BookPage January 2009

®

America’s BoOK Review

off to a

running start

Get your reading list in shape for 2009 with our selections fitness

Quit aiming for perfection

5 stories

Can’t-miss collections

Animal minds Finding the best life for your pet

finance

After the crash

January 2009

®

America’s BoOK Review

CONTENTS INTERVIEWS

Associate publisher Julia Steele Editor Lynn L. Green Assistant EditorS MiChelle Jones Trisha Ping Contributing Editor Sukey Howard Contributor Roger Bishop Advertising Sales Julia Steele Angela J. Bowman

the behavior of household pets

FEATURES 6 M eet the Author Neil deGrasse Tyson, in his own words

8 New You Start fresh in 2009 10 W ell Read Barry Unsworth’s new novel takes place 12 F ood & Fiction A delicious combination

Our editors evaluate and select for review the best new books published each month. Only books we highly recommend are featured. BookPage is editorially independent and never accepts payment for editorial coverage.

S U B S CR I B E Public libraries and bookstores may subscribe to BookPage in quantity for distribution to their patrons. For information, please visit www.BookPage.com or call 1-800-726-4242, ext. 34.

those older and wiser

22 P ersonal Finance Surviving the crash

10

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Children’s Books

12

Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips

24 J ulia Alvarez The immigrant experience

14

A Day and a Night and a Day by Glen Duncan

25 J an Thomas Meet the author-illustrator

14

Muse of Fire by Dan Simmons

30

Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi

by Nanci Kincaid

30

Going to See the Elephant by Rodes Fishburne

31

Two Rivers by T. Greenwood

26 H onest Abe Celebrating Lincoln’s birthday

REVIEWS Fiction 6 Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos 6 Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell 10

The Piano Teacher by Janice Y.K. Lee

fitness

4 Street Gang by Michael Davis 16

The Third Chapter by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

19

Every Living Thing by Rob Dunn

23 That Went Well by Terrell Harris Dougan

DEPARTMENTS

A DV E R T I S E

3 Buzz Girl

Rates are available online or contact Julia Steele at 615-292-8926, ext.15 for more information.

4 The Author Enablers 11 Whodunit?

Notice: Some books mentioned in this issue may be in short supply or not yet available. Prices of books are subject to change without notice.

B O O K PAG E. C OM

4 My Fathers’ Daughter by Hannah Pool

23 Losing Everything by David Lozell Martin

BookPage Subscriptions 2143 Belcourt Avenue Nashville, TN 37212

R E A D A LL O UR R E V I E W S AT

Nonfiction

21 A World of Trouble by Patrick Tyler

Individual subscriptions to BookPage are available for $30 per year. Send check or money order to:

All material © copyright 2009

by ProMotion, inc.

page 7

15 B ehind the Book Henry Alford shares lessons from

20 S hort Stories Big talent in small doses

R E V I E W S

Tiffany Baker’s first novel is a towering achievement

during Iraq’s early days

Production Designer Karen Trotter Elley

ONLINE SERVICES manager Scott Grissom

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

19 T emple Grandin Animal rights activist delves into

18 C areers Finding the ladder to success

Customer Service Alice Fitzgibbon

revealing second memoir

Production Manager Penny Childress

SUBSCRIPTION MANAGER Elizabeth Grace Herbert

‘Giant’ debut

5 A zar Nafisi Iranian expat doesn’t hold back in a

THE BEST IN NEW BOOKS Publisher Michael A. Zibart

january 2009

14 Book Clubs

Shaping up for the New Year

page 16

18 Audio 30 Cooking 31 Romance Cover illustration © 2009 Dave Carlson, carlson-art.com

buzz girl ➥ Our publishing

insider gets the skinny on tomorrow’s bestsellers

➥ make ‘em laugh girls If recent deals are any indication, women are very, very funny.

Comedian Sarah Silverman, who has her own show on Comedy Central, sold a collection of humorous essays to Harper for $2.5 million.

Susie Essman, the actress and comedian who plays the wife of Larry’s agent on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” gives hilarious advice in What Would Susie Say?, to be published by Simon & Schuster.

And Tina Fey, sarah silverman former star of “SNL” who currently lights up Thursday nights on “30 Rock” got more than $5 million from Little, Brown for what’s reported to be a Nora Ephron-like nonfiction title.

➥ Gossip boy?

➥ conroy ahoy

➥ alexie’s on fire

follows private eye Doc Sportello through the waning days of free love in 1960s L.A. The publishers promise plenty of psychedelia and trademark Pynchon touches. But what we really want to know is, can we look forward to another “Simpsons” appearance?

He might have won the National Book Award for his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, but Auth-anon Sherman Alexie hasn’t forgotWiliam Morrow recently ton his adult audience. The won rights to publish a author just signed a deal with coming-of-age story set Little, Brown to publish a novel sherman alexie in the 1980s. The catch? called Fire with Fire sometime They didn’t know who’d in 2010. The new novel, Alexies’ fourth, will feature a character from his written it. Speculation abounded—was very first short-story collection, published it an author looking for a new start? A politician? Hot young actor-turnedin 1993.

MFA-candidate James Franco? None of the above: the manuscript was by ’galaxy’ moves on writer Joyce Maynard, who is neither a Author Douglas Adams, whose play- man nor a celebrity. But Morrow probful Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy nov- ably isn’t experiencing buyer’s remorse; els captured the imagination of millions, a new work from Maynard, who pubdied suddenly in 2001, leaving the sixth lished a memoir that drew the attention novel in the series unfinished. of the literati—including novelist J.D. Recently it was revealed that acclaimed Salinger—when she was just 18, is sure children’s author Eoin Colfer would fin- to get noticed.  ish the book and continue the series with And Another Thing . . . to be published by Hyperion in October.

Adams’ widow, Jane Belson, approves of the choice, saying that Colfer has her “full support.” We Yes, after 20 years, Burning think Colfer’s wild imagination, on Questions is no more. But the display in the best-selling Artemis Fowl books, is a good match for the good news is, Buzz Girl is here to series—and the fact that the Irish answer your questions before you author is “bloody determined that even know you have them! this will be the best thing I have ever Still got something you want to written” doesn’t hurt, either.

➥

of The Color of Water

JAMES McBRIDE

➥

Ch-ch-changes

➥ child 45 Several of us at BookPage enjoyed Tom Rob Smith’s debut novel, Child 44, when it was published last summer. The fast-paced thriller, which put an MGB agent on the trail of a serial killer in Stalinist Russia, went on to rack up big summer sales, and Grand Central is publishing the sequel, The Secret Speech, in May. The new book finds Leo and his family amid the 1956 Hungarian revolution. © David Spielman

We know readers have been waiting for this one: Pat Conroy, of Prince of Tides fame, has finished a new novel. Conroy had mentioned his work in progress several times over the last year or two, but his publisher, Doubleday, stayed vice squad close-mouthed on the project pat conroy Fans of reclusive novuntil recently, when they anelist Thomas Pynchon nounced that South of Broad will be published this fall. Like Conroy’s have something to look forward to: other works, the book has Southern fla- a new novel this August, less than vor: it follows a group of high school three years after the release of the friends from Charleston through the sprawling Against the Day. Inherent Vice (Penguin Press) next 20 years of their lives.

➥

share, or seeking the very latest news on books and publishing?

Starting next month, the new and improved BookPage.com is the place to find all that and more.

With three blogs, daily features and reviews and interviews you won’t find in the print edition—not to mention our fabulous archives—BookPage.com is where booklovers will want to be.

Is Buzz Girl still online?

Yes, but not in the same place.

When the new site launches in February, Buzz Girl will be one of the contributors to our new blog, along with other editors and columnists, so make sure to head to BookPage.com for more news about future bestsellers! 

SONG YET SUNG

The flight of a runaway slave and her dreams of the future thrust all those near her toward a mysterious, redemptive fate.

Filled with rich, true details and told in James McBride’s signature lyrical style, Song Yet Sung is a story of tragic triumph, violent decisions, and unexpected kindness.

“Gripping, effecting and beautifully paced.”

—O, The Oprah Magazine

jamesmcbride.com penguin.com

A Member of Penguin Group (USA) $15/9781594483509

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

A new memoir from the half-brother of Gossip Girl author Cecily von Zeigesar should shed some light on their unusual upbringing in a house filled with 13 siblings, stepsiblings and cousins. Though Peter von Zeigesar downplays the role his half sister has in the book, we’re sure that won’t stop Gossip Girl fans from looking for juicy tidbits.

Fun fact: all of Conroy’s published novels have been turned into films. Perhaps we’ll see South of Broad, the movie, in 2011?

© larry d. Moore

As the new year begins, B o okPage is launching an exciting feature: a streamlined version of online favorite Buzz Girl. Each month, you’ll find industry news, recent publishing deals and the books everyone will be talking about next season—and beyond.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author

MEMOIR

Her own flesh and blood

By Anne Bartlett It wasn’t that Hannah Pool’s birth family in Eritrea didn’t want to renew contact with her. When Pool was a university student in Liverpool, an older brother wrote her a letter. She read it, but didn’t know how to cope with it emotionally. So she didn’t respond.

For nine years. The length of her silence underlines how ambivalent Pool felt about her unknown African relatives.

Adopted as an infant from an orphanage in always-troubled Eritrea, she had grown up mostly in England, with her British adoptive family. Her adoptive father, an academic expert on Eritrea, was always open about her origins. Pool became a journalist, living a sophisticated urban life in London, but, like virtually every adopted child, she wondered: What were my birth parents like? Do I have siblings? Who do I look like?

And, most painfully, why did they give me away?

At 29, Pool finally decided to find the answers, and My Fathers’ Daughter is the result. Her mother had died at her birth, but she found a living father with numerous children, who welcomed her back into their world with excitement and generosity. Pool was thrilled. But she was also terrified, frustrated, fascinated and everything in between. Her mov- My Fathers’ ing memoir is a narrative of her inner thoughts as she meets Daughter her family, in the Eritrean capital and in remote villages.

By Hannah Pool Her style is candid and beguiling: she likens the meetings Free Press to “first dates,” as she worries about what she’s wearing and $25, 256 pages what on earth she should say to these strangers. She learns ISBN 9781416593690 how British she is. But she also learns that she looks like her mother, has the same temperament as an older sister, and was never forgotten by her father. When she visits him, he is mildly disapproving of her Western clothes and hair, but unquestioningly cares for her welfare and happiness.

As the plural “fathers” indicates in the book’s title, Pool believes she has come to terms with her dual identity. She is still part of “dad’s” family in England, but she now knows she belongs to an extended clan that she is still discovering. o Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.

POPULAR CULTURE

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

How they got to ‘Sesame Street’

By Linda M. Castellitto To mark the 40th anniversary of the groundbreaking, beloved children’s television show, “Sesame Street,” Michael Davis has crafted a richly detailed history that includes behind-the-scenes looks at the program’s genesis, the creation of its quirky characters and the life stories of the founders of the first TV show that aimed to entertain and educate the preschool set.

Davis, a former preschool teacher and longtime journalist (including a nine-year stint as an editor and family television columnist for TV Guide), conducted five years of interviews and research, and his efforts show: Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street is at once a fascinating, often funny story about a bunch of talented friends and colleagues who dared to try something new, and a point-by-point recounting of conversations, on-set hilarity and frustration, and the back-stories of the diverse group of people who became famous as characters and puppeteers on “Sesame Street.”

The book begins on a sad note: Davis describes show cocreator Joan Ganz Cooney’s grief-stricken walk to the 1990 funeral of creative partner and world-famous Muppeteer Jim Henson. “The sidewalks were overrun by pedestrians . . . all moving toward the cathedral steps,” Davis writes. Around 5,000 people attended the public memorial that day, from Street Gang “Saturday Night Live” mastermind Lorne Michaels to actress Darryl Hannah, plus plenty of non-famous folks of all By Michael Davis ages. Millions more have tuned in to the show—children, Viking $27.95, 384 pages babysitters, parents, teachers, grandparents—since its debut ISBN 9780670019960 on November 10, 1969.

Also available on audio Fun tidbits abound in Davis’ narrative, from the inspiration for Oscar the Grouch’s voice (a real-life cranky cabbie) to a hilarious description of a Cookie Monster game-show skit in which the big blue guy picks a “COOKIE!” over $25,000 in cash. Davis examines the social context of the show—the objections and challenges it has faced and the impact it’s had on education and parenting. Photo inserts offer a visual history, and statistics provide a sense of the show’s wide-reaching influence: 40 years later, “Sesame Street” reaches 8 million preschoolers via 350 PBS stations in the U.S. and it airs in 120 countries worldwide. o

THE AUTHOR ENABLERS New year, new you The headline is a reference to a marketing term from the self-help world that, frankly, doesn’t make much sense, but seems to sell books come January and February. However, in the spirit of new beginnings, we bring you three brave folks who are attempting new ventures. And we say, more power to them!

Dear Author Enablers, I am a successful artist and have been told by many people that my art would look great on book jackets. How can I get my work considered for such a thing?

S. Lassiter Zanesville, Ohio Publishing companies do need art for book jackets, so the trick is getting your work in front of the right person. This is

BY SAM BARRY & like any other freelance job search—you need a portfolio, a good website and a KATHI KAMEN GOLDMARK couple of contacts to get started. To find out whom to submit to, you need to do some research—contact the publishers (and in the case of large houses each division or imprint) for the name of the art director. You can either go to Literary Market Place (available through libraries or at literarymarketplace.com) for a list of publishers, or you can get information from the copyright page of books that have covers similar to your art. Good luck!

Dear Author Enablers, I’m new to the world of writing and publishing. I’ve mainly written book reviews to this point (just sold my first to a magazine!), but my true passion is fiction. I’ve had a flash fiction published and now have a short story to pitch (1,200 words). I don’t know where to start, though: the magazine I usually write for only prints fiction of 500 words or less, and my editors and mentors haven’t had any specific suggestions as to where I should shop my work.

I picked up 2009 Writer’s Market; am I on the right track looking there? Are there advantages to submitting to online publications vs. “real,” hard-copy pubs?

And should I have a cycle of stories written, or actually published, before looking for an agent? I figure once I have a dozen or so I could look in that direction.

If you can offer any advice/insight, I would be indebted. If the day ever arose where I could in some way enable you, I would consider it my pleasure to do so.

Matthew Miranda Rochester, New York There are hundreds of literary magazines and journals, and listings of these can be found online or in a reputable publication directory such as the 2009 Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market (by the editors of Writers’s Digest Books). Don’t forget to check out the submission guidelines first. Also, keep in mind that a majority of publications do not allow simultaneous submissions. Then start pitching, or shooting, or passing, depending on the season. But don’t start flashing.

Online publications, just like print publications, vary in quality and style—so there’s no one answer. These are wild west days for publishing, and it’s both exciting and a little confusing for everyone. And yes, you should have a larger body of work completed before seeking an agent.

Dear Author Enablers, I am finishing my first novel. In my book I write that a woman is singing “Aura Lee,” an old song. Do I need permission from the author or anyone involved to use the name of the song?

Jackie Curry Darlington, Maryland It’s our understanding that mentioning the title of a song does not require permission. If you want to quote lyrics, however, you have to find out who holds the copyright and usually pay a small fee for usage. (You can easily check the BMI, ASCAP and SESAC music-rights agency websites for this information.) In the case of “Aura Lee,” the song is old enough that chances are it has drifted into public domain, which means no one gets to charge money for usage. (We notice Elvis had no problem borrowing the melody as the tune for “Love Me Tender,” and he’s, well, the King.) So you’ve got something old (a song in public domain), something new (your novel), something borrowed (“Aura Lee”) and something blue (“Love Me Tender”). All you have to do now is set a date. o With more than 25 years experience in the industry, Kathi Kamen Goldmark and Sam Barry have the inside scoop on writing and publishing. E-mail your questions (along with your name and hometown) to AuthorEnabler@aol.com.

Q&A

Silent no more: recalling life in Iran

By Amy Scribner n her beloved and powerful memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, author Azar Nafisi wrote about using literature as a source of strength while she lived under the oppressive government of Iran. Now she returns with a new memoir, Things I’ve Been Silent About (Random House, $27, 352 pages, ISBN 9781400063611), in which she opens up even more about her life, from her complex relationship with her mother to how she survived long-ago sexual abuse.

Honest, introspective and at times painfully direct, Things I’ve Been Silent About is a compelling followup memoir, one that exposes the cost of family secrets.

Nafisi recently talked with BookPage about her decision to open up her life to millions of readers.

I

“ bravissimo!”* Culinary leGend Frank stitt returns with a new Cookbook on ameriCa’s Favorite Cuisine—italian!

You are incredibly honest in your memoirs, which is all the more striking since discussing personal experiences is considered taboo in Iran. How has your family reacted to the very personal details you reveal about life in the Nafisi family and in Iran?

My family has been very supportive. This does not mean that they do not have their anxieties and reservations, but they, specially my immediate family, have been considerate of my work and me to such an extent that I often went to them to seek encourageAZAR NAFISI ment and consolation. My brother has been amazing.

I know how difficult this has been for him, but he provided me with information, with photos and documents, without interfering in the story in any way.

As the title suggests, you write honestly about a lot of painful experiences in Things I’ve Been Silent About, including the sexual molestation you suffered as a child.

What made you decide to share this and how difficult was it to write about?

At first I avoided writing about this and other painful events in my life; this was almost instinctive, perhaps from a desire to protect myself. But while an author is and should be in control of her book, every book, like a child, has a life of its own; it will also bring in its own rules and norms. The events I chose to talk about were the ones that were most pertinent to the main themes of my book. I have avoided mentioning individuals and incidents that were not integral to my story and this one was such an integral part of the story. One of the main themes of this book focuses on victims and authority figures, on ways through which we do or do not overcome our victimhood and the choices we make in relation to it. This event was in many ways crucial to the development of these themes, not just in personal terms—it resonated on so many different levels, cultural, social as well as universal.

You write, “If at home I was subdued into compliance, at school I quickly developed a reputation as a difficult child.” How much of your childhood self do you see in yourself now?

You’ve written, “I left Iran in 1997, but Iran did not leave me.” Do you think you’ll ever return there?

Well, every time I write or talk about Iran, I feel that I have returned. When I was physically in Iran there were so many restrictions that I, like some others, tried to act as if we lived somewhere else. But to return to your more direct question: I do expect to return for visits if for nothing else. I consider that my natural right.

Newsday said Reading Lolita in Tehran “reminds us of why we read in the first place.” Why do you read?

I read for the same reason that I write: I cannot help myself. It is like falling in love, there must be a number of reasons why one falls in love, but when it comes to explaining them, one can feel tongue-tied. I think the basis for both reading and writing is a sense of curiosity, the desire to know, to go places where you have never visited before. There is a sense of incomparable freedom and liberation in our ability to respond to this urge. o

“The freshest take on Italian food I’ve seen in years.”

—*Mario Batali, author of Italian Grill “You will not find a more rewarding book this year.”

—Ben Barker, coauthor of Not Afraid of Flavor

nationwide book tour beGins january 2009 A l s o AvA i l A b l e

Frank stitt’s southern table recipes and Gracious traditions from highlands bar and Grill Winner! 2005 Southeast Booksellers Association Cookbook of the Year and a Main Selection of the Good Cook Book Club

A divison of Workman Publishing, Inc. www.artisanbooks.com

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

That self for better or for worse is still alive and kicking—in some ways I remain a “problem child!” Looking back, more than anything I was reacting to authority figures, and although now those figures have changed, my reaction to authority and authority figures has in some ways remained much the same. I am instinctively suspicious of them, especially when it comes to political authorities and ideologies. On some level I believe with John Locke that “All authority is error.” I don’t mean we do not need a system that helps create and maintain order or one that holds us all accountable, but I am wary of people and systems that try to take away your power of questioning. I believe now my reactions are not as impulsive as they were in my childhood, they are more measured and I hope I have learned to base my life not on reaction to others, be they authority figures or not, but on my own actions.

on sale now

MEET

Neil deGrasse Tyson Title of your new book:

Describe your book:

Why do people have such strong feelings about Pluto?

How does it feel to get hate mail from third graders?

What’s your own favorite planet?

FICTION

Siblings struggle with loss

By Deborah Donovan Stephanie Kallos’ well-received debut novel, 2004’s Broken for You, was praised for its engaging cast of eccentric characters. She continues in that same perceptive vein with her second novel, Sing Them Home—a compelling portrait of three adult siblings struggling to come to terms with their father’s sudden death from a lightning strike.

Dr. Llwellyn (Welly) Jones had been a widower for 25 years, ever since his wife Hope was sucked up by a tornado in 1978 near their small Nebraska town of Emlyn Springs, never to be found. Upon his own bizarre death, the three Jones children gather for the funeral, setting in motion their intertwining memories of life both before and after their mother’s death.

Larken, the oldest, is a single, overweight, food-obsessed art history professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. She is angling for the department chairmanship; her greatest joy is hosting the five-year-old daughter of the mismatched couple upstairs for Friday night sleepovers. Her brother Gaelan is a weatherman—not a meteorologist, to his chagrin—for a local Lincoln television station. Never married, he’s a chronic womanizer who has used the sad details of his mother’s demise to attract a long line of sexual partners. Their younger sister Bonnie, who as a seven-yearold was tossed around by the same tornado that killed their mother, has strung together a series of odd jobs over the years, most recently at a smoothie stand. She spends most Sing Them Home of her spare time searching for relics left by that tornado,

By Stephanie Kallos still hoping for clues to her mother’s fate.

Kallos intersperses chapters written in the voices of these Atlantic Monthly 560 pages siblings with entries from their mother Hope’s diary, the $24, ISBN 9780871139634 sometimes hopeful, mostly sad chronicle of her long bat- Also available on audio tle with multiple sclerosis. One high point is her steadfast friendship with Alvina (Viney) Cross, her husband’s longtime nurse, and eventual lover.

Kallos writes with sympathetic insight into the quirks of each of the survivors, bringing her readers a family saga tinged with mysticism, humor and pathos, and peopled with characters not soon forgotten. o Deborah Donovan writes from La Veta, Colorado.

DEBUT FICTION You were once named “Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive” by People magazine. Do you plan to reclaim your title?

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

What’s your best personal quality?

Your most aggravating habit?

Words to live by?

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, which held the exhibit that first demoted Pluto from planetary status. He tells the story of America’s love affair with this tiny orbiting object in The Pluto Files (Norton, $23.95, 160 pages, ISBN 9780393065206).

Doing penance in a New York hospital

By Ian Schwartz Josh Bazell landed a lucrative publishing deal for his first novel shortly after graduating from medical school. To say that he’s better at writing than most writers would be at practicing medicine is to understate Bazell’s talent, but it’s too good a line to pass up. Beat the Reaper, his highly anticipated debut, may be a bit short on art, but it’s long on page-turning action and laughs.

When it comes to the human body, Bazell knows his bones.

He has an M.D. from Columbia University and is a medical resident at the University of California, San Francisco. His protagonist, Pietro Brnwa, is also a doctor—an overworked Manhattan hospital intern who goes by the name Peter Brown. Pietro took an unusual road to his Hippocratic oath, having spent his earlier years as a mob hit man nicknamed “The Bearclaw.” After seeing the error of his ways—which in the mafia means he testified against his former employers and joined the witness protection program—he became a doctor as penance.

Not surprisingly, Brnwa’s former life catches up with him.

Mobster Eddy Squillante, in the hospital for a life-saving Beat the Reaper surgery with about a 50 percent success rate, recognizes the killer-turned-doctor. Now Brnwa must keep him alive or By Josh Bazell Squillante will hand his new knowledge over to a wannabe Little, Brown $24.99, 320 pages hit man named Skinflick.

ISBN 9780316032223 In chapters that alternate between past and present, Bazell Also available on audio fills us in on how Brnwa became “The Bearclaw” while keeping the action rolling. He includes medical footnotes, mostly confirming that the craziest thing a sick person can do is check into a hospital.

Bazell doesn’t waste time. In the very first paragraph, an unfortunate mugger is pointing a gun in Brnwa’s face after the doctor stops to watch a rat fight a pigeon—a true Manhattan undercard. The mugger serves his purpose, however, since the pistol winds up in Brnwa’s scrub pants pocket. However, it would be unwise for the reader to relax. It’s chapter one, the firearm is introduced and the good doctor Bazell knows his Chekhov. o Ian Schwartz writes from San Diego.

INTERVIEW

A big-hearted heroine

In Tiffany Baker’s debut novel, a giantess finds her place so fun to give a person a voice who doesn’t have one,” she says. The

By Katherine Wyrick n a recent call to her Marin County home, just north of townspeople do, however, begin to take notice when Truly unSan Francisco, Tiffany Baker seems unruffled, despite dergoes both an outward and inward transformation. And when the fact that her babysitter hasn’t shown up to corral Truly begins to grow out of her assigned role in society (or, in an her three young children, who at present can be heard shriek- ironic twist, “shrink” out of it), it makes some of those people very ing through the halls. An occasional squeal punctuates our uncomfortable. As her name not so subtly infers, Truly Plaice does ensuing conversation, but Baker maintains her composure and at last find her true place.

Though it would be accurate to focus—and her sense of humor. Focus subtitle the book, “The Incredible is something that the author obviShrinking Woman,” Little Giant is less ously has in spades, having written freak show than fable. Baker does turn her first novel while tending to one her attention to the daily travails of her baby and pregnant with another. “I’ve characters, but the story, which strikes always written, ever since I was little,” a universal tone and has a folkloric feel, she says. is not bound by city limits. Baker cites In addition to three children, ages her Ukrainian background as one of six, five and two, Baker has also given the reasons folklore has always fascibirth to a debut novel that’s already nated her. And she credits her boardgenerating a big buzz. With The Little ing school experience back East for Giant of Aberdeen County, Baker inher interest in New England as a settroduces readers to Truly Plaice, an ting. It was also at her Rhode Island unconventional heroine, a giantess prep school that Baker fell in love with whose monstrous proportions make the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne, her both an outcast and a curiosity in which clearly informs her work. Baker, her small, upstate New York town. “I who has a doctorate in Victorian litknow that it’s a very odd book,” Baker erature, says, “I’ve described [Little Giconcedes. But, we believe, one that will TIFFANY BAKER ant] as kind of New England Gothic have considerable appeal. folklore.” She muses, “I love that kind Set against the bleak backdrop of of fairytale, folktale feeling because a dying town, Truly’s story begins at maybe I never really grew up.” birth, with an epic scene reminiscent Though Truly takes up the most of something out of Isabel Allende. space, Baker also populates her novel Thereafter, the novel unfolds at a quiwith a cast of minor characters who eter pace. After the death of her mothadd color and their own distinctive er, who died in childbirth presumably voices to the narrative. As the story because of Truly’s enormous size, Truprogresses, Truly leaves the Dyerson ly plods through a hardscrabble exisfarm and her adopted sister Ametence with her tormented father and lia, herself an outcast, to take care of pretty, popular sister, Serena Jane. Her Serena Jane’s husband and son after father also dies prematurely, and Truly, Serena Jane abandons them. It is in who continues to grow at an alarming rate due an untreated pituitary problem, is sent to live with the the Morgan family home where Truly discovers family secrets Dyersons, a luckless farming family trying and failing to scratch that will change her life forever. Thus emerges the parallel story out a living from barren land and a series of decrepit race horses. of Tabitha Dyerson, one of the novel’s most interesting threads.

Serena Jane, however, goes on to live a life of privilege and relative Tabitha, a rumored witch and healer, left behind a mysterious happiness—until, that is, she crosses paths with the cruel Bob Bob “shadow book,” which has eluded generations of Dyerson men.

Morgan, the youngest in a line of Robert Morgans, Aberdeen’s It takes Truly to unravel this mystery, and it is in doing so that she family doctors for generations. This encounter changes the course finds she has the power not only to heal others, but also herself.

In the interest of not giving away too much, let’s just say that of Serena Jane’s life and ends her plans to escape her hometown the most delightful aspect of the novel is the story of Tabitha’s and become a Hollywood starlet.

Asked about the creation of a character as peculiar as Truly, Bak- quilt, an object that itself constitutes a character.

It comes as no surprise that Baker cites Allende, John Irving er says, “I’m very much a voice writer. I just got Truly’s voice in my head, for better or for worse, because it didn’t leave for years after!” and Anne Tyler as influences. And, like Truly with her herbal She goes on to say that additional inspiration arrived in another remedies, Baker has concocted a pleasing brew of the three: the form. “I got the image of this woman shrinking,” she explains, offbeat Irving with his penchant for eccentric characters, the magical quality of Allende and Tyler’s plainspoken insightfulness into which is what begins to happen to Truly toward the novel’s end.

Baker was also intrigued by the idea of a larger-than-life char- relationships of every stripe.

Baker is currently at work on her second novel, in which she acter that defies definition. “She’s just too big for her life, but no one can see her. She is so big and so out of the ordinary, but it returns to New England, this time to a salt farm. She won’t dimakes her invisible. I became fasci- vulge too much, but does say that it is about three women, two nated by that contrast,” says Baker. of them sisters, who are all involved with the same man. If Little She believes there are many people in Giant is any indication, we can expect Baker’s next book to bear society we willingly choose not to see, the mark of her natural storytelling and astute observations on like the crazy person on the bus. “It’s human nature.

Baker brings a wisdom and compassion to this timeless portrait of small-town life, a place where the boundary between reality The Little Giant and fairy tale is but a blur and happy endings are possible. “I love of Aberdeen County a happy ending,” says Baker unapologetically. “That’s the whole

By Tiffany Baker point in reading, because you don’t always get that in life.” In Little Grand Central Giant, Baker rewards the reader with one, and it’s all the sweeter $24.99, 352 pages because of the long, hard road it takes Truly to get there. o ISBN 9780446194204 Katherine Wyrick is a writer in Little Rock.

Also available on audio

*

© LAUREN DREVER

O

“Beautifully written fiction with a fascinating hook.”

“She is so big and so out of the ordinary, but it makes her invisible. I became

fascinated by that contrast.”

Available wherever books are sold

CrownPublishing.com *–Karen

Harper, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Boleyn

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

The long reign of Elizabeth I—with its scandal, intrigue, and resilience—has sparked the imaginations of generations. In her sweeping historical debut, Ella March Chase explores a thrilling possibility: that the Tudor bloodline did not end with the Virgin Queen.

SELF HELP

Time for a fresh start How to change your outlook and find new interests

By Alison Hood our holiday wish list is a mere memory: it’s resolution time (yes, another list). So, grab your paper and pencil and crack open any of the following books for minty-fresh, unusual perspectives on retooling your inner and outer worlds.

Dream It. List it. Do It!: How to Live a Bigger & Bolder Life (Workman, $8.95, 464 pages, ISBN 9780761151265), by journalist Lia Steakley and the editors of 43Things.com, is list-mania at its most entertaining. Based on the popular social networking site, it features themed lists and short “I did it!” stories drawn from site users. There’s inspiration for jotting down your own list and jump-starting your life: you may be emboldened to “ride naked on horseback” or, barring that, simply to “clean out your briefcase.” Even if you are allergic to list-making, this is a fun book with 43 intriguing and practical goals—from “Develop Supernatural Powers” to “Be More Organized”—and the often wacky suggestions to help you achieve them.

Dream It. List It. also gives 10 simple rules for using lists effectively, such as “document your progress.” So plant that rooftop garden and reach for the stars.

Feeling adventuresome? Then pick up Keri Smith’s How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum (Perigee, $14.95, 208 pages, ISBN 9780399534607).

This is an interactive field guide to exploring alleys, sidewalks, neighborhoods, your local library, mountaintops, kitchen cabinets or the garbage dump—wherever your life adventures lead.

Smith (Wreck This Journal), an illustrator, offers a uniquely melded artistic cum scientific approach to observing, analyzing and documenting minutia—of ourselves and our manmade and natural worlds.

His 59 quirky “explorations” invite readers to be curious; to investigate cracks, smells and splotches; wander aimlessly; and celebrate trees. Full of kicky photomontages and Smith’s wobbly line drawings, this field journal can lead readers into brave new worlds.

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Y

Women and girls There are bracing antidotes within the collected essays and aphorisms of Note to Self: 30 Women on Hardship, Humiliation, Heartbreak, and Overcoming It All (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, $24.95, 352 pages, ISBN 9781416948766). This comforting book is the brainchild of editor Andrea Buchanan, who “curates famous quotes . . . snippets of phone conversation, ideas.” In her touching introduction, Buchanan relates that all of her collected sayings had a backstory that might offer “joy and comfort and [an] occasional laugh.” Thus this book was born, with well-told stories solicited from a diverse group of women, many of them famous. The essays address the “Big Three” of the book’s title, along with “Life’s Constant Complexities.” Each ends with a Post-it-sized “note to self” summarizing the tale’s core message. From an actress’ humiliation on “Jeopardy,” and a housewife’s compassionate adoption of a family victimized by Hurricane

Katrina, to an activist’s grief over her son’s tragic death, these stories hold wisdom bites to soothe and heal.

A Year in High Heels: The Girl’s Guide to Everything from Jane Austen to the A-list (Harper, $16.95, 544 pages, ISBN 9780061673603) is London fashion writer Camilla Morton’s (How to Walk in High Heels) latest literary bling. While this follow-up doesn’t exactly fall flat, it does stumble: intending to be a monthly calendar of to-do’s for girly fabulousness, it is instead a strangely arranged encyclopedia of historical and cultural trivia with oddly clashing suggestions (January mandates include both detox and imbibing hot toddies!), which might induce migraines in the most determined fashionista. Each chapter opens a new month with an insouciant postcard from fashion pioneers such as Giorgio Armani and Manolo Blahnik, and features a “Muse of the Month” (e.g., Coco Chanel), a “Page Turner” (recommended reading) and a “Foot Note” (short history of a shoe style). Shoehorned in between are quips from Cleopatra, tips on moonwalking and letter-writing.

Much of the history and dates to note are geared toward Brits (St. George’s birthday), with the occasional sop thrown across the Pond (Mae West’s birthday). However, there are universal lessons, such as how to job-hunt (wear heels) and how to be a collector (inherit money).

This is a dizzy, often entertaining read—if perused with slightly raised (and wellplucked) eyebrows.

You, you, you Doctors Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz present a new book in their YOU series (You: Staying Young; You: On a Diet, etc.), namely, You: Being Beautiful: The Owner’s Manual to Inner and Outer Beauty (Free Press, $26.99, 422 pages, ISBN 9781416572343). You: Being Beautiful has the authors’ signature (if slightly juvenile) humor, and is a holistic approach to well-being that addresses looking, feeling and being beautiful.

“Beauty,” they say, “. . . is health.” That said, this is not a beauty guide to supermodel makeup tricks; it is a roadmap to beauty via healthy physical and mental habits, starting with a “You-Q” test to measure inner and outer beauty. The narrative is peppered with self-evaluation exercises, informative sidebars and healing tools. Part one leads readers matter-offactly through the biology of tip-top skin, hair, teeth, finger, toes and figure. Part two focuses on body-mind sensations: energy levels, pain management, mind maladies and work-money issues. The shift here from physical feelings to emotional is slightly clumsy, but serves the book’s holistic vision. Part three tackles the biology of love, sexuality and happiness, wrapping up with the “Be-YOU-tiful Plan” to elevate gorgeousness, and an ap-

pendix on how to find a good plastic surgeon (just in case).

Something to think about If your house is crammed with stuff, chances are your cranium is cluttered, too. Organizational guru Peter Walsh returns to clutter-bust your mind in Enough Already! Clearing Mental Clutter to Become the Best You (Free Press, $26, 320 pages, ISBN 9781416560180), coming in March. “If you have ever tripped and fallen on your own belongings,” he says, “then imagine what the clutter in your head is doing to you.” Walsh constantly sees that lack of clear vision causes chaos in relationships, careers, finances, health and spirits, and he preaches using imagination to create a vision of your desired life, to identify and clear obstacles and to realize that vision.

Walsh includes a wealth of commonsense discussion; systematic support material, such as “you are not alone” stories; self-evaluation quizzes to pinpoint life goals and obstacles; and action-oriented checklists and tips. Often, we know what we don’t want in our lives, but cannot focus on that which we do. Clear space, Walsh advises, for “if you don’t clear room to walk, you’ll never find the path to your dreams.” o Alison Hood is kicking off the new year at her home in Marin County, California.

Saucy seafood bites back at life Lady-killer crustacean, Pepe the King Prawn, dispenses spicy sagacity in It’s Hard Out Here for a Shrimp: Life, Love, and Living Large (Hyperion, $16.95, 176 pages, ISBN 9781401323059).

If you’re a Muppets fan (and you know you are), or if you need smooth talk on love, work and the social scene, Pepe’s your go-to guy—um, prawn. A salute from fellow Muppet Kermit the Frog launches this raconteur’s manifesto of living “La Vida Pepe” with chapters covering parties, love and money, family and friends, work, politics, therapy, style and stress. There’s a slightly wicked howto here for every eventuality, from using the perfect pickup line on “the womens” (“Is it me, or are you hot in here?”) to coping with annoyances, like trips to the post office (“If you can’t do the time, don’t wait in line”). My favorite Pepe-ism extols meditation: “A deep spiritual experience or an excuse to take a nap. Either way you win, okay.” o —ALISON HOOD

Princess Mia s ’ first novel

© 2007 Ali Smith

M E G C A B O T presents…

On Sale January 6, 2009 in Trade Paperback

Also on sale

THE PRINCESS DIARIES X: Forever Princess,

the final installment in the international bestselling series All Ransom My Heart author royalties will be donated to To learn more visit

greenpeace.org

a novel

www.megcabot.com An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers AVON

www.avonbooks.com

Take care of your inner princess and the planet!

Enter for a chance to win a Saks Fifth Avenue shopping spree and a donation in your name to Greenpeace:

GRAND PRIZE: $500 Saks Fifth Avenue Gift Card*

PRINCES S OF GEN OVI MIA THE RMOPOL A IS

With hel� from

MEG CAB

author o

Second Prize: $200 Gift Card*

f The Pri

OT

ncess Di

aries

Third Prize: $100 Gift Card* *A matching donation to Greenpeace will also be made in the winners’ names for each prize level. And each winner will receive a signed copy of Ransom My Heart.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open to U.S. residents of 18 years of age and older. To enter follow the instructions at www.BookPage.com. All entries must be received by March 6, 2009 (11pm EST). Winners selected by a random drawing. Approximate total retail value of all prizes: $1,645. Go to www.BookPage.com for the Official Rules.

Well Read The struggles that shaped a region Barry Unsworth, Booker Prize winner for Sacred Hunger, has set many of his novels—some historical, some contemporary—in the region where Western culture originated: Greece, Turkey, Italy and the Middle East. His latest, Land of Marvels, takes place at the heart of what is often referred to as the “cradle of civilization”—the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers historically called Mesopotamia. Set in 1914, on the eve of World War I, Unsworth’s intriguing fiction concerns the two local commodities, antiquities and oil, that have shaped the destiny of the territory that would become modern-day Iraq.

John Somerville, a British archeologist, has spent the last three years excavating Tell Erdek, a site he believes contains important Assyrian ruins that, if unearthed, will make his reputation. A methodical, restrained man, Somerville is nonetheless perturbed by a railway line being built by the Germans, which he fears will compromise, perhaps even obliterate, his dig. He has hired a local Arab, Jehar, to act as an informal spy, paying the young man for information

BY ROBERT about the progress of the railroad as it draws near.

WEIBEZAHL Somerville is a scholar who keeps the politics of the region at arm’s length, but with a European war imminent, there are many others who are jockeying behind the scenes for control of the area’s resources and strategic position. When Somerville travels to Constantinople to solicit the aid of the British ambassador in diverting the German rail route, he is surprised to encounter Lord Rampling, a powerful man of shadowy reputation, at the meeting. In return for help with the railroad issue, Rampling, who claims to be acting in Britain’s best interests, asks Somerville to play host to an American geologist, who will masquerade as a visiting archeologist while in truth undertaking oil exploration. Focused only on his own crusade against the German trains, Somerville agrees.

Unsworth deftly portrays the collision of cultures that planted the seeds of discontent in present-day Iraq.

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

The arrival of the self-assured American at Tell Erdek Land of Marvels changes the dynamic of the insular little group, particu- By Barry Unsworth larly in regard to Somerville’s wife, who begins an affair Nan A. Talese with the dashing Alexander Elliott. Thoroughly immersed $26, 304 pages in his work as he closes in on an Assyrian burial chamber, ISBN 9780385520072 Somerville remains oblivious to the affair, and he is equally unaware of Jehar’s growing discontent. The Arab, who has fallen in love with a girl and desperately needs to raise the bride price required to marry her, devises a dangerous scheme to secure the money. Somerville, himself desperate to keep the German railway at bay, foolishly agrees to the plan. Soon the once quiet archeological camp is percolating with intrigue, and the various strands of the story converge with violence consequences.

Unsworth devotes large sections of Land of Marvels to explicating the ancient history behind Somerville’s quest, and readers with an interest in Middle Eastern archeology will relish having this history told with such fluent grace. He also gives pages over to the geology of oil exploration, managing to explain things without getting bogged down in dry scientific writing. With so much attention paid to these details, though, the story sometimes suffers, and it doesn’t really begin to gel until about halfway into the book. Then, once the plot gets rolling, it all comes together too quickly. At times the motives and actions of major characters are predictable, and some of the minor players remain a bit sketchily drawn, sometimes bordering on stock characters. One humorous subplot involving some Swedish religious zealots looking to build a hotel on the site of the Garden of Eden is, sadly, given short shrift.

What Unsworth does best here is portray the collision of cultures and political and economic interests that, with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire a few years later, would lead to the drawing of questionable national boundaries, giving Britain control of the newly named Iraq, and planting the seeds of discontent that, some 85 years later, would find the United States invading a country it did not fully understand. Land of Marvels is subtle in the connections it makes between then and now, but the discerning reader can see clearly the hand of fate planting those seeds 10 of luckless destiny. o

DEBUT FICTION

Hong Kong in the wake of war

By Maude McDaniel Claire married Martin because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Later, after they moved from England to Hong Kong in 1951, “there had been times when [she] felt that she could become a different person.” Still, “the elasticity of her possibility diminished over time” until she met Will, emotionally damaged from earlier experiences, but still able to help her get “out of context.”

In the course of Janice Y.K. Lee’s exceptional first novel, Claire (the eponymous piano teacher) eventually lands at the far end of the arc of independence she hadn’t realized she’d been following from the beginning. Certainly, if one is to do one’s own thing, Hong Kong, with its population of rebels and fawners, is the place for it. On the other hand (except perhaps for poor Martin), the other residents all have longer histories of machinations and personal betrayals—how could it be otherwise given the last 10 years of this city’s history, the first five of which were spent in trying to survive the brutal Japanese occupation, and the last five in trying to forget it?

The Piano Teacher is split into two alternating narratives: one detailing Will’s affair during World War II with the The Piano Teacher haunting Eurasian beauty Trudy (who dominates the pages during her tenure), and the other exploring his affair with By Janice Y.K. Lee Claire a decade later. This book is well worth reading if only Viking for its pitch-perfect portrayal of a ruthlessly brittle society, $25.95, 336 pages ISBN 9780670020485 so destroyed in the 1940s and revived in the ’50s. The moral Also available on audio ambiguities and secrets of citizens and expatriates alike float or sink as they deal (and make deals) with their occupiers.

Lee was herself born and raised in Hong Kong and educated at Harvard. A former editor at Elle and Mirabella magazines, she now lives once more in that extravagant city.

Here, Lee has produced a powerful treatment of a precarious place where deceit and betrayal and their consequences are not confined to the war years. And where sometimes, it must seem, the last and best resort is to hunker down and curl up in a ball, to “dissolve into [Hong Kong], be absorbed in its rhythms and become, easily, a part of the world.”

For better or for worse. o Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.

DEBUT FICTION

When your mind is your enemy

By Carla Jean Whitley Harvard psychology professor Dr. Alice Howland is only 50 years old when she begins to experience frequent and unusual memory loss. A BlackBerry forgotten at dinner, a mysterious item on her to-do list and an out-of-town conference she forgot to attend all make Alice wonder what’s happening to her.

First-time novelist Lisa Genova self-published Still Alice before the book was picked up by Pocket Books. But the knowledge she has gained from earning a doctorate in neuroscience and serving as an online columnist for the National Alzheimer’s Association, shines throughout this debut, a realistic portrayal of an intelligent, independent woman facing early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

It’s painful to witness scene after scene of forgetting, particularly as Alice awaits and then denies her diagnosis. But through those incidents, Alice’s plight evokes the reader’s sympathy and understanding. Still Alice tracks her mental decline over a two-year period, revealing how early-onset Alzheimer’s affects Alice’s relationships, career and sense of self. During the disease’s rapid progression, Still Alice she becomes more and more dependent on her husband By Lisa Genova and three grown children to guide her through each day. Pocket Once-mundane tasks become to-do list fodder. Alice $15, 320 pages makes notes to remind herself to take medication every ISBN 9781439102817 morning and evening. She’s even prone to forget to teach Also available on audio classes.

Alice discovers who she is and what her relationships mean as the disease advances.

Memories fall away, but the heart remains. And though the novel is heavy on explanation of the disease’s effects, Genova writes in clear language that even the least medically inclined will understand.

Those who have lost a loved one to Alzheimer’s will find particular comfort in this sensitive tale. The novel portrays both the patient’s and the family’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease in a more heart-rending way than medical literature ever could. o Carla Jean Whitley writes fron Birmingham, Alabama.

WHODUNIT? Secrets hidden by apartheid

Mystery of the month

South Africa in 1952 provides the setting for Malla Nunn’s atmospheric mystery, A Beautiful Place to Die (Atria, $25, 384 pages, ISBN 9781416586203). At the dawning of the age of apartheid, South Africa has become an uncomfortable place to live for blacks and whites alike. In Jacob’s Rest, a tiny town on the border with Mozambique, racial tensions come to a head when an Afrikaner police captain is found dead alongside the local river, a victim of foul play. Enter Detective Emmanuel Cooper, an Englishman relatively free of the biases that affect his Afrikaner compatriots. He will be the lead investigator into the murder . . . but not for long: the killing has caught the attention of the police Special Branch, and Cooper’s authority is undercut by the powerful and radical political

BY BRUCE TIERNEY organization. Cooper is demoted to data-gatherer, but it will give him the opportunity to do some investigating of his own.

Cooper quickly learns that the deceased police captain led something of a double life: on the one hand, he was a loving husband and father, a pillar of the community; on the other hand, he apparently pursued a complicated and forbidden relationship with a young black woman, a fact that someone (perhaps everyone) wants badly to suppress. Somewhere in the dichotomy lies the truth, and Cooper means to find it. A Beautiful Place to Die is Nunn’s debut novel, and it bodes well for a long and successful run.

Inspector Jian, a Chinese cop, receives a frantic phone call from his beloved but somewhat headstrong daughter Wei Wei, an exchange student in rural England.

“Dad, help me, help me, help . . .” Then there is an ominous clunk and the line goes dead. Immediately he phones back, but gets only her voicemail. So begins Simon Lewis’ debut thriller, Bad Traffic (Scribner, $25, 384 pages, ISBN 9781416593539), this month’s Tip of the Ice Pick Award winner. Already a critically acclaimed hit in England, Bad Traffic is poised for similar success here.

Calling in some serious favors, Jian arranges a UK visa and a flight for the following morning. He bears a hastily translated note in capital letters: THIS MAN HAVE COME FROM CHINA TO FIND HIS DAUGHTER WHO HAVE SOME TROUBLE. HE DOES NOT SPEAK ENGLISH. He expects the same sort of deference in England that he is accorded in China, but nobody at his daughter’s school wants to give him the time of day. Finally one diffident student approaches: “I am learn Chinese here. I can help you.” Bad grammar, but arguably a good start. Meanwhile, not far away, fellow countryman Ding Ming has his own set of worries: having paid an enormous sum to a group of “snakeheads” (smugglers dealing in human contraband) to get to England, he has become an indentured slave, forcibly separated from his young wife. On the plus side, Ding Ming speaks decent English, a valuable asset when he makes his escape. Now he must find his wife and somehow help her escape as well.

It goes without saying that Jian and Ding Ming will cross paths, and that their individual talents will prove useful to one another. It is a marriage of convenience, however, as their goals do not always dovetail. Only the knowledge that the alternative is exponentially worse keeps them together.

And so these two strangers in a strange land careen through the pastoral English countryside in search of the women they love. Lewis has spent a good deal of time in the Middle Kingdom; he worked as a travel writer for the legendary Rough Guides to China, Beijing and Shanghai. When not traveling, he lives in London’s multicultural community of Brixton. o —BRUCE TIERNEY

Death stalks the Big Easy Although I tend to avoid period mysteries, I make a happy exception for David Fulmer’s Valentin St. Cyr novels, set in New Orleans in the rough and tumble days shortly before World War I. In the latest installment, Lost River (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25, 336 pages, ISBN 9780151011872), our Creole PI hero has given up his Storyville (think “seamy underbelly”) haunts, the result of a promise to his sweetheart that he would find a less dangerous line of endeavor. Now he runs a moderately successful and stable business as an above-board private detective, albeit one with little of the excitement and glitz of his previous career on the mean streets. In a moment of weakness, however, St. Cyr agrees to have a look into the murder of a man in a brothel, thinking he can sort it out quickly. Instead, in a classic variation of the “hunter becomes the game” theme, St. Cyr finds himself wanted for a murder he had nothing to do with. His girlfriend is seriously irritated with him—in fact, she may just be entertaining the notion of finding herself a “fancy man” and leaving St. Cyr high and dry. Seemingly with nowhere to turn, St. Cyr must rely on his street smarts to stay one step ahead of the cops as he tries to determine just who set him up, and if at all possible, to turn the tables. Fulmer won the Shamus Award for Best First PI novel for Chasing the Devil’s Tail; four books later, he still displays the fine form that originally caught the judges’ attention.

Memory loss

It was a murder made for TV: two cases go beyond passion, into the realm of obsessive vengeance and shocking betrayal.

Just what the networks love.

In stores now.

“Flawed yet identifiable characters and genuinely terrifying villains populate this impressive and arresting thriller.”

—Publishers Weekly

www.MIRABooks.com www.JTEllison.com

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Harry Hole, the Oslo cop with the unforgettable name, is back in Jo Nesbo’s gripping Nemesis (Harper, $25.99, 480 pages, ISBN 9780061655500). In this sequel to the best-selling Redbreast, Harry is involved in the investigation of a bank robbery gone bad, the teller shot at point-blank range for the apparently unpardonable error of handing the money over mere seconds past the one-minute deadline given by the robber. While Harry’s significant other, Rakel, is away in Moscow, he agrees to meet an old flame for dinner. It will be casual, he thinks, no problem. As it turns out, a rather serious problem is in the offing. Next morning, Harry has a splitting headache, and no clear memory of the previous evening. Next day, he is called to a death scene, where he is dumbfounded to discover that his date of the previous evening is dead of a gunshot wound to the head. Although early indications are that it is a suicide, that doesn’t ring true for Harry. Still, he cannot give her death the attention it deserves, since the bank robbers’ escapades are becoming both more frequent and more violent. Then further investigation into the supposed suicide leads the police to suspect foul play; Harry finds himself the prime suspect. It will be a race against time to find the killer before Harry is put away for a murder he did not commit, or rather, a murder he’s pretty sure he didn’t commit, given the lapse in his memory. High tension, lightning pace, a flawed but ultimately sympathetic protagonist: Nemesis has it all. o

SEX, LIES and VIDEOTAPE.

11

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

12

FICTION

FICTION

Momentous return for beloved writer

Novels to feed the hungry heart

By Lauren Bufferd It’s been nine years since Jayne Anne Phillips’ last book and almost 30 since the acclaimed author burst on the scene with her dazzling short-story collection Black Tickets.

Like her previous work, Lark and Termite uses highly evocative, poetic language to explore the complexities of ordinary relationships—mothers, fathers, daughters, lovers— but this time, they’re set against a wider backdrop of war and environmental destruction.

Lark and Termite tells two overlapping stories: the death of Robert Leavitt, a young soldier in Korea in 1950, and four days in the life of his severely handicapped son on the eve of a great flood nine years later. These two characters never meet, but their intuitive sense of one another fuels this intensely spiritual novel.

Termite and his half-sister Lark live with Nonie, their aunt and caregiver, in small-town West Virginia. Termite is unable to walk or talk, but the teenage Lark bears the burden of his care lightly, almost joyfully. Hovering over this family are the spirits of Termite’s father and the children’s mother, the unstable, enigmatic Lola, who could not take care of either child.

Using multiple narrators, Lark and Termite invites the Lark and Termite reader to experience the perceptions, memories and desires By Jayne Anne Phillips of the characters. Phillips has a gift for narrative voice and Knopf shifting time, from the brisk no-nonsense tones of hard $24, 272 pages ISBN 9780375401954 working Nonie to Leavitt’s erotically charged recollections of Lola. Even Termite, in a literary nod to the character of Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, expresses himself in intense monologues of sensory observations. Events and actions echo and repeat themselves like a carnival hall of mirrors, and Phillips doesn’t shy away from bold symbolism or her notion that the bonds of love—familial, erotic, paternal—can conquer time and space. Only once does the book step from the spiritual to what reads as a plot contrivance, and this change in direction strikes an artificial note. Still, one misstep is a small price to pay for any reader who welcomes Phillips’ return to fiction. o Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

By Joanna Brichetto ho doesn’t like food and love, together or apart? Together, they are magic, and whether it began with Chocolat or Like Water for Chocolate, “foodie fiction” is hot. Three new choices are showcased below: all centered on a female character at or near 40, all tending toward the literary rather than strictly romance or chick lit. Each one is a sensual exploration of foods simple and complex, homey and exotic, and above all, slow. Slow food allows time for the invocation of vivid and luxuriant metaphors (a food is said to be something else: a particular feeling, wet autumn leaves, a magnolia petal, a lover’s lower lip, the smell of a mahogany desk and so on). Some descriptions are so inventive they verge on outright cross-sensory synesthesia. And be forewarned—each of these novels will make you very, very hungry.

W

A pinch of humor Nancy Spiller’s Entertaining Disasters (Counterpoint, $14.95, 296 pages, ISBN 9781582434513) is aptly titled. The double entendre captures the plight of the unnamed narrator to a tee. A freelance food writer, she makes it her business, literally, to orchestrate exquisite dinner parties and record every detail for newspaper and magazine articles. Unfortunately, her journalistic output belongs not under “Style” or “Living” or “Food,” but firmly under “Fiction.” She makes it all up. Why? Because, without exception, every dinner party she has actually sponsored was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. As a result, her social anxieties have escalated into party paralysis. So, for 10 years she has conducted only imaginary gatherings: sparkling dinner parties peopled by an anonymous and utterly fictitious roster of L.A.’s most beautiful.

Until now. Suddenly, her editor, who has no inkling of her secret, invites himself to her next soiree. Since he’s a busy man, the first available date is five months off, which gives our narrator nearly half a year to obsess about one dinner party. Her borderline streamof-consciousness, tangential terror splits into fascinating diversions about food and food history, and ultimately, about herself. Her past gradually emerges, pulled from silence by a smell, a taste, a touch or a memory of a particular ingredient. Now, at midlife, she is ready to examine the list of her own ingredients: who she is and what she wants.

A dash of romance The central character of The Lost Recipe for Happiness (Bantam Discovery, $13, 464 pages, ISBN 9780553385519), by Barbara O’Neal, is also starting over. Elena Alvarez arrives in Aspen poised for the professional opportunity of a lifetime: her own kitchen in an upscale, new restaurant. Poised, that is, with a broken body, a broken family and a string of broken relationships behind her. Thirty-seven, unmarried with no children, she is deservedly proud of her decades of slow, hard work up the kitchen ladder from slave to sous to chef.

Elena has been rebuilding her life since she was a teenager, when a horrific accident killed her boyfriend and several family members. Elena alone survived—albeit with horrific injuries—and she remains haunted by her past. So much so, perhaps, that she is in danger of missing a different opportunity: the possibility of true love. The unlikely candidate is Julian Liswood, who is not only a four-time-divorced hotshot film director, but her new boss, as well. The story alternates between third-person viewpoints of these two, and as the intricacies of each is revealed, the plot thickens quicker than a béchamel sauce. A nice touch is the bit of magic realism O’Neal (aka novelist Barbara Samuel) throws into the mix, giving Elena a bit of ghostly guidance and a sixth sense that serves her well.

Mix with friendship “Moves like a tornado.”

—James Patterson, New York Times bestselling author

www.MIRABooks.com www.RickMofina.com

In The School of Essential Ingredients (Putnam, $24.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9780399155437), by Erica Bauermeister, eight people are brought together in a monthly cooking class with an intuitive and slightly mysterious chef, Lillian. With the exception of one couple, all are strangers to one another and to a certain degree, to themselves. Lillian’s slow but startling method of instruction spills over into their inner lives, gently nudging each to explore what needs to be examined. Along the way, of course, they cook.

True to Lillian’s style, they cook without written recipes, guided by senses, memory and instinct.

Perhaps the most satisfying character study is the glimpse of Lillian’s own genesis as a chef, and her earliest attempts in the kitchen. As a damaged child, she begins with little more than sheer will. With patient, methodical, focused experimentation (and a little help from a Wise Woman archetype), she begins what can be described as a journey of faith. Transforming basic ingredients into new works becomes a type of spirituality, a religion. With it, she saves her own mother, finds her own calling and masters her profession. Delicious. o Joanna Brichetto is trying to slow down.

This month’s top publisher picks The Amazing Adventures of Diet Girl Shauna Reid Entertaining, hilarious and honest, this is the uplifting true story of a young woman who defeated her demons and conquered her cravings to become a weight-loss superhero to inspire us all.

Avon PB 9780061657702 $13.99

PB 9780061688409 $13.99

Bring on the Blessings

Shelter Me

Beverly Jenkins

Juliette Fay

One of the few all-black towns founded after Reconstruction, over a century later Henry Adams was falling apart. So Mayor Trenton July put his town up for sale on the internet. With a new owner, and the ex-mayor and friends doing everything they can to turn the deal on its head, will this be the death of Henry Adams...or its rebirth?

An unforgettable novel of what is means to love, and what it means to be alive.

“What a gorgeous paradox of a book: a deep, thoughtful exploration of a young mother’s first year of widowhood.”

— Marisa de los Santos, New York Times best-selling author of Belong To Me PB 9780061673399 $14.99

Avon

The White Tiger

Inevitable Sentences

Kiss of a Traitor

Aravind Adiga Read by John Lee

Tekla Dennison Miller

Cat Lindler

Can Celeste Brookstone, new owner and director of a women’s shelter, save her life and her sanity when her daughter’s killer comes knocking on her door?

Amid deceit, betrayal and clashing political loyalties, can Willa and Ford discover what truly matters?

2008 Man Booker Prize Winner The White Tiger—the first-person confession of a murderer—is utterly, brilliantly irreverent, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable.

Unabridged CD and downloadable audio.

Avon

Medallion

Medallion CD 9781400106653 $34.99

PB 9781933836515 $6.95

Tantor Audio

PB 9781934755013 $8.95

An all-new BookPage.com is coming in February! ®

Where readers discover their next great book Books By Genre

Authors

Children’s Books

Print Edition

Book Clubs

Blogs

Win Free Stuff!

The new BookPage.com will go beyond the current print edition, adding web-only author interviews, features and book reviews. We’ll also have special sections for book clubs and children’s books.

Every time you visit BookPage.com, you’ll find more chances to enter publisher-sponsored contests and win fantastic prizes, free books and even advance copies of books not yet published!

Online Community for Book Lovers!

Search Our Extensive Archives!

Create a profile for yourself or your book club, post reviews, comment on one of our three new blogs or participate in a quick survey.

The BookPage.com community will be active, informative and fun!

With our new search capabilities, you’ll be able to access more than 10,000 of our reviews, interviews and features with the touch of a button!

BookPage.com

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

More Book Reviews!

13

FICTION

The lawlessness of life and love

By Kim Schmidt It may sound amiss to say a novel about torture is beautiful, but in the case of Glen Duncan’s seventh novel, A Day and a Night and a Day, the adjective is oddly fitting. Duncan takes his protagonist, Augustus Rose, to his physical and emotional limits, exposing what happens to a man when he is dramatically tested by pain—and by love. The novel is beautiful not necessarily for what is revealed in this process, but for its masterful execution and for the humanity with which it is told.

Moving deftly between three periods in Augustus’ life, Duncan weaves together the story of a boy born in Harlem to a single white mother and an absent African-American father in 1948. He chronicles Augustus’ affair with Selina, a lovely white woman with whom he tumbles into love during the late ’60s; his day and a night and a day 40 years later, where the torture he endures by Harper, a fellow American, will define every moment to follow; and his attempt to find solitude on the remote European island of Calansay, which is interrupted by yet another act of violence.

Ultimately each of these stories informs the other, resulting in a rich understanding of Augustus’ character and how he went from a young man passionately consumed with love, to an unfulfilled middle-aged restaurateur, to a latein-life terrorist hanging by his wrists in a cell. Duncan is A Day and a at his most brilliant in his intimate passages describing Au- Night and a Day gustus’ torture. With careful attention to detail that remark- By Glen Duncan ably avoids the stereotypical guts and gore, these haunting Ecco scenes make every nerve come alive and the blood, sweat $24.99, 256 pages and fear palpable.

ISBN 9780061239991 Duncan, who was born in Northern England to an Anglo-Indian family, has called his novel an “examination of two kinds of lawlessness, the lawlessness that tramples the Geneva Convention, and the joyous lawlessness of love.” In the end, A Day and a Night and a Day is his portrayal of a world in crisis and his attempt to tell the story of a world gone feral through the very intimate experiences of one man, in one cell, facing the hands of his torturer. o Kim Schmidt writes from Champaign, Illinois.

SCIENCE FICTION

More things in heaven and earth

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

By Jedediah Berry The distant future finds humanity scattered over hundreds of worlds, enslaved to an alien race, laboring in mines and building fortresses for their spider-like masters, the Archon. Earth has been transformed into a mass grave, and all that remains of human culture is the daily fare of pubs and churches. And also, as luck would have it, the plays of William Shakespeare.

Wilbr, the narrator of the tale, is by his own admission not the most talented of actors. His Rosencrantz is fine, but he knows he’ll never have a shot at Hamlet. Meanwhile Aglaé, “the best and most attractive Juliet and Rosalind,” hardly acknowledges his existence. They and the rest of the crew of The Muse of Fire tour the galaxy, offering residents of the planets they’re allowed to visit a moment’s respite from lives of drudgery. When a group of Archons join the audience to observe one otherwise routine production, the players find themselves conscripted into a series of shows put on for the benefit of ever more strange and powerful alien races. Naturally, the survival of the human race hangs in the balance.

Muse of Fire is a short novel (it originally appeared in the New Space Opera anthology edited by Gardner Dozois and Muse of Fire Jonathan Strahan), but it feels expansive. As the crew travels from one stage to another, each more grand and bewildering By Dan Simmons than the last, the member of their troupe who usually plays Subterranean 112 pages Iago plots to overthrow their cruel masters, while Wilbr and $35, ISBN 9781596061811 Aglaé prepare for a final performance on which everything depends: a rendition of Romeo and Juliet unlike any other.

This is not the first time Dan Simmons has yoked the classics of the Western canon to space opera science fiction. The novels of his Hugo Award-winning Hyperion Cantos bore the influences of Keats and The Canterbury Tales (for starters) and Ilium featured a re-creation of the Trojan War on Mars. Fans of those masterly works will adore Muse of Fire for its layered symbology, intertextual wit and deep humanism. But Muse of Fire also shows Simmons at his best as a storyteller, and readers will be delighted by a tale so expertly told. o 14 Jedediah Berry is the author of The Manual of Detection, forthcoming from Penguin Press.

Book clubs New paperbacks for reading groups The Sum of Our Days

By Isabel Allende In her fourth work of nonfiction, the celebrated Chilean author offers another poignant meditation on love, loss and grief. Still haunted by the death of her daughter—a tragedy that occurred in 1992, providing the basis for her best-selling memoir Paula—Allende now looks back at the years that have passed since that heartbreaking event. Taking the measure of her life and finding much to savor despite Paula’s death, she covers varied territory in this brisk autobiography.

Allende examines topics like marriage, religion, drug abuse Harper and her eventful career as a journalist and fiction writer, and $14.99, 336 pages she brings a special compassion to her recounting. She pep- ISBN 9780061551840 pers the narrative with hard-won insights, and at times it’s clear that she’s writing from a place marked by incredible pain. Yet ever-present elements of warmth and humor keep the tone of the book balanced. No one can match Allende when it comes to writing about the sustaining presence of family, the evolving nature of grief or the redemption that can, at times, follow tragedy.

From these subjects she has crafted a wise and generous narrative with much to offer readers. This is vintage Allende, a big-hearted book full of spirit, spice and wit.

People of the Book

By Geraldine Brooks Brooks, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of March (2005), blends mystery and history in this splendid novel. At the center of the story is an actual Jewish religious work called the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the first texts of its kind to feature illuminated images. The volume endured several centuries’ worth of religious conflicts and wars due to the vigilance of a brave group of individuals, who endangered their lives in order to preserve it. This fascinating fictionalization of the Haggadah’s survival features Hanna Heath, a rare-books specialist in Sarajevo who is working to restore the text. Over the Penguin course of her labors, Hanna finds that the book reveals clues $15, 400 pages ISBN 9780143115007 about itself and its background. Through small discoveries in the volume—a wine stain, a strand of hair, some salt crystals—Hanna is able to research the text’s mysteries from a scientific standpoint. But these efforts only serve to lead her deep into sinister territory. In addition to Hanna’s spine-tingling discoveries about the Haggadah, readers are treated to accounts of critical incidents in its remarkable history, which are presented in the form of short, beautifully crafted chapters. The Haggadah’s story is compelling in itself, yet Brooks fleshes out the narrative many clever elements of suspense and an appealing love story. Complex yet wonderfully readable, this is first-rate literary fiction. A reading group guide is included in the book.

The Senator’s Wife

By Sue Miller Miller offers another intriguing look into the female psyche with this tense, well-crafted novel. Young, beautiful Meri has just wed a successful professor, and the two live in part of a New England townhouse, which they share with the sophisticated Delia and her senator-husband. Each couple has a wing of the house, an arrangement that allows Meri and Delia to become friends and confidantes. When a surprise pregnancy throws Meri into a tailspin, she must take stock of her life, beginning with her disturbing child- Vintage hood and ending with her new marriage. Delia, meanwhile, $14.95, 320 pages dutifully suffers the indiscretions of her husband, whose af- ISBN 9780307276698 fairs have earned him a reputation as a womanizer. Their marriage exists solely as a means of furthering his political career. As Meri and Delia experience their own separate emotional hardships, the bond between them grows, and their lives soon overlap in unpredictable—and damaging—ways. The book’s taut, perfectly controlled plot features some surprises, and its evolution is complemented by the insight and intuition Miller brings to the book. Her uncanny ability to tap into the emotional interiors of women makes the narrative surprisingly potent. This study of two very different female characters whose private worlds unexpectedly intertwine reinforces Miller’s reputation as one of our leading contemporary novelists. A reading group guide is available in print and online at readinggroupcenter.com. o —JULIE HALE

BEHIND THE BOOK

The keepers of wisdom

What the stories of old people tell us about ourselves

P

Because wisdom is such an amorphous (and centuries-old) concept, writing a book about it is like trying to sculpt with mashed potatoes. So, early on, I give the reader a brief guide to wisdom literature over the ages (from the Book of Job all the way up to the quotations on the paper cups at Starbuck’s), and cite the five qualities that I think are essential to being wise: reciprocity, doubt, non-attachment, social conscience and discretion. I also try to provide some context by looking at some of the startling commonalities in the latein-life works of writers as disparate as Graham Greene, William Burroughs and T.S. Eliot. A chapter on famous last words suggests that, at the end of life, we are more ourselves than ever—like the death row prisoner whose last meal request included low-fat salad dressing.

I’ve sometimes described the book to people as “a family memoir meets Studs Terkel,” which seems pretty accurate, though it doesn’t reflect the fact that my background—former staff writer for Spy, current contributor of humor to Vanity Fair and the New Yorker—is as a humorist. Previously, when people asked if, given its title, How to Live is self-help, I would become flushed and slightly irritable, like a country store clerk who has lost his spectacles in the barley. But with time, I have mellowed. I’ve realized that, like many people, I’m always looking to put my life under the stewardship of metaphor—to find some kind of organizing principle that doesn’t come from the New Age movement or organized religion.

Writing How to Live made me realize that I find this stewardship in biography, that I find it from talking to people or reading about them. For me, to learn about another person’s life—to learn why and how they did what they did—is to be simultaneously humbled and buoyed up. Old folks are the people on Earth who’ve lived the most, thus they stand to inspire the most humbling and buoying up. So now when people ask me if How to Live is self-help, I tell them, “Help yourself.” o © JOHN WOO

By Henry Alford eople always ask me if I had “personal reasons” for writing a book about the wisdom of old people. I did not. At first. But—bizarrely—as soon as I started writing, I stumbled onto something far more personal than I would have ever thought imaginable.

The book started as an idea. Namely, that human beings are one of the few species that lives long after the age at which we procreate. Why would Mother Nature have it thus? I think it’s because old folks serve—or have, until the middle part of the last century or so—as the keepers of wisdom in society; as an old African saying runs, “The death of an old person is like the burning of a library.” And recent medical evidence supports this theory, too: though we experience a five percent or so decrease in brain weight and volume for each decade we live past 40, the actual number of brain cells decreases only marginally. Yes, we may endure much memory loss when we age, but our ability to assimilate information and learn from the experience doesn’t change much.

Armed with this information, I set off on a quest to interview fascinating people over the age of 70. Some had done notable things— like walk across the country in support of campaign finance reform, henry alford or save thousands of tribe members’ lives by predicting the oncoming tsunami. Some were famous—like Phyllis Diller and Edward Albee and Harold Bloom and Ram Dass.

Some were winningly eccentric—like the retired aerospace engineer who harvests much of his diet out of Dumpsters, or the Lutheran pastor who claims napping is a kind of prayer.

And then, suddenly, my quest got deeply personal when I decided to interview the two older people I know best—my mother and stepfather. Shortly after my interview with my stepfather, he overdosed on sleeping pills, whereupon my mother, furious that he was breaking his commitment to sobriety, threw him out of the house, divorced him and moved 580 miles away. Because both parties were willing to have me tag along during this painful rupture in their 31-year union, I did. Watching my mother make a series of difficult—and wise—decisions ended up being the throughline for my quest and my book.

Humorist Henry Alford tackles a serious subject in his latest book, How To Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (Twelve, $23.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9780446196031).

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

15

HEALTH

Forget perfection This season’s fitness books value substance over style, at last

By Deanna Larson long overdue anti-perfectionist trend is overtaking the fitness world. Being overweight isn’t always unhealthy. You can think yourself thin—and you don’t need to spend hours in the gym. Feel like crying with relief over your stack of New Year’s resolutions? Read on.

Count calories, sure, but keep weight off with different thinking. Dr. Judith S. Beck uses the power of the mind to push dieters to lose once and for all in The Complete Beck Diet for Life: The Five-Stage Program for Permanent Weight Loss (Oxmoor House, $24.95, 286 pages, ISBN 9780848732745). Daughter of pioneering cognitive therapy founder Aaron Beck and director of the Beck Institute of Cognitive Therapy, Beck (The Beck Diet Solution) is a diet coach who helps dieters feel in control and remain motivated while losing at a steady rate and still eating favorite foods.

The “getting ready to lose” section is a mental and emotional workout, followed by beginner and maintenance phases of her “Think Thin Program.” Each section includes “In Session with Dr. Beck” counseling scenarios, food plans and sidebars like “Reality Check” and “Success Skills.” Beck knows you’ll make mistakes, or even decide that enjoying a few more calories is a fair exchange for a few extra pounds. But her mantra is: you will turn mistakes into opportunity, you will maintain your weight loss. Sample daily menus, recipes for healthy meals and snacks, a bibliography and plenty of charts and graphs for amateur scientists and left-brainers round out this authoritative guide to getting off the diet-go-round.

A

Fitness through the years Weight creep as we age isn’t a given. Orthopedic surgeon Vonda Wright, director of PRIMA (the Performance and Research Initiative for Masters Athletes), believes that a sedentary lifestyle rather than biology accelerates the “aging” process. Fitness After 40: How to Stay Strong at Any Age (Amacom, $17.95, 304 pages, ISBN 9780814409947) is an approach to post-midlife fitness through the F.A.C.E. system of flexibility, aerobic exercise, “carrying” load-bearing exercise and achieving equilibrium and balance. Illustrated exercises, chapters on healing and avoiding injury when exercising as well as hydration and good nutrition are about as dry as a physical therapy pamphlet, but reiterating the basics will doubtless ensure you don’t become “merely a bad sequel to your 20-year-old self.”

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

It’s not you, it’s your genes If you want to be a size zero, “choose your parents well,” says Dr. Linda Bacon in Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight (BenBella Books, $14.95, 304 pages, ISBN 9781933771588). Bacon—a therapist and recovering “weight obsessive” with an ironic name who holds a doctorate in physiology and specializes in eating disorders and body image—looks at the disconnect between modern food processing, diet culture and the actual science behind the “moral imperative” to lose weight. She disproves the assumption that being fat equals being unhealthy and deconstructs food and fat politics. There are plenty of thin people among McDonald’s regular customers, according to Bacon, who explores why diet and exercise programs often don’t work, and offers practical advice on how to recast the “weight problem” by helping the vulnerable respect their bodies and souls, taking care of real hungers and changing taste in the process. The best way to lose is to give up the fight and turn control over to your body, according to the book. “You will find that biology is much more powerful than willpower,” Bacon writes.

“Body weight might be a marker for an imprudent lifestyle in some people but its role in determining health . . . is grossly exaggerated.”

Motivation in pictures

That’s a “fattitude” heartily endorsed by comic-strip creator Carol Lay in her intriguing graphic memoir, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude (Villard, $18, 208 pages, ISBN 9780345504043). The L.A. based writer and creator of the WayLay comic strip that has appeared in The San Francisco Examiner, L.A. Weekly and Salon.com, is a “born eater.” After learning unhealthy eating—and dieting—habits from her parents, Lay spent her college years in denim maxi dresses, gorging on home-baked bread and fake cookie dough, followed by addiction to amphetamine-based weight-loss pills. She starts the action with a comic strip featuring a hostess greeting her recent self with “You’ve lost so much weight! You look great! How did you do it?” “I count calories and exercise every 16 day,” she answers, followed by a trio of wordless panels showing the hostess dumbfounded for seconds on end. Her seriocomic weighty adventures have a fresh Californian vibe

while communicating slightly self-righteous weight-loss tips, but before you hate this cool chick for her steely self-control, she draws a panel about the dangers of emotional binging after a breakup. On a holiday. Or imagines how the Devil would tempt her in the so-Hollywood “Day in the Diet” fantasy strip, which features George Clooney arriving unannounced with hot sausage biscuits, hash browns and a double chocolate chip “crappicino” from Mickey D’s. Handwritten calorie charts (her recommended plan only provides about 1,350 calories, a bit low for healthy weight loss), eating plans and recipes and lists of “dodgy foods” round out this quirky but useful motivational tool for achieving thinner peace.

No time? No problem!

Weak-willed? Time-strapped? Get The 90-Second Fitness Solution: The Most Time-Efficient Workout Ever for a Healthier, Stronger, Younger You (Atria, $25, 256 pages, ISBN 9781416566489). New York trainer Pete Cerqua probably got sick of clients moaning about their desire for defined tank-top arms without having a minute to do a thing about it. His brilliant 15minute-per-week workout promises to beat cardio at shedding pounds and reduce bodies by a half-dress size without changing food choices. His simple illustrated exercises, which only require resolve, a wall and a floor, are done in 90-second reps using pauses and holding weights in key positions rather than slow movements. Busting myths up and down the fitness spectrum, Cerqua advocates four simple secrets to success: short workouts, simplified eating, fewer supplements and a stress-proof life to eliminate timeconsuming symptoms, not to mention life-altering illness. Bright, clean and breezy with its “Ask Pete” sidebars, real-life 90-Second Success Stories, speed reader’s synopses, lightning-fast gourmet recipes and oversized exercise scorecards, this is the trend-setting fitness guide for the rest of us. o

NONFICTION

Third chapter offers second chances

By Linda Stankard We can’t stay 49 forever. When we cross the half-century mark, the low distant rumbling of “Time’s winged chariot,” so easily kept at bay before, suddenly sounds alarmingly close and sobering. As renowned sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot notes in The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50, both men and women at this juncture begin to feel “the years closing in on them; they appreciate that every day counts in a life that will inevitably end sooner and sooner.” But far from despairing, resting on their laurels, or simply soaking in sunsets, Lawrence-Lightfoot finds that in increasing numbers, people in their “Third Chapter” are using this time “to bring the pieces together,” to integrate their long-held values and the dreams they have too-long deferred, with their actions and behaviors going forward.

An education professor at Harvard and the author of eight previous books, Lawrence-Lightfoot spent two years traveling the country interviewing men and women ages 50 to 75 who saw themselves as “new learners,” people who The Third Chapter were finding new ways of “changing, adapting, exploring, By Sara Lawrencemastering, and channeling their energies, skills, and pas- Lightfoot sions into new domains of learning.” Part chronicler, part Farrar, Straus cheerleader, she witnessed their inspirational endeavors $24, 240 pages, first-hand. “I watched a fifty-five-year-old biologist take ISBN 9780374275495 Also available on audio surfing lessons . . . followed in the footsteps of a seventyyear-old architect going on her first archeological dig.”

As we “reshape our culture’s understanding” of education, wisdom, productivity and work after age 50, Lawrence-Lightfoot stresses that our society must also provide the “necessary institutions and infrastructures” that allow people to continue to contribute.

And in spite of differences in situation, circumstance or goals, she noticed that people who were successful at aging shared certain characteristics—a willingness to “take risks, experience vulnerability and uncertainty, learn from . . . younger generations, and develop new relationships of support and intimacy.” o Linda Stankard is a few pages into her third chapter and no stranger to reinvention.

CAREERS

Less can be more, in the world of work

By Linda M. Castellitto ow’s the time to usher in the new year—and perhaps a new approach to your career. If you’ve resolved in 2009 to work smarter, be more productive, follow your dreams or find more fun in the daily 9-to-5, this quartet of books will come in handy.

N

Back to basics Is your life overscheduled and overrun by clutter, whether piles of paper on your desk or way too many commitments on your calendar? Leo Babauta has the solution. In The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential . . . in Business and in Life (Hyperion, $16.95, 192 pages, ISBN 9781401309701) he has created “a how-to manual on how to simplify and focus on the essential. How to do less while accomplishing more.” Babauta isn’t just paying lip service to the importance of learning to focus on what’s important. Over the last few years, he’s accomplished quite a list of goals (running two marathons, doubling his income, eliminating his debt, writing this book) while parenting six children. His secret lies in his ability to focus on one thing at a time rather than trying to juggle too many things at once. In the book, Babauta offers targeted suggestions for slowly but surely finding focus (and thus, greater efficiency). A 30-day challenge provides a kick-start, and simplification strategies and tips abound.

Control is key David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, published in 2001, sold a million copies and significantly increased demand for Allen’s Getting Things Done, or GTD, seminars, delivered at companies and government agencies worldwide.

Not surprisingly, he found time to write another book: Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life (Viking, $25.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9780670019953). This time around, he offers “new and deeper perspectives about why [the GTD] information works as well as it does and how universally it can be applied.” The first few chapters explain the GTD concept and set up Allen’s plan for Making It All Work. Perspective is important to this process, and the author skillfully frames the various levels of perspective as distances, which range from 50,000 feet (career, purpose, lifestyle) to 10,000 feet (current projects) to “runway” (daily actions, like managing email). The author says adhering to his principles will enable you to “quickly gain coherence and reorient yourself for the next round when you’re faced with disruption”—a useful skill to have in a recession, for sure.

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Entrepreneurial excitement Donny Deutsch’s CNBC television show “The Big Idea” profiled entrepreneurs who’ve achieved the American Dream of having, well, a big idea, and working hard to make it a reality. In the show’s companion book, The Big Idea: How to Make Your Entrepreneurial Dreams Come True, from the “Aha Moment” to Your First Million (Hyperion, $25.95, 272 pages, ISBN 9781401323219), written with Catherine Whitney, Deutsch’s energy and enthusiasm are infectious. The Big Idea is a fine mix of advice gleaned from his own experiences running an ad agency, plus stories of successful idea-implementers who have appeared on his TV show. Those profiled include the founders of Subway, Spanx and Sam Adams, plus proprietors of lesser-known companies like the Ugly Talent Agency, which fills the need for regular-looking folks on movie sets and in magazines. This book will serve as a useful how-to manual for would-be entrepreneurs, and provide “If they can do it, so can I!” inspiration.

Cubicle-bound creativity

Unlike most career-related books, Who Took All the Paperclips? Fun Things to Do with Office Supplies When the Boss Isn’t Looking (Running Press, $12.95, 136 pages, ISBN 9780762432585) supports—nay, encourages—pilfering office supplies. Author Rachel Rifat advocates using those Post-its and paperclips to make crafts that will perk up a boring cubicle. Rifat opens her compendium of crafts with “Matchstick Incense: When nature calls and the whole office doesn’t need to know!” and includes step-by-step instructions for a beaded privacy curtain and a pillow made from bubble-wrap, among other projects. Quirky illustrations and funny captions add to the book’s appeal, as does the author’s explanation of why she left her own corporate job: “she decided she could not stand to see another manager wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts at a beer bust.” It’s hard to argue with that. o 18 Linda M. Castellitto makes Post-it origami in North Carolina.

THE SPOKEN WORD The comforts of Alexander McCall Smith Having weathered the election and the holidays, I think we’re entitled to the kind of comfort that comes from listening to a favorite author spin a signature tale.

Isabel Dalhousie makes another most welcome appearance in The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday (Recorded Books, $29.99, 7.75 hours unabridged, ISBN 9781436141369), the fifth in Alexander McCall Smith’s leisurely paced series of mild-mannered, thought-inducing mysteries (no grit, no gore, no guns) set in Edinburgh. Now the owner and editor of The Review of Applied Ethics, Isabel is her own best disciple, applying ethics as she takes on dicey issues or, as she puts it herself, gives in to her penchant for nosiness. The problem that’s landed in her lap this time is the ruined reputation of a good doctor and suspicion of wrongBY SUKEY HOWARD ful doings by a powerful pharma. Isabel, so wonderfully evinced in Davina Porter’s burr-burnished narration, is a total charmer, a smart, independent 40-something with a handsome, much younger, bassoon-playing beau who’s the father of her sweet toddler, Charlie. Isabel’s curiosity about everyone she meets and her strikingly civil insights, liberally sprinkled with quotes from W.H. Auden, make her the next best thing to Precious Ramotswe.

They’ve got your number Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, Big Brother is crunching you. And in our digitally propelled universe, you really can’t hide—your preferences and predilections, how you vote, shop, read, travel, make a date, pick a mate, choose a movie or a rental car are quantifiable from the data trail you leave on your computer, cell phone, credit card and more. Just who is analyzing what is all laid out in Stephen Baker’s own very accessible analysis, The Numerati (Blackstone Audiobooks, $29.95, 8 hours unabridged, ISBN 9781433249303), narrated with smooth, understated understanding by Paul Michael Garcia. There’s an almost bottomless sea of data out there—in one month, Yahoo, for example, accumulates 110 billion pieces of information about its customers—useless unless people with the right smarts can summon meaning from it.

The numerati (mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists) have those smarts, and by collaborating with all sorts of experts in other fields, are beginning to make the first predictive models of humanity. How it impacts us now and how it will increasingly impact and direct our future is a revelation; fascinating and a bit scary, but intelligence from the edge of the cutting edge we all need.

Sukey’s favorite One can only hope that Balram Halwai, the hero/ anti-hero of Aravind Adiga’s debut, Man Booker Prizewinning novel, The White Tiger (Tantor Media, $34.99, 9 hours unabridged, ISBN 9781400106653), is not totally typical of those who have made it in India’s new ITpowered boom. He’s a go-getter par excellence, a man of low caste from the heart of India’s “darkness,” who’s pulled himself out of miserable servitude and into the light of successful entrepreneurship in Bangalore; he’s also a self-confessed and unrepentant murderer. Balram refers quite matter-of-factly to the bloody event early in his tale of moving from scrubbing filthy tearoom floors in his village to becoming a driver for a wealthy young businessman in Delhi. But the details come later after we’ve seen what his excoriating eyes have seen—a culture that thrives on corruption, a wildly inequitable society where caste structure, fear and hopelessness keeps millions caged in grinding poverty. John Lee’s pitch-perfect, Indian-accented narration gives Balram a voice that makes his incisive, black-humored take on contemporary Indian society compelling, real and riveting. I read the book before I listened to the audio and, this time, the audio wins hands down.

Mystery maven alert Don’t miss Joe Mantegna’s reading of Robert B. Parker’s latest Spenser caper, Rough Weather (Random House Audio, $29.95, 5.5 hours unabridged, ISBN 9780739339985). o

INTERVIEW

Think like an animal

Temple Grandin teaches readers how to give their pets a happy home

T

“Usually—but not always—the more freedom you give an animal to act naturally, the better.”

Grandin, who has targeted massive industrial farming companies and meat plants as well as the average pet owner with her award-winning animal welfare work.

“I feel strongly we have to give animals a decent life,” she says by phone from Fort Collins, where she is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University.

Grandin’s work with animals has been strongly influenced by DR. TEMPLE her own autism, a condition that has helped her understand how GRANDIN animals perceive the world. She has explored the connection in two best-selling books, Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.

Her extraordinary new book, Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals (Houghton Mifflin, $26, 288 pages, ISBN 9780151014897) makes a connection between the humane treatment of farm animals and the physically and emotionally healthy life that household pets deserve.

Most animal behavior—pleasant or obnoxious—is driven by “the blue ribbon emotions,” according to Grandin, which include seeking (searching, investigating and making sense of the environment); rage (frustration sparked by mental and/or physical restraint); fear; lust; care (maternal love and caring); and play.

She identifies the primary emotions motivating animals in various locations: the wild, the “enriched environments” of zoos, industrial farms, ranches and homes. Then she explains how to recognize the physical and behavioral signs of both stress and satisfaction to bring out the best in any species.

“Usually—but not always—the more freedom you give an animal to act naturally, the better, because normal behaviors evolved to satisfy the core emotions,” she writes.

Grandin’s interest in animal welfare dates back to her childhood, when she can recall happy, emotionally healthy dogs wandering her childhood neighborhood (“We never had leash aggression,” Grandin says), which contrasts with her current observations of lonely dogs barking and whining in isolated backyards.

But the “normal” behaviors for a dog—roaming the countryside for miles per day—

usually aren’t possible for the modern pet owner, so Grandin identifies good substitute behaviors like off-leash romps, plenty of games with humans and a rotating stash of toys which stimulate the play and seeking drives.

“Dominance aggression” or leash aggression has become extremely common in modern dogs. But Grandin suggests that aggression—which isn’t an animal emotion—has its basis in fear and anxiety, which are painful emotions that can be addressed through frustration tolerance and obedience training.

Her own childhood struggles with autism and her perception in pictures rather than words helped Grandin comprehend how animals see the world. Observing how cattle became calm in the “squeeze” chutes used to perform veterinary procedures on her aunt’s ranch, she discovered the same calming sensation for her own hyper-awareness and anxiety. After earning degrees in animal science at Arizona State and the University of Illinois she then designed a similar, humane chute now used by more than half of the beef processing plants in America.

In Animals Make Us Human, her anecdotes about working with the meat industry, zoo keepers, ranchers, farmers and other animal owners make for fascinating reading. She helps cowboys shoo “riperian loafers” grazing on protected land by getting them to work with the cattle’s nature instead of against it.

She explores why cats are trained effectively with a clicker. (“A cat . . . hasn’t evolved to read people, and he isn’t motivated to scrutinize his owner for signs. You know a cat is going to hear a click.”) She helps a horse owner figure out why his mare went “berserk” when a carriage harness was put on after discovering that a previous owner had made his harnesses out of rubber, snapping the horse’s skin like a big rubber band.

And she stares at the flip side of abuse, the farm workers too tenderhearted to put runts or sick animals down. “When employees repeatedly go through the pain of holding onto an animal and watching it suffer and then finally euthanizing it or watching it die, eventually they’re going to become desensitized to animal suffering.

That’s how habituation works.”

Grandin has dedicated her entire career to meat-industry reform and animal welfare, designing plant audits for huge corporate buyers like McDonald’s, and showing oftenreluctant CEOs that animals can be processed quickly and humanely with a few often inexpensive modifications, as well as better training and monitoring of staff.

“I would have liked that they just stopped being mean to the animals,” Grandin says.

“But if you want change to happen, you have to do it on business terms.”

She encourages her students to enter the animal welfare field, and encourages ordinary animal lovers to find out where their food comes from, then consider writing a hand-crafted note to big corporations rather than a form letter or e-mail (“Those count,” Grandin says). And she hopes that her insights into horses, dogs and cats in the book will perhaps turn a “mere” pet owner into a gentle agitator, bringing “real change on the ground.”

“You have to be consistently insistent,” Grandin says of her tireless and unsentimental work on behalf of animals. “Activists soften the steel, then I bend it into pretty grill work.” o Deanna Larson writes from Nashville.

More than life itself

By Howard Shirley In Genesis, the first task God gives man is to name the living things of the Earth. To this day, the desire to discover and categorize the creatures of our world continues—and the creatures we discover have only become more and more remarkable. In Every Living Thing: Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys, biologist Rob Dunn traces the beginnings of modern biology back to two men: Leeuwenhoek, who peered through his self-made microscope and learned that life could be smaller than anyone had imagined, and Linnaeus, who believed it was his destiny to name all creatures.

From these two explorers grew a search that has discovered lifeforms not in the thousands (as Linnaeus predicted), but in the millions. Life that exists in teeming multitudes of insect species suspended in the trees above the jungle floor. Life that spreads across that jungle floor, a single acre holding a thousand times more diversity than the entirety of Lin-

Every Living Thing

By Rob Dunn Collins $26.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780061430305

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

SCIENCE

© JOEL BENJAMIN

By Deanna Larson he smart mischievous chicken, the sweet sensitive cow and the problem-solving pig are the stuff of cartoons. But these almost human qualities are based in reality, according to scientist and animal welfare pioneer Dr. Temple Grandin, and that’s hard to swallow when the animals become breakfast or dinner.

“All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain,” she writes. All sentient beings—from wildlife and zoo residents to farm animals and family pets—deserve greater understanding, humane treatment and respect, according to

naeus’ native Sweden. Life that lives in superheated poisonous vents at the deepest depths of the oceans and perhaps even life that thrives in the airless, radiation-soaked distances of space. Every Living Thing is a journey into the marvelous, miraculous and unimaginable realm of life.

It is also a journey into the equally marvelous minds of the men and women who seek to discover, name and understand everything within that realm. Dunn looks into their stories, revealing brilliance mixed with wildness, obsession with vision, perseverance with stubbornness, all wrapped up in the desire to know. From forests heights to the sea floor, from the confines of a petri dish to the vastness of the stars, the reader travels through the domain of life, with Dunn serving as a biologist’s Virgil.

Writing with heart and light touches of humor, Dunn steers the lay reader through the heady, improbable reaches of biology without getting lost in Latin names or technical theory. Engaging, compelling and as thoroughly fascinating as life itself, Every Living Thing is a masterful view into the world of biological science—and one that will leave the reader looking at life with wonder. o 19 Howard Shirley writes from Franklin, Tennessee.

SHORT STORIES

Take a journey around the world in stories

By Harvey Freedenberg rom Mexico, to the former Soviet Union, to England, Japan and the United States, the reach of the short story spans the globe. These five collections, some by established authors and others by writers just beginning to make their mark, offer a generous introduction to the richness of modern short fiction.

F

Chilly slices of modern life Ali Smith, author of the critically praised novel The Accidental, has observed, “Stories can change lives if we’re not careful.” In The First Person and Other Stories (Pantheon, $23.95, 224 pages, ISBN 9780307377715), her fourth collection, she offers her unsettling take on contemporary life.

Smith’s book is most notable for its air of experimentation. The story that opens the collection, “True Short Story,” begins with a writer in a café, observing two men and imagining the story of their relationship before halting the exercise. (“I stopped making them up. It felt a bit wrong to.”) It concludes with a series of pithy observations on the nature of the short form from writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and Alice Munro.

Smith’s style is terse and edgy, almost daring the reader to settle in. In most of these stories, the characters are nameless, and it’s only possible to know their setting because of a passing allusion to London or some feature of British life.

One of the more startling tales is “The Child,” in which a woman discovers a baby abandoned in her grocery store shopping cart. When she takes the child with her, it begins spouting conservative political dogma, soon laced with racist and sexist jokes. The First Person and Other Stories won’t appeal to everyone’s taste, but those who like their stories provocative and enigmatic are likely to find it a satisfying work.

for his science fiction. His collection, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno (Pantheon, $21.95, 272 pages, ISBN 9780307377265), translated by Andrew Driver, contains several examples in that genre, but it also sparkles with biting pieces of social and political satire that reveal a formidable talent.

Tsutsui excels at creating protagonists living in worlds uncomfortably recognizable as our own and yet decidedly dystopian. In “Rumours of Me,” a young man suddenly begins to hear and read news stories about the most mundane aspects of his daily life. “Anything can become big news if the media report it,” a newspaper editor tells him, bringing to mind the short-lived obsession with “Joe the Plumber” in last fall’s presidential campaign. “Commuter Army” is a brilliant satire on the insanity of war, imagining platoons of soldiers who board the train each morning like office workers, the fortunate survivors returning home the same evening.

“Hello, Hello, Hello” features a meddlesome “Household Economy Consultant” whose bizarre counsel sheds a revealing light on modern capitalism and our consumer culture.

The title story, the longest in the collection, is a complex exploration of human sexuality and evolutionary biology that plays out in the context of a space adventure.

Throughout this wildly varied assortment of tales, Tsutsui’s voice is witty and quirky, seducing us to suspend our disbelief for even the most fanciful narrative.

Riding the waves

Whether as a force for life or one of destruction, water in all its forms is the unifying theme in writer and artist Peter Selgin’s powerful collection, Drowning Lessons (University of Georgia Press, $24.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9780820332109). Selgin is never heavy-handed in his use of metWeird, wonderful and wild aphor, and it’s rewarding to trace Although he’s unknown to the American audience, the skill with which he employs Yasutaka Tsutsui has captured awards in his native Japan it in many of these 13 stories.

In the opening tale, “Swimming,” an elderly man disgruntled with the state of his marriage ofIt’s a bit early to say, but it looks as though 2009 just might be fers swimming the year of the short story. We’re especially looking forward to lessons to an atthese collections: tractive younger woman. “Our FEBRUARY Cups Are Bottomless” features a We’ll Always Have Paris by Ray Bradbury (Morrow, $24.95, man in a coffee shop in a dying 224 pages, ISBN 9780061670138). The newest collection from this mill town, contemplating the award-winning writer is billed for all ages. suicide notes he’s written as the Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff (Hyperion/Voice, $23.95, town’s two rivers rise in a raging 320 pages, ISBN 9781401340865). The imaginative author of The downpour.

Monsters of Templeton returns.

The most dramatic story in DrownMarch ing Lessons is “The Sea Cure.” In it, two Don’t Cry by Mary Gaitskill (Pantheon, $23.95, 240 pages, brothers take a trip to Mexico. Lewis beISBN 9780375424199). A new work from Gaitskill is a publishing comes ill after drinking the local water, event—readers are in for a disturbing, entertaining ride. and Clarke meets a mysterious woman Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson (Bloomsbury, $25, 304 pages, he believes will help secure medical treatISBN 9781596915749). One of America’s most talented short-story ment for Lewis, whose condition becomes writers offers a set of sharply observed tales set in the Southwest. more desperate with each page, until the story reaches its haunting climax. The April collection concludes with the alternately How It Ended by Jay McInerney (Knopf, $25.95, 352 pages, hilarious and touching “My Search for ISBN 9780307268051). This massive collection contains 22 stories, Red and Gray Wide-Striped Pajamas.” Its only seven of which have been previously published. o narrator suffers from mysterious fainting —TRISHA PING 20 spells while wandering New York City JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Tantalizing tales to come

seeking a pair of pajamas like the ones worn by his late father, his search a metaphor for the attempt to find his way in the world.

Coming to America When a young writer’s first two stories are published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic, it’s a safe bet she’s on the fast track to recognition in the world of literary fiction. In One More Year (Spiegel & Grau, $21.95, 208 pages, ISBN 9780385524391), Sana Krasikov, born in Ukraine and now living in New York, demonstrates why the early notice she’s achieved is well-deserved.

Krasikov’s fiction focuses on her fellow immigrants. Unlike the affluent Bengalis depicted in the stories of another young star of contemporary short fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri, however, her characters are struggling to plant their feet firmly on the first rung of the ladder of success in America. Most of the stories are set in Westchester County, New York, but it’s hardly the country club and cocktail party world of John Cheever.

In stories like “Companion,” “Asal” and “Maia in Yonkers,” women from the former Soviet Union find themselves in low-end personal care jobs. Maia’s son sums up her plight when he berates her, “Every year you say ‘It’s one more year, one more year!’ ” and his blunt indictment sums up the predicament of most of Krasikov’s characters. Representative is Anya, the protagonist of “Better Half,” 22 years old, married for a few months and working as a waitress, who observes that “trying to escape your tedious fate only led you back to it.”

Their task won’t be easy, but at the end of this consistently strong collection we’re left with a feeling that the determination by Krasikov’s characters to establish themselves in a new land will be rewarded.

Living and loving in Mexico Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico’s most distinguished living writer, offers a rich collection of stories in Happy Families (Random House, $26, 352 pages, ISBN 9781400066889). Taking his ironic title from Tolstoy’s legendary observation, Fuentes exposes the dark corners of his characters’ emotional lives with a piercing light.

Fuentes’ prose is lush, almost poetic, as presented in this translation by the distinguished translator Edith Grossman. Indeed, after each story there is a free verse “chorus,” many of them illuminating some troubling aspect of modern Mexican life.

In its 16 stories, Happy Families covers the subject of love in all its complexity. We meet a long-married couple raking over the dying coals of their relationship (“Conjugal Ties (1)”), a priest who’s fathered an illegitimate daughter and lives with her in an isolated mountain village at the base of a volcano (“The Father’s Servant”) and a mother desperate to rescue her son from a life of street crime (“The Mariachi’s Mother”). Fuentes is a keen student of human behavior, and if his Mexican historic and cultural references occasionally may be puzzling to non-Mexican readers, the emotions on display are universal. In “The Discomfiting Brother,” the story of an impoverished man who returns to the home of his prosperous brother after more than 30 years, the former notes, “Life consists in our getting used to the fact that everything will be badly for us.” That solemn observation serves as a fitting benediction to this collection by an acknowledged literary master. o Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

CURRENT EVENTS

Dissecting six decades of American Mideast policy

Visit us online at www.bookpage.com

Henry Kissinger that American negotiating initiatives with Israel and the Palestinians had to be vetted first by the Israeli side. According to Tyler, Presidents Carter, Reagan and G.W. Bush ignored the pledge when it interfered with U.S. interests.

A World of Trouble gives us the big picture of key events in the Middle East for roughly the last six decades. This book is hard to put down and is an excellent and extremely readable guide to how we got into the pres-

ent situation in this troubled region. o Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

A World of Trouble

By Patrick Tyler Farrar, Straus $30, 640 pages ISBN 9780374292898 Also available on audio

Berkley, $7.99, 9780425225462

Jove ,$7.99, 9780515145809

Signet, $9.99, 9780451225702

Signet Eclipse, $7.99, 9780451225757

PAPERBACK PICKS PARANORMAL

PARANORMAL

Betrayal Dismas Hardy agrees to take an appeal to overturn the murder conviction of National Guard reservist.

As Dismas delves into the case, he begins to uncover a terrible truth that drops him right into the complicated world of government conspiracy, assassination, and betrayal.

Dawnkeepers A frightening vision leads Nate Blackhawk to distance himself from warrior Alexis Gray in spite of the intense passion he feels for her. Thrown together once more, they must reassemble seven Mayan artifacts that hold the key to preventing the end of the world.

Murder Game The queen of paranormal romance (USA Today) returns to the world of the GhostWalkers. As bodies pile up, a violent new cross-country game is blamed on the GhostWalkers.

To clear their name, they infiltrate the dangerous sport. And to survive it, they must ignore the rules.

Night Huntress The fifth book to feature the D’Artigo sisters—half-human, halfFae operatives for the Otherworld Intelligence Agency. Delilah, a werecat, has to fight off the demon general who stole the third Spirit Seal and is now out for blood.

Onyx, $7.99, 9780451412669

Jove, $9.99, 9780515145700

Berkley, $7.99, 9780425226230

PARANORMAL

Signet, $7.99, 9780451225719

FICTION

FICTION

ROMANCE

PARANORMAL

FICTION

The Shooters A key DEA agent has been kidnapped by drugrunners. As much as the news angers Delta Force Officer Charley Castillo, he thinks there’s no way he could get permission to rescue the man. But he’s wrong—the President himself orders Castillo to do anything it takes—except get caught.

Star Bright In this new novel featuring the fiercely loyal Harrigan family, Rainie Hall fakes her own death to escape her murderous husband. Rainie takes refuge in the rural community of Crystal Falls, where she finds work as a bookkeeper on a horse ranch run by dangerously handsome Parker Harrigan.

Stay the Night Outlaw, immortal vampire, and art thief, Darkyn Lord Robin of Locksley has evaded authorities for the last 700 years. The prince of thieves also tends to steal the hearts of women—until the night he meets the woman who steals his: undercover federal agent Christina Renshaw.

What Time Devours Thomas Knight, the hero from On the Fifth Day, returns and is faced with a centuries-old mystery surrounding a long-lost, priceless Shakespearean play. To find it, Thomas enters a story that drags loss and death after it like one of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

By Roger Bishop Despite billions of dollars spent on the most extensive intelligence network in the world and much diplomatic activity, presidents from Eisenhower to George W. Bush have often found themselves baffled by events in the Middle East. During the last 60 years there has not been a consistent U.S. policy for the region; instead, each new president set out to pursue his own approach. As Patrick Tyler demonstrates in his sweeping and compelling history, A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East—From the Cold War to the War on Terror, this has only made the situation worse. Although there were some successes, such as the Camp David Accords under President Carter in 1978, invariably the efforts usually ended in disappointment and the U.S. has often found itself responding to events rather than initiating them.

Tyler covered the Middle East and other parts of the globe for the Washington Post and the New York Times and is the author of A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China and Running Critical: The Silent War, Rickover, and General Dynamics. His latest book is the result of exceptional research, including memoirs, oral histories, recently declassified government records and his own interviews with important figures. His narrative demonstrates the crucial roles played by individuals, the importance of timing and the influences of domestic politics and specific groups of constituents on decision-makers. Tyler presents the region as perceived by those who live there as well as those here in the U.S., offering enough information to challenge the biases, prejudices and preconceptions of many readers.

The author devotes much attention to the Israeli-Arab dispute and writes that nothing in the region would be the same after the Six-Day War in 1967, which led to periodic outbreaks of war and much conflict in the years to come. Tyler considers that war a failure of American diplomacy.

The Arabs hoped President Johnson would support the return of the territory captured by Israel, as President Eisenhower had done a decade earlier. But Johnson was deeply occupied with the Vietnam War and could not devote time to the complexities of the Middle East. It was during the term of his successor, Richard Nixon, that the U.S. strongly committed itself to arming Israel and Iran.

Jimmy Carter was the first American president emphatically committed to finding a comprehensive settlement to the Arab-Israeli dispute; no other president got into the details of peacemaking and showed that compromise and peace were possible. It was also during the Carter years that Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar began to work closely with the White House.

Though Prince Bandar is not immune to controversy, his was one of the longest and closest connections by a foreign envoy in U.S. history.

Tyler also discusses the pledge made by

21

PERSONAL FINANCE

Bouncing back

How to manage your investments during the downturn

By Susan Rucci hat a difference a year can make, especially if you have a 401k or other investments in the stock market. Now that the Wall Street bubble has burst, what’s an individual investor to do? A new batch of books sets out to prove that even in bad economic times, you can turn your stock portfolio, bank account or retirement fund around and rebound financially.

W

Taming the Bear Two of the best books are part of Wiley’s Little Book, Big Profits series that focuses on all things financial, from investment strategies to long-term economic trends. My favorite is The Little Book That Saves Your Assets: What the Rich Do to Stay Wealthy in Up and Down Markets (Wiley, $19.95, 208 pages, ISBN 9780470250044) by David M. Darst, a managing director at Morgan Stanley. Darst says to thrive financially today you must practice asset allocation, compiling a financial portfolio with assets that make money when the economy is doing well, but also including assets that make money when the economy slows down. He says it’s the approach the wealthy use to maintain their lifestyle even in tough economic times. Darst writes in a reader-friendly manner, often using football analogies to make a point. One of his strongest chapters is called “Building Your House,” which compares a financial portfolio to a person’s home. He writes that much like a house, a portfolio should reflect an investor’s personality and should be “built” to have a mixture of assets that are functioning (steady and reliable, like bonds) and fun (riskier, but with a potentially bigger payoff, like stocks). In another compelling chapter called “The Road Less Traveled That You Should Take,” Darst rightly argues that most people no longer have any choice but to be actively engaged in managing their financial portfolio because the days of a guaranteed pension are gone forever. Now all the responsibility rests on the individual.

Another recent book in the series is also well edited and on point. The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets: How to Keep Your Portfolio Up When the Market Is Down (Wiley, $19.95, 264 pages, ISBN 9780470383780), by investment advisor Peter Schiff, is a playbook on how to preserve wealth even as the economy falters. After a brief history lesson on the U.S. stock market, Schiff outlines an investment plan that taps into the larger and financially stronger global economy. He particularly likes the money-making opportunities in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). All have seen their economies boom thanks to manufacturing; Schiff is particularly fond of China.

Besides the BRIC bloc, Schiff likes Canada, Australia and New Zealand as good wealthbuilding opportunities through investments in raw materials, oil and minerals. He also recommends investing in precious metals such as gold (either in physical gold or in mining stocks). He closes out his book with a provocative look at the 2008 presidential election and argues that the American investor would be wise to wait until at least 2012 before re-investing in the market. Schiff wrote the bestseller Crash Proof, which accurately predicted the current Wall Street turmoil, so his words are particularly valuable now.

Think globally JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Another book that urges a more global approach to your financial portfolio is Game Over: How You Can Prosper in a Shattered Economy (Business Plus, $25.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9780446544801) by Stephen Leeb. The book went to print just as the Dow began its tumble last fall. Leeb’s premise is fairly depressing; he argues that the economy will take years to recover from inflation, the weakening dollar and, most importantly, runaway national debt. He spends more than half the book discussing resource shortages like oil and water (the latter being the more interesting read of the two) and emerging alternative energies. Leeb urges investors to create portfolios that are inflation-proof and to invest in industries that produce high rates of return in spite of high inflation. Like other authors featured here, he urges investment in gold through exchange-traded funds or individual gold companies. Another interesting nugget from Leeb: he says the last thing any investor should do is turn investments into cash. He contends that money in a checking or savings account will not earn nearly the amount of interest needed to compensate for the decline in its value because of inflation.

The Jubak Picks: 50 Stocks That Will Rebuild Your Wealth and Safeguard Your Future (Crown, $25, 352 pages, ISBN 9780307407818) sums up the latest strategies of Jim Jubak, senior markets editor for the website MSN Money, where more than a million investors click on his monthly “Jubak Journal” for financial advice. Jubak asserts that investing in the right macro trends will make you money, and he includes specific, detailed stock picks for each of his suggestions. He says the best investments right now can be 22 found outside the U.S., particularly in China and India; in food (which he calls the new oil), through agriculture and food-commodity stocks; and in technology. Jubak ends his

book with a chapter titled “50 best stocks in the world.” Exxon, precious metals companies and search engine Google are among those that make the list.

The Ten Roads to Riches: The Way the Wealthy Got There (And How You Can Too!) (Wiley, $24.95, 228 pages, ISBN 9780470285367) by Forbes columnist Ken Fischer might be the most fun-to-read book in this group because it delves into one of Americans’ favorite topics: how the rich get rich. Fischer knows that road well; he’s a self-made billionaire who’s on the Forbes 400 list and owns a firm that manages $45 billion in assets. Fischer says there are 10 ways to acquire wealth a lot faster than the idealized “work hard, save your money” mantra. The richest road is also the most obvious and the one most people take—starting your own business. But there are other ways, including managing other people’s money, owning real estate and even turning celebrity into wealth. Fischer points out that boxer George Foreman retired from the sport completely broke. An indoor grill bearing his name changed his financial status and now Foreman is not only a household name (at least in the kitchen) but also worth millions. Single women, and maybe some single men as well, will be amused and perhaps inspired by the chapter which outlines marriage as another way to acquire wealth. My, how times have changed. Fischer says you should forget about marrying a millionaire—now you need to marry a billionaire to acquire true wealth.

Most of these books rely on the premise that the reader has money to invest and time to wait out the investment payoffs.

What they don’t address are the day-to-day financial struggles so many people are facing as jobs vanish and the economy spirals downward. The need for help in those areas should create a bull market in financial advice books as the new year progresses. o Susan Rucci is a TV news producer who writes from Washington, D.C.

Putting your house in order This will be another tough year in the housing market, with foreclosures expected to remain at their highest numbers in more than a decade. Two recent books offer timely advice for those facing difficult choices about their homes.

How to Sell a House Fast in a Slow Real Estate Market (Wiley, $19.95, 240 pages, ISBN 9780470382608) by William Bronchick and Ray Cooper is a smart, fairly fast read on what to do to get your house sold quickly. Some suggestions are obvious: invest in paint, new rugs and curb appeal. Other advice is simply interesting, like knowing the supply quotient for your neighborhood (divide the number of homes for sale by the number of closings in the last 30 days). If you have the time and/or live in the home, the authors recommend you do the selling yourself—you’ll get to pocket a real estate agent’s three to six percent commission. And there are good ideas about what to do if several months have passed and your home still hasn’t sold (try the round-robin strategy, which involves holding an open house over a two-day period and then taking bids from all prospective buyers).

If you’re facing foreclosure, pick up a copy of Stop Foreclosure Now (AMACOM, $19.95, 368 pages, ISBN 9780814413302), by attorney and mortgage expert Lloyd Segal. Lloyd self-published Stop Foreclosure Now in 2007 with considerable success; AMACOM recently issued a paperback edition. For less than $20, the book is a wealth of information on the foreclosure process, walking the reader through every detail. Early on, Segal advises the reader not to panic because foreclosure is a lengthy process that can take anywhere from three months (in nonjudicial foreclosures) to two years to complete. He urges homeowners to use that time to figure out whether it’s better to try to keep the property or lose it. There’s a lengthy section on refinancing as well as a chapter devoted to members of the military on active duty who are legally protected from foreclosure and may actually be entitled to a lower interest rate. Foreclosure is complicated and while Segal argues that a homeowner can handle the process, the wiser move still seems to be hiring an attorney to help you navigate the system. o —SUSAN RUCCI

MEMOIR

FAMILY

A novelist’s harrowing journey

Caring for a special needs sister

By Pete Croatto At one point in the riveting Losing Everything, author David Lozell Martin reveals that he “had to write this book to understand how I could have made so little progress in forty-five years.” Readers usually don’t find such a sentence in a memoir, which some authors use as an excuse to take a victory lap. Martin doesn’t do that. Maybe it’s because even before he put a gun to his head in the hopes of ending his personal and professional freefall, there wasn’t much time for celebrating.

Before losing his wife, his money and his home, Martin grew up with an abusive father who had a murderous distrust of his wife. Martin’s mother was far from a stabilizing influence herself, spending time in a mental hospital and even inviting 14-year-old David to have sex with her. Martin, thankfully, left home, working at steel mills to pay for college. He sabotaged his first marriage by writing nonstop and devoting his free time to drinking and philandering. By the time he married his beloved second wife, his future as a lucrative full-time novelist looked bright. The couple handled the prosperity poorly, as their “contempt” for money had a devastating effect: “When the successful years came Losing Everything to a close, we didn’t have the sense or courage to live poor

By David Lozell Martin again,” he writes.

Simon and Schuster Obviously, he pulled himself out of the abyss and found $24, 224 pages his way to stability, but the redemptive narrative isn’t what ISBN 9780743294331 carries the book; it’s Martin’s brutal honesty in evaluating his life and his relationships. His refreshing penchant for straight talk keeps you reading, even when you’re dreading the consequences of his choices.

Martin comes across as a regular guy who has made some awful decisions, but he accepts the blame without whining or compromise and thus earns our respect. The later chapters of Losing Everything have Martin espousing life lessons and remembering the dead, sections which seem to be lifted from a different book by a cheerier author. Still, you can’t help but smile, because despite his earlier assertion, Martin has made progress. o Pete Croatto is a freelance writer in East Brunswick, New Jersey.

By Rebecca Bain Anyone who’s ever seen a three-year-old throw a major tantrum knows it can be a harrowing experience. Now imagine how much more harrowing it would be if the tantrum—complete with screaming, hitting, breaking things and even flinging packages of chicken around a grocery store—were the actions of a mature woman with the mind of a three-year-old. Terrell Harris Dougan knows only too well, because that person is Irene, her sister. Dougan writes about their relationship in That Went Well: Adventures in Caring For My Sister. It’s a real eye-opener for people who have never dealt, on a personal or bureaucratic level, with the difficulties of caring for a mentally challenged individual.

When Irene was born in 1946, it was soon evident that the baby was “different,” but the family didn’t know the extent of her problems until she was tested at age six. They were told Irene’s IQ was around 57, she would never learn to read or write, that emotionally she was about three—and that she would never fit into the public school system. Refusing to send Irene to a state institution, one of the few options at the time, Dougan’s father instead decided to start a That Went Well school for children with developmental disabilities.

As an adult, Dougan inherited the torch, becoming a key By Terrell Harris figure in establishing legislative changes in the rights of this Dougan country’s mentally disabled citizens. But her relationship Hyperion 224 pages with Irene is the warm heart of this book. Despite Irene’s $24.95, ISBN 9781401323295 tantrums, strong will and manipulative behavior, Dougan is quick to point out the many joys she has found in her relationship with her sister. Irene will always have the delightful qualities of childhood—she believes in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny—and she can be hysterically funny.

Providing care to those who cannot care for themselves is an ever-growing concern in today’s society. That Went Well is a pleasant reminder that joy can be found in the role of caregiver, so long as patience and a sense of humor are a healthy part of the process. o Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

Independent Voices for an Independent World The Religious Subversion of Democracy

Journey to my Master Teacher

We have no evidence of a “super-being” who has influence on our lives. The only god we know is the god of chance.

Thousands of students from around the world pursue knowledge at Ramtha’s school. They all share an appreciation for the powerful being— the beloved teacher, Ramtha.

9780976709718 $17.95

9780615239101 $25.95

Concerto

This is the compelling story of Governor Sarah Palin’s battle with Alaska’s big oil companies and her record as an administrator.

Erik, Philharmonic of the Americas conductor, and Alex, its arts manager, develop more than a client/agent relationship.

9780982163207 $21.95

9780977394609 $14.00

Distributed by

Weebeastology: Volume 1

Janos Starker: King of Cellists

Discover the existence of an ancient, fictional species known as the Weebeasts. Purchase the book through AtlasBooks in January and receive a free plush Weebeasts toy!

Cellist, Janos Starker made an impact on the world of music. His music, teachings and relationships made him a fantastic cellist, recording artist, and teacher.

9780980188899 $19.99

9780975473405 $24.95

Available at your favorite bookstore, online at www.atlasbooks.com or by calling 1-800-BOOKLOG.

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Sarah Takes on Big Oil

23

CHILDREN’S BOOKS Understanding children caught between cultures

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

As Alvarez began to help out in the classroom, she realized that not only was the

By Alice Cary “If you live and pay attention,” says writer Julia Alvarez, “life gives you so much to Mexican girl disoriented, but so were her classmates. Over time the children befriendwrite about.” Alvarez has indeed been paying attention. As a child, she and her fam- ed each other, until the girl suddenly returned to Mexico with an aunt, while her parily fled the Dominican Republic to escape the harsh dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo ents continued to work in Vermont.

“The kids were really traumatized that their classmate (her father had secretly been involved in the underground). had disappeared,” Alvarez explains. “This doesn’t happen Many miles and many years later, she speaks from an office in their United States, that somebody disappears because at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she is writer-inthey’re not supposed to be here, and their parents could be residence and the author of books for both adults and chilrounded up and they would be deported and put in holddren, such as the award-winning How the Garcia Girls Lost ing. All of this can be very troubling stuff in fourth and fifth Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies and Something grade. And I thought that we need a story to understand to Declare. what’s happening to us.”

Her latest is Return to Sender (Knopf, $16.99, 240 pages, Return to Sender tells this tale from both sides, using ISBN 9780375858383), a novel for nine- to 12-year-olds the voices of Tyler, a Vermont farm boy, and Mari, who was about a sixth-grade boy on a Vermont farm who befriends born in Mexico and now lives in a trailer as her dad and unthe daughter of undocumented Mexican workers. cle work on Tyler’s family farm. Tyler’s father was injured in Alvarez and her husband live on their own small farm, a tractor accident and can no longer handle the daily chores along with cows, rabbits, chickens and a new barn. She by himself. Mari’s mother has been missing for nearly a year, speaks on the day before America’s presidential election, and Mari and her sisters aren’t sure if she is dead or alive. prompting her to muse, “When I get to vote, I get weepy. I Their mother returned to Mexico when her own mother know what it costs to get to this. Members of my family died was ill, but she hasn’t been heard from since attempting to so I could have this day.” secretly cross the border to return to the U.S. When 10-year-old Alvarez and her family arrived in New Does Alvarez worry about introducing such heavy conYork City in 1960, books and later writing became her ticket cepts to young readers? to freedom. “We had landed in this land that I had always “I’m not just a writer,” she replies. “I’ve also been an eduheard was the home of the free and the brave, but I didn’t cator for three decades. And a story protects us in a way. In find it very friendly at all,” Alvarez remembers. “The kids on JULIA ALVAREZ a sense, it’s a safe world in which to consider what’s going to the playground called me ‘spic,’ they made fun of my accent, hit you broadside in the real world. You give kids the things and they told me to go back to where I had come from.” that are bombarding them in their real lives, but it’s within Salvation came in the form of reading, guided by teach“A story protects us in a way. a safe context. It gives them a way to navigate through the ers and a librarian—and reading was something new. “I world.” came from an oral culture,” she says. “I was surrounded by It’s a safe world in which to Alvarez navigated herself through many different parts the world’s greatest storytellers, but we were not readers. I of the U.S. early in her career, working as what she calls a never saw my mother or father reading a book.”

Eventually, Alvarez became a writer, realizing that there consider what’s going to hit you “migrant writer,” teaching poetry wherever grant funding was available, including Kentucky, California, Delaware, were some stories only she could tell. She says her books North Carolina and Massachusetts. Now that she’s settled usually start with what she calls “the pebble in my shoe.” broadside in the real world.” in New England, she still travels to the Dominican Republic “It’s something that I try to shake,” she elaborates, “but I about six times a year, to see family and to visit Café Alta keep going back over it. It’s usually something that has unGracia, a 60-acre coffee farm that settled me.” she and her husband own.

Return to Sender began when a farmer brought a Mexi“The mountains here in Vermont remind me of the can farm worker in to see her husband, an ophthalmologist. Alvarez and her husband soon discovered that undocumented Mexicans were doing most of the milking on the mountains of the Dominican Republic where we have our dairy farms in their county. They met some of these workers, and Alvarez was asked farm,” she says. “We don’t have winter there, of course, but to help with a schoolgirl who didn’t know enough English to communicate with her the lush greenness of the mountains and a certain kind of accessible mentality—there’s something that’s very simpatico teachers or classmates.

Certainly Alvarez could relate—on more than one level. She notes: “It’s not just about the Vermont culture and my Dominican culture.”

Although Julia Alvarez has found a place to call home, down in the border states that [immigration] is an issue. It’s reached Vermont, and it’s so much the issue of our times: mass movements of people from one place to another. she continues to write about people caught between culAs we globalize, people become aware of other opportunities and possibilities, and tures. “Displacement is just part of the human story,” she want to create a new story for themselves—and therefore leave everything to remake says. “You don’t have to be an immigrant to write about that, because we’ve all felt it.” o their story.”

A post-war journey to adulthood

By James Neal Webb Evie Spooner is a 15-year-old New Yorker growing up in postWorld War II Queens; she loves the Dodgers, candy cigarettes, her parents and Frank Sinatra, though not necessarily in that order. She’s learning from her friends how women are supposed to act, but she doesn’t think she’ll ever be as pretty and sophisticated as her mother.

Evie’s looks apparently came from her long-departed father, a man eclipsed by her adored stepfather, Joe. Her late summer reverie is broken by his announcement that the three of them will be vacationing in Palm Beach, Florida, but this is a trip that will cover more than miles: it will be a journey from childhood to adulthood, where her loyalty will be tested and she will learn both the joy of love and the shattering pain of betrayal.

What I Saw and How I Lied, which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in November, is the marvelous new 24 book for teens by Judy Blundell, a veteran writer of more than 100 books, who is publishing under her own name for the first time.

What I Saw and How I Lied

By Judy Blundell Scholastic, $16.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780439903462 Ages 12 and up

Blundell has good reason to want her name on this work; it’s a compelling coming-of-age story of blackmail and tragedy with a strong moral center. Evie Spooner is that center, and as the awkward teen tries to fit into the social scene at a rundown hotel her father is negotiating to buy, she finds herself falling in love with handsome young Peter Coleridge, whose Long Island father has “business interests” in Palm Beach. More importantly, he served with Evie’s father in post-war Austria, and she quickly realizes that there’s more to their past connections than he’s saying. As summer wanes, her feelings for Peter increase, her stepfather’s negotiations become strained, and there’s talk of bad weather ahead. More than one kind of storm is brewing for Evie.

This beautifully written story is full of period detail, from a postwar New York City right out of Life magazine to a sleepy and sticky Florida courthouse, and its well-drawn and original characters spring to life on the page. Like much of the best literature being written for teens, this gripping novel would also make a top-notch read for adults. o James Neal Webb works in a university library.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS Fictional journals bring the past alive

MEET Jan Thomas

By MiChelle Jones ecording their lives with mere pen and paper may seem hopelessly old-fashioned, or at least counterintuitive, to today’s tech-savvy kids. As these two books show, however, there’s something to be said for a visual and written history that will never be rendered obsolete by evolving technologies. While the books represent young girls in completely different situations and times—one is a wartime diary and scrapbook, the other a lark-filled trip journal—they showcase spirited entries, artfilled pages and insight into bygone eras.

R

Flossie’s War Flossie Albright is nine years old at the start of My Secret War Diary: My History of the Second World War, 1939-1945 (Candlewick, $21.99, 144 pages, ISBN 9780763641115), written and illustrated by Marcia Williams, and she’s as spunky as a red-haired, freckled heroine should be. As war with Germany looms, Flossie’s beloved father, Archie, joins the army, leaving her to look after her great-uncle Colin and her little brother in their cottage on an estate in Dorchester, England.

This is a book to be read slowly, rationed out over a number of days, as one is drawn into a story populated with friends and an extended family of women and children evacuated from London, “Land Army” girls come to replace male farmhands, and even a Jewish “Kindertransport” from Berlin. The pages of the journal (a posh gift from the estate owner’s daughter to help Flossie cope with MY SECRET WAR DIARY. Copyright © 2008 Marcia Williams. Reproduced her father’s absence and her mother’s by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA on behalf of Walker Books, London. death) are filled with drawings, snatches of Prime Minister Churchill’s speeches, bulletins from radio and newspapers, and mementos from author Williams’ own family, including photographs, war medals and other memorabilia. There are also messages in code and dire warnings to those who read the most secret of secret passages.

The resulting chronicle is an exceptionally well-done book that is not only a great story, but also an entertaining history of wartime England in the vein of Carrie’s War or Good Night, Mr. Tom. Williams addresses a wide array of issues: missing or killed relatives; atrocities and bombings; blackouts and shortages; Yanks bearing chocolate and stockings; increased opportunities for women; the seemingly never-ending war. On particularly bad days, Flossie remembers her mother’s advice to “Draw a line under it and start again.”

(There are a number of touching references to Flossie’s mother: “I MISS HER MORE THAN THE HIGHEST SEARCHLIGHT IN WEYMOUTH! Sometimes I imagine one of them searchlights lighting up heaven and there’s Mum looking down at me and smiling one of her special smiles.”) Through it all, Flossie is a dutiful daughter, who does her bit for the war effort and matures into a bright 15-year-old by book’s end.

Meanwhile, kids who want more of Flossie’s family, or young boys who may prefer a male perspective on history, should look into Williams’ previous book, Archie’s War, which presents World War I as seen by a youngster named Archie Albright—Flossie’s father.

Charlotte, always

Rhyming Dust Bunnies (Simon & Schuster, $12.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9781416979760), is the fourth picture book by authorillustrator Jan Thomas, once again featuring her bold, bright artwork and talent for spinning hilarious stories. A former graphic designer and comic strip illustrator who made her picture book debut with What Will Fat Cat Sit On? in 2007, Thomas lives in Socorro, New Mexico.

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Charlotte in London (Chronicle, $16.99, 64 pages, ISBN 9780811856355), by Joan MacPhail Knight, illustrated by Melissa Sweet, is the fourth in a series of books that record the adventures of a little American girl living in France while her father studies the “en plein air” technique used by Claude Monet and other Impressionist painters. After escapades in Giverny, Paris and New York, Charlotte looks forward to seeing London’s sights with her best friend, while her mother is determined to sit for the leading society portraitist, John Singer Sargent.

Compared to Flossie’s, Charlotte’s life is a piece of cake. It’s 1895 and she wanders through city and countryside, rides in a hot air balloon, dines with the cream of London society and even spends an afternoon amazed by the lifelike wax figures in Madame Tussaud’s. Watercolor illustrations accompany her journal entries and vintage postcards and photographs (of Buckingham Palace, a village cottage, Sargent painting in a field), drawn mostly from the author’s private collection, help young readers imagine the Victorian era.

Like its predecessors, Charlotte in London is also packed with information about the artists and their works—both in the narrative and in an artist index—and includes reproductions of such ground-breaking paintings as Whistler’s “Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket,” Monet’s “The Thames at Charing Cross” and Turner’s “Rain, Steam, and Speed, The Great Western Railway.” This makes a fine introduction to the world of art and, for those just discovering it, the Charlotte series. o

25

CHILDREN’S BOOKS Following Honest Abe on his journey into history

By Ellen Trachtenberg id you notice how frequently Abraham Lincoln’s image was conjured during the recent presidential election? The symmetry between the early political careers of the 16th and 44th U.S. presidents seems to have captured the imaginations of many.

Adding to the fascination is an important milestone: February 12 marks the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Children’s book publishers have responded in kind, and the season brings an impressive display of new titles that chart the course of Lincoln’s life in its entirety, from lighthearted looks at pivotal moments from his youth to painterly representations of his famous speeches. There are rare glimpses of Lincoln as a family man and an engrossing new spin on biography that revisits the aftermath of the president’s assassination.

Taken as a whole, this collection is an invaluable and multifaceted lesson in American history for young readers.

D

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

What might have been Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek: A Tall, Thin Tale (Schwartz & Wade, $16.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9780375837685) takes place “on the other side of yesterday, before computers or cars, in the year 1816” as sevenyear-old Abe sets out with his good friend, Austin Gollaher, on a partridge-finding expedition down by Knob Creek. Problem is, the boys must cross the raging waters to get close enough to the birds. This proves to be a nearly impossible task, but determined to brave the danger, Abe shows his mettle. The results are nearly disastrous and if Austin wasn’t close by—well, let’s just say that the course of American history might have been drastically altered. Author Deborah Hopkinson (a BookPage contributor) and illustrator John Hendrix have created a delightful, folksy tale that depicts Lincoln before political aspiration took root.

Clever intervention from the storytellers provides a playful yet profound “what if” factor. The final pages depict President Lincoln wistfully remembering his childhood friend while Hopkinson provides the following wisdom: “Let’s remember Austin Gollaher, who, one day long ago, when no one else was there to see, saved Abe Lincoln’s life. And without Abraham Lincoln, where would we be?”

United by a cause

From Nikki Giovanni and illustrator Bryan Collier, the acclaimed duo that brought us Rosa (winner of the Coretta Scott King Award and a Caldecott Honor book), comes Lincoln and Douglass: An American Friendship (Holt, $16.95, 40 pages, ISBN 9780805082647). Here readers are treated to a glimpse of Lincoln in his formative years through the 26 stirring combination of Giovanni’s prose and Collier’s

celebrated collage depictions. This time, we’re shown the ethical parallels between the future president and his longtime ally, Frederick Douglass. When Lincoln was a newly elected congressman, Douglass paid him a visit, and “A friendship flowered based on mutual values, a love of good food, and the ability to laugh even in the worst of times.” Adamantly principled on the topic of slavery, both men devoted their public lives to the cause of abolition. The Civil War cast a pall over the festivities that accompanied Lincoln’s inauguration as president, but there was one guest that Lincoln insisted on seeing at the White House that evening, despite the rules that prohibited Negroes from entering. When Douglass finally arrives, the men gaze over the balcony and renew their shared commitment to freedom for all people.

A new birth of freedom Two new books exemplify Lincoln’s impact by incorporating his own words into the narrative. In What Lincoln Said (HarperCollins, $17.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780060848194), author Sarah L. Thomson uses direct quotes from pivotal moments in Honest Abe’s life. Illustrator James E. Ransome presents a more jovial, less stern depiction than we’re accustomed to seeing. The story ends with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day in 1863 as Lincoln humbly states, “If ever my name goes into history, it will be for this act . . . and my whole soul is in it.”

Destined to be a classic, Abe’s Honest Words (Hyperion, $16.99, 48 pages, ISBN 9781423104087) by Doreen Rappaport (author of the Caldecott Honor book, Martin’s Big Words), features divine, luminous illustrations by Kadir Nelson (known best for Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom, also a Caldecott Honor book and Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award winner). Rappaport’s own prose is coupled with Lincoln’s thoughts on the importance of reading and education, the horrors of slavery, the challenges of being a young and unknown politician, and, of course, the iconic speech delivered on a Gettysburg battlefield.

Family matters Beloved author Rosemary Wells shines a light on a personal dimension of Lincoln’s life in Lincoln and His Boys (Candlewick, $16.99, 96 pages, ISBN 9780763637231). This is history as seen through the eyes of his young sons, Willie and Tad, who, after Lincoln is elected president, accompany him on the 12-day train ride (unfathomable to us now) from Illinois to Washington, D.C. They gleefully interrupt cabinet meetings and pray with their parents to heal the soldiers as the war escalates. The boys persistently ask questions of their adoring “Papa-day,” trying to make sense of events as they unfold. Illustrations by P.J. Lynch are warm and vivid, capturing the genuine bond between a famous father and his sons.

The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary (Schwartz & Wade, $24.99, 196 pages, ISBN 9780375836183) takes readers ever deeper into the lives of Lincoln, his family and his country. Author Candace

Fleming has painstakingly compiled rare photographs (including the only known photo of Abraham with both Willie and Tad), insights into the Lincolns’ marriage, accounts of White House mischief by their sons, biographical information about the president’s cabinet, humorous anecdotes about stovepipe hats and three tales about Mary that you won’t want to miss.

This is the type of book that will invite readers to examine and re-examine its pages. Each time they do, they’ll be rewarded with more captivating details. o Ellen Trachtenberg is the author of The Best Children’s Literature: A Parent’s Guide.

Extra, extra: A special edition tells Lincoln’s story Books about Abraham Lincoln are plentiful this year, but one of the most impressive tributes comes in the form of Lincoln Shot: A President’s Life Remembered (Feiwel & Friends, $24.95, 40 pages, ISBN 9780312370138) by Barry Denenberg, featuring enthralling artwork by Christopher Bing. The format is eye-catching: a special edition of a newspaper, dated April 14, 1866, marking the one-year anniversary of Lincoln’s death. From the very first page, readers get the sense that they’re examining privileged archival documents. The headline reads “President Dies at 7:22, Nation Mourns Fallen Leader.” The search for assassin John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators is recounted. After the villains’ apprehension and execution, all told with riveting specifics, the paper turns to Lincoln’s life, from boyhood hardships in the Indiana wilderness, to spelling bee triumphs, through his early career as a lawyer and romance at age 30 with a charming socialite named Mary Todd. Lincoln’s entire political career is offered for inspection and the Civil War is fascinatingly detailed. In fact, though the book is only 40 pages long, there’s hardly a moment of Lincoln’s life that’s missed. With its mimicry of a 19th-century newspaper, complete with archival photography, authentic typesetting and period advertisements, this type of alternative biography is sure to capture the imagination of both ready and reluctant readers. When the story ends with Lincoln’s assassination, only five days after the Union victory, we come away with new perspectives on a most famous historical figure and the era he represented, all derived from the unique learning experience that this book provides. o —ELLEN TRACHTENBERG

This month’s top publisher picks

HC 9781423107286 $16.99

HC 9780967468105 $15.95

HC 9780374399245 $16.95

HC 9780763620677 $29.99

Twist and Ernest

Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out

Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland

Adèle & Simon in America

Laura T. Barnes, Illustrated by Carol A. Camburn

108 Renowned Authors and Illustrators

Jon Scieszka, Illustrated by Mary Blair

This incomparable collection of essays, personal accounts, historical fiction, poetry and stunning original art offers a multifaceted look at America’s history through the prism of the White House.

Candlewick

This delightful new picture book features Caldecott Honorwinning author Jon Scieszka and concept art from Disney design legend Mary Blair—brought together to tell the story of Alice in Wonderland. Disney

Barbara McClintock Parisians Adèle and Simon arrive in New York City for a train trip that captures the vitality of early-twentieth-century America, from the Boston Public Garden to San Francisco’s Chinatown. Visit www.adeleandsimoninamerica.com. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Discover these enchanting, award-winning barnyard tales featuring tiny, loveable Ernest and his farmyard friends. Together, they illustrate the importance of persistence, devotion, friendship, being yourself and most of all, love. Barnesyard

HC 9780316166874 $16.99

HC 9780375842702 $12.99

Fanny Holly Hobbie Writer/illustrator Holly Hobbie’s young fans everywhere will revel in her tale of a little girl who takes matters into her own hands when Mom says “no” to the purchase of a trendy new doll. The book includes a paper doll with clothes. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

HC 9780753462102 $19.95

Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Writing Thank-you Notes

The Kingfisher Book of Classic Animal Stories

Peggy Gifford Moxy isn’t thrilled that she has to write a thank-you note for each of her Christmas presents in order to attend a star-studded Hollywood event with the father she hasn’t seen in years. Schwartz & Wade

Adults will recognize long-lost friends, and children will meet new ones in this collection of the most beloved animal stories of children’s literature. A gorgeous gift for the whole family. Kingfisher

Sally Grindley

HC 9780977010868 $19.95 HC 9780814757208 $32.95

HC 9780762433131 $15.95

Newest book in the “In the Woods Series”

First Snow in the Woods

Creepers

Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel, Editors

Carl R. Sams II and Jean Stoick The great gray owl carried the message to the creatures of the forest, “Winter is coming! Winter is coming early! Prepare!”Will the animals be ready for the cold, hard winter to come? Carl R. Sams II Photography, Inc.

Joanne Dahme A thrilling teen chiller featuring 13-year-old Courtney who finds herself thrust into a full-fledged haunted adventure. Help uncover the secret in this suspenseful ghost story that R. L. Stine calls “a good one!” Running Press Kids

A collection of 43 mostly out-of-print stories, poems, comic strips and other texts for children that reflect the concerns of 20th-century leftist movements, like peace, civil rights and environmental responsibility. NYU Press

HC 9780802853028 $17 HC 9780802853301 $17 HC 9780152062354 $16

A River of Words HC 9780439023481 $17.99

Jen Bryant, Illustrated by Melissa Sweet

HC 9781416905851 $16.99

Frankenstein Takes the Cake

The Hunger Games

Tenth Avenue Cowboy

Chains

Adam Rex In this wickedly funny follow-up to Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, Adam Rex once again proves that monsters are just like you and me. (Well, sort of.) Harcourt Children’s

Suzanne Collins This novel delivers suspense, philosophy, adventure and romance. In a future society, 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen is forced to represent her district in a fight to the death. Audio package also available. Scholastic

Linda Oatman High, Illustrated by Bill Farnsworth Two memorable picture books capture the story of a poet’s life and the dreams of a homesick boy in New York City.

Eerdmans Books for Young Readers

Laurie Halse Anderson A young girl faces the choice of working for or against the British— she chooses to side with herself and to work with anyone who can help her.

Simon & Schuster Children’s

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

Tales for Little Rebels

27

COOKING

La cucina di Franco Stitti I hope Frank Stitt, award-winning chef/owner of three fabulous restaurants in Birmingham, Alabama, will forgive me for Italianizing his fine Southern name, but he’s earned it with his years of cooking and serving great Italian food at Bottega Restaurant and Café. Now, with his second cookbook, Bottega Favorita: A Southern Chef’s Love Affair with Italian Food (Artisan, $40, 270 pages, ISBN 9781579653026), he invites us all to his Mediterranean table and makes it possible to replicate the recipes at home. Stitt’s take on Italian cuisine is infused with his Southern sensibility—you can take this boy out of the South, but you can’t take the South out of the boy and that’s

BY SYBIL PRATT what makes these recipes sing with a unique culinary harmony. Shell beans replace cannellini beans and pair with wild American shrimp and lump crabmeat in a Southern take on a classic Italian summer salad. Zabaglione Meringue Cake is a sweet, snowy triumph of a Southern cake with an Italian accent. There are some truly simple dishes like Fennel and Parmigiano among the 150 recipes, but this is not quick-fix cooking. These are the elegant, much-admired dishes served at Bottega, made accessible by Stitt’s detailed instructions and his helpful, tip-filled header notes—the results are worth the extra effort.

Have a ‘souper’ year

Heavy holiday food weighing you down? Have you resolved to go easy on the fat this year? No problem, The Best of Cooking Light Everyday Favorites (Oxmoor House, $24.95, 416 pages, ISBN 9780848732615) serves up 500 of the magazine’s alltime greatest recipes, each with a nutritional analysis that allows you to keep track of calories, fat, fiber, etc. With such a comprehensive collection it’s almost easier to say

Soup, soup, beautiful soup, warming in winter, refreshing in summer. An appetizer, an entrée, a soothing comfort or a spicy pick-me-up: soup is super anytime, any way. Here to inspire you to soup it up year-round is Sunday Soup: A Year’s Worth of Mouthwatering, Easy-to-Make Recipes (Chronicle, $19.95, 168 pages, ISBN 9780811860321) by Betty Rosbottom, with fabulous photos by Charles Schiller. Betty has assembled 60 of her best soup, chowder and chili recipes—one for every week, plus a few tasty extras—and arranged them by season. Since it’s January, you may want to start with a slow-simmered White Bean Soup with Chorizo and Kale, robust enough to make a meal with a salad and crusty bread; or a quietly chic Celery Bisque topped with crumbled Stilton toasts. Heavenly Asparagus Soup with dollops of tarragon-scented crème fraîche is the perfect harbinger of spring and then it will be summer, though it seems so far away now, and time for Icy Cucumber Soup garnished with smoked salmon and dill and Zucchini Vichyssoise. Each recipe comes with suggested “soup-er sides,” detailed explanations of cooking techniques and “market notes” on where to find unfamiliar ingredients. 

FICTION

DEBUT FICTION

Southern values, California style

Here’s the scoop

Lighten up!

By Arlene McKanic Truely Noonan Jr., the protagonist of Nanci Kincaid’s gentle, humorous, rambling novel, Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi, is a man wandering around in a sort of fog. His situation isn’t dire; he’s a wealthy inventor and has been since he was barely out of college. He has a vast apartment in San Francisco. His wife has left him and his romantic life since then has been tepid, but that hardly makes him out of the ordinary. His parents are gone, but at his age that’s not very exceptional either. He has no children. His best link to his happy Mississippi childhood is his sister Courtney, who’s as aimless as he is. She too has been dumped by her spouse, she too is rich, and she too is childless. Then, Arnold shows up in their lives.

Arnold is one of the people on the periphery of Truely’s love life; he’s a friend of Truely’s on-again, off-again girlfriend’s brother. When Arnold is sent to San Francisco for a job, he moves in with Truely, or more accurately, invades his space; he insists, with an astonishing sense of entitlement, to be left out of nothing in Truely’s life. Still, both Truely and Courtney take to him, and she especially sees him as a project, feeding him Southern food and drilling him while he Eat, Drink, and Be works toward his GED. Arnold gets into scrapes from which the siblings must continually rescue him, but the young man From Mississippi has become family to the Noonans, and when you’re from By Nanci Kincaid Mississippi, standing by family is the thing that’s done.

Little, Brown Kincaid, the author of five books and a Southerner- $23.99, 400 pages turned-Californian herself, fills her story with a rich stew of ISBN 9780316009157 characters. There’s Truely and Courtney’s parents, both kind and God-fearing, save the genteel racism that forbids them from letting Truely’s one black friend inside their home. There’s Truely’s passionate first wife Jesse, and his sometime girlfriend Shauna, who lapses into bitterness when her brother, Arnold’s friend, is wounded in Iraq. There’s Courtney’s ponytailed ex-husband and the mouseburger he leaves her for, and Arnold’s sweet baby sister and their grandmother, awed by the kind attention shown them by the Noonans. You leave Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi with a sense of gratitude for human goodness.  30 Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

what’s not here than what is. There are appetizers galore and the potables to go with them, a fabulous selection of breads, biscuits and breakfast goodies (the Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread had my name on it), more than enough fish, shellfish, meat and poultry dishes to satisfy everyone, every night, plus meatless mains with a tantalizing range of ethnic accents—just try Shrimp and Pasta with Peanut Sauce, Marinated Flank Steak with Horseradish Raita or Portobello Mushroom Fajitas. The four S’s—salads, soups, sides and sandwiches—come in a wide array from the simple (Green Beans with Roasted Onion Vinaigrette), to the spectacular (White Bean, Artichoke, and Chard Ragout with Fennel Relish), and the beat goes on ’til we reach the dazzling desserts, including a to-die-for Cappuccino Cheesecake with Fudge Sauce. All the recipes have been tested and re-tested in the Cooking Light kitchens so you know you’re in good hands.

By Rebecca Stropoli With Going to See the Elephant, first-time novelist Rodes Fishburne has created a fantastical world that exists in the middle of San Francisco. Featuring characters that are frequently over-the-top and a plot that covers everything from the world of journalism to mad-science weather manipulation, the book is a canvas for Fishburne’s colorful imagination. But the cartoonish images and wild storyline aren’t all the reader gets from the tale; by the time the novel ends, one thing that stands out is its real, very human sentiment.

As the book opens, we meet Slater Brown, an overeager and laughably naive 25-year-old with one goal: to be recognized as the greatest writer in the world. He has come from the East Coast to San Francisco in order to realize that goal, although he has no real idea how to do so. Scribbling furiously in his notebook as he scours the city for inspiration, dressed absurdly in a linen suit and Panama hat, he is the perfect parody of the affected, starry-eyed young scribe found in many a graduate school English class.

Needing a paycheck, Slater applies to struggling local newspaper The Morning Trumpet, only to hilariously bomb his first assignment. But after he chances upon a resident Going to See “answer man” who leaves him with a very special parting the Elephant gift, Slater is suddenly San Fran’s scoop magnet.

As Slater’s sensational stories singlehandedly revive the By Rodes Fishburne Trumpet and his celebrity skyrockets, the reader is intro- Delacorte duced to a rich cast of supporting characters, including the $22, 304 pages crooked mayor out to destroy Slater after he digs up a dam- ISBN 9780385342391 aging story on him (his emotional overeating binge and enormous weight gain following the story’s release is a comic highlight); the scientist whose weather-changing experiments could give Slater his best story yet; and the gorgeous female chess prodigy who ultimately changes the direction of Slater’s life.

The book’s many layers could use some fine-tuning, and the dramatic climactic scene is something of an eye-roller, but it is refreshing to see Fishburne reveal the more grounded, less outrageous aspects of each character as the story’s surprisingly simple message is uncovered. It will be interesting to see where he might go with a second novel.  Rebecca Stropoli writes from Brooklyn, New York.

ROMANCE Burning up the charts January offers a delightful variety of romance, with new worlds, historical settings, familiar-but-favorite storylines and enough sizzle to compensate for the falling temperatures.

In Running Hot (Putnam, $25.95, 352 pages, ISBN 9780399155215) author Jayne Ann Krentz brings her Arcane Society—a secret organization of those with paranormal abilities—into a modern-day setting. Excop and Arcane society member Luther Malone takes on the job of bodyguard for aura-reader and librarian Grace Renquist. Her task: to track down a certain person at a Hawaiian resort and determine if he’s a serial killer. But Luther and Grace uncover more than just one man with murderous tendencies— BY christie ridgway and as they investigate this larger mystery they learn more about each other’s powers as well as the powerful attraction between them.

Fast-paced, with a fascinating premise and with characters—big and small—that spring to life on the page, Running Hot will keep the reader turning pages as well as looking forward to more entries in the Arcane Society series.

One sweet knight Meg Cabot offers a frolicking medieval romance, Ransom My Heart (Avon A, $14.99, 432 pages, ISBN 9780061700071), in the guise of her fictional character Princess Mia Thermopolis of Genovia (of Princess Diaries fame). Irrepressible Finnula Crais, young expert huntress with a shadowed past, succumbs to a sister’s pleading to find a man. A man, that is, that Finnula can kidnap and ransom in order to restore her older sister’s spent dowry.

Tough on the outside, but soft on the inside, Finnula agrees, and through a delightful series of events captures a handsome knight on his way home from the Holy Land. Hugo has a secret, but it doesn’t stop him from falling in with the adventurous Finnula’s plan, or falling in love. When the pair’s secrets and shadows are revealed, complications abound, and attempts on Hugo’s life threaten Finnula as well as the happy ending they seek. Peopled with entertaining characters, Cabot’s latest romps briskly to a satisfying denouement.

Dear lover

In the shadows Readers looking to enter another world can find it within Jacquelyn Frank’s Ecstasy: The Shadowdwellers (Zebra, $6.99, 330 pages, ISBN 9780821780701). After a horrific car accident, Ashla Townsend finds herself alone in New York City. Completely alone. Although there is food available and stores open, she sees no one else and senses no others. When she begins to wonder if she’s lost her mind, a violent fight between two warriors crashes into her existence. One is killed, and as the other appears to be dying, Ashla unleashes her secret—and sometimes shameful— talent of healing. Trace, an important advisor to the powerful in the Shadowdweller’s political realm, is fascinated by the woman who saves his life. She’s a puzzle he can’t solve, and it’s only as she enters his environment that they both come to understand her special gift and then its surprising source. Frank’s paranormal romance is both sexy and stylized, and promises further forays into an intriguing world. o Christie Ridgway writes contemporary romance from her home in Southern California.

Stranger on a train

By Arlene McKanic T. Greenwood’s novel Two Rivers begins with a lynching—or does it? We learn later that the incident happens in 1968, not 1928, and in Vermont, not Mississippi. We also learn that one of the possible participants, Harper, lost his pregnant wife that same night. When the action fast-forwards to 1980, we see Harper save an odd-eyed pregnant girl from a train wreck. Are these events all somehow related?

Two Rivers is reminiscent of Thornton Wilder, with its quiet New England town shadowed by tragedy, and of Sherwood Anderson, with its sense of desperate loneliness and regret. It’s as if the loneliness that has plagued Harper since the death of his wife—the beautiful and ebullient Betsy, a girl he’d loved since they were 12 years old—has reached out and infected the landscape. The novel, after all, is set in autumn, a time of fading and gathering cold.

Even the protagonist’s name, Harper, calls to mind To Kill a Mockingbird, with its painful racial entanglements also set in a small town. Yet the girl Harper saves from the train wreck, who calls herself Marguerite, brings warmth and hope to Harper and his daughter Shelly, who was born that dreadful night and whose 12th birthday Harper nearly forgets. Marguerite, a black girl from the South who Two Rivers claims to have been exiled from her own town because of her pregnancy, is completely comfortable with these white By T. Greenwood Kensington folks she’s never met. Why? $15, 352 pages Along with Harper, Shelly, Marguerite and Betsy, Green- ISBN 9780758228772 wood fills her novel with memorable characters, especially in the flashback chapters. There’s Harper’s mother, the town misfit, aflame with her indignation at injustice and whose passion for the civil rights movement seems to have led to her death. Harper’s father, by contrast, is sad and passive. There’s Harper’s not-quite friend Brooder, a veteran disfigured in Vietnam, who was also in love with Betsy. Did his love for her lead him to do what he did the night the black man was lynched? It’s to Greenwood’s credit that she answers her novel’s mysteries in ways that are believable, that make you feel the sadness that informs her characters’ lives. o

XTRA, XTRA Read all about it!

Exceptional book reviews and author interviews— Delivered right to your inbox

More BookPage, more often Sign up today at BookPage.com “I love BookPageXTRA because I am an avid reader, and BookPageXTRA tells me about so many fascinating books. My reading choices are more eclectic because of you.”

—R. Nelson, Elberta, AL

JANUARY 2009 BOOKPAGE = www.bookpage.com

A friends-to-lovers story always delights, and Janice Maynard’s Hot Mail (Signet Eclipse, $14, 320 pages, ISBN 9780451225832) follows the tried-and-true course of the popular plot line: a couple who have known each other for years is awoken to the fact that they share more than platonic feelings. In Maynard’s story, the threats to heroine Jane Norman’s small-town Tennessee stationery shop make assistant chief of police Ethan Oldham take a second look at his old buddy. But the situation is complicated by the sexy valentines that Ethan is receiving from an anonymous local woman—and Jane isn’t about to let him know that it’s her. She had decided to make a move on him just as circumstances brought them together, and she doesn’t want to end the fun of sending him suggestive poetry nor jeopardize this apparent new chance with the man she’s loved from afar. Though there’s plenty of steam here, the tentativeness of a new relationship is also portrayed in this romance, making it sure to please those who like their stories both emotional and hot. A subplot involving Ethan’s older sister Sherry and a younger police officer add to the spice of this book, which proves that little towns do not lack for scorching passion.

FICTION

31

WORDNOOK

Cut-and-dried

By the editors of Merriam-Webster

Horsing around Dear Editor: I heard on the financial news recently that a certain wellknown soup maker had done well on an otherwise dismal day on the stock market. The commentators kept making plays on the expression soup up, saying the company souped up their profits, etc. Now I’m really curious as to the origin of this expression. Is this the soup the expression refers to, and if so, why do we also say that we can soup up cars?

P. L. Standish, Maine

tended uses describing people souped up on coffee, baseball players with souped up batting averages and even theatrical companies doing souped up versions of Shakespeare’s plays. The use of soup up in connection with the stock market is another example of this extended use.

New kid on the block Dear Editor: I have often wondered about the origin of the word rookie to describe a beginner. Where did that word come from?

F. Q. Lebanon, Pennsylvania

Dear Editor: It seems like all advertisers use the term cutting edge, particularly for new products. What is this cutting edge anyway, and how can I get it?

S. J. Jackson, Michigan Everyone is eager to be on the cutting edge these days. Unfortunately, the cutting edge is not something you can buy, although it is ultimately attainable. The term is defined in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition, as “the foremost part or place,” synonymous with vanguard. This comparison of a sharp or cutting edge with progress probably stems from the sense of the word edge that means a point near the beginning or end, in other words, the brink or verge of something. Like the similarly popular term state of the art, cutting edge is popular among advertisers as a catch-all phrase that makes a product sound attractively innovative and unique, not to mention technologically superior. Objects and ideas that are in a constant state of flux, from art and fashion to biological research are described as on the cutting edge or even as being the cutting edge itself. A quotation from our file that makes less than solemn use of the term reads this way: “That chap was the emperor of ice cream; his lab was the cutting edge of chocolate almond research.” 

Luckily, many things, including our economy, can be souped up, meaning that they can be given “increased We really aren’t sure where rookie comes from. power or efficiency.” Evidence in our files suggests that soup up derives from a horse-racing term popular in the There are many theories, but because the word’s roots are lost in the murky realms of slang, it is impossible late 19th century.

Soup was horse-racing jargon relating to the illicit prac- to determine which hypothesis is true. The earliest tice of injecting horses with a substance to affect perfor- known use of rookie of which we are aware dates from mance. The soup, as it was called, might make the horse 1892 and suggests that it may have originated as an run faster or might slow it down, according to the needs alteration of recruit (which has been used as a noun since at least 1648). Another source suggests that the of the gamblers behind the scam.

With the onset of the 20th century, soup was transferred word may have developed from the word rook, meaning to mechanical modes of transportation. Perhaps also in- “to defraud by cheating or swindling” (a sense that has used since at least 1590), on the premise that a fluenced by supercharge, to souppuz up began be used PUZ Sample 2/9/08to 10:22 AM inPagebeen 1 connection with engines, airplanes and cars, meaning “to naive novice is a person who can be easily rooked. A increase the power or heighten the performance of.” The third source guesses that rookie developed out of slang adjective souped up also became popular, especially dur- use of rookery. According to this story, rookery was once to describe soldiers ing the 1930s and 1940s, in descriptions 73. If Plum is a lass, Joethe is __barracks in which new J anet Evanovich Janet Evanovichof bank robber used 75. UShoused; capital forashort were rookie was therefore a soldier who lived John Dillinger’s soupedCROSSWORD up getaway cars.

76. Suitable DOWN continued a rookery. These are all colorful explanations, but Soup up was soon used in connection with more than in 77. Whole body X-ray 61. Plum’s time zone real origin of rookie remains uncertain. just mechanical items, however.

We have citations of ex- for ACROSS 78. now Genus the of clams

Please send correspondence regarding Word Nook to:

Language Research Service P.O. Box 281 71. What Plum destroys frequently (sing.)

Springfield, MAof parents 01102 72. Group and teachers for short

65. College writing piece 1. Plum’s first name 80. Ex-profession of Plum’s sidekick Lula 74. Initials of Spencer Tracy co-star and lover 67. Do over 8. Kind of spray Plum uses for protection 81. Keen interest, as Plum has for donuts and 77. __ casa es su casa 68. Pier 13. Before, poetic 63-Across 79. 52 wks.

69. Plum’s a __, in fact she’s the whole 14. Poem ” This crossword82. is She fromis “quite Lindacontrary K. Murdock’s Mystery Lover’s Puzzledeck Book, published by Bellwether Books. © 2007 Linda K. Murdock.

15. Defunct airline 17. Yucatan Indian DOWN 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 18. Plural pronoun 1. Use needle and thread wide shoes down Joe 3. Men’s 19. Plum’s hair color 2.for Plum’s birthplace 36. Land surrounded by water

13 14 15 16 17 Toot your own 20. Moroccan mountains 3. Men’s wide4. shoes ACROSS short 22. __ Big Ones, Plum is a gang target 5. They continued without further ____ 18 4. Toot your own 1. Plum’s first name 19 20 21 22 23. Another way 37. Plum’s of saying 31-Down neighborhood 5. They continued 6. without Plum’sfurther state __ 8. Kind of spray Plum uses 25.for Young lady 6. Plum’s state 38. Casey ____ the Bat 23 24 22 25 25 7. Hollywood gossip show for short 26. Plum’s preferred gun protection Hollywood gossip show for short 40. Tease, as Joe and Ranger7. do to 27. Plum broke Joe’s __ 8. Couple, like 8.

Joe Couple, and Plumlike Joe and Plum 13. Before, poetic 26 28 27 28 29 29 30 30 31 29. Home of Cincinnati Plum 9. England’s Blair or ThatcherBlair for one 9. England’s or Thatcher for one 14. Poem 31. “And __ it goes . . .” on Plum’s boyfriend 10.Joe Frisks, as Joe __ down a suspect 32 33 34 33 43. Tattoo 10. Frisks, as Joe ____ down a 15. Defunct airline 32. Written items for remembrance 11. Joe’s mother gives Plum the evil one suspect 33. Aries symbol 45. Plum is a bounty hunter; 12. Lula __ __ Plum for help from her attacker 35 36 38 37 38 39 17. Yucatan Indian parlors gun inforTwo ____ 34. Plum visits funeral for the __ 11. Joe’s gives Plum the evil 16. Plum gets her man withmother this court compli18. Plural pronoun 35. __ for the Money, Plum tracks down Joe 40 41 42 43 44 45 ance document 47. Military branch

one 19. Plum’s hair color 36. Land surrounded by water for short 19. Joe’s dog prefers a burger to a __ 48. Gold 12. Lula ____ ____ Plum for help from

37.

Plum’s neighborhood 45 46 46 47 48 49 50 20. Moroccan mountains 21. Plum’s apartment is on the 2nd one 49. Disease, mostly affecting24. women Casey __ the Bat Limits her attacker TV show, __ 22. ____ Big Ones, Plum is38. a gang

40. Tease, as Joe 50. Plum’s and Ranger quietest do to Plum 51 52 51 53 54 53 55 family member 26. Kind of flake, not Plum this time 16. Plum gets her man with this court target 43. Tattoo on Plum’s boyfriend Joe 28. Happy affair 51. Indestructible car of 50-Across compliance document 56 57 58 58 59 60 61 Plum is a bounty hunter; gun for __ 23. Another way of saying 45.

31-Down 30. Belonging to Grant or O’Brian 54. Self-esteem 19. Joe’sisdog prefers a burger to a 47. Military branch 31. Twelve __, 63-Across revealed 25. Young lady 62 63 61 64 65 56. Ebert’s ____ ____ Movies34. If past __ for 48. Gold court, ____Plum will hunt you 26. Plum’s preferred gun 49. Disease, mostly affecting women 37. Color of Plum’s eyes 57. Lennon’s wife 21. Plum’s apartment is on the 2nd 66 67 68 64 65 66 69 27. Plum broke Joe’s ____50. Plum’s quietest family member away from a Plum book 59. One of a kind, as is Plum39. Try to __ yourself oneand carefully, not 41. To sneak up slowly 29. Home of Cincinnati 51. Indestructible car of 50-Across 67 70 70 71 72 72 73 Self-esteem 62. Neuter pronoun Plum’s style24. TV show, “____ Limits” 31. “And ____ it goes . . .” 54.

Movies 56. Ebert’s __ __63. Plum’s sexy co-worker 42. Plum’s favorite is Tasty Pastry not Plum this time 26. Kind of flake, 74 74 75 76 75 77 78 79 32. Written items for remembrance 57. Lennon’s wife 44. The peach state 64. Get rid of 28. Happy affair 59. One of a kind, as is Plum 33. Aries symbol 46. Factory where Plum could get work 80 81 78 82 66. Expression of dismay 49. Boyfriend Joe’s 62. Neuter 30. Belonging last name to Grant or O’Brian 34. Plum visits funeral parlors in Two pronoun

63. Plum’s sexy co-worker 69. Belongs to the hero of 55-Down 31. Twelve 51. Plumorbrings in people who jump63-Across this ____, is

Copyright © 2007 by Linda K. Murdock for the ____ 64. Get rid of 52. Information technology for short “Make my day” star revealed 35. ____ for the Money, Plum tracks of dismay 66. Expression 53. Short for country of Great Britain Evanovich and Lula’s affirmative response 70. New, prefix 34. If past ____ for court, Plum will 69. Belongs to the hero of 55-Down or relative 55. Plum’s gun-toting 71. Profession of Plum’s Joe 57. Eleven __ __ Plumhunt “ M a ke my day” star you works for 63-Across 70. New, prefix 73. If Plum is a lass, Joe is ____ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ 58. Over, poetic37. Color of Plum’s eyes 71. Profession of Plum’s Joe 60. Opera solo 34 5 78 6 1 74 36 8 9 79

IT’S A MYSTERY Janet Evanovich

S O L U T I O N

75. U.S. capital for short 76. Suitable 77. Whole body X-ray 78. Genus of clams 80. Ex-profession of Plum’s sidekick Lula 81. Keen interest, as Plum has for donuts and 63-Across 82. She is “quite contrary” DOWN 1. Use needle and thread 2. Plum’s birthplace

39. Try to ____ yourself away from a Plum book 41. To sneak up slowly and carefully, not Plum’s style 42. Plum’s favorite is Tasty Pastry 44. The peach state 46. Factory where Plum could get work 49. Boyfriend Joe’s last name 51. Plum brings in people who jump this 52. Information technology for short

53. Short for country of Great Britain 55. Plum’s gun-toting relative 57. Eleven ____ ____ Plum works for 63-Across 58. Over, poetic 60. Opera solo 61. Plum’s time zone 65. College writing piece 67. Do over 68. Pier

69. Plum’s a ____, in fact she’s the whole deck 71. What Plum destroys frequently (sing.)

72. Group of parents and teachers for short 74. Initials of Spencer Tracy co-star and lover 77. ____ casa es su casa 79. 52 wks.