealth. With its handsome cover featuring the Flatiron Building and a full-page photo of the Cornelius Vanderbilt mansion facing the introduction, this is a book that cheerfully joins in the celebration. But don’t be fooled—author Esther Crain has produced a comprehensive look at the Gilded Age, peeling back the veneer to examine the multiple flaws that led to progressive reforms. So yes, there are plenty of photos and reproductions of mansions, costume balls and luxury hotels, but Crain also carefully depicts all aspects of life in the Big Apple, with chapters focusing on the poor, crime (and sin!) and the rise of the “New Woman.” Treat this like a coffee table book, merely flipping through pages to gaze at the pictures, at your peril. With numerous breakout sections on such topics as crusading reporter Nellie Bly, “The Opera House War” and an all-female stolen-goods ring, it’s a fascinating history lesson as well.
BLACK PANTHER LEGACY The founders of the Black Panther Party probably didn’t expect a coffee table book about the group’s creation when they got together 50 years ago, but this year’s anniversary commemorations include Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers (Abrams, $40, 256 pages, ISBN 9781419722400). Authored by Stephen Shames and party co-founder Bobby Seale, the
book uses photographs from the early days (almost all of them black and white) and oral recollections to tell the story of the revolutionary social organization created as a response to racism and social inequality. Most controversially, the Black Panthers advocated armed self-defense to counter police bru-
we’ve almost forgotten (cotton gin, anyone?) and some of which we still marvel at. Each entry checks in at about three pages, including illustrations, which makes this the book to pick up any time you’re looking for that perfect factoid or cocktail party anecdote. Did you know that the death of legend-
December 1941. As for the attack itself, destruction on the ground and at sea is depicted in page after page of photos, with black smoke filling the sky. But don’t overlook the accompanying words, including a thoughtful explanation of the run-up to the war and a valuable timeline for Dec. 7, 1941. Additional features include maps, breakouts such as “Did Roosevelt Know?” and a look at another surprise attack on American soil: Sept. 11, 2001. And in a nod to tradition, archival pages from Life coverage of the attack on Pearl Harbor are replicated at the end of the book. One indication of how things have changed: No photos from the actual attack appeared until the Dec. 29 issue.
GOING BIG
tality. (One of the most striking images shows Seale and other party members armed during a protest at the California State Legislature.) Seale’s voice dominates the text, but many figures important to the movement, including Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver, are also heard from. The photographs are by Shames, who acknowledges in the introduction that the Panthers have made errors but emphasizes a legacy of positive social programs, including free breakfasts and health care. His photographs capture it all, including recent images that make it plain that the struggle continues.
MARVELS OF INVENTION Just as you can’t eat only one potato chip, it would be impossible to stop with one selection from America the Ingenious: How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants, and Tinkerers Changed the World (Artisan, $29.95, 320 pages, ISBN 9781579656942). Written by novelist and journalist Kevin Baker (Paradise Alley), it’s a celebration of more than 75 inventions and innovations—some of which we take for granted, some of which
If you like your gift books with a little ambition, look no further than Big History: Examines Our Past, Explains Our Present, ary football coach Knute Rockne Imagines Our Future (DK, $50, hastened the development of the 440 pages, ISBN 9781465454430). transcontinental airplane? Or that As the subtitle indicates, all it seeks 3-D printing has been around in some form since the 19th century? to do is “ponder some of the most Thanks to Baker’s efficient and wit- exciting and enduring questions about life, the universe, and what ty commentary, the learning goes the future holds for humans.” A down easily and leaves the reader project of the Big History Institute wanting more. His selections are at Macquarie University in Sydney, eclectic—don’t go looking for a Australia, this is a fascinating book recounting of how Bell invented the telephone—and he casts a wide with vivid illustrations and—despite its high-flying ambitions— net, somehow managing to work easy-to-understand, forthright in such disparate subjects as the safety pin and the Tennessee Valley text. Divided into eight sections, from “The Big Bang” to “IndusAuthority. try Rises,” it presents an array of SURPRISE ATTACK maps, graphics and text to educate the reader on what it terms a The weekly Life magazine “grand evolutionary epic.” Particthat baby boomers grew up with ularly useful are the “Goldilocks may be gone, but its editors still Conditions” charts that open each maintain an online presence and section, laying out how the right publish books on a broad range conditions occurred at just the of subjects. The latest is Pearl right time to trigger fundamental Harbor: 75 Years Later (Life, $35, change—including the emergence 192 pages, ISBN 9781618931764), of life. Also useful: back-of-thewhich carries on the Life tradition book timelines of world history, of iconic photographs, with additional features. The photographs— with breakouts on such topics most of them black and white—are as culture, inventions and great buildings. Even at more than 400 striking, of course, and include pages, it’s a book you don’t want to images from a Japanese aircraft see end. carrier bound for Pearl Harbor in
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gifts Tinseltown treats to put under the tree
HOLLYWOOD B Y PAT H . B R O E S K E
cious, controversial artists. Author Matt Zoller Seitz (co-author of the aforementioned TV) and Stone or TV and film lovers, this year’s crop of books offer fun “best of” rankings, participate in a probing Q&A that provides an engaging through line behind-the-scenes tours, photos from the vaults of Hollywood A-listers, in the book. touching tributes and more. Stone doesn’t hold back about his privileged upbringing, his relationships with his parents and Is “The Simpsons” really the best curated photographic retrospective Wagner, Wood’s eldest daughter, women, behind-closed-doors TV show ever? Does “Deadwood” contains restored shots of Hepburn this book has a straightforward Hollywood dealings, how Vietnam belong in the top 10? Is “The Larry from a decade of acting on sets like agenda: to restore Wood’s legacy. As changed his worldview and more. Sanders Show” TV’s most influenthe opening chapter notes, In the preface, Seitz states that her “accidental death” in tial series? Readers will be fighting this isn’t just a portrait of the difor the remote and cruising Netflix 1981 has for too long overrector responsible for iconic films to see how their picks compare shadowed her life. Moving such as Scarface, Platoon, Wall chronologically through her Street, JFK and the loony Natural with those of authors Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, who life and career, the chapters Born Killers, but a celebration of feature remembrances from one of America’s film titans. The name the greatest American various colleagues, friends shows of all time in TV (The Book) book wraps with Snowden, Stone’s (Grand Central, $19.99, 432 pages, and family. Fans will love latest eyebrow-raising and politthe shots of Wood on the set ically charged title. Love him or ISBN 9781455588190). In choosing of the iconic Rebel Without the greatest scripted comedies and loathe him, his movies are never a Cause and other favorites dramas, criteria included innovaboring and neither is this book. For like Splendor in the Grass, tion, influence and storytelling. Stone’s followers, it’s a must-have. along with her magazine The bulk of the nods are for shows covers, wedding photos and IT’S “FRON-KEN-STEEN” from the ’80s (when TV first hit never-before-seen images its artistic stride, per the authors) On the lighter side is Young from her family’s private through today. Still, “I Love Lucy” Frankenstein (Black Dog & Levcollection. An introduction makes their top 10. enthal, $29.99, 200 pages, ISBN penned by Robert Wagner, 9780316315470), a collection of PIONEERING LEADING LADIES Hepburn on the set of Sabrina courtesy of Wills’ collection. to whom she was famously photos and ruminations about one twice married; her friend For fans of Hollywood’s Golden of the funniest movies ever made. Robert Redford’s brief afterword; Funny Face and The Nun’s Story, Age, there are lavish, large-forWritten by beloved crazy man Mel and a special chapter on the makwith snippets from her interviews mat celebrations of two indelible Brooks, it’s got behind-the-scenes leading ladies. Audrey: The 50s and charming candids of Hepburn ing of West Side Story make this a surprises plus never-before-seen standout tribute. (Dey Street, $45, 256 pages, ISBN at home. Audrey is a great gift for art. Brooks’ voice comes through in fashion and film lovers alike. 9780062472069) tracks the early his writing, and like the movie, it’s FILMMAKING FINESSE Natalie Wood (Turner Classic years of Audrey Hepburn’s career. both distinctive and hilarious. Author David Wills utilizes his Movies): Reflections on a LegLet’s not forget the filmmakThe 1974 film Young Frankenown photo archives to spotlight endary Life (Running Press, $35, stein was the brainchild of the late ers. The Oliver Stone Experience the actress and her movies, her 320 pages, ISBN 9780762460519) (Abrams, $50, 400 pages, ISBN Gene Wilder, who played Dr. Fredis the first family-authorized erick Frankenstein. Their teamup, relationships with colleagues (her 9781419717901) is appropriately Roman Holiday co-star Gregory book about the Oscar-nominated hefty, with 500 color photos and says Brooks, was “a fierce collaboPeck called her “a magical combiactress who starred in classics illustrations, including facsimiles ration” marked by an especially big nation of high chic and high spirincluding Miracle on 34th Street, fight involving Wilder’s desire to of script pages and corresponRebel Without a Cause and West have the movie’s monster perform its”) and her undeniable impact dence. This dramatically designed on fashion, a Hepburn legacy that Side Story. Authored by Manoah the song and dance number, “Putbook looks at the life and work of Bowman with Natasha Gregson tin’ on the Ritz.” If you’ve seen the began with Sabrina. This carefully one of Hollywood’s most audafilm, you know who won that one. In the book’s introduction, contemporary comedy king Judd Apatow calls the film “the comedy equivalent of ‘Sgt. Pepper’ or The Great Gatsby, or the ’86 New York Mets.” He won’t get any arguments.
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ART & PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALICE CARY
Capturing the universal
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ast, present and future collide in glorious ways in these art and photography books, whether it’s a modern photographer witnessing history come alive on Civil War battlefields or a discussion of why the Yellow Brick Road was yellow in The Wizard of Oz.
When photographer Paul Mobley was working on his book American Farmer, he noticed that many of his subjects were age 100 or more, and was inspired to begin his next project: traveling to all 50
states and photographing at least one centenarian in each. After crisscrossing the country with his wife in an Airstream trailer, Mobley created a lively look at their lives in If I Live to Be 100: The Wisdom of Centenarians (Welcome Books, $50, 216 pages, ISBN 9781599621357). His black-and-white portraits reveal plenty of spunk, personality and spirit, while Allison Milionis writes an accompanying profile of each subject. We meet Irving Olson of Tucson, Arizona, who was profiled in Smithsonian magazine at age 98 for his unbelievable photographs of colliding drops of water. Meet Margaret Wachs of Stratford, Connecticut, who swam 10 laps to raise money for her church on her 100th birthday. “Along the way,” Mobley notes, “I discovered a treasure trove of ideas and lessons on how we can all live
gracefully and with meaning as we travel toward our final sunset.”
MODERN EYEWITNESS A Civil War enthusiast since his childhood, photographer Michael Falco set out on a four-year, battlefield-to-battlefield odyssey coinciding with the war’s 150th anniversary. The result is the wonderfully haunting Echoes of the Civil War: Capturing Battlefields through a Pinhole Camera (Countryman Press, $35, 288 pages, ISBN 9781581573800). “Soldiers’ journals and memoirs describe the battlefields as dreamlike,” Falco writes, “and that is how they appear through the patient eye of the pinhole camera.” While exploring major battle sites from Bull Run to Appomattox, Falco became not just a chronicler but a re-enactor himself, dressing in period clothing as he set up his primitive wooden box camera, using modern film but no lens, viewfinder or shutter. Along with these evocative photos, Falco interweaves past and present through his narrative as he “tumbled down the rabbit hole of Civil War history.” Echoes of the Civil War will hold great appeal for history and photography buffs alike.
DANCERS ON DISPLAY One day, 12-year-old Sarah asked her photographer parents, Ken Browar and Deborah Ory, for
pictures of her favorite dancers for her bedroom walls. They could find images of famous dancers of the past, but few, if any, of current stars. The couple rectified the situation through the NYC Dance Project, photographing a variety of dancers in the loft studio space of their Brooklyn home. The Art of Movement (Black Dog & Leventhal, $50, 304 pages, ISBN 9780316318587) is the spectacular result, a large book filled with arresting images of more than 70 dancers from companies that include the American Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Royal Danish Ballet and London’s Royal Ballet. As Ohry writes: “The images focus on capturing emotion through movement, which at the core is what I feel dance is about: it’s a language that is spoken through movement.” And what movements they are, as dancers soar through the air, draped in colorful costumes or couture clothing. Browar and Ory capture the rare blend of athleticism and grace in dancers like Misty Copeland, Bill T. Jones, Xin Ying and Robert Fairchild as they transform their bodies into art.
WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS In A History of Pictures (Abrams, $45, 360 pages, ISBN 9781419722752), renowned British artist David Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford explore a sweeping variety of pictures, including those on canvas, paper, cinema screens and even smartphones, showing how our ongoing artistic narrative “is still unfolding.” The result is a lively, dynamic conversation between Hockney and Gayford, written in alternating commentary. Pages juxta-
pose, for example, a Titian portrait of Mary Magdalene with a film still of Ingrid Berman in Casablanca, or Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe images with a Manet painting. In a chapter on “Movies and Stills,” they show how the Bates Motel in Psycho was based on Edward Hopper’s painting “House by the Railroad.” (As for the aforementioned Yellow Brick Road, it’s because early Technicolor was good with yellow.) This book is an unexpected delight.
BRING ON THE BUNNIES Brimming with over 200 photographs, paintings and sketches, The Art of Beatrix Potter (Chronicle, $40, 256 pages, ISBN 9781452151274) provides an indepth look at the creative process of one of the world’s enduringly beloved storytellers, published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of her birth. Organized geographically by writer and image researcher Emily Zach, this volume explores how different places Potter lived affected not only her life but also her art, beginning with a London schoolroom filled with rabbits, mice, bats, guinea pigs and hedgehogs. A natural scientist at heart as well as a gifted observer, Potter became fascinated by a variety of things she encountered, such as fungi and their colors. Readers see examples of the “picture letters” that Potter wrote to friends that inspired The Tale of Peter Rabbit and the many books that followed. Lovers of art and children’s literature will get lost in this intriguing compilation of a lifetime of art.
From The Art of Beatrix Potter. Frederick Warne & Co is the owner of all rights, copyrights and trademarks in the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations.
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gifts
PETS BY LINDA M. CASTELLITTO
Heavenly creatures
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oving, entertaining, clever, confounding . . . our precious pets enrich our lives, and attentive pet owners are always looking for more: more ways to understand them, decode their behavior, have a closer relationship or pay tribute. These new books offer wonderful ways to do just that, via pet psychology, inspiring stories, poetry and creative DIY. With CatWise: America’s Favorite Cat Expert Answers Your Cat Behavior Questions (Penguin, $18, 352 pages, ISBN 9780143129561), Pam Johnson-Bennett has created an informative, insightful go-to resource for current or aspiring cat owners. The author, a certified cat behaviorist for 30 years with eight bestsellers and a TV series under her belt, created the book to serve as an FAQ, but it’s also a work of advocacy. She writes, “[C]ats are often placed in a no-win situation. We . . . pick and choose what aspects of catness are acceptable, which usually means convenient—to us.” She urges readers to remember that, just like humans, cats are individuals. She also encourages readers to see cats’ more confounding behaviors as the problem-solving efforts they are, rather than attribute them to aloofness, spitefulness, etc. To wit, if your cat turns her back to you, she’s not being rude—it’s actually an expression of deep trust (i.e., she doesn’t have to keep a suspicious eye on you). Readers can choose sections of interest, specific questions (Why does my cat eat grass?), or read straight through from babyhood to the golden years. Whether readers are considering a new kitten or caring for a longtime feline companion, there’s much to learn from Johnson-Bennett’s patient, smart, encouraging expertise. It’s also important for dog owners to resist preconceived notions and pay attention to individual personalities, as Victoria Stilwell explains in The Secret Language of Dogs: Unlocking the Canine Mind for a Happier Pet (Ten Speed, $17.99, 160 pages, ISBN 9781607749523). The author, an accomplished trainer and host of the TV series “It’s Me or the Dog,” writes, “Like humans, dogs communicate consciously and unconsciously, using body and vocal signals that reflect
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what they are thinking and feeling.” Recognizing and responding to them (while remembering that doggy intent may not be the same as human interpretation) encourages a strong, happy relationship. The book covers everything from tone of voice (high = playful, low = serious) to the reason bitter spray won’t stop inappropriate chomping (bitterness receptors are on the back of dogs’ tongues, so they won’t taste it on a shoe). Photos and illustrations are helpful for deciphering body language. Throughout, Stilwell shares her knowledge while advocating for a consistent, loving approach to training and caring for dogs.
OLDIES BUT GOODIES An adorable, fuzzy-headed senior dog named Susie turned out to be the key to unlocking Erin Stanton’s passion for helping senior dogs find forever homes. After she began co-parenting the pooch with husband Brandon Stanton, of Humans of New York fame, “Improving their lonely, vulnerable lives became my purpose,” she writes in Susie’s Senior Dogs: Heartwarming, Tail-Wagging Stories from the Social Media Sensation (Gallery, $24.99, 144 pages, ISBN 9781501122477). Stanton realized that, like her husband, she could use social media to spur change, and it’s working: The Susie’s Senior Dogs Facebook page has 585,000plus followers, and the eponymous nonprofit organization has helped
arrange 500 adoptions of senior dogs. This book is sure to inspire more. It’s a charming collection of adoption stories, plus profiles of inspiring dog-centric sorts like a longtime city shelter volunteer and
a rescue dog photographer. Photos abound, and the book is dotted with tips from Susie, who says, “Don’t be scared of old age. Great things still do happen.” She sure would know.
QUOTH THE FELINE BARD Jennifer McCartney is a writer and humorist who struck a chord with her bestseller The Joy of Leaving Your Sh*t All Over the Place. Her new book, Poetry from Scratch: A Kitten’s Book of Verse (Countryman Press, $14.95, 96 pages, ISBN 9781581574289), is a “collection of the best (and only) cat poetry in existence.” She discovered the collection in Milan, you see, where the owners of a century-old cat cafe had faithfully been transcribing the feline residents’ literary efforts. Now, everyone can enjoy poems like “The Rodent Not Taken” (“I took the one less fit and spry/And that has made all the difference.”)
and “Ode to a Sunbeam.” There’s also beat poetry (“88 Lines About 44 Cats”), plus haiku and limericks. This is funny stuff for poets, cat lovers, poetic cats, catty poets and whoever else might appreciate a literarily inclined laugh.
ADORABLE CAT ABODES DIY meets cat worship in Cat Castles: 20 Cardboard Habitats You Can Build Yourself (Quirk, $14.99, 96 pages, ISBN 9781594749414), a how-to guide for creating fanciful and functional cat habitats. As Carin Oliver notes, although cats “are experts at relaxing,” they are “not great at arts and crafts. That’s where you come in.” Though it’s likely a curious cat will want to “help” when they see construction begin, that shouldn’t prove a hindrance, because Oliver’s instructions and diagrams are clear and easy to follow—and she devotes many pages to proper preparation via detailed materials lists, basic techniques and design tips. Projects include a castle, airplane, condo, nap tubes, couch and the especially hilarious and on-trend food truck. Lots of fun for budding builders—or those who just want to look at lots of photos of cats as they climb, hide, play and explore a variety of cardboard domiciles.
FEELING SQUIRRELLY The cover of How to Keep a Pet Squirrel (Faber & Faber, $14.95, 40 pages, ISBN 9780571255986)—a wide-eyed red squirrel on a trapeze—will inspire delight in those who see the furry tree-dwellers as cute . . . and stomach-clenching angst in those who consider them birdseed-stealing, wire-gnawing miscreants. More lively, witty illustrations from Axel Scheffler (The Gruffalo) accompany the text, which Scheffler discovered while paging through a circa-1910 children’s encyclopedia. While the book isn’t actually advocating squirrel adoption, peaceful coexistence might feel more achievable after reading it. This would be a delightful gift for an animal lover, or a funny way to tweak someone who talks perhaps a bit too much about their ongoing battles with these resourceful rodents.
FOOD BY HENRY L. CARRIGAN JR.
So good you can almost taste it
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eading succulent books on food and its history is almost as satisfying as eating a great meal. This season our tables are laden with five luscious books sure to appeal to the foodies on your holiday list.
In Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine (Simon & Schuster, $26.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9781476753959), Sarah Lohman traces the evolution of our culinary culture by exploring the histories of eight ingredients that have come to characterize modern American cuisine: black pepper, vanilla, chili powder, curry powder, soy sauce, garlic, monosodium glutamate and Sriracha. Drawing on deep research into cookbooks, as well as her own travels in search of flavor origins, Lohman introduces us to the explorers, merchants and cooks responsible for changing our tastes. For example, in the early 19th century, merchant John Crowninshield and his father, George, brought 1.5 million pounds of black pepper from Sumatra to the U.S. over a period of two years. Americans have been using hot sauce to spice up their dishes since 1807, Lohman discovers, and the popularity of Sriracha, first produced by Huy Fong Foods in 1980, continues to turn up the heat in our meals. Lohman’s delectable book illustrates the deep connections between culture and food, reminding us that the flavors that enhance our foods represent the people who cook it.
HOT TIMES Also noticing that Americans love a little spice in life—and on their vegetables, pork roast or chicken wings—journalist Denver Nicks offers an enticing overview of this passion in Hot Sauce Nation: America’s Burning Obsession (Chicago Review Press, $17.99, 240
pages, ISBN 9781613731840). He discovers that sales of hot sauce in the U.S. far outstrip sales of other condiments. These peppery potions have long been an integral ingredient in the cooking of the world’s poor because hot sauce is inexpensive, tasty and has a long shelf life. Fast food chains, such as Wendy’s and White Castle, have introduced dishes such as spicy chicken sandwiches, jalapeño burgers and Sriracha sliders to their menus to satisfy the cravings for capsaicin (the chemical in peppers that causes the sizzling sensation). Nicks’ burning questions about our love of Tabasco and its many cousins eventually move beyond the taste of the sauce and on to the mystery of why we love it. He concludes philosophically that we devour hot sauce “to enliven our meals and to dance with pain,” transcending, at least momentarily, the agony induced by the capsaicin rush.
CULINARY TRAVELS Matt Goulding’s love of Spanish cuisine began when he shared a meal with the woman who would become his wife. In Grape, Olive, Pig: Deep Travels Through Spain’s Food Culture (Anthony Bourdain, $35, 368 pages, ISBN 9780062394132), Goulding does for Spain’s food what he did for
Japan’s in Rice, Noodle, Fish, except that this time it’s more personal. In a foreword, Goulding dishes out the elements of Spanish cuisine that he’s fallen for: “beautiful local ingredients, impeccable techniques, and a ravenous appetite for all manners of flora and fauna. The Spanish suck the brains from shrimp heads, crunch sardine spines like potato chips, and throw elaborate wine-soaked parties to celebrate spring onions.” Goulding’s succulent prose celebrates nine regions of Spain, commending the food, drink or manner of preparation that makes each area memorable. In Barcelona, for example, it’s foraging for dinner in the markets across the city, from the sheep market to the pig market. Galicia reigns supreme for its gooseneck barnacles, while Basque country produces Spain’s finest wines. Goulding sprinkles useful advice throughout the book; thus, on “how to drink like a Spaniard,” he counsels to “order it local,” “drink it small and cold,” and “skip the Sangria.” Affectionate and amusing, Goulding’s book provides a tasty guide for travelers grazing through Spain’s food cultures.
TASTE OF THE TOWN As the late food historian Joy Santlofer demonstrates in her
elegant Food City: Four Centuries of Food-Making in New York (Norton, $28.95, 480 pages, ISBN 9780393076394), the Big Apple has long been a crossroads of food cultures. Santlofer vividly traces the evolution of New York City as the capital of the food industry from the mid-17th century to the present. She focuses on the big four of food production in New York—bread, sugar, drink, meat— and chronicles the ways that the production of each moved from the artisanal to the industrial and back to the artisanal. During the height of industrialization, New York was home to National Biscuit Company, Hebrew National and American Chicle. Readers familiar with the city will be surprised to learn that the pedestrian mall on 42nd Street functioned in the 19th century as a trail where cattle were driven to slaughterhouses along the East River. Santlofer brings to life the colorful history of “food city,” emphasizing that the future belongs to young artisans who continue to create new products.
A REAL PAGE-CHURNER In Butter: A Rich History (Algonquin, $25.95, 368 pages, ISBN 9781616203641), food writer and former pastry chef Elaine Khosrova whips up a tasty chronicle of the indispensable dairy product. Khosrova demonstrates that “the life and times of butter have been deeply entwined” with events far from kitchen or creamery. She explores, for example, the use of butter in Tibetan Buddhism to sculpt sacred figures; the staple also took on sacred properties in the Middle Ages when the Roman Catholic Church banned consumption of butter on fast days. Khosrova points out that butter’s rich texture and flavor enhance other ingredients and make sweets irresistible. She provides a range of recipes, from croissants and shortbread to hollandaise and butterscotch pudding, that butter made possible, as well as recipes for making your own butter. Khosrova’s richly textured history melts in your mouth.
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INSPIRATION BY HEATHER SEGGEL
all God wants from you is you.” And you are, in fact, the fourth chair in this bridge game; Christian or not, faithful or not, like it or not, that force is a part of us, just as we are of it. Read The Divine Dance, and be prepared to lose a little sleep; it’s that exhilarating.
Directions for life’s journey
T
he silence after the holiday rush gives us an opportunity to reflect and review the year that was. These new books offer spiritual insight from a variety of perspectives sure to enlarge our own.
From a storied run in college football to difficult times in the NFL, Tim Tebow has weathered his share of setbacks, all made that much harder by being in the public eye. In Shaken: Discovering Your True Identity in the Midst of Life’s Storms (WaterBrook, $25,
of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World (Avery, $26, 368 pages, ISBN 9780399185045) is the result of those talks. Combining Tibetan Buddhist thought, Christian wisdom and science that shows the benefits of faith and meditation, there’s much to consider here;
God as manifest in open spaces, but the smallest human interactions ripple outward among others as well; as a result, Voskamp reads like a heady cocktail of Cheryl Strayed and Strong’s Concordance. We can’t have communion without threshing grain and crushing
224 pages, ISBN 9780735289864), Tebow shares stories from his life, then offers parallel tales of friends who have overcome adversity and lessons from Scripture that point toward a relationship with God as the bedrock of true character. He’s a very affable guy, and the book, co-written with A.J. Gregory, is both personal and uplifting. Shaken is a perfect read for someone in need of a latte-sized shot of courage.
the truest moments, though, are scenes of the two men together, holding hands or touching one another’s cheeks in deep affection, and constantly joking, teasing and laughing. The analysis easily takes a backseat to their demonstration of joy in action.
grapes; a hard truth, but through it, so much is possible.
COMPANIONS IN JOY His Holiness the Dalai Lama and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu have had a long and deep friendship, though health issues and political interference have intervened to keep them apart over the years. The two were able to meet for a week with writer Douglas Abrams, and they spent the time discussing the sources of and obstacles to joy. The Book
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BECOMING WHOLE Ann Voskamp’s The Broken Way: A Daring Path into the Abundant Life (Zondervan, $22.99, 288 pages, ISBN 9780310318583) opens with a scene of such arresting violence it’s impossible to turn away. The bestselling author makes a proposal many will find uncomfortable: Maybe the only way to find union with God is to become fully broken. That doesn’t mean self-harm, but looking at the ways life is already breaking us daily and instead of resisting or turning away, moving into the brokenness. Her vivid descriptions of farm life portray
RETHINKING THE TRINITY Many churches suggest a handsoff approach to the Holy Trinity on the basis that it’s an unknowable mystery. Richard Rohr is having none of that, thank you. The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation (Whitaker House, $23.99, 224 pages, ISBN 9781629117294), co-written with Mike Morrell, posits a Trinity that has more to do with science, the natural world and our increasing need for human connection than the two guys and a dove (or wind or tongue of flame) many of us know. Rohr’s insistence on God’s total inclusion of all beings would be radical enough, but he goes so far as to bend the three faces of God from a triangle into a spiral, a regenerating force. He writes, “In the eternal scheme of things, we discover that
THE WISDOM OF THE STOICS If the word “stoic” conjures up images of living on crackers and water, think again. The Stoics were philosophers dedicated to the study of self-mastery, not self-abnegation. Take a little time to familiarize yourself with the tenets of Stoicism, and you’ll find advice that’s shockingly contemporary. Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman’s The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living (Portfolio, $25, 416 pages, ISBN 9780735211735) is a daily reader; each page offers a quote from Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius or a second string of their predecessors, followed by tools for reflection and action. Perception, Action and Will are the three disciplines the Stoics focused on, and they are the focus here as well. Many successful people have cited the wisdom of the Stoics, with its intensity of focus and discarding of the unnecessary, as key to success in life and business. Mastering one’s emotions is hard enough without trying to do it on an empty stomach; put down the Saltines, have a decent meal and see where this ancient yet still relevant philosophy leads you. March 25th
WEALTH AND FREEDOM ARE FREE “. . . freedom isn’t secured by filling up on your heart’s desire but by removing your desire.” —Epictetus, Discourses, 4.1.175
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here are two ways to be wealthy— to get everything you want or to want everything you have. Which is easier right here and right now? The same goes for freedom. If you chafe and fight and struggle for more, you will never be free. If you could find and focus on the pockets of freedom you already have? Well, then you’d be free right here, right now. —One of the 366 meditations in The Daily Stoic (Portfolio)
LITERARY BY JULIE HALE
biographies, background on the creation of each work and a wealth of visuals complete this standout tribute to stories that transport the reader. Isn’t that what fiction’s for?
Holiday must-haves for literature lovers
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f you’re shopping for someone who’s happiest in the company of a book, then these recommendations are for you! Bibliophiles will delight over the goodies we’ve gathered this holiday season.
First up is a story of cinematic proportions: An ancient codex, written by an unidentified author in a hand no one can decipher, flits in and out of history, confounding researchers across the centuries. The codex in question, known as the Voynich Manuscript, is one of literature’s great enigmas. The work dates back to the 15th century, and what’s known about its past is piecemeal. After passing through the hands of various owners, it surfaced in a book sale in Rome in 1903. Nine years later, it came into the possession of Polish antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich. Today it’s housed at Yale University. Readers everywhere can now puzzle over this archival oddity thanks to a magnificent new facsimile edition created from fresh photographs of the original. The Voynich Manuscript (Yale, $50, 304 pages, ISBN 9780300217230) includes the full text of the codex, as well as reproductions of its arcane illustrations. Edited by rare books expert Raymond Clemens, the volume features essays on the background of the manuscript and the latest research connected to it—efforts that have produced few clues about its provenance. A strange yet sublime work, The Voynich Manuscript is a jewel for the literary enthusiast and a prize for any personal library.
MINDING THE STORE For book lovers, nothing beats a few hours of browsing in a wellstocked bookshop. New Yorker illustrator Bob Eckstein celebrates the singular joys of perusal and possible purchase in Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores (Clarkson Potter, $22, 176
pages, ISBN 9780553459272), an international tour of 75 indie bookshops that includes literary institutions such as City Lights (San Francisco) and Shakespeare and Company (Paris). Eckstein captures the essence of each shop in his luminous illustrations and shares stories from the stacks. The destinations are worthy of a bibliophile’s bucket list, like Word on the Water, a London bookstore located on a floating barge, and Librairie Avant-Garde, an underground book emporium in a former bomb shelter in Nanjing, China, with 43,000 square feet of browsing space. A foreword by Garrison Keillor and quotes from Alice Munro, Robin Williams, Patti Smith and other notables make this the ultimate valentine to the brick-and-mortar bookstore.
THE WRITING LIFE Getting writers to interview other writers is a long-held practice at Vanity Fair that has resulted in classic contributions to the magazine. The best of these literary pairings appear in the lively new anthology Vanity Fair’s Writers on Writers (Penguin, $20, 432 pages, ISBN 9780143111764). Assembled by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, these 43 pieces are filled with the larger-than-life reportage and sophisticated criticism that have made the publication famous. In “Mississippi Queen,” Willie Morris goes for a drive with Eudora Welty—“quite simply,” he says, “the funniest person I’ve ever known.” In “The White Stuff,” Michael Lewis pays a call on Tom Wolfe in his Hamptons home, finding the great writer turned out in (you guessed it) a white suit and matching
fedora. When it comes to author appraisals, the collection’s lineup of matches is remarkable: James Wolcott tackles Jack Kerouac, Martin Amis assesses Saul Bellow, Jacqueline Woodson honors James Baldwin—and that’s just a preview. In his introduction to the collection, fellow editor David Friend writes, “the life of every storyteller brims with revelatory tales.” So does this terrific anthology.
FICTIONAL WORLDS Like a brave heroine or stalwart adventurer, setting takes a leading role in many a beloved literary work. Middle-earth, Oz and Narnia are fully realized worlds that readers can map with their imaginations. These and other sensational sites are celebrated in Literary Wonderlands (Black Dog & Leventhal, $29.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9780316316385), an unforgettable expedition to 90-plus places made famous in fiction and poetry. Edited by Slate columnist Laura Miller, Wonderlands tracks almost 4,000 years of narrative. Starting with lands brought to life in time-honored tales like The Odyssey and The Tempest, the volume moves forward to explore 20th-century favorites (Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse-Five) and up-to-date offerings (The Hunger Games, 1Q84). Author
A BOOK CLUB’S BEST FRIEND Is your book group in need of a boost? This holiday, surprise the members of your circle with A Year of Reading (Sourcebooks, $14.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9781492642220) and get set for inspired discussions in 2017. Amply qualified authors Elisabeth Ellington (Ph.D., British lit) and Jane Freimiller (Ph.D., philosophy) share creative ideas for a year’s worth of reading in this handy guide. In a month-by-month format, the book offers reading recommendations tailored to each season. Ideas for February range from the new to the tried-and-true: Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance; Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. For November, there’s a bounty of food-related reading, including Lucy Knisley’s Relish, a culinary memoir told in graphic-novel form. Along with out-of-the-ordinary selections, the guide provides talking points that can kickstart a conversation and questions to keep the dialogue alive. With tips on how to organize a new reading group and resources for researching titles, this manual is a must for book-clubbers. Illustration copyright © 2016 by Bob Eckstein. Reproduced with permission from Clarkson Potter.
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reviews T PI OP CK
FICTION
MOONGLOW
The stories that make up a life REVIEW BY IAN SCHWARTZ
Michael Chabon’s sparkling, richly satisfying new novel, Moonglow, is built from the stories of the so-called Greatest Generation. Specifically, stories told to him over the course of a week by his dying grandfather in 1989. While parts of the book are narrated by the author, and his mother and grandmother are prominent characters, this work of “fictional nonfiction” clearly belongs to the old man. The novel unfolds in alternating threads showing different parts of his grandfather’s life, interspersed with scenes featuring the author as narrator. Chabon learns his grandfather is a brilliant, physical man, equally capable of fashioning—and using—a garrote and carving wooden horses for his daughter. We follow his work as a soldier tasked By Michael Chabon with kidnapping Nazi scientists before the Soviets can do the same; his Harper, $28.99, 448 pages postwar life loving a broken, secretive Frenchwoman during her descent ISBN 9780062225559, audio, eBook available into madness; and finally his days as a widower in a Florida retirement community, stalking a python that preys upon small pets. LITERARY FICTION Despite heavy themes, delicious exchanges abound. One of my favorites comes during the Florida years when Devaughn, community security guard and reluctant Sancho Panza in the snake hunt, warns this dotty old geezer that he risks going to jail. “I’ve been in jail,” Chabon’s grandfather says. “I got a lot of reading done.” “I might like to re-estimate my opinion of you,” Devaughn replies. More than 25 years after his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, there’s no need to re-estimate the opinion of Chabon. His writing is joyful, his timing and humor have grown only more impeccable, and his characters still live with you long after you turn the final page.
THE ORNATRIX By Kate Howard
Overlook $27.95, 304 pages ISBN 9781468313826 eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION
In 16th-century Italy, where goodness and beauty are believed to go hand in hand, blemishes on the skin are seen as physical manifestations of the state of one’s soul. So when Flavia is born with a lurid birthmark across her face, the girl is viewed as an object of horror. After years of rejection, on the eve of her sister’s wedding Flavia snaps and does something so terrible that she is banished to a convent. Here her path crosses with Ghostanza, a woman whose otherworldly beauty inspires reverence in women and men alike. She claims
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Flavia as her ornatrix (a lady’s maid), schooling her in the art of Renaissance-era beauty regimens and cosmetics. However, Ghostanza’s tutelage goes much deeper, teaching Flavia that physical perfection carries a hefty price. By drawing sly parallels between Flavia’s world and our own, debut novelist Kate Howard demonstrates that unattainable beauty standards are hardly new. But Howard’s true genius lies in her skillful interweaving of themes of beauty, self-acceptance and artifice versus authenticity into an immersive story. The meticulous research and rich world-building place Howard alongside masters of the genre like Sarah Dunant and Tracy Chevalier (though Howard isn’t afraid to take readers down more ominous paths). If the idea of The Picture of Dorian Gray with feminist leanings gives you a thrill, then The Ornatrix is for you. —STEPHENIE HARRISON
I’LL TAKE YOU THERE By Wally Lamb
Harper $25.99, 272 pages ISBN 9780062656285 Audio, eBook available POPULAR FICTION
Wally Lamb won readers’ hearts with his New York Times bestselling novel (and Oprah Book Club selection) She’s Come Undone. Four bestsellers later, he returns with I’ll Take You There. The novel follows film professor Felix Funicello, a divorced father who runs a Monday-night movie club for his film students. One evening, Felix encounters the ghost of Lois Weber, an American silent film actress and director. Felix follows her on the ride of his life, revisiting scenes from his past that are projected onto a movie screen. As Lois
takes him back through time, Felix realizes that he has been charged with uncovering a dark secret at the heart of his family. Lamb’s previous work has been quite sensitive to women, painting endearing portraits of female characters who have been ignored, shamed and often mistreated. He builds on that tradition in I’ll Take You There, a love letter to feminism and to trailblazing women—real and imagined—who have graced the silver screen or stood behind the camera. —MEGAN FISHMANN
TO CAPTURE WHAT WE CANNOT KEEP By Beatrice Colin Flatiron $25.99, 304 pages ISBN 9781250071446 Audio, eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION
Paris, a city unequivocally associated with romance, is front and center in Beatrice Colin’s latest novel, To Capture What We Cannot Keep, an unlikely love story involving the Eiffel Tower’s real-life engineer, Émile Nouguier, and a 30-year-old Scots widow. We begin on a cold and rainy morning in February of 1887, inside a hot air balloon. Caitriona Wallace, known as Cait, is chaperoning the unconventional Arrol siblings as they tour Europe on their rich uncle’s dime. Émile and Cait’s chance meeting seems more awkward than electric, but leaves behind a spark. Émile’s prestige and promising career is a stark contrast to Cait, whose gender, age and marital status point toward a grim and choiceless future. But love is not always reasonable— something Colin proves over and over again as Émile and Cait’s secret relationship advances. Colin ably brings to life a time before the iron lattice of the Eiffel Tower became an iconic part of the Parisian landscape. To Capture What We Cannot Keep is part history lesson and part thrilling love story, leading to an ending full of depth, promise and hope. —CHIKA GUJARATHI
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NONFICTION
THE MARCHES
Identity and the land REVIEW BY ALDEN MUDGE
If you’re thinking about building a very big wall, why not start by reading Rory Stewart’s captivating new book, The Marches: A Borderland Journey between England and Scotland. In its first section, Stewart describes walking—occasionally accompanied by his then 89-year-old father—along Hadrian’s Wall, which the Romans built in Northern England to keep out the barbarians. A student of the wall’s history, Stewart knows that it was for centuries garrisoned by a remarkably diverse set of soldiers and their families, including “Tigris barge-men from Iraq.” What, then, does it really mean to be a Briton, a Scot or an Englishman? At the time of Stewart’s first walk along the thousand-mile length of the border, Scotland was about to hold a referendum on whether to leave the United Kingdom. A vote to leave would mean that Stewart, recently elected to Parliament from a district in Northern England, and By Rory Stewart his father, Brian, a proud Scottish Highlander who has spent his career HMH, $27, 368 pages ISBN 9780544108882, eBook available working for the British Empire, would live in different nations. The meaning and history of borders and national identities is someTRAVEL thing he ponders during a longer walk recounted in the second section of the book. Stewart, who wrote about his 2002 walk across Afghanistan in the brilliant bestseller The Places in Between, has complicated, sometimes contradictory experiences, all framed by encounters with people who live in the Marches. He longs for the bucolic landscapes described by Wordsworth and is disillusioned by the wilder landscapes that environmentalists have succeeded in restoring. Which of these is the real English landscape? It seems to depend on when you start your timeline. Time is one of the chief concerns of the third and final section of the book, because at 93 years of age, Stewart’s father is dying. Stewart writes movingly and honestly about his father, who was 50 when Rory was born but possessed a remarkable vigor and a keen interest in his son that readers will feel throughout the narrative. It’s a fitting end to this powerful exploration of personal and national lineages and landscapes.
BORN A CRIME By Trevor Noah
Spiegel & Grau $28, 304 pages ISBN 9780399588174 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR
When Trevor Noah succeeded Jon Stewart as host of “The Daily Show” last year, the 32-year-old South African comedian had huge shoes to fill. Could he prove himself a worthy successor? Who was he, anyway? In his fascinating memoir, Born a Crime, we get to know Comedy Central’s import, and the evidence is clear: Challenges are nothing new to Noah. Born in 1984 to a Swiss father
and a black mother, Noah was living proof that his parents had violated the law forbidding “illicit” relationships between whites and blacks. His mixed looks marked him as an outsider. Growing up without his father, he moved with his fearless, fanatical mother between the black and white townships near Johannesburg, rarely feeling accepted anywhere. Poverty precluded any hope of escape. Engaging and insightful, Born a Crime is not a rags-to-riches story; the memoir ends before Noah finds success. Instead, the book reveals the hard details of a grim life: a mother and son who, together, survived the cruelties of apartheid and domestic violence. Ironically, today it is Noah’s perspective as an outsider that serves him so well in his starring role in U.S. comedy. —PRISCILLA KIPP
THE GLASS UNIVERSE By Dava Sobel
Viking $30, 336 pages ISBN 9780670016952 Audio, eBook available SCIENCE
Dava Sobel, best known for such remarkable books as Galileo’s Daughter and Longitude, chronicles the groundbreaking careers of several little-known women scientists in The Glass Universe. Sobel begins her story in 1882 at a glittering dinner party held by Dr. Henry Draper and his wife, Anna Palmer Draper. Dr. Draper, a physician and amateur astronomer, died five days later, leaving Anna with a
deep desire to continue his work. Her support, along with that of fellow heiress Catherine Wolfe Bruce, made it possible for women such as Antonia Maury, Williamina Fleming and Cecilia Payne (who earned Harvard’s first Ph.D. in astronomy) to work at the Harvard Observatory and contribute to the discoveries of the day. One of the pleasures of seeing history through Sobel’s eyes is her delectable prose and her ability to realize scenes from the past. Her new book is a compelling read and a welcome reminder that American women have long desired to reach for the stars. —DEBORAH HOPKINSON
GEORGE LUCAS By Brian Jay Jones Little, Brown $32, 560 pages ISBN 9780316257442 Audio, eBook available BIOGRAPHY
Just in time for the release of the latest Star Wars movie, Brian Jay Jones (author of Jim Henson) offers a cinematic and engrossing look at the life of filmmaker George Lucas. From the start, Lucas wouldn’t bend to anyone else’s creative vision, whether it belonged to film school professors or the studios backing his movies. Early relationships with Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg shaped Lucas’ work and place in Hollywood—and foreshadowed what was to come. When the book turns to the first Star Wars film, readers observe Lucas’ tortured creative process. He wrote treatments of the screenplay longhand in pencil and painstakingly edited snippets from other movies to show how he wanted Star Wars to look and feel. The result forever changed how Americans experience film. For movie fans or anyone fascinated by the creative process, this is a well-researched and illuminating biography. — K E L LY B L E W E T T
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children’s
CHRISTMAS BY JULIE HALE
Dazzling picture books to become December traditions
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ather your little elves for story time, and get set for a sparkling holiday with heartwarming tales of Christmas Eve magic. The plum picks featured here will bring the spirit of December to any reading circle.
A new book from paper-craft whiz Robert Sabuda is always a cause for celebration, and this year he delivers another popup masterpiece. The Christmas Story (Candlewick, $35, 12 pages, ISBN 9780763683269, ages 5 to 8) is a spellbinding depiction of the Nativity that will enchant readers of all ages. Sabuda uses white paper with touches of gold to create pristine scenes that capture the majesty of the story of Jesus’ birth. His crisp tableaux lend a new dimension—literally—to the cherished tale. Wise men astride camels, a sparkling star and a stable filled with very special occupants are standout elements in a book brimming with pop-up surprises. It seems there’s nothing Sabuda can’t create out of paper. His visionary take on the Nativity is destined to become a December staple.
MEOWY CHRISTMAS You can’t go wrong with a title like Stowaway in a Sleigh (HMH, $17.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780544481749, ages 4 to 7). This irresistible Christmas caper from C. Roger Mader features a feline with a problem only Santa can solve. On Christmas Eve, Slipper, a green-eyed cat, discovers an intruder in the house—a big man with furry boots, dressed in headto-toe red! Deciding to check out his bag of goodies, Slipper crawls inside. Unsuspecting Santa shoulders the sack, and in a breathtaking nod to The Polar Express, Slipper soon finds herself flying high in Santa’s sleigh, heading for
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the North Pole. How will she get home? With the help of Mr. Claus, of course! In his richly detailed pastel illustrations, Mader conveys Slipper’s many moods—curiosity, wonder and, in the end, contentment. This is a trip readers will want to take again and again.
AN ANTICIPATED ARRIVAL In Anik McGrory’s The Christmas Fox (Knopf, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9781101935002, ages 3 to 7), a mischievous fox is summoned by his animal friends to help prepare the stable for the arrival of a baby. “Come . . . there’s a place to make warm with sweet-smelling hay,” says the cow. “Come,” the lamb tells him. “There are gifts to get ready with soft, cozy wool.” But the fox—uncertain about how he can help—ignores their words. He frolics in the snow and plays in a stream. Once he arrives at the stable, he finds that he’s able to contribute after all, in true fox-like fashion. Youngsters will fall for McGrory’s impish fox, whose personality comes alive in her appealing illustrations, and if they don’t yet know the Nativity story, they’ll find an easy introduction here.
WISHES CAN COME TRUE Lisa Wheeler celebrates the miracles of the season in The Christmas Boot (Dial, $17.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780803741348, ages 4 to 8). Hannah Greyweather is out gathering wood when she discovers a lone boot in the snow. It fits her left foot perfectly and eases her walk back to the solitary cabin she calls
home. How wonderful it would be, Hannah thinks, to have its mate! The next morning, she’s surprised to find two boots by her bed. Soon anything Hannah wishes for materializes before her eyes, including bright red mittens and a magnificent new house. When the owner of the lost boot—Santa himself—comes to claim it, he brings the magic to an end, but before he departs, he gives Hannah the gift she needs the most. Jeff Pinkney’s breathtaking illustrations make this an exceptional holiday story and a tale to be treasured.
illustrations make this Christmas Eve, with its star-studded night sky, one to remember. Little readers will feel big love for George’s furry holiday heroes.
AN OVERLOOKED TREASURE In Delia Huddy’s The Christmas Eve Tree (Candlewick, $16.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9780763679170, ages 5 to 8), a homeless boy rescues a forlorn little fir fated for the trash
SPECIAL DELIVERY Kallie George’s The Lost Gift (Schwartz & Wade, $17.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9780553524819, ages 4 to 8) is all about the goodness of giving. Squirrel, Rabbit, Bird and The Christmas Eve Tree. Illustration copyright © 2015 by Emily Deer wait on snow-ladSutton. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick en Merry Woods Hill in Press, Somerville, MA on behalf of Walker Books, Limited. hopes of spotting Santa. When they finally spy him overand takes it to his camp beneath head, the wind whips his sleigh a railway bridge. With the help of and a present falls off “like a shoot- candles, the resourceful lad transing star.” In the forest, the critters forms it into a magnificent symbol find the gift—a package tagged for of the season. The tree’s blazing the new baby at a local farm. With branches attract passersby, who some ingenuity—and Santa-income together around it and sing. spired goodwill—they deliver the After the holiday, the boy moves present to its tiny rightful owner. on and the fir is forgotten—almost. At the end of their mission, they In the end, it endures, growing to discover a surprise—a present just majestic heights in a park. Thanks for them, from you-know-who. to artist Emily Sutton, whose Stephanie Graegin’s pencil-and-ink watercolor visuals have a delightful retro quality, Huddy’s story brims with holiday sweetness. This distinctive tale is a testament to the way Christmas can create a sense of community.
read the #1 new york times bestselling duology from
“
SHINES
WITH REDEMPTION, FRIENDSHIP, AND LOVE.” —USA TODAY
“AN ENDURING SENSE OF
DARK, LARCENOUS FUN.” —NPR
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MASTER OF FANTASY.”
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grishaverse.com
gifts
CHILDREN’S BY ALICE CARY
Magic at young readers’ fingertips
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ll I want for Christmas this year is a box full of kids’ gift books. That’s exactly how I feel after perusing these inspiring selections, which include visual, musical and artistic treasures, plus boatloads of fun and games.
Preschoolers will eagerly hop aboard Train: A Journey Through the Pages Book (Workman, $22.95, 14 pages, ISBN 9780761187165, ages 4 to 8), Mike Vago and Matt Rockefeller’s sure-to-be-a-hit creation. Young engineers can steer a small plastic steam engine across “tracks” built into the book’s pages, starting early in the morning in a train yard and traveling through a city full of skyscrapers, hillside towns, snow-capped mountains, wide-open prairies, a parched desert and a cheerful seaside bay. Colorful illustrations in this changing American landscape offer the feel of a cross-country journey as the train travels over rivers and navigates mountainous curves. Clever construction allows the train to stay on its “tracks,” moving seamlessly from page to page. Finally, at the end, a tunnel built into the book allows train lovers to start their journey all over again.
incredibly varied, colorful and appealing. Build an animated bear’s head or a model of your bedroom. Put on a magic show, or film your own LEGO movie. Construct a small pinball machine, a shark that bites or a carnival shooting gallery. This is creativity at its best, and it’ll keep your builder busy all year long.
MUSIC TO YOUR EARS Kids tend to love “sound books,” but endless pushing of those buttons can quickly drive parents over the brink. Not so with Katie
Cotton’s The Story Orchestra: Four Seasons in One Day (Frances Lincoln, $22.99, 24 pages, ISBN 9781847808776, ages 6 to 9), the story of a girl and her dog set to the sounds of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” the first in a series of books to bring classical music to life for kids. A YEAR OF LEGO FUN As readers follow young Isabelle and her dog, Pickle, through the Does your LEGO lover need inspiration? From the creative team year, beginning with a Spring Festithat developed the bestselling The val and ending on a snowy winter’s eve, buttons on each spread LEGO Ideas Book and LEGO Aweplay snippets of movements from some Ideas comes 365 Things to Do with LEGO Bricks (DK, $24.99, Vivaldi’s opus. Artwork by Jessica 256 pages, ISBN 9781465453020, Courtney-Tickle is a gorgeous riot ages 6 to 9). It’s packed with a vari- of color and detail, guaranteed to ety of activities, games, challenges hold readers’ interest as they listen and pranks that will appeal to to the music. everyone from elementary stuAn informative spread at the dents to young-at-heart grownend contains a capsule biography ups. A small timer allows builders of the composer, a short glossary to race against the clock during and brief explanations of the music select challenges, or use its random featured on each spread. The Story number generator to decide which Orchestra is an innovative little project to pursue. master class for young listeners. This is not a book for beginBRINGING ART TO LIFE ners, nor does it offer step-by-step instructions, but the projects are What might Vincent van Gogh
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have been thinking about when he was about to paint one of his most famous masterpieces? Elementary school students will be in the know after reading Vincent’s Starry Night and Other Stories: A Children’s History of Art (Laurence King, $29.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9781780676159, ages 8 to 12), a creative and comprehensive look at masterworks from cave paintings to Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. Art historian Michael Bird brings 68 stories to life using fact-filled
creative nonfiction. For instance, Bird describes Jackson Pollock’s creative process through the eyes of the artist’s wife: “He dips a wooden stick into another pot, and flicks and drips the paint—here, there, too quick for thinking. All the time, he strides and kind of dances around the canvas, bent over it, a magician casting a spell.” Each chapter offers an intriguing and informative tale and is accompanied by a photograph of the artwork being discussed, as well as Kate Evans’ evocative illustrations of the artist at work. This lovely book is rounded out by a map, timeline, glossary and list of artworks.
ABRACADABRA There is no end of children’s magic kits and books, but The Magic Show Book (DK, $19.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9781465453969, ages 8 to 12) has everything young illusionists need, including props, pop-up tricks and materials to make your own special “shrinking”
magic wand—a trick in itself. (Parents will particularly appreciate this self-contained aspect.) Each colorful page includes a flap with hidden instructions showing how to practice and perfect tricks such as “Tricky Chicken,” “The Astonishing Slicer” and “Eyes on the Ace.” Additional pages explain a variety of rope (shoelace), coin and card sleights of hand. There’s even a pop-up magic hat. The Magic Show Book is bound to appeal to a broad spectrum of elementary students; just prepare to watch and be amazed.
TRULY MAGICAL NATURE Kids and adults alike may fight over Illuminature: Discover Hidden Animals with Your Magic Three Color Lens (Wide Eyed Editions, $30, 64 pages, ISBN
9781847808875, ages 8 to 12). The Italian artistic duo known as Carnovsky (Silvia Quintanilla and Francesco Rugi) bring their RGB Project (red, green and blue) to the world of children’s books, providing a unique journey through 10 of the world’s habitats, from the Andes Mountains to the Ganges River Basin. Something amazing happens when you view Carnovsky’s artwork through the provided viewing lens. See daytime animals through the red lens, plant life abounds with the green lens, and nocturnal and crepuscular animals appear through the blue lens. A total of 180 are hidden within, waiting to be discovered. While observers are busy staring at the wonderful transformations on these oversize pages, they’ll be soaking in plenty of data as well. Rachel Williams’ well-organized text provides facts about each destination as well as the varieties of species seen on each page. Leaping lizards, don’t miss this book!
TEEN BY HEATHER SEGGEL
Gifts they’ll actually like
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rom fairy-tale archetypes turned into art to the mysteries of the universe and our own emotional landscapes, these books are full of thought-provoking entertainment for teen readers.
Charlie McDonnell’s Fun Science: A Guide to Life, the Universe and Why Science Is So Awesome (Quadrille, $22.95, 224 pages, ISBN 9781849498029) uses accessible, illustrated examples and plenty of humor to explore why science is the best tool we have for understanding the world around us. The 26-year-old English YouTube sensation starts way out in the cosmos and explains his way down to a single cell, with stops along the way to look at evolution, the atmosphere and the human body. Did I mention how funny it is? From cartoonish illustrations to “editor’s note” blurbs talking back to McDonnell, it’s easy to be carried along by the jokes only to realize several pages in that you’re learning a ton. A science lover will like this, but a lot of readers will become science lovers after starting here.
INCREDULATION You most likely know Eden Sher from the ABC comedy “The Middle”; the word “adorkable” may have been coined to describe her character, Sue Heck. Sher has more feelings than she can express without bursting at any given time, so she and illustrator Julia Wertz created The Emotionary: A Dictionary of Words That Don’t Exist for Feelings That Do (Razorbill, $19.95, 208 pages, ISBN 9781595148384) to make sense of that overload. Words like losstracize (“to reject the support of others in times of grief”) are illustrated with short cartoons that exemplify the unique ways we manage to shoot
ourselves in the feet when we’re feeling too much. Are you irredependent (irrationally independent and unable to ask for help)? That tends to end poorly; cartoon Eden won’t accept a hand with a dangerously heavy box and is ultimately squashed so completely her guts fly out like streamers. Her friend deadpans that she’s unlikely to get her deposit back when it’s time to move. It’s simultaneously sweet and laugh-outloud (in painful recognition) funny.
ARTFUL TALES The Singing Bones (Arthur A. Levine, $24.99, 192 pages, ISBN 9780545946124) collects photos of small sculptures by Shaun Tan and displays them next to excerpts from the Grimm’s fairy tales on which they’re based. Don’t pick it up thinking you’ll be able to put it down when the phone rings, or it’s time for bed, or the house is on fire. These pieces are simple, almost primitive, and perfectly play with the fairy-tale archetypes. “The Companionship of the Cat and Mouse” depicts a large cat with an enormous saucer for a mouth, on which the tiny mouse has been perched, unbeknownst to him, for the entire story. Neil Gaiman contributes a foreword, and there’s an essay by Jack Zipes providing some background on the Brothers Grimm, both of which are helpful. But dive into the artwork and you’ll find creepy, cool, deceptively simple works sure to fire the imagination. It’s perfect for artists, writers and dreamers.
meet LORI NICHOLS the title of your Q: What’s new book?
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MAPLE & WILLOW’S CHRISTMAS TREE Author-illustrator Lori Nichols’ love of trees imbues her picture books about two outdoorsy sisters. In their latest story, Maple & Willow’s Christmas Tree (Nancy Paulsen, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780399167560, ages 3 to 5), the girls must find a solution to Maple’s Christmas tree allergies. Nichols lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her husband and three daughters.
47
WORDNOOK
BY THE EDITORS OF MERRIAM-WEBSTER
GREEK TO ME
Dear Editor: In art and history, Attic is used to describe things that come from or are characteristic of ancient Athens. Is the word attic referring to the top floor of a house related, or is it just a coincidence? P. Q. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey The ancient Greek city-state of Athens included the whole of the Attic peninsula, the region called Attica. The use of pilasters is typical of the Attic or Athenian style of architecture. Pilasters are rectangular columns projecting from, but attached to, the wall. These take the place of the freestanding and usually rounded pillars common in other architectural styles. Occasionally the large columns and entablature that form the façade of a building are surmounted by a similar but smaller decorative structure, whose columns are usually pilasters rather than pillars. Because this small upper order is
in the Attic style, the French named it attique. The English borrowed the word as attic and extended its meaning, originally in the phrases attic story and attic floor, to designate the top story of any building just under the roof. So the word that was once associated with an elegant architectural style now names what is usually no more than a lowly storage area.
ROYAL REPRIMAND
Dear Editor: Where does the expression to read the riot act come from? E. D. Kearney, Nebraska George I of England was not a popular monarch. When he became king in 1714, his opponents began inciting rebellions and protests against him. In an effort to prevent such protests, Parliament passed a law in 1715 called the Riot Act. It allowed public officials to break up gatherings of 12 or more people by reading aloud a procla-
mation warning those who heard it that they must disperse within the hour or be guilty of a felony punishable by death and be subject to being forcibly dispersed. By the late 1700s, riot act was also being used more generally for any stern warning or reprimand, especially in the phrase read the riot act. Although the law long ago fell into disuse and was finally repealed in 1973, the term that it generated lives on today.
Uranus was the father of the god Saturn and the grandfather of Jupiter. In 1781 the English astronomer Sir William Herschel discovered by telescope the seventh planet of our solar system. Because the planets long familiar to astronomy were named after Roman gods, the German astronomer Johann Bode suggested the name Uranus, an especially apt choice since the fifth and sixth planets were Jupiter and Saturn respectively. Here’s where the timing comes in. In 1789 the German chemist Martin Klaproth discovered a new element. Because the discovery of Uranus was such big and recent scientific news, a short time after its discovery, Klaproth gave the new element the name uranium, after the planet that had also been recently discovered.
IN THE STARS
Dear Editor: How did uranium get its name? C. F. Plano, Texas The naming of uranium seems to have been largely a matter of timing. In Greek mythology, the god of the heavens was known as Ouranos, literally “sky” or “heaven,” and the muse of astronomy was known as Ourania. The Romans latinized these figures as Uranus and Urania.
Send correspondence regarding Word Nook to: Language Research Service P.O. Box 281 Springfield, MA 01102
Test Your Mental Mettle with Puzzles from 399 Games to Keep Your Brain Young
Anagrams The letters of each word in this list can be arranged in multiple ways to form other words. We provide the word and the number of anagrams that are possible to make. 1. Loop (2) ________
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5. Leapt (3) ________
2. Mesa (2) ________
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3. Abets (4) ________
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6. Bleary (2) ________
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7. Stable (2) ________
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Each time you see the c it stands for the consecutive letters CAT. Can you find all eighteen words in the grid—printed forward, backward, and diagonally—that contain CAT? For an extra-challenging brain workout, put a two-minute timer on this game and don’t use the word list unless you get stuck.
c E A
P R E
c A D
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Z H
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C Y
B J
R O V
c O B
Z I G
X O
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L O c I
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Word Finder—A Lot of Cats
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W D E c
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1. A Tree Grows in BROOKLYN 4. “GEORGIA on My Mind” 7. Lost in YONKERS 2. April in PARIS 5. “CHATTANOOGA Choo Choo” 8. “CALIFORNIA, Here I Come” 3. Blue HAWAII 6. “I Left My Heart in SAN FRANCISCO” 9. WKRP in CINCINNATI
Replace Pottersville
1. Loop, Polo, Pool 2. Mesa, Same, Seam 3. Abets, Baste, Betas, Beast, Beats 4. Taser, Aster, Rates, Stare, Tears
Anagrams
5. Leapt, Petal, Plate, Pleat 6. Bleary, Barely, Barley 7. Stable, Bleats, Tables 8. Starer, Arrest, Rarest, Raters
workman.com
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6. “I Left My Heart in POTTERSVILLE” 9. WKRP in POTTERSVILLE
Z V Y
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❍ Educate ❍ Location ❍ Category ❍ Vacation ❍ Catalyst ❍ Cathedral ❍ Caricature ❍ Decathlon ❍ Caterpillar
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1. A Tree Grows in POTTERSVILLE
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Word List ❍ Cater ❍ Catch ❍ Catsup ❍ Bobcat ❍ Cattle ❍ Catnap ❍ Scatter ❍ Catalog ❍ Copycat
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There’s something not quite right about these film, TV, book, and song titles. You need to correct them by replacing the word POTTERSVILLE with the real location.
ANSWERS
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POTTERSVILLE
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REPLACE
8. Starer (3) ________
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W O R D
WORKMAN is a registered trademark of Workman Publishing Co., Inc.
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