BookPage January 2011

discover your next great book j a n u a r y

america’s book review

2011

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New You!

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Books to change your life page 16

UNRAVELING FAMILY SECRETS

Kim Edwards’ haunting follow-up to The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

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paperback picks penguin.com

Boiling Point

Frostfire

The Honor of Spies

Master of Smoke

Chaiten, a long-dormant volcano in Chile, fuses the destinies of two microbiologists: a celebrity scientist, and a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who waits for the one sign that his diabolical plan is about to be put into motion.

As one of the genetically enhanced Kyndred, Lilah’s mind-reading powers make her vulnerable to a mysterious biotech company willing to murder to acquire her superhuman DNA. But the true danger may come from her own Kyndred brethren.

As a spy with the Office of Strategic Services, young Cletus Frade has faced many unlikely situations. Having helped Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm Frogger escape a Mississippi P.O.W. camp, he must now get the defiant German to turn against his country.

After being attacked by a werewolf, Beth Roman is now able to shift into one. Luckily she saves a handsome shapeshifter from a similar attack.

Beth does not know his true identity as Smoke, a Sidhe warrior.

9780515148800 • $7.99

9780451413024 • $7.99

9780515148794 • $9.99

Ruthless Game

Sun Kissed

The Templar Conspiracy

Treasure Hunt

GhostWalker Kane Cannon’s mission plunges him into a hot zone more personal than he anticipated: the hiding place of Rose Patterson— hunted fugitive, ex-lover, and a fellow GhostWalker desperate to save the life of her unborn child. Kane’s child.

Samantha Harrigan’s quarter horses are falling ill due to poison, and as the insurance beneficiary, she’s the prime suspect. This bonus book includes Beautiful Gifts, a historical novella featuring a Coulter family ancestor, as well as an exclusive preview of the upcoming Harrigan family novel Here to Stay.

In Rome, the assassination of the Pope on Christmas Day sets off a massive investigation that stretches across the globe. But behind the veil of Rex Deus—the Templar cabal that silently wields power in the twenty-first century—the plot has only just begun.

The widow of a major player in the world of San Francisco nonprofits believes that his alleged mistress killed him—and she’s giving fifty grand to whoever helps prove it.

Wyatt Hunt and his investigation firm want in on that action—no matter where it takes them.

9780451231901 • $9.99

9780451231451 • $9.99

9780515149210 • $7.99

9780451232908 • $6.99

9780425239162 • $7.99

From New York Times Bestselling Author T. Jefferson Parker Along the U.S./Mexico border, a man named Finnegan wakes up in the town of Buenavista after a hit and run—eerily aware of events he should know nothing about, $90,000 richer, and with Charlie Hood’s name and address in his wallet. Meanwhile, when tracking the flow of illegal guns into Mexico, Hood’s team accidentally kills the son of Benjamin Armenta, head of the Gulf Cartel and one of the most violent men in the world. As Hood grasps for control of Buenavista, he must discover the link to Finnegan and end Armenta’s violent plans.

NOW IN PAPERBACK NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY A Member of Penguin Group (USA)

9780451232427 • $14

contents

january 2011 w w w. B o o k Pa g e . c o m

features

16

12 mary jane clark Meet the author of To Have and To Kill

cover story

new year, new you

This year, let our selection of inspiring new books be your guide to becoming the best version of yourself

13 kim edwards Looking at her childhood home in a whole new light

Cover photo © iStockphoto.com/lisegagne

14 annie proulx The search for the perfect house leads to the wilds of Wyoming

15 lisa genova Neuroscientist-turned-novelist depicts a mystifying brain disorder

18 books for your body In 2011, renew your commitment to good health and well-being

20 timothy ferriss Conducting the ultimate experiment— on himself

29 tim tharp A study of courage on the battlefield and in everyday life

reviews 21 Fiction

top pick:

Clara and Mr. Tiffany

by Susan Vreeland a l s o r e v i e w e d : Kings of Colorado by David E. Hilton; The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly; The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín; Being Polite to Hitler by Robb Forman Dew; The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna; The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card; The Sherlockian by Graham Moore; The Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger; The Memory of Love

by Aminatta Forna

26 NonFiction top pick:

Poser

by Claire Dederer a l s o r e v i e w e d : The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók; American Rose by Karen Abbott; Unless It Moves the Human Heart by Roger Rosenblatt; Toward the Setting Sun by Brian Hicks; Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua; I Shall Not Hate by Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish; American Uprising by Daniel Rasmussen

30 Children’s top pick:

Fall for Anything

by Courtney Summers a l s o r e v i e w e d : Old Bear and His Cub by Olivier Dunrea; Young Fredle by Cynthia Voigt; Just Grace and the Terrible Tutu

by Charise Mericle Harper; Across the Universe by Beth Revis; The Big Crunch by Pete Hautman

31 leo and diane dillon Meet the illustrators of The Secret River

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author enablers lifestyles cooking well read romance whodunit book clubs audio

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Author of the

#1 New York Times bestseller

columns

The MeMory Keeper’s DAughTer

paltrow’s kitchen

Our publishing insider gets the skinny on tomorrow’s bestsellers

gore changes course ON SALE JANUARY 4

Kim Edwards’s highly anticipated new novel tells the story of a woman’s homecoming to the lake of her childhood and the discovery of a secret past that will alter her understanding of her family forever.

Available from Penguin Books

Kristin Gore, daughter of Al Gore, launched her literary career with two smart chick-lit novels set in the world of Washington politics (Sammy’s Hill and Sammy’s House).

On April 26, she’ll be taking her writing in a new direction with Sweet Jiminy (Hyperion), a novel set in rural Mississippi on a family farm.

The farm in question belongs to heroine Jiminy’s grandmother.

Though Jiminy has returned to the farm in search of sanctuary after dropping out of law school, she instead discovers an unsolved mystery that dates back to the Civil Rights era.

She’s determined to ungore cover the truth, “to the dismay of those who would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie,” according to the publisher.

Consider our interest piqued!

rather on rather

“This is simply a beautiful book—I can’t wait to see what she writes next.”

—Jodi Picoult

4

VIKINg

A member of Penguin Group (USA) www.penguin.com

Buzz Girl

Former CBS anchor and reporter Dan Rather has inked a deal with Grand Central to pen a memoir titled Summing Up. According to USA Today, the book “will cover [Rather’s] long career in journalism, from the John F. Kennedy assassination and Watergate to the Iraq War and his final years at CBS, when a disputed story about President George W. Bush’s military service led to Rather’s departure in 2006.”

Summing Up is scheduled to hit bookstores in 2012.

Gwyneth Paltrow seems like one of those women who can do it all.

She’s an Academy Award-winning actress, a rock star wife and mom to two adorable children, a singer, a TV co-host and now—an author.

My Father’s Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family and Togetherness is on sale in April from Grand Central, and it’s equal parts cookbook and love letter to her late father, Bruce Paltrow.

P A L T RO W According to the publisher, the book shares “personal recipes and photographs cele­ brating the joy of preparing food for loved ones, a passion [Paltrow] learned from her beloved father.”

Sounds simply delicious to us.

Wolitzer tries ya Meg Wolitzer is known for her adult novels (most recently, The Ten-Year Nap, and coming in April, The Uncoupling), but she is about to try something new. According to the Penguin Young Readers Group, “Meg Wolitzer . . . will publish a children’s novel entitled The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman with Dutton Children’s Books . . . scheduled for publication in September 2011. [It] tells the story of three unique 7th graders whose lives intersect at a national Scrabble tournament, where each has a very different reason for attending and for needing to win.”

The press release also states that Wolitzer loves both children’s lit and Scrabble, so this sounds like the perfect fit for her next book.

life after ‘precious’ Does the name Sapphire ring a bell? Well, it should. In the mid’90s, Random House paid Sapphire $500,000 for her debut novel, Push—the gritty, stream-of-consciousness story of Precious Jones, an obese, illiterate 16-year-old who is the victim of sexual abuse and incest. The novel went on to inspire Lee Daniels’ Academy Award-winning movie Precious.

Now Penguin Press has announced the acquisition of Sapphire’s follow-up to Push—The Kid. The new novel is about Abdul Jones, the son of Precious.

Ann Godoff, president and

publisher of Penguin Press, says: “Sapphire never fails to render the hardest material comprehensible by coming from a place of love. . . .

In her second novel, she fearlessly explores the young life of an African American boy as he approaches manhood. . . . It is an honor for [us] to have the opportunity to publish this extraordinary book.”

Look for The Kid in summer 2011.

a dad On his own Matt Logelin and his wife, Liz, were two normal, excited expectant parents in the spring of 2008.

Then the unthinkable happened.

Just 27 hours after welcoming their first child, Madeline, into the world, Liz suffered a massive pulmonary embolism and died instantly.

Shocked and devastated, Logelin was left to pick up the pieces of his shattered life—and raise his baby daughter without her mother.

Logelin turned to blogging about his pain and experiences, and his story captured the nation’s attention.

Just three year’s after Maddy’s birth (and Liz’s death), Logelin’s legions of fans will have the chance to hear the whole story in Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love, on sale April 14.

bestseller watch Release dates for some of the guaranteed blockbusters hitting shelves in January:

10 love, honor, and betray

By Kimberla Lawson Roby

Grand Central, $24.99 ISBN 9780446572453 Reverend Black struggles to keep his family together in Roby’s latest domestic drama.

24 Tick Tock

By James Patterson Little, Brown, $27.99 ISBN 9780316037914 Top NYC detective Michael Bennett is called away from a family holiday when a rash of heinous crimes strike the city in this tense thriller.

25 known and unknown

By Donald Rumsfeld

Sentinel, $36, ISBN 9781595230676 The memoir from the twotime U.S. Secretary of Defense promises to provide unprecedented insight into Rumsfeld’s career in American politics.

author enablers by kathi kamen goldmark & Sam Barry

WRITERS CHALLENGE 2011 Have you ever noticed that a lot of big, beautiful cookbooks are published during the holiday season, and then boom—right after New Year’s Day, we are inundated with diet books? In the publishing trade, January is a time for transformation, with plenty of self-help books to help you create a new persona.

In that spirit, we proudly present the Author Enablers’ Writers Challenge for the new year: Try writing something new and different. Don’t go easy on yourself; take a risk. For instance, if you write thrillers, how about a tear-jerker, feel-good romance? If you write for children, try your hand at an epic poem. Have fun, and let us know how it goes.

We’ll be busy writing a textbook on quantum physics.

RHYME AND REASON Dear Author Enablers, I am an aspiring poet with some minor success being published in local magazines and poetry collections. My style is composed in traditional rhythm. I wonder if I am limiting my success by continuing on this same path. However, I am reluctant to abandon my style for the popular prose. Should I stay true to myself or adopt the free style of verse, changing my tune?

Susan Marie Davniero Lindenhurst, New York Our four cents: The wonderful thing about writing is that you can experiment with different approaches, styles and forms without anyone seeing your work until you are ready to show it.

Why not venture outside your comfort zone and see what happens? A mediocre poem is the worst possible outcome (in which case you can hit “delete”), but you might surprise yourself and come up with something spectacular. You’ll never know if you don’t give it a whirl.

BACK TO SCHOOL Dear Author Enablers, I have an idea that would involve interviewing many high school administrators and former students.

The book is about how these people can influence a student’s life from both an academic and an athletic viewpoint.

What is the best way to approach them? My concern is that they will not respond because I do not have any “cred.” Do I send them a brief

New from the New York Times bestselliNg author

“Remember how you couldn’t put down Still Alice?

Well, clear your schedule—because you’re going to feel the same way.”

—Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author of House Rules synopsis of the book to let them see how their comments will be used?

Kenn Olson Oshkosh, Wisconsin You’d be surprised how cooperative some people can be if you make your request professionally and courteously. Reporters have been doing this for years. Most people like to talk about what they do and everyone wants to be appreciated. Offering a synopsis is a fine idea. Be sure to have a trusted, skilled reader proofread your query letter before you send it.

FULL STEAM AHEAD Dear Author Enablers, I have never made an attempt to write a full-length original novel before, but I’ve always believed I could with a plot that gripped me enough.

I finally have a plot, but the concepts are a little . . . sensational.

I wonder if it’s wise to write a first novel that in no way could escape the Banned Book lists. Should I put it on hold until I’ve managed to write a well-received book before attempting to publish a work that examines sensitive topics like religion, sexuality and the way our society treats these topics?

Amberlee Garrison Lindenwold, New Jersey Write the book you want to write!

Writing a novel is a lot of work, and if you aren’t passionate about your work, it’s unlikely anyone else will be. Many successful novels are sensational in the way you describe, and not all of them were written by established novelists.

It’s a good idea to find thoughtful, intelligent readers to give you feedback along the way. This might be a writing group, a teacher, an agent or a friend who knows literature and will give you honest criticism.

(From the sound of things, it probably shouldn’t be your mother.)

Questions about writing and publishing? Email them to Kathi and Sam at authorenablers@gmail.com. Please include your name and hometown.

What if half of your world just disappeared?

The poignant story of a high-powered, over-scheduled young woman who, after an accident, has a bizarre condition called Left Neglect—the left side of her world no longer exists. To recover, she must learn to pay attention to everything her mind wants her to ignore and find what truly matters.

“Huge, powerful human drama at its elegant best.”

—Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean

“Lisa Genova has done it again.

By turns chilling and deeply moving, Left Neglected is a stunning reminder that a single moment can change a life.”

—Brunonia Barry, author of The Lace Reader Also by Lisa Genova:

www.simonandschuster.com

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columns

lifestyles

cooking

by sybil PRATT

b y j o a n n a b r i c h e tt o

Skills to last a lifetime

The British are coming

How to Build a Fire: And Other Handy Things Your Grandfather Knew (Ballantine, $15, 304 pages, ISBN 9780345525093) by Erin Bried takes readers back to basics by championing more than 100 practical life skills. All of them are guaranteed for life, but are especially valuable during an economic recession. Divided into 11 categories, the book covers the gamut of real-life scenarios out of doors (how to tie a

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is still as enthusiastic about food as when he first arrived on the scene. His intense curiosity about America, from the “dream” to the egg cream, led him on a journey across the U.S., resulting in Jamie’s America (Hyperion, $37.50, 360 pages, ISBN 9781401323608). He focused on six idiosyncratically chosen places: New York and L.A.—with forays into their “gritty underbellies”— plus Arizona, Louisiana, Georgia

and products are each followed by a fun miniquiz and checklist to keep your unique approach in the spotlight. Inspiration pops from every gorgeous layout of inventive and ultra-tidy solutions, but the chapters showcasing real-life spaces of professional designers—the apotheosis of the scrapbooker—are truly amazing.

Top pick for Lifestyles

bowline knot), in the home (how to hang drywall), in the garage (how to change a tire), at the office (how to negotiate a raise), on the field (how to drive a golf ball), in the kitchen (how to make a good cup of coffee) and in the bedroom (how to write a love letter). With its comprehensive inventory of how-tos, How to Build a Fire could have been a dry D.I.Y. manual or a random retro wish list, but every skill was selected on the basis of a particular authority: real grandfathers. The author interviewed 10 such elders, all born before the Great Depression, and asked how they managed to craft a full and happy life. Both simple and serious, the answers add up to a kind of self-sufficiency and wisdom we can all afford.

Scrap the clutter

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Scrapbooking folks tend to accumulate things—okay, they hoard.

And the more creative we are, the more we tend to collect. To cure the chaos, The Organized & Inspired Scrapbooker (Leisure Arts, $16.95, 176 pages, ISBN 9781609000875) offers the tantalizing possibility of clutter-free desks, indexed albums, color-coded embellishments and alphabetized containers. In short: paradise. Scrapbooker Wendy Smedley and organizer Aby Garvey team up to share smart solutions for organizing and storing every conceivable component, starting with the often overlooked but crucial step of defining a goal. Chapters on photos, memorabilia, tools

The Cleaner Plate Club: More Than 100 Recipes for Real Food Your Kids Will Love is thankfully written for Real Parents, meaning we who want the best for our families, but who are very, very tired. We just can’t summon the time and energy to figure out how to provide wholesome, organic, balanced meals every single day.

Well, maybe we can’t, but authors Beth Bader and Ali Benjamin can and do with this massive yet peppy manual. First, we learn the basics about children’s health and “food preferences” (which can explain the cult of mac and cheese) and how to shop efficiently. Oodles of veggies are introduced—each accompanied by at least one kid-friendly recipe.

Then we go to recipes for main meals that can fit the parameters at hand (what’s in the fridge, how much time do I have, can I make it in advance?), followed by snacks and sweets, with the revelation that both can actually contribute to our kids’ health rather than make them fat, sick, hyper or crabby. This book is jammed with info: guidelines, pantry lists, meal-planning techniques and time-savers—yet the energetic authors make it feel as fresh as our next family dinner can be, with their plate-cleaning help.

The Cleaner Plate Club

By Beth Bader and Ali Benjamin Storey $16.95, 312 pages ISBN 9781603425858

PARENTING

recipes that incorporate each of them.

After you’ve prepared a jar of Honey Mustard, you can use it in warming, winterperfect Maple and Mustard-Glazed Root Vegetables or Mustard and Bourbon-Glazed Pork Roast. Asianaccented Soy-Ginger Dressing with veggies will entice even the most salad-averse, and homemade Mascarpone will jazz up your next Tiramisu and cut down on the cost.

Real food—simple staples made with your own hands—is the real deal for body and soul.

Cookbook of the Month and, for a taste of cowboy cuisine, Wyoming. Though he went looking for “quintessential American food,” he decided there was no such thing and ended up with a “wealth of seriously exciting dishes,” ranging from Quick & Punchy Kimchi and Venison & Juniper Stew to Chile Cheese Cornbread, Awesome Apple Pancakes and Bread Pudding with Chocolate-Beer Sauce. Committed but coolly casual, Jamie’s trademark chatty introductions, instructions and measurements (“4 good handfuls of interesting salad leaves”) are reassuring and fun, and the fullcolor photographs of the people he met, the places he went and the dishes he devoured are fabulous.

Real food from scratch If you’re making this a D.I.Y. year, whether to save money, to be more self-reliant or just to get away from mass-produced foods, D.I.Y. Delicious (Chronicle, $24.95, 240 pages, ISBN 9780811873468) by Vanessa Barrington is a good place to start.

I’m old enough to remember a time when cooking was almost wholly a D.I.Y. endeavor, but times have changed, and most of us need a little guidance when it comes to making our own crème fraîche, granola, sauerkraut or salsa. Vanessa includes a wonderful range of basics, explaining the necessary skills and anticipating your questions. As she goes from Aioli to Root Beer with stops for sourdough starter, Italian Table Pickles and Persimmon-Spice Butter, she provides flavor-packed

The antidote for cold weather and darker days is cozy comfort food. And what could be cozier than a big, beguiling brunch? DeDe Lahman and Neil Kleinberg know from brunch, as New Yorkers would say, and in Clinton St. Baking Company Cookbook, they share the secrets of the treasured treats that even the most jaded, been-there-eaten-that city-dwellers queue up for at their tiny establishment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Neil is a Brooklyn boy, but his buttermilk biscuits are truly to die for, and spread with Tomato Jam, topped with fluffy scrambled eggs, they anchor one of the best breakfast sandwiches this side of paradise (though I love them for dinner). Then come the muffins, scones, rhapsodically light pancakes, seasonal soups, sandwiches and sides like Grilled Goat Cheese on sourdough and Baked Truffled Grits, divine desserts and delicious drinks. Step-by-step directions, seasoned with tips and “restaurant tricks,” helpful notes and gorgeous photos make the making of these delights as pleasurable as their consumption.

Clinton St. Baking Company Cookbook

By DeDe Lahman and Neil Kleinberg Little, Brown $29.99, 224 pages ISBN 9780316083379

BRUNCH

WELL READ by robert Weibezahl

CARLOS FUENTES’ Mexican allegory Reading Destiny and Desire means entering a world that straddles the real and the imaginary, where time and place are fluid and truth is malleable. Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico’s most internationally renowned living writer, is a member of the aging generation of Latin American authors who burst on the world literary stage in the 1960s and ’70s with their brand of magical realism. Over time, that once-startling narrative technique has become commonplace even in mainstream fiction, but Fuentes remains a stalwart practitioner of its purest form. His challenging novels are not for the fainthearted.

Consider, for instance, that Destiny and Desire is narrated by the decapitated head of one of its central characters. The severed head belongs to Josué Nadal, a young man of indeterminate birth.

At Catholic boarding school, Josué meets his blood brother, Jericó— much is made of the Biblical correlation of their names—and the

two boys come of age as intellectual and emotional soul mates who share everything from philosophical discourses to prostitutes at the local brothel. The two are separated for a time when Jericó goes to study in Paris (or so he claims—Josué suspects his friend has been in the United States), then reunited as each is poised to follow the professional route that will lead to his inexorable destiny.

Josué goes to work for Max Monroy, a mysterious businessman who seems to control much of Mexico’s industrial wealth, and he falls under the sway of two corrupting influences: Asunta Jordán, Max’s seductive frontwoman, and Miguel Aparecido, a murderous convict. Jericó becomes advisor to the president, who seeks to control the masses with facile promises of happiness. This basic plot device of the disparate paths chosen by two “brothers,” the stuff of countless parables, novels and movies, is the mere framework on which Fuen-

tes hangs a complicated allegory of Mexico’s intertwined politics, religion and culture. It is a fable, really, populated with archetypes and prophets, set in slums and cafés and even in the celestial netherworld between heaven and earth. In the world Fuentes creates here, it is not unusual for a woman dressed as Amelia Earhart to drop from the sky into a man’s arms, or for a conversation with the dead to illuminate the past as well as the future. Mexico is “a country destroyed by its own epic,” confides Max’s mother from the grave, “and in Mexico the epic of the revolution justified everything, progress and backwardness, construction and corruption, peace and politics.”

Certainly this is not a book for the casual reader, and a workable knowledge of Mexico’s history will go a long way in helping make sense of the many subtleties in Destiny and Desire. Fuentes’ prose (exactingly rendered into English by the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman) is dense, his rich imagery ever shifting and some-

times hard to pin down.

Yet lovers of muscular, philosophically stimulating fiction will relish the visionary nightmare Fuentes conjures of his homeland and its fragile place in the larger world.

DESTINY AND DESIRE

By Carlos Fuentes Random House $27, 432 pages ISBN 9781400068807 eBook available

literary fiction

From New York Times and USA Today bestselling author

“the master of international action and intrigue.” —Richmond Times Dispatch A shipwreck off the coast of Louisiana reveals a mysterious cargo: genetically altered animals of impossible intelligence. But something deadly has escaped, setting off a chain of events that will change the world forever.

Coming in June— the next thrilling Sigma Force novel.

Preorder Now!

NOW IN PAPERBACK!

Connect with James Rollins at www.JamesRollins.com and on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.

Imprints of HarperCollinsPublishers

www.harpercollins.com

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Novel Reads

HARPERCOLLINS HarperCollins.com • AvonRomance.com Sidney Sheldon’s After the Darkness

by Sidney Sheldon and Tilly Bagshawe A classic tale of love and betrayal, and a struggle for survival in the new world order, this is an enthralling novel with rippedfrom-the-headlines immediacy, perfect for the post-Bernie Madoff era in America. A tribute to one of America’s most popular and bestselling authors, Sidney Sheldon’s After the Darkness is a novel that the master himself would have been proud to call his own.

columns Her haunted past Six months before Senseless (Zebra, $6.99, 416 pages, ISBN 9781420110197) opens, Eva Rayburn is released from prison after serving time for killing a man she claims brutally raped her. Three sorority sisters testified against her—and now one of those very women has turned up dead, with star-shaped brands similar to one

9780061728310, $7.99

Black Magic Sanction

by Kim Harrison Rachel Morgan has fought and hunted vampires, werewolves, banshees, demons, and other supernatural dangers as both witch and bounty hunter—and lived to tell the tale. But she’s never faced off against her own kind . . . until now.

9780061138041, $7.99

Ghost Country

by Patrick Lee Fearing a terrifying personal destiny revealed to him from the other side of the Breach, Travis Chase abandoned Tangent . . . and Paige Campbell. Now he must rescue her— because Paige knows tomorrow’s world is desolate and dead, a ghost country scattered with the bones of billions. And Doomsday will dawn in just four short months . . . unless they can find the answers buried in the ruins to come.

9780061584442, $7.99

Scared to Death

by Wendy Corsi Staub Perfect strangers whose once-perfect lives were cruelly shattered, they’re bound by a long-lost child, a fragile strand of newfound maternal hope—and mutual loneliness. Yet Elsa and Marin are never truly alone. Someone is always nearby, watching them and their children. Someone who must satisfy a dark need with innocent blood. And now time is running out.

9780061895074, $7.99

Wedding of the Season

by Laura Lee Guhrke Lady Beatrix Danbury had always known she would marry William Mallory. She’d loved him forever and she’d never doubted he loved her, too. But when she made him choose between their life together or his lifelong dream, Will chose the latter . . . and left two weeks before their wedding.

9780061963155, $7.99

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romance b y c h r i s t i e r i d g way

with as well.

Magnus, who has been living on pure revenge for years, at first distrusts Margo as a sea witch. Can he soften under his feelings for her? Will Margo settle into a medieval life and trust this new world won’t be snatched away? Both questions require the courageous couple to battle violent enemies and their own unsettling emotions. Mackay’s lusty romance is an action-packed trip through time.

Romance of the Month

left on Eva. As more people die, Detective Deacon Garrison follows the clues back to the young woman who he sees was unjustly convicted.

She’s naturally wary, though, and cooperation with the attractive cop doesn’t come easy. While Eva tries to move into her future, the old case and current crimes bring her back to former friends and family. The gruesome killings continue and Eva must work beside Deacon to stop them even as their feelings for each other grow. This is a story to read with the lights on.

Medieval magic Travel to medieval Scotland in Allie Mackay’s Must Love Kilts (Signet, $7.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9780451231949). Heroine Margo Menlove, a dedicated Scotophile, wins a dream vacation to the land she longs for. But the bus tour only allows glimpses of the splendor of the Highlands. Not once has she seen anything close to the magnificence of the legendary warrior Magnus MacBride, Viking Slayer, a figure who seems to have invaded her heart and soul. Then, on a solitary walk, a vengeful witch tells Margo that she and Magnus have been cursed to desire each other but to exist on different planes and never touch. Before Margo can fully fathom that, however, she unwittingly thwarts the spell—and she and Magnus are together in beautiful and dangerous medieval times with Vikings breathing down their necks and a fated love to contend

Carolyn Jewel returns to a fascinating world of magic and mayhem in My Immortal Assassin. Set in contemporary San Francisco, it tells of the continuing struggles between the Kin—a subspecies of demons— and the magekind, humans who possess magic. Durian, a demon known as a powerful assassin, comes across the human Grayson Spencer as she attempts to kill a malevolent mage who destroyed her life. In an effort to bring peace between the warring factions, Durian has sworn to protect all mages and so takes the vengeful woman under his wing in order to keep her bloodthirst in check. She has unusual abilities that he can help her learn to control, he tells her. Gray agrees to his tutelage, hoping that she’ll master her new talents and then make good on her goal of revenge.

As they work together, passion blossoms, but it’s a thorny relationship because of their opposite intentions. Surrounded by danger, can a killer demon and a woman with strange magic surrender to love?

Dark, edgy and laced with thrilling desire, My Immortal Assassin will set readers’ hearts racing.

My Immortal Assassin

By Carolyn Jewel Grand Central/Forever $7.99, 384 pages ISBN 9780446563864 eBook available

Paranormal

Whodunit

by Bruce Tierney

Saved by a well-placed paperback To be sure, Ayn Rand had (and still has) her legions of fans, but it’s a fair bet that among them only Logan Hamilton can claim that the iconic author literally saved his life.

A 600-page Rand paperback in his jacket pocket blocked the sniper’s bullet meant to dispatch him to his final reward; now Hamilton lies on a Florida sidewalk with a “Wha’

happened?” expression on his mug, and it will be up to Longboat Key police chief Bill Lester and lawyerturned-investigator Matt Royal to keep him safe until they can nail the shooter. A dramatic opening scene, to say the least, for H. Terrell Griffin’s fifth Matt Royal novel, Bitter Legacy (Oceanview, $25.95, 360 pages, ISBN 9781933515960).

Royal, like numerous other Florida mystery novel protagonists starting with the legendary Travis McGee, is semi-retired, a likable slacker who works only when the notion strikes him. He soon finds himself embroiled in a mineral rights case with roots in the original Seminole treaties of the mid-1800s. Pacing, characters, history, mystery—what more can a suspense addict ask for?

ALL IN THE family San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy makes but a cameo appearance in John Lescroart’s latest thriller, Damage (Dutton, $26.95, 416 pages, ISBN 9780525951766); this time, center stage goes to Hardy’s perennial second banana, San Francisco cop Abe Glitsky. It seems that the court of appeals has ordered a new trial for convicted rapist/murderer Ro Curtlee, scion of an influential Bay Area newspaper family. Shortly after Curtlee’s release from prison, the original witnesses against him start dying one by one, none by natural causes.

Glitsky is stymied by the lack of evidence implicating Curtlee in this latest wave of killings, and by

the pressure brought to bear on the investigation by the family’s newspaper. When Curtlee pays an obliquely menacing visit to the Glitsky household, the tension becomes palpable—and personal. Ro Curtlee is as well drawn a sociopath as any in recent fiction, and the cat-and-mouse game in which he engages with Glitsky will leave readers wondering just who is toying with whom.

With Damage, John Lescroart (pronounced “les-kwah,” in case you were wondering) is clearly at the top of his game, and it is a very good game indeed.

A true man’s man Stephen Hunter’s Dead Zero (Simon & Schuster, $26, 416 pages, ISBN 9781439138656) features sorta-retired military sniper Bob Lee Swagger (think of a Tommy Lee Jones-esque cowboy with an attitude and an adopted Asian daughter), who would like nothing better than to retire to his Idaho ranch, except that he keeps getting called upon to deal with matters of national security. This time out, Swagger is engaged to rout renegade sniper Ray Cruz, the legendary “Cruise Missile” of Afghanistan, a man reputed to allow nothing to get in the way of his mission.

Cruz’s assignment is to terminate an Afghani presidential aspirant, once an enemy of the state, now (to Cruz’s surprise and consternation) a political darling of his American “handlers.” Just as there are “guy cars” (Dodge Viper, Corvette ZR-1), there are “guy books,” and this one hits the mark on every count: lotsa guns, lotsa mano-a-mano violence, a bounteous babe or two and a fair bit of high-drama pyrotechnics.

And lines like this, just after a fusillade among a herd of farm animals: “It was raining goats . . . the weather had become 100% chance of goat.”

You gotta love that.

Mystery of the month L.A. Sheriff Charlie Hood is back for his fourth outing in T. Jefferson

Parker’s The Border Lords. On loan to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, he is point man for an investigation into the North Baja Cartel, which has for some time been importing drugs (and wholesale slaughter) across the all-toopermeable California border with Mexico. Hood’s amigo, ATF agent Sean Ozburn, is operating deep undercover within the cartel; it is his custom to check in daily. It has been six days since his last contact.

And then, inexplicably, Ozburn is back with a fury, laying waste to the safe-house full of cartel gangbangers (on camera, no less) before making good his escape from the stunned police surveillance unit.

Hood and Ozburn’s convoluted and deadly game of tag take them from the Mexican border all the way to Costa Rica, where each will come into contact with an enigmatic priest who seems to worship no known god, a man suspected by the locals of having unpleasant paranormal powers. The Charlie Hood books are less Californ-sun-

drenched than Parker’s earlier books (Laguna Heat, Little Saigon, et al.); that said, the intensity, plotting, characters and suspense are all there in spades. And for those who enjoy a shiver of the supernatural—just a suggestion, really—The Border Lords should be right at the top of your short list.

The Border Lords

By T. Jefferson Parker Dutton $26.95, 384 pages ISBN 9780525952008 Audio, eBook available

thriller

When Elise Vanderzell plummets from her bedroom balcony one gorgeous summer night, her children awaken to a nightmare.

THEIR MOTHER IS DEAD. THEIR FATHER IS CHARGED WITH HER MURDER.

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9

columns This month’s best paperback releases for reading groups

A LONG, STRANGE TRIP In his remarkably mature debut, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (Picador, $14, 240 pages, ISBN 9780312680466), Zachary Mason takes liberties with a literary classic to produce a fascinating novel that succeeds on its own merits. Mason uses Homer’s work as a foundation and writes in a style that’s poetic yet accessible. He departs from tradition by putting his own spin on Odysseus’ adventures, playing a game of what-if throughout the book and

book clubs

audio

by julie hale

by sukey howard

obituaries, strives to do as little as possible at the paper, yet, when his personal life falls apart, he finds new inspiration in his work. Paris correspondent Lloyd Burko tries to extract state secrets from his son, but what he learns has more to do with family politics than government policy. Copyeditor Dave Belling— freshly fired—becomes romantically involved with the woman who laid him off. The paper that unites these disparate personalities is on the brink of collapse, which makes their stories all the more poignant.

Rachman, a newspaperman himself, knows whereof he writes. This is a skillfully executed portrait of a culture that may soon be obsolete.

baby’s gone again Amanda McCready was four years old in Gone, Baby, Gone, when she was kidnapped, found by P.I. Patrick Kenzie and returned to her negligent mother. It’s 12 years later in Moonlight Mile (HarperAudio, $34.99, 9 hours unabridged, ISBN 9780062010865); Amanda has vanished again, and her aunt insists that Patrick find her. Dennis Lehane, one of crime fiction’s master perpetrators, has brought back Patrick and his P.I. partner, Angie Gennaro, in a sequel equal to the original, adroitly and convincingly read by Jonathan Davis. Patrick, now married to Angie, with a fouryear-old daughter of their own and

Audio of the Month

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS tinkering with famous plotlines.

Mason’s hero, for instance, opts not to use the Trojan horse, and his Penelope, hardly the patient, penitent wife-in-waiting she’s famously known to be, goes ahead and takes a husband—a fat old fellow posing as Odysseus. These clever variations on the original tale are so convincingly executed, they seem like natural parts of the narrative.

Fully developed yet interconnected, the book’s chapters take the form of short stories or brief set pieces.

Footnotes explaining the original text and expounding on the new add an extra layer to this delightfully innovative novel. Inventive and inspired, Mason’s book breathes new life into a time-honored epic.

when in rome

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With The Imperfectionists (Dial, $15, 304 pages, ISBN 9780385343671), his shrewd debut, Tom Rachman offers a compelling look at the news industry as it used to be. Set in the not-toodistant past, when the phrase “hot off the presses” still had meaning, the novel focuses on an Englishlanguage paper in Rome. Capturing the hectic pace that characterizes a newsroom, the novel unfolds in short chapters, each of which is centered around a different employee. Arthur Gopal, who writes

Featuring a deliciously twisty plot and a pair of unforgettable leading characters, Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America is a rip-roaring work of historical fiction. Olivier de Garmont, a fictional French aristocrat based on Alexis de Tocqueville, is the pampered son of protective parents who—prompted

by France’s uncertain political climate—send him to safety in America. Watching over Olivier in the New World is an Englishman named Parrot. A member of the working class and tough as brass, Parrot has little patience for his spoiled charge. Olivier, for his part, is taken aback by the lack of manners and lust for money that seem to characterize most Americans.

His adventures with Parrot in New York and Philadelphia, among other places, give rise to the sort of witty, sophisticated insights for which de Tocqueville was known. This complex and comedic work has earned Carey much well-deserved acclaim.

Parrot and Olivier in America

By Peter Carey Vintage $15.95, 400 pages ISBN 9780307476012

historical fiction

and visionary leader, with an unwavering capacity to forgive, and glimpses of him as a friend and a family man.

He’s been called a saint, but his definition of a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying. He kept on trying, surviving 27 years in prison, persevering in his belief that a better future for his country was possible, and finally achieving the end of apartheid. John Kani, whose voice and delivery is uncannily close to Mandela’s own, reads, making this Mandela mosaic come alive.

still conflicted by the consequences of what he did 12 years ago, is reluctant to get involved with Amanda again. But this tough, smart guy with unyielding integrity can’t say no. I won’t even try to summarize the plot; you have to listen through it, dazzled by its twists and turns,

by Lehane’s powerfully descriptive prose and by his intensely believable characters, whether it’s a Moldavian thug mangling English while he casually murders his Russian mafia boss, or Patrick considering his flaws, his future and the “burdens” he’s come to cherish.

What makes a man “To so many of us he was more than just a man. He was a symbol of the struggle for justice, equality and dignity in South Africa and around the world.” That’s how Barack Obama describes Nelson Mandela in his foreword to Conversations with Myself (Macmillan Audio, $39.99, 10 hours unabridged, ISBN 9781427210517), a collection Mandela has made from his personal archive of letters, notes, journals, calendars, parts of an unfinished autobiography and archival interviews. What emerges from these extraordinary fragments is a sort of scrapbook that offers a rare portrait of the real man behind the legend, his evolution as a political thinker

Percy Darling, widowed long ago and recently retired, is the charming curmudgeon at the heart of The Widower’s Tale, set in a small, upscale Massachusetts town. His voice alternates with those of his beloved grandson Robert—whose best friend turns out to be a charismatic ecoterrorist—a gay kindergarten teacher named Ira and Celestino, a young Guatemalan gardener without a green card. Mark Bramhall’s exceptionally gifted narration makes each man’s voice distinct and authentic in age, accent and emotional nuance. Julia Glass, an astute, sympathetic observer of family with all its mistakes, misunderstandings, mingled joys and woes, spins out a leisurely paced, totally involving narrative with subplots and backstories galore.

Provocative but never preachy, she gently nudges readers to think about such topics as environmental degradation, economic disparity and the obligations that privilege should carry. I didn’t want The Widower’s Tale to end, didn’t want to leave these wonderfully drawn characters as they moved on in their complexly intertwined lives.

The Widower’s Tale

By Julia Glass Random House Audio $45, 18 hours unabridged ISBN 9780739383094

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meet MARY JANE CLARK © Verlyn Larson

the title of your Q: What’s

new book?

would you describe Q: How

the book?

© KEVIN WHITE

your favorite thing about Piper Donovan, the book’s Q: What’s

lead character?

© KEVIN WHITE

We Q: search hear you took a cake-decorating class as part of your refor this series. Are you ready to be the next Cake Boss?

Q: would If you could trade places with one person for a day, who it be? three things would you want with you on a desert island?

Q: What

Q: W hat’s the best book you’ve read in the last year?

Q: W hat’s your number one resolution for 2011?

TO HAVE AND TO KILL

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After writing a dozen thrillers based on her experience as a writer and producer for CBS News, Mary Jane Clark turns her attention to a sweeter setting in To Have and To Kill (Morrow, $24.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9780061995545), the first in a new series of Wedding Cake Mysteries. Clark, the mother of two grown children, divides her time between homes in New Jersey and Florida.

interviews

KIM EDWARDS Interview by Katherine Wyrick

Rewriting a family’s history

W

hen Kim Edwards began writing a follow-up to her wildly successful novel The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, she intended to create a contemporary story in the picturesque area of upstate New York where she grew up. She soon found, however, that the past kept asserting itself on the present.

The resulting novel, The Lake of Dreams, is a seamless interplay of the two—part historical, epistolary novel and part modern-day quest story. “The two are deeply interwoven,” Edwards says during a call to her Kentucky home. “The past presses itself on the present . . . it became more forceful as I was writing it.”

When the novel opens, Lucy Jarrett is at a turning point in her life and has returned to Lake of Dreams, New York, from her recent home in Japan, after a decade-long absence. Back in the rambling old house of her childhood, she finds that she is still haunted by her father’s unresolved death in a fishing accident years earlier. She also learns that her brother, Blake, has gone into the family business and joined ranks with their uncle in a controversial project to develop the area’s pristine wetlands.

Meanwhile, Lucy also reconnects with her first love, Keegan Fall, a sensitive, thoughtful glass artist who still carries a torch for her after all these years. But one morning, everything changes when Lucy makes a curious discovery in a window seat of the house’s longneglected cupola. There she unearths a cache of letters, ephemera linked to the suffrage movement and an heirloom tapestry bordered with interlocking spheres—an ancient symbol that, as Lucy soon learns, also appears in stained-glass windows crafted by a local artist almost a century earlier. Thus begins a journey that will force her to rewrite her family’s history—and her own.

Though Lucy’s life doesn’t directly mirror the author’s, there are some parallels. Edwards grew up in Skaneateles, in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and after completing her graduate work, she traveled to Asia with her husband, where they spent the next five years teaching.

Later on, she enjoyed revisiting the upstate area and muses, “I think the landscape of everybody’s childhood

really stays with them.” She also relished rediscovering the region’s history and its ties with the women’s suffrage movement. “It was really, really fun to see it through that lens,” Edwards recalls.

An associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Edwards has been on leave for the past two years to write The Lake of Dreams. After a whirlwind tour following the success of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which has sold more than 4.5 million copies, she alighted in Kentucky seeking the solitude required to write. Her husband, former chair of the English department at the university and a carpenter in his previous “I think the life, built her landscape of a secluded home studio everybody’s in which to childhood work. really stays Edwards “wrote the with them.” book from the outside in,” she explains: “I told myself I had to write 1,000 words a day just to see where it took me.”

The story for The Lake of Dreams, however, had been germinating long before The Memory Keeper’s Daughter came into being, its images floating in the author’s mind like dust motes in the dappled light of a stained-glass window. Years ago, Edwards wrote a draft of a novel (her first) that had similar themes, like a concern for the land. Over the years, she returned to her discarded novel and came to understand it in a totally new way—an exercise that proved fruitful, because it was during this process that she found the voice for The Lake of Dreams. “For me, and many writers, that’s a crucial discovery,” Edwards says. If she had to identify the seed of the story, however it would be a stained-glass window. “I loved the metaphor of glass, as something that moves between states of being.”

It’s while standing before a series of these windows that Lucy experiences this revelation about her ancestor, Rose: “It was physical, almost, my desire to know who she was and how she had lived. . . .

From this point in time, almost a hundred years later, the events of her life looked fixed, determined.

And yet, in her brief notes I had recognized a restless passion that seemed familiar, mirroring my own seeking, my own questions.”

Fans of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees will find much to love in this novel, especially the way Edwards integrates arcane subject matter into a contemporary story.

The character of Lucy, with her wanderlust and longing for selfknowledge, recalls literary heroes across time.

“I think of this book as kind of a quest story, and so the underlying structure of that, both seeking something in the world and undergoing some kind of internal change, too, is the structure that was in my mind when I was writing it,” Edwards says. “I did a lot of reading about myths, traditional and ancient quest stories along the way.

One of the elements of a quest story is that the hero gets called back from whatever he or she is doing at the time, so it seemed to fit really beautifully with the wandering Lucy has done.” (Edwards even manages to work a chalice into the narrative.)

Not surprisingly, dreams also figure prominently in The Lake of Dreams. At different points in her career, Edwards says, she has been interested in theology and the works of Carl Jung—interests that clearly inform her fiction. The design that appears on the heirloom blanket Lucy discovers was inspired by the Chalice Well of Glaston-

bury—on which appears a sacred geometry that consists of two interlocking circles, called vesica piscis, or in more modern terminology, a Venn diagram. At her urging, the book’s designers incorporated the blanket’s border into each chapter heading.

Though parts of the book feel a touch treacly, Edwards writes well about familial relationships and the tenuous ties that bind us. One particular passage stands out in which Lucy, visiting an abandoned chapel, sits bathed in the ethereal light of stained-glass windows.

This magical, meditative scene transports the reader, with Lucy, to a place like dreamtime, where the veil between the worlds—the seen and unseen—grows thin. It’s a place Edwards herself has come to know through the creative process. Of the act of writing, she says, “I would emerge from it feeling like I was still partially there. . . . The writing changes you. You leave as a different person. You never know what you’re going to discover.”

The Lake of Dreams

By Kim Edwards, Viking, $26.95, 400 pages, ISBN 9780670022175, Audio available

13

interviews

Annie PROULX Interview by Rebecca Bain

AT LONG LAST, FINDING HOME

A

nnie Proulx is a bit of a nomad. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain” moved 20 times as a child, and she’s kept the habit alive as an adult. A constant series of unsatisfactory houses—too big, too small, no bookcases—made her long for a home that reflected who she is as a woman and a writer.

Proulx almost has that ideal home on 640 acres in Wyoming, a landscape she writes about in her first nonfiction book in two decades. Her house and her book are called Bird Cloud.

Bird Cloud is many things: part memoir, part social history, part nature observations, with a little archeology tossed into the mix as well. However, it’s not exactly the book Proulx was planning to write.

“I hadn’t planned to write a memoir. What I thought I was going to be writing about were the problems and solutions in constructing my house because I find that sort of

USA TODAY AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

This vampire has been alone for far too long . . .

thing interesting. And there was a lot more of that in the book before my editor decided maybe there shouldn’t be,” Proulx says by phone from New Mexico. Laughing, she adds, “So a lot of that went out the window. And it gradually, by itself, turned into a memoir because life is holistic, not compartmented.”

The problems with the house began long before Proulx broke ground. She had been looking for land—beautiful, wild land—for some time when she found a former nature preserve by the North Platte River. But acquiring it proved a touch dicey, as she explains: “I didn’t think we were going to get the land when we were bickering and dickering back and forth with the Nature Conservancy, from whom I bought it. And one day I was driving from the east to the west; the weather comes out of the west. And I was living on the other side of the Medicine Bowl Range at the time. And as I turned glumly into the driveway, I glanced up at the sky and there was this enormous, enormous bird-shaped cloud. . . . And I thought, oh, that’s cool. It must be a sign that I’m going to get the place, and it should be called Bird Cloud.”

Bird Cloud

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LynsaySands.net

AVONBOOKS.COM AvonBooks.com

By Annie Proulx, Scribner, $26, 256 pages, ISBN 9780743288804, Audio, eBook available

Anyone familiar with Proulx’s work knows the physical settings of her fiction are often love poems to the land itself. Naturally she wanted the house she built on her Wyoming prairie, with its towering cliffs and gorgeous wetlands, to reflect that. As she writes in Bird Cloud, “Because place is such a major part of my writing and life, I thought it important that Bird Cloud breathe in and out of the landscape. A house subject not only to the wind, but to the drowning shadows that submerge it every evening and the sharp slice of sunlight at the eastern end of the cliff.”

And did her architect design such a wonder for her?

“Indeed he did! I love the place,” she says. “It’s incredibly beautiful, it is calming, it’s a fine place to work, all my books are there. The problem is, I can’t be there in the winter.”

All it took was one winter. Wyoming’s 80-90-mph winds pack the heavy snows into something resembling concrete. The stuff can’t be shoveled—it has to be poked with sharp stakes in an effort to break it up. Plus, Proulx has a half-milelong driveway. When the snow gets packed like that, snowplows are useless. Proulx realized her house was only perfect about eight or nine months of the year—the other months she’d be trapped inside, unable to leave her beautiful prison.

Wonderful as Bird Cloud is, she still hasn’t achieved a perfect house she can live in all year long.

“I was having exactly this conversation with my middle son and his girlfriend yesterday. There’s always a trade-off. There’s always something that’s awful and wonderful about the place. When we look at it, we usually see the wonderful things and not the awful things. It’s when

we start living in it that the awful things become quite upfront.”

When the weather begins to worsen in Wyoming, she relocates to New Mexico, where she spends the winters. That’s why she was in Albuquerque when our conversation took place.

Proulx’s new book isn’t just about her house or her life in Wyoming, fascinating as that is. She also shares the entertaining histories of some of the more colorful characters who lived there in the 19th century (and some equally colorful ones who live there now), her theories on the extinction of the woolly mammoths and her lyrical observations on the flora and fauna. She’s got a rich source of material: There are pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope.

“That’s been one of the great pleasures of the place, to have watched the private lives of all the local birds. They recognize me and they recognize the James Gang who worked on the house. But when strangers come, they get all agitated,” Proulx says.

In addition to the hardcover edition, Bird Cloud is also being released in audio format. When asked if she’s the one reading it, Proulx crisply replies, “Heavens, no! I’m far too busy for that. I did read the introduction for the audiobook, but I left the rest of the book to someone else. I don’t have time for it.”

Does that mean she has another project in the works? Proulx says yes, but offers no details. Just like the men of the Old West she writes about in Bird Cloud, she likes to hold her cards close to her chest until she’s ready to lay ’em down.

LISA GENOVA Interview by Alden Mudge

© Christopher Seufert

Novelist captures a world cut in half

W

hile she was being “wildly irresponsible”—writing her first novel, Still Alice, instead of going back to work at a highpowered Boston consultancy firm—Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard, decided, what the heck, she might as well take acting lessons too.

“I was a divorced single mother at the time,” Genova says during a call to her home on Cape Cod. “I wasn’t doing anything I was supposed to be doing, and I had always wanted to act.” So for a year and a half Genova trained as an actress.

“One of the things I learned,” she says, “is that you always raise the stakes as high as possible whenever possible.”

It’s a lesson Genova seems to have applied in much of her creative life. When Still Alice wasn’t picked up by a publisher, for example, she decided in 2007 to selfpublish the novel, which offers a moving depiction of the life of Alice Howland, a Harvard professor who develops early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. “It was self-published for 10 months and in that time I sold just over 1,000 copies, and I was really, really proud of that,” Genova says, laughing. “Then it was bought

by Simon & Schuster, and Barnes & Noble sold more copies than that on the first day it was released!”

The popularity of Still Alice allowed Genova to become an Alzheimer’s advocate and to write full time. When she began to develop the character of Sarah Nickerson, the high-achieving, 30-something narrator of her new novel Left Neglected, Genova says she was inspired first by her curiosity about an unusual condition called Left Neglect Syndrome and then by her concern about the crazy-busy lives so many Americans lead these days.

“Most women who are raising kids and who have to work are finding themselves doing way too much in a day,” Genova says. “In fact, it’s sort of a badge of honor to say that you’re really, really busy. So I could have given Sarah a normal job but I thought, raise the stakes as high as possible whenever possible, and I decided to give her a really crazy job. I wanted to make her exhaustion and level of multitasking pretty severe. I wanted readers to see that there are so many things she’s not paying attention to in her own life.

She’s not paying attention to her

distant relationship with her mother because it’s easier not to look at that. She’s ignoring the fact that she and her husband haven’t had sex in a while. She’s ignoring the elliptical machine in the basement and the fact that she’s 20 pounds overweight. And she’s not paying attention to the road because she’s on her cell phone.”

Left Neglected tells of Sarah’s attempt to recover from that moment of inattention on the road and to learn to live with Left Neglect Syndrome. “It’s a confusing condition to wrap your brain around,” Genova says. She first read about it in Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and the disorder would crop up in her neuroscience classes at Harvard. Left Neglect is a condition in which trauma to the right side of the brain results in a person not being able to recognize left-side space. “If you ask a patient with it to draw a clock,” Genova explains, “they would draw the numbers 12 through 6 and think they had drawn the whole clock. I’m like, wait a minute, how does this person walk through the world if they’re only recognizing half of it? I knew that if I got to write another novel, I wanted to write about someone with this condition.”

One of the great accomplishments of Left Neglected is how fully Genova allows a reader to inhabit Sarah’s experiences of this peculiar disorder. Those experiences are often frustrating, but they are also laced with humor. “I didn’t know Sarah would unfold that way,” Genova says. “I haven’t written humor before, but there’s a lot of physical comedy in the book, and that was fun to see evolve.”

But Genova also has a larger purpose in mind in writing Left Neglected. “I wanted to use this condition as a metaphor for our crazy lives as a culture right now,” she says. “It’s one of the things I have wrestled with in my life. In my 20s, I was very driven to succeed, like Sarah. I had my head down barreling a thousand miles an hour toward

what was an outwardly, visibly successful life. A Ph.D. in neuroscience, a job that was very, very well paid. I had a sort of laundry list of things I would have: I would get married, I would have kids, I would do it all, without really thinking about what I wanted my life to look like. Then when I was 33, I got divorced.

That sort of shook things up. It was devastating on the one hand, and on the other hand it gave me an opportunity to stop and think about what I wanted.”

In Left Neglected, Sarah Nickerson quite literally crashes and is then forced to rebuild her life. She struggles with her disorder and she struggles to reconnect with her mother, her husband and her children and to discover how to lead a meaningful life without the preconceived standards of success.

In Genova’s own life, she metaphorically crashed after her divorce and “began choosing a simpler life.”

In 2007 she married photographer and filmmaker Christopher Seufert and moved to the Cape, where the family lives in a house overlooking a saltwater creek. She writes at Starbucks most mornings and attends her 10-year-old daughter’s soccer and softball games in the after-

noons. She is now the author of two novels and the mother of two more children—a two-year-old son and a three-month-old daughter.

“That’s right!” Genova says, laughing, “I delivered a baby and a book this year. It was a little crazy.”

Award-Winning Author

MEGAN HART

Left Neglected

A delicate balance between horror and hope.

Megan Hart’s newest novel will lead the reader down a twisted trail of shocking revelations.

By Lisa Genova, Gallery, $25, 336 pages, ISBN 9781439164631, Audio, eBook available

www.eHarlequin.com • www.MeganHart.com

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features

NEW YEAR, NEW YOU

books to inspire personal CHANGE

A

re you ready to make a fresh start in the new year? We’ve lined up a bevy of guidebooks to help you launch 2011 with a renewed sense of purpose and effective new strategies for dealing with life’s challenges. Choose the approach that best suits your lifestyle and take those first steps toward a new and improved you.

The 100 Thing Challenge

By Dave Bruno Harper $13.99, 224 pages ISBN 9780061787744 eBook available

SELF-HELP

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Dave Bruno was a success: booming business, loving family, nice home and solid Christian faith.

He owned lots of stuff, which led to wanting more stuff, leading to a blog called Stuck in Stuff, where he complained about consumerism but continued to buy—wait for it—more stuff. Finally, all that stuff started to take its toll, and in a quest to examine his consumption more closely, Bruno decided to pare back to just 100 personal items for one year. He chronicles that journey in his inspirational new memoir, The 100 Thing Challenge.

Bruno’s book is often funny, as when he finds a pair of cleats he will never use again but had kept “in case I started to age in reverse.”

One-liners like those sometimes steal focus from the project, which is only described in detail halfway through the book. By that time, our attention has been diverted down so many side paths it’s hard

to remember what we came for.

Thankfully, a detailed appendix will assist readers inspired to try the 100 Thing Challenge themselves, as many apparently have.

After reading about Bruno’s experience—which he says helped him to regain his soul—you’ll never look at the contents of your junk drawer the same way again. And don’t feel too conflicted about buying the book: Bruno counts his whole “library” as one item, a form of cheating any avid reader would wholeheartedly endorse.

—Heather Seggel

The New Normal

By David Wann St. Martin’s/Griffin $14.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780312575434 eBook available

Conservation

Guides to sustainable living bend the shelves at bookstores these days, but David Wann takes sustainability farther than most. In The New Normal, he maps out a future without dependency on fossil fuels, cheap goods or processed food. Because we are all faced with a warming world, he offers steps

to deeply transform our resourcedependent routines to self-reliant, more fulfilling lives that are easier on our planet.

Changes in population, technology and available resources have outdistanced our cultural ideals, says Wann. For our “new normal,” we should ditch old status symbols, such as huge McMansions in the suburbs, and instead value actions that build local communities, such as bike-friendly thoroughfares, energy-efficient housing and shorter food and energy supply lines.

Wann describes how meeting our needs locally will make life not only sustainable but more meaningful, through closer ties with our family and neighbors.

The New Normal provides both the vision and the actions needed to change the status quo. It is an excellent resource for people who want specific information on creating a sustainable culture where they live—and beyond.

Chemistry of Calm, from how to choose better food options at the grocery store, to using dietary supplements linked to brain health, to integrating a routine of meditative exercises.

For Emmons, “Mindfulness” is the key to corralling the thoughts and emotions that ratchet up our anxiety, and The Chemistry of Calm is an in-depth how-to guide that can benefit us all.

—Marianne Peters

Fifteen years after the phenomenal success of Simple Abundance, which spent a year at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, author Sarah Ban Breathnach admits, “All the money’s gone.”

Her new book, Peace and Plenty, explains how she hit bottom and offers an approach perfectly timed for the new year: “a fresh start for all of us: living well, spending less, and appreciating more.”

Ban Breathnach’s writing is therapy on a page as she copes with her monumental losses: multiple homes, nine assistants, extravagant purchases (Isaac Newton’s prayer chapel in England, Marilyn Monroe’s furs) and a thieving husband.

In dealing with the aftermath, she uncovers the emotionally volatile relationship women have with money.

Instead of writing another dry investing how-to, Ban Breathnach gives women a guide to finding spiritual and emotional peace after financial loss. Anyone who has suffered financial catastrophe—losing a home to foreclosure, losing a job to the recession, losing it all in a messy divorce—will find reassurance and compassion. With gentle advice, Peace and Plenty helps readers face their guilt about past money mistakes and move forward.

Ban Breathnach brings her Victorian sensibilities to plainJane finance; her budget includes

The Chemistry of Calm

By Henry Emmons, M.D. Touchstone $15, 288 pages ISBN 9781439129067 eBook available

Self-help

Dr. Henry Emmons’ new book, The Chemistry of Calm, offers natural solutions to overcoming anxiety, maintaining that there is an alternative to panic attacks and Prozac. Emmons, a psychiatrist, laid the groundwork for a holistic path to wellness with his last book, The Chemistry of Joy. In this followup, Emmons outlines what he calls the Resilience Training Program.

Meditation, diet, exercise and supplements comprise the program. What Emmons lays out is a very doable regimen for readers that begins with self-care and acceptance. Although many other self-help books center on fixing the problem(s), Emmons takes the position that individuals are innately healthy and simply need to refocus.

The shift from anxious to peaceable takes seven steps. Emmons walks readers through each in The

—Lizza Connor Bowen

PEACE AND PLENTY

By Sarah Ban Breathnach Grand Central $24.99, 448 pages ISBN 9780446561747 Audio, eBook available

PERSONAL GROWTH

NEW YEAR, NEW YOU a Christmas Club, her cash system creates a pin money stash. Readers rediscover the “thrill of thrift” by cleaning out purses and closets for a fresh start, and pampering themselves with poetry and early bedtime routines.

Ban Breathnach, who popularized the Gratitude Journal, now recommends several more tools for inexpensive self-reflection. The Journal of Well-Spent Moments, the Contentment Chest and the Comfort Companion all focus on finding the positive without spending much money.

Advice and anecdotes from famous women who’ve dealt with their own reversals of fortune are included throughout, but Ban Breathnach is at her best when sharing the deeply personal stories of her own financial foibles. And perhaps her greatest lesson came from the treachery of her English husband: Protect yourself first, she advises.

Sharing tears, laughter and many cups of tea with Ban Breathnach, readers will come away with a new perspective for finding peace.

—Stephanie Gerber

Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

By Karen Armstrong Knopf $22.95, 240 pages ISBN 9780307595591 Audio, eBook available

spirituality

Everybody knows the world lacks compassion, yet it’s something we deeply desire. To care about others, we must set aside our own egos, which is hard. Toward this end, selfdescribed religious historian Karen Armstrong has written Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, calculated to mirror other 12-step programs and help us “dethrone ourselves from the centre of our worlds.”

Armstrong is the 2008 TED Prize winner and creator of The Charter for Compassion, crafted in 2009 by prominent religious leaders of many faiths and the general public.

She believes that all religions are saying the same things, albeit in different ways, and that we must restore compassion to the heart of

our religious practices. Considering that her narrative draws from the myths and precepts of many disparate faiths, including Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, her prose is clear and her concepts surprisingly easy to follow; it’s a warm and, yes, compassionate book. Yet she is still able to convey a sense of urgency: We are hardwired for compassion as well as cruelty, and it’s time to take the high road.

Armstrong’s genius is her ability to distill an impressive amount of information into just over 200 pages, making complex concepts easy to understand. In the end, living compassionately means following the Golden Rule: Always treat others as you yourself would want to be treated. With Armstrong as a guide, we can learn to do just that.

money that can then be spent on more meaningful family vacations.

She addresses other common family money matters with “workouts” for situations from launching a home-based business to determining children’s allowances.

Kay admits to being born thrifty, but she balances it by giving generously. Her 10/10/80 spending budget allocates 10 percent to giving and 10 percent to savings.

That’s a hefty chunk for someone overwhelmed with credit card debt.

But her Giving Guide Workout challenges you to strengthen your generosity muscle by doing more to share your time, resources and money, promising that you’ll feel and live better. And if you don’t have a dollar to spare, she includes 25 gifts that don’t cost a cent.

your brain works, determine where your creative comfort zone lies and pinpoint the areas in your creative process which need some beefing up.

From Rorschach tests to association exercises, Your Creative Brain doesn’t simply teach you how to be more creative—it actually starts the process for you.

— C a t D . Ac r e e

365 thank yous

By John Kralik Hyperion $22.99, 240 pages ISBN 9781401324056

SELF-HELP

—Stephanie Gerber

—Linda Leaming

THE 60-MINUTE MONEY WORKOUT

By Ellie Kay WaterBrook $14.99, 224 pages ISBN 9780307446039 eBook available

your creative brain

By Shelley Carson, Ph.D. Jossey-Bass $24.95, 370 pages ISBN 9780470547632 eBook available

Psychology

finance

If getting your family’s financial house in order seems like an overwhelming task, then Ellie Kay’s The 60-Minute Money Workout is for you. Every topic is broken down into chunks that make paying down debt, planning for retirement and even college planning doable in just one hour a week. From warm up to cool down, Kay acts as your money trainer as you discover your money personality and get on the same page with your partner.

Kay is called America’s Family Financial Expert for good reason.

She brings real wisdom from supporting seven children on an annual income of just $55,000. The Kay family pays cash for cars, has no college loans and even paid off $40,000 in debt.

Her head-of-household experience shines in chapters like “Cha Ching Guide to Paying Less” and “Travel and Fun Guide Workout.”

She shares loads of family-friendly ways to shop smarter for groceries, clothes and gas, saving time and

Before you can start using your brain most effectively, you must understand it. This is the thinking behind Your Creative Brain, which contains the most up-to-date research-based exercises and rules to help you deliver your creative potential. For those who consider themselves “uncreative types” or are too attached to tried-and-true concepts, Your Creative Brain acts as an interactive guide to determine your weaker points and put them to work.

According to Harvard psychologist and researcher Shelley Carson, creativity is not an attribute reserved only for crafty types or inventors. Carson is the first researcher to frame creativity as a set of neurological functions, and Your Creative Brain lets you discover her findings for yourself.

Carson’s research explains the seven “brainsets” of the mind and how you can use those brainsets to increase creativity, productivity and innovation. Quizzes and exercises help you understand how

When John Kralik was a boy, his grandfather gave him a silver dollar, along with the promise of another if Kralik would send a thank you note. He wrote the letter and got the second dollar, but Kralik didn’t get the lesson behind it until midlife.

Overwhelmed one New Year’s Day by a series of personal and professional setbacks, he decided to focus on gratitude by sending one thank you note per day for a year, to anyone and everyone: his children, clients of his law firm, an on-and-off girlfriend, even his regular barista at Starbucks. And things did change in Kralik’s life; his work life and home life both improved, he reconnected with old friends and boosted his health and selfesteem, and his focus shifted from the problems in his life to the things that were going right, and deserving of recognition and thanks.

For a small story predicated on a seemingly minor activity, 365 Thank Yous is told with impressive humility, heart and soul. It’s touching when the Starbucks worker explains his reluctance to open Kralik’s note, anticipating another complaint from an entitled three-dollar-latte drinker, only to be pleasantly surprised by the gift of simple appreciation.

Readers will forgive Kralik for taking 15 months to write all 365 notes, and thank him for sharing the fruits of the project in this sweet and uplifting book.

— H e a t h e r S e gg e l

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features

HEALTH & WELLNESS

by Lacey Galbraith

shape up for a healthier you

T

ransformation can be hard work—really hard work. Whether it’s losing weight, getting healthy or staying motivated, we could all use a little nudge to succeed. A new crop of books aim to help.

COLD COMFORT In The Secrets of People Who Never Get Sick (Workman, $23.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9780761158141), author Gene Stone shares what he believes are “the most worthwhile secrets to your health.” A journalist who has written about—and participated in—everything from bone-density scans and EKGs to acupuncture and reflexology, Stone says that after two decades of work he still didn’t know why the “common cold is just as common as it was eons ago.” In search of an answer, he set out “to find people who didn’t get sick, to find out why they didn’t get sick, and then to see if their secrets were valid for others.”

The 25 secrets Stone settled upon range from the familiar—chicken soup, Vitamin C, regular exercise— to the unconventional—napping, cold showers, eating dirt (yes, soil).

These secrets, Stone explains, “are ones that seemed destined to remain interesting over time, had the firmest basis in scientific fact, and were endorsed intelligently and articulately by their proponents.”

His experience in the field of health and wellness shows as Stone easily synthesizes the arcane historical fact with the modern scientific one.

More than a how-to for staying well, The Secrets of People Who Never Get Sick is an entertaining—not to mention informative—lesson on health, history and human ingenuity.

THE DIET PUZZLE

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Cinch! Conquer Cravings, Drop Pounds, and Lose Inches (HarperOne, $25.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9780061974649) is the newest offering from Cynthia Sass, co-author of the New York Times bestseller Flat Belly Diet! Unlike most other diet plans, Sass assures us that her new weight-loss strategy does not involve counting calories. The focus instead is on “meal timing, portions, combinations of foods, and food quality.” Plus there’s a daily dark chocolate requirement—yes, requirement (we like this plan already). Every meal is a carefully

constructed “puzzle” consisting of a whole grain, a lean protein, a plantbased fat, produce and seasonings.

Among the 100 recipes included in the book are vegetarian- and veganfriendly options, and Sass shows her readers how to follow the plan not only at home but in restaurants, too. Hoping to create order out of “diet chaos,” Sass has come up with a plan where “you won’t feel like you’re in reform school or diet boot camp.” Rather, you will learn to avoid processed and artificial foods, eat four meals at structured times throughout the day and discover how to replace butter, sugar and salt with a variety of healthful—and delicious— herbs, seasonFive authors ings and spices.

Following the offer advice plan for 30 days on how to seems doable, stay well, lose even for the truly dietweight and challenged, feel your best and we can certainly agree in the new with Sass about year. the benefits of sticking with it: “No matter what else is going on, taking charge of your body will make you feel like you can conquer the world.”

PICKING THE RIGHT FOODS In Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It (Knopf, $24.95, 272 pages, ISBN 9780307272706), author Gary Taubes returns to familiar territory, arguing as he did in 2007’s Good Calories, Bad Calories that today’s “nutrition and obesity research [has] lost its way.” While Taubes’ earlier book presented readers with nearly 500 pages of dense scientific research and heavily annotated explanations, Why We Get Fat simplifies his arguments against the conventional wisdom on obesity. It’s not too many calories and too little exercise that are making Americans fat, he says; it’s too many of the wrong calories, specifically calories from refined carbohydrates and sugars. “These

carbohydrates literally make us fat,” Taubes writes, “and by driving us to accumulate fat, they make us hungrier and they make us sedentary.” An award-winning science writer, Taubes is set on sharing this message with a nonscientific audience. In clear and accessible prose, he lays out the history of America’s obesity epidemic, asking questions that push both him and the reader to consider possible solutions (a carbohydrate-restricted diet) and their implications (how would a subsequently increased dependence upon animal products affect the planet, our health, our society?). Taubes is intent on exploring the answers, and his conviction alone makes Why We Get Fat well worth considering.

MIND OVER MATTER Dr. Marie Pasinski shares seven steps for developing a “better, smarter, younger you” in Beautiful Brain, Beautiful You: Look Radiant from the Inside Out by Empowering Your Mind (Voice, $15.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9781401341480). A neurologist and Harvard Medical School faculty member, Pasinski believes that “your brain is the key to improving every facet of your life.” Focusing specifically on women who want to feel and look their best as they age, the doctor aims to show readers that there’s more to brain health than memory games and puzzles. “While these might be helpful,” she writes, “I encourage you to embark on a wider journey that includes optimizing the lifestyle and health factors that impact your brain function.”

Pasinski explains “how physical ailments, mood disorders, hormones,

and medications directly affect brain performance,” and advises readers on which supplements to take and which to avoid. Pasinski’s tone is encouraging and her sevenstep plan is specific enough to give readers workable goals. Whether it’s taking a new route to work, working in the garden or changing your diet, she says, “even the smallest changes will begin to transform the way you think and the way you look and feel.”

KEEPING IT OFF In The Life You Want: Get Motivated, Lose Weight, and Be Happy (Simon & Schuster, $25, 304 pages, ISBN 9781416588368), Bob Greene, best known as Oprah’s personal trainer, helps readers lose weight and shows them how to stay motivated to keep it off. Too often, it’s this latter part—“the psychological side of weight loss”—that’s ignored, even though it’s typically the mental and emotional components that determine how long weight loss lasts. Greene is determined to change this, helping readers take a deeper look at themselves and their relationship with food. Most of all, he says, his goal is not “just to get you to make changes; my goal is to get you to make changes that last.”

More than a book about weight loss, The Life You Want is a treatise on deciding what’s important in life, setting goals and achieving them— lessons that can benefit almost everyone.

An accessible and user-friendly one-stop guide to Pilates With beautiful step-by-step photography, clear instructions on each exercise, and key features, such as annotated photographs of common faults and a list of the physical and mental benefits of each exercise, Pilates Practice Companion is an accessible, authoritative and inspiring resource to guide people of all abilities in their practice of Pilates.

The BookPage/DK Pilates Practice Companion Sweepstakes Enter for a Chance to Win! 1. One (1) Grand Prize of a $300.00 GAIAM gift certificate and a library of fitness books published by DK (Total Approximate Retail Value (“ARV�) of Grand Prize = $450.00) 2. Ten (10) Runner-up prizes of a copy of Pilates Practice Companion by Alycea Ungaro, published by DK (ARV of each prize = $25.00).

No purchase necessary. Open to residents of the fifty United States and the District of Columbia, ages 18 and older. Entries must be received no later than January 31, 2011, 11:59:59 PM Eastern Time. Winners will be selected on or about February 15, 2011. Void where prohibited by law.

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Go to www.bookpage.com/ and click on the Pilates Practice Companion Sweepstakes banner for complete details and Official Rules.

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q&a

TIMOTHY FERRISS I N T E R V I E W b y L in d a M . C a s tellitt o

SMALL STEPS TO a better body

T

imothy Ferriss published his first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, in 2007, and in a selfpromotion tour de force, went from a little-known investor and business advisor to a best-selling author whose blog garners a million-plus visitors a month. with readers. What made you write your second book about body rather than work? Did you view the change in topics as a risk or a natural progression?

The wider world thinks I’m obsessed with time management, but they haven’t seen the other—much more legitimate, much more ridiculous—obsession. I’ve recorded almost every workout I’ve done since age 18. Since 2004, I’ve tracked everything from complete lipid panels to free testosterone. I’ve had stem cell growth factors imported from Israel to reverse “permanent” injuries. . . . I’ve spent more than $250,000 on testing and tweaking over the last decade. And that was

When it came time to find volunteers for his new book, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman, hundreds of his fans joined experiments in diet, exercise, sex and more. But the title of head guinea pig goes to Ferriss himself. He underwent thousands of blood tests, traveled as many miles and compiled hundreds of case studies on everything from weight loss to sexual behavior to learning to swim in 10 days. Ferriss took some downtime to answer questions about the new book, his obsessions and why his methods are most likely to succeed.

Your first book struck a chord

Take Charge of Your Own

WELLNESS

As the debate over health care continues, this new book shows the relationship between a person’s physical health and spiritual well-being.

Written by Dr. Scott Morris, Health Care You Can Live With puts a human face on the hot topic of health care.

For videos and more visit www.healthcareyoucanlivewith.com

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978-1-61626-2 47-1 Also Available in Spanish!

| Available Wherever Books are Sold

just to satisfy my own curiosity and improve my own physical machine.

Then I had a conversation with a WIRED magazine writer, in which we joked that the main fears of modern men and women could be boiled down to two things: e-mail overload [addressed in The 4-Hour Workweek] and getting fat. Shortly thereafter, I realized I had to write The 4-Hour Body. It is, without a doubt, a natural progression, a risk and the most important thing I’ve ever written.

Any book that addresses eating and exercise is met with skepticism, most likely because people find it difficult to remain motivated. How will your approach be more effective for readers?

Big changes seldom work. The 4-Hour Body is intended to answer one question: What are the smallest changes that produce the biggest physical changes? To illustrate the point: Even if someone has 100 pounds to lose, I wouldn’t have them start diet and exercise at the same time. Why? The exercise often triggers “reward” meals, more overeating and abandonment of the new program after a few weeks of plateauing. Instead, I have them focus on one small change that can produce three to five pounds of fat loss in a single week, such as changing breakfast to include at least 20 grams of protein. Using this small-step approach, compliance is incredible: 58 percent of test subjects I tracked indicated my diet was the first diet they’d ever been able to follow. Many lost 20 pounds the first month, and some lost 100-plus pounds total.

You recommend a Slow-Carb Diet, and characterize it as “better fat-loss through simplicity.” Tenets include avoiding “white” carbs, eating the same few meals and cheating one day a week. Why are these practices so effective?

Because the diet removes any paradox of choice. The more decisions someone has to make, the more they’ll make mistakes or give up and revert to old behaviors. The Slow-Carb Diet removes the need to think, and offers one day a week to do whatever you want. That one day—a stress release valve that also accelerates fat loss—means you’re not giving up your favorite foods forever, just six days at a time. After testing all the diets and fads, this is the best, most enjoyable approach I’ve found for sustained fat loss.

I’ve been doing it for more than five years.

You’ve included explicit sexual advice in the book. Why? Did anyone try to discourage you from being so detailed?

Sex is a fundamental part of life, but there’s very little mainstream discussion of how to improve sex with real specifics. Also, most sexual advice is based on a footnote from a book, based on yet another book— there’s no testing. I tested it all, and had others replicate my success with things like the 15-minute orgasm. For many readers, this will easily be the most important part of the book. But did my publisher let me include my explicit photos?

Nope. We had to make them detailed illustrations.

Anything I haven’t asked that BookPage readers should know?

At least 50 percent of the case studies are women. This isn’t a book only for 30-something guys. It’s for

The 4-Hour Body

By Timothy Ferriss, Crown Archetype, $27, 592 pages, ISBN 9780307463630, Audio, eBook available

reviews clara and mr. tiffany

FICTION

Women’s work, rediscovered Review by Sheri Bodoh

Following 2007’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, author Susan Vreeland again delves into the lives behind an iconic work of art—this time, the intricate lamps produced by Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company at the turn of the 20th century. Long thought to be the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany himself, the famous lamps were discovered in 2005 to have been designed by Clara Driscoll, the head of his studio’s remarkable women’s department. Clara not only designed what became, for a time, Tiffany’s most lucrative line of decorative items, but also grew a fledgling team of six young girls into a crew of female artists 30 strong in the space of a few years. Vreeland’s depiction of Clara’s world, her accomplishments and her desires in Clara and Mr. Tiffany is movingly delightful.

At the start of the novel, the widowed, 31-year-old Clara returns to Tiffany’s employ after two years away. Inspired by her return to the work

By Susan Vreeland, Random House, $26, 432 pages, she loves, Clara conceives the idea for leaded glass lampshades. But ISBN 9781400068166, Audio, eBook available while her creativity blooms with the colorful blossoms in her designs, her frustration with Mr. Tiffany, whom she respects and adores, grows as he refuses to publicly acknowledge the roles she and her “Tiffany Girls” play in his artistic and commercial successes. Meanwhile, Clara’s longing for love forces her into a difficult choice between career and marriage, since Tiffany will not allow married women to work for him.

Vreeland brings 1890s Manhattan to vibrant life as Clara becomes aware of her young immigrant hires’ impoverished home lives and as she grows close to her eccentric, artistic boardinghouse neighbors, including the flamboyant George and steadfast Bernard. Vivid descriptions of window and lamp production will surely bring readers a new appreciation for stained glass. And Clara’s battles for the rights of her female workers and for artistic originality versus mass production are compelling, as is her complicated relationship with Mr. Tiffany.

This charming woman is a memorable heroine and, just as Clara’s art enhanced the images of nature that it depicted, Vreeland’s illuminating vision of Clara’s story is a pleasure to experience.

KINGS OF COLORADO

By David E. Hilton Simon & Schuster $24, 288 pages ISBN 9781439183823 eBook available

Debut fiction

David E. Hilton doesn’t start out slowly—his compelling debut, a haunting coming-of-age story set during the 1960s at a reformatory school in rural Colorado, tackles human nature at its most fundamental levels, pitting good against evil, friendship against betrayal and innocence against corruption.

After years of horrifying abuse against him and his mother, 13-year-old William Sheppard, a Chicago boy with no record of trouble, stabs his father in an act of self-defense and is sentenced to two years at the Swope Ranch Boys Reformatory, where the horses and

the boys tasked with training them are equally wild. Will quickly learns that some of his fellow inmates are, like him, good boys at heart driven to crime by circumstance. He befriends three—Mickey, Cooper and Benny—and the quartet bands together against the rampant cruelty of the guards, the harsh manual labor and unforgiving climate and the intangible taxation of guilt and loneliness. But there is a force in the camp more evil than any of them could have possibly imagined, and in desperate scene after desperate scene, Will and his friends fight to survive in the most unthinkable circumstances.

Kings of Colorado is Hilton’s first novel, and in many ways, it shows— the prose lacks some polish and sophistication, and he could have done more with Will’s adult voice, which narrates the story from 50 years later. But where he excels is his heartbreaking portrayal of innocence lost in the most profound sense. A former middle school teacher, Hilton clearly understands the struggle of adolescence, and

he interrogates that struggle with finesse and admirable curiosity by pushing his characters to their most extreme limits. Will and his compatriots are achingly sympathetic, and their bond with each other and communal will to survive is riveting and thought-provoking.

—Rebecca Shapiro

THE POISON TREE

By Erin Kelly Pamela Dorman $26.95, 336 pages ISBN 9780670022403 eBook available

suspense

has a chance encounter with a free-spirited and captivating drama student named Biba that throws her careful plans out the window. Intoxicated by Biba’s friendship, Karen finds herself caught up in a hedonistic world of drugs, sex and a total lack of responsibility. She is fiercely devoted to Biba and will do almost anything to protect her friend, until one night ends with two people dead. The resulting string of events will test Karen’s loyalty and call into question everything she has come to believe—including the lines she herself is willing to cross in order to keep from losing everything she holds dear.

The Poison Tree, Erin Kelly’s first novel, is a stunning debut. Perfectly paced, it starts with a bang and teems with twists that will keep you guessing right up until its thrilling and shocking conclusion. Kelly masterfully ratchets up the suspense, constantly causing readers to reappraise what is true as well as which dark and dirty secret will be unearthed next, all while nimbly maneuvering back and forth in time to keep tensions running high.

Veteran mystery fans looking for nail-biting thrills will find plenty that is fresh and surprising about The Poison Tree, and Kelly’s masterful plotting and intricately crafted story make the comparisons to Tana French and Donna Tartt well-deserved. Exhilarating and satisfying, this is a book that reminds us just how rewarding and flat-out fun a really good book can be. Take the phone off the hook and cancel your evening plans, because this is one book you’ll want to read from cover to cover in order to see how everything shakes out.

— S t e p h e n i e H a rr i s o n

THE EMPTY FAMILY

By Colm Tóibín Scribner $24, 288 pages ISBN 9781439138328 eBook available

Short stories

No one ever said growing up would be easy, but Karen Clarke never expected it to be quite so hard. Having spent the last few years dutifully pursuing a college degree and making all the sensible choices about her future, Karen

Four years after the publication of his short story collection Mothers and Sons and on the heels of his novel Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín returns with The Empty Family, an-

21

reviews other group of stories that will only enhance his stature as an esteemed author of literary fiction.

As was true in Mothers and Sons, this collection features a unifying theme—the often unsettling, sometimes painful experience of return.

In “Two Women,” Frances Rossiter, an aging Hollywood set dresser, comes back to Dublin to work on a film, where her journey is shadowed by the memory of a deceased lover. The narrator of “One Minus One,” now living in Texas, reflects on the painful trip he made to his dying mother’s bedside in Ireland six years earlier.

“The Colour of Shadows” tells of the protagonist’s encounter with the Enniscorthy house where his aunt raised him, a dwelling she must now abandon for a nursing home. And in the title story, the unnamed first-person narrator, his eyes fixed on the Irish coastline, muses on the cycle of exile and return, “the empty family from whom we had set out alone with such a burst of brave unknowing energy.”

this month’s top publisher picks

A Royal Likeness

PB 9780758238580 $15 www.christinetrent.com

God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens PB 9781893670471 $20 http://tebotbach.org/publication.html#godseed

22

—Harvey Freedenberg

By Robb Forman Dew Little, Brown $24.95, 304 pages ISBN 9780316889506 eBook available

fiction

Christine Trent

Kensington

Perhaps to avoid being pigeonholed as an Irish writer, Tóibín has set three of these stories in Spain, including two in Barcelona, where he lived for a time in the 1970s.

“Barcelona, 1975,” which takes place in the year of Franco’s death, is an unabashedly frank account of the sexual exploits of young gay men in that era. Balanced against the occasionally shocking carnality of that story is the moving entry “The Street,” the volume’s longest tale. Told from the perspective of Malik, a Pakistani immigrant struggling for survival in Spain, it recounts with the utmost tenderness the young man’s forbidden love affair with a fellow immigrant.

Colm Tóibín’s stories draw their power from his empathy and close observation, not dramatic incidents or arresting plot twists. Each, in its own quiet, meticulous way, examines a different aspect of our quest to find what meaning we can amid the travails of daily life.

BEING POLITE TO HITLER

top shelf A waxworks apprentice to the great Madame Tussaud finds her loyalties, and her heart, under fire from all sides when she helps Britain flush out spies against the Crown.

FICTION

“A lovely, singing book, in both art and language— intricate beauties informed by informed passion.”

—William Kittredge “A beautiful mix of words and images, light and deep.”

—William Wiley Tebot Bach Press

Agnes Scofield is approaching old age in America midway through the 20th century. Should she change or remain the same? Her husband is dead, and though her teaching job at a local school is consistent and familiar, it is not as stimulating as it once was. She is a source of stability in her young students’ lives, but that stability is proving tiresome.

Perhaps her friend Sam could rescue her from her boredom. After all, he has proposed marriage. Perhaps Agnes could have a new house in Maine—a modest renaissance in her old age. She might even get a dog and undertake a new building project. Or is it too late to start over?

Meanwhile, America is also having growing pains. The country has lost an important phase of the Space Race to the Soviet Union; Sputnik is now on the prowl.

Racially segregated schools are no longer acceptable, women are

beginning to insist on equal rights, a young Catholic is narrowing in on the presidency and “polio” remains a well-known and frightening word.

What is to become of the stillyouthful United States?

Being Polite to Hitler is effortless and memorable. Robb Forman Dew, a past winner of the National Book Award, writes beautifully about a wide range of changes—the things that happen in an aging woman’s heart, the jolts and shocks that greeted America throughout the ’50s and ’60s. Best of all, Dew shows us many surprising connections between the mundane and the cosmic—the way the Space Race altered American families’ purchasing habits, the way a small argument can turn into a lifechanging crisis. Dew tells stories with ease and confidence; within the first few pages, you know you are in good hands.

Fans of Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Strout and William Maxwell won’t want to miss this quiet and graceful novel. It is to be hoped that Dew will continue the story of Agnes Scofield’s life in another volume— and soon!

—Dan Barrett

clear to us or to him, and that’s the joy of it. In lieu of a map, Vatanen chooses his path based on desire.

He reflects at one point, while performing heavy labor on a forestry job in Kuhmo and living in a tent, that anyone could live this freely if only they had the good judgment to give up the way they’re currently residing. He calls his prior life “flabby,” in contrast to the unfussiness of the fresh air and quiet company he has chosen to keep after meeting the hare.

Paasilinna’s story is somehow plausible, despite the Lucy-andEthel situations the lead characters get themselves into, and it feels as though we, too, could so easily desert our responsibilities to others to follow what fulfills us. The glory of the outdoors is celebrated here, through each season, and we can nearly smell the early clover and meadow vetchling of the hare’s diet.

Vatanen is who we want to be—minus the forest firefighting. And cow herding. And discovery of a dead granddad in a barn.

No, scratch that—Vatanen is who we yearn to be brave enough to become, as soon as we stop waiting for the timing to be right.

—Katie Lewis

The year of the hare

By Arto Paasilinna Penguin $14, 208 pages ISBN 9780143117926 Audio, eBook available

International fiction

It takes little to motivate middleaged journalist Kaarlo Vatanen to turn in his notepad for a new adventure. When he and a photographer hit a hare while driving on assignment, Vatanen alone follows the injured animal into the woods.

This act changes the course of the Finn’s next 364 days and beyond, documented in Arto Paasilinna’s international bestseller The Year of the Hare, as he abruptly decides to leave his job, wife and home for whatever awaits him with his new, wild, recovering companion.

The comic novel moves across Finland and into Soviet territory as Vatanen and the hare take a series of odd jobs and slay a bear in the quest for—what? It’s never quite

THE LOST GATE

By Orson Scott Card Tor $24.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780765326577 Audio, eBook available

fantasy

Thirteen-year-old Danny North is a disappointment. In a family of magicians descended from Norse gods, only Danny has no magical talent. He has extraordinary talent for the ordinary activities of running and climbing, sure. But Danny’s true ability is actually the rarest and most dangerous of all.

Internationally acclaimed bestselling author Orson Scott Card’s new novel, The Lost Gate, traces Danny’s adventures from his family’s compound in Virginia to the harsh realities of life on the street and beyond. His sarcasm and impudent behavior cause Danny trouble with mages, criminals and ordinary citizens alike. Card intersperses the

FICTION protagonist’s journey with that of a mysterious young man from a very different time and reality who faces challenges parallel with Danny’s.

His teachers, enemies and companions include a manipulative older street kid and a married couple who appear to be small farmers, as well as members of Danny’s own and other divinely descended families.

Card weaves the twinned narratives seamlessly together with the ease of a master storyteller.

The adventures of a teenager who differs from others might have been overly familiar in the hands of a less experienced writer, but Card keeps the action vivid and exciting.

In addition, he uses Norse mythology to provide unique explanations for beings as varied as fairies and werewolves. Danny is an unreliable narrator, but he remains sympathetic throughout, even when his attitude places him at variance with every authority figure he meets, from police officers to the people who want to help him.

As the tension builds to an intense conclusion, Danny develops and matures in unexpected ways.

Card’s longtime fans will read The Lost Gate with delight, while new readers will relish this introduction to the prize-winning author’s work, thanks to lively characterization, imaginative world-building and lucid prose.

—Leslie Moïse

ligent, he finds himself embroiled in a mysterious death at the annual meeting of the Sherlock experts. A member claims to have found the missing Conan Doyle diary and promises to reveal all at the conference, only to turn up dead, presumably murdered, on the morning of his presentation. Determined to solve the mystery on his own, White sets off on a wide-ranging adventure into something bigger than he first imagined.

Meanwhile, every other chapter details the adventures of Conan Doyle and his loyal friend Bram Stoker (yes, the very one and the same) as they attempt to solve a series of brutal murders hinted at in a failed letter bomb sent to Conan Doyle. As the details of the missing years of Conan Doyle’s hiatus from Holmes coalesce, it becomes clear that both “detectives” in the tale are on the trail of something very sinister indeed.

The Sherlockian combines good pacing with an engaging plot, and its ample dose of Holmes quotes, errata and flair for humor have enough to keep anyone from an initiate to a dedicated Sherlockian on the hook. While some of the dialogue is slightly mawkish and the mystery ends up feeling a bit too predictable in the end, these minor flaws are overcome by the kind of everyman adventure that one can’t help but enjoy.

—T o n y K u e h n

THE SHERLOCKIAN

By Graham Moore Twelve $24.99, 368 pages ISBN 9780446572590 eBook available

FICTION

THE MISTRESS OF NOTHING

By Kate Pullinger Touchstone $24, 256 pages ISBN 9781439193860 Audio, eBook available

historical FICTION

Fans of the great Holmes, from the casual to the obsessive, will rejoice at The Sherlockian. Written as a dual narrative, the novel’s chapters alternate between the story of modern-day Baker Street Irregular Harold White, and the adventures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Harold White is one of the youngest inductees of the Baker Street Irregulars, the most prestigious and exclusive club of devoted Sherlockian experts. Extensively read, socially awkward and highly intel-

In England in 1862, there was little cure for the racking, bloody crawl of tuberculosis. When Lady Duff Gordon faces death as her lungs collapse beneath consumption, she has no choice but to escape the chill of London. Her maid Sally Naldrett, whose loyalty edges on childlike adoration, follows her Lady in her descent into Egypt, where the two women find themselves completely out of touch with their surroundings. The Lady hires

a dragoman, Omar Abu Halaweh, to help them acclimate to their new foreign home.

It is not long before the three characters fall into familiar rhythms. The women shed their heavy British garb for the lighter clothing worn by Egyptian men, gain very dark tans and learn Arabic. They become more like friends than lady and servant, and soon neither woman can be recognized as her former self. Most of all, both women experience a type of freedom that they had not previously encountered—Lady Duff Gordon with her condemnation of the Egyptian community leaders, and Sally with her sudden discovery of love and all its freedoms. Their glowing little world cannot remain, however, and a mistake could cost Sally everything she ever had—or could dream of having.

Winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award, The Mistress of Nothing is inspired by the true story of Sally and Omar, whose lives were hidden between the lines of Lucie Duff Gordon’s book Letters from Egypt. There is little known about Lady Duff Gordon’s maid and dragoman, and Kate Pullinger illuminates these blank spaces to create serpentine connections between the three characters. Pullinger offers them neither judgment nor amnesty, and the book’s commitment to a historical and pragmatic voice is its true gem. Even with its soft voice, The Mistress of Nothing is a tough story of the unavoidable tragedies and celebrations that three simple, yet extraordinary, lives may yield.

— C a t D . Ac r e e

THE MEMORY OF LOVE

By Aminatta Forna Atlantic Monthly $24.95, 496 pages ISBN 9780802119650

literary fiction

Writer Aminatta Forna spent her childhood in the United Kingdom and Sierra Leone, the daughter of an African father and Scottish mother. Her father Mohamed trained as a physician in Scotland, but filled with hope created by post-

colonial possibilities, he returned to Africa with his new family, working at first in a clinic, then holding political office as minister of finance. In 1974, he was charged and then executed for treason. Forna explored this period brilliantly in her thoughtful memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water; and she revisits the time and place in her new novel The Memory of Love, a striking study of the past and present of a country whose name calls up twisted images of beautiful beaches, blood diamonds and child soldiers.

Forna’s complex novel revolves around the lives of two doctors in contemporary Sierra Leone. Adrian Lockhart, a British psychiatrist, has come to the city convinced that his work in post-traumatic stress disorders will be of great help to its troubled citizens. Kai Mansaray is an orthopedic surgeon born and raised in Sierra Leone. His parents and most of his friends have emigrated; though he toys with the idea of leaving himself, he can’t commit.

Each man has a caseload that connects him to a wide network of survivors whose mental and physical ailments are also metaphors for war’s lingering effects. Kai literally has to break the legs of one of his patients whose limbs are so misshapen he cannot walk. Adrian is drawn to a woman who periodically loses all sense of herself and wanders through the countryside as if in a trance. Most pertinent to the novel, Adrian’s elderly patient Elias Cole is a survivor of the country’s turbulent history. A low-level academic during the late 1960s, he fell in love with a colleague’s glamorous wife, and his obsession led him to actions he has spent decades justifying to himself.

The Memory of Love looks hard at the scars that civil war leaves behind. The city’s dusty streets are filled with the walking wounded: perpetrators living among their victims, women immobilized by fears of assault, men like Cole searching for absolution. Forna is reluctant to leave any motive unexamined, and as the novel sweeps from the radical campus politics of the 1960s to the traumatized population of the current day, the prose occasionally drags. The Memory of Love is an ambitious novel, but one that richly rewards the committed reader.

—Lauren Bufferd

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top

shelf this month’s top publisher picks

Swan

by Mary Oliver

Beacon Press HC 9780807068991 $23 www.beacon.org

Tasting Freedom

by Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin

Temple University Press HC 9781592134656 $35

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The Map of True Places

The Lace Reader

Promised Lands

by Brunonia Barry

by Brunonia Barry

by Derek Rubin, Editor

William Morrow

HarperCollins

University Press of New England

HC 9780061624780 $25.99

PB 9780061624773 $14.99

PB 9781584659204 $26

www.harpercollins.com

www.harpercollins.com

www.upne.com

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth

Life

The Memory Palace

by Keith Richards

by Mira Bartók

by Jon Stewart

Grand Central HC 9780446579223 $27.99 www.hachettebookgroup.com

The Three-Legged Woman and Other Excursions in Teaching

by Robert Klose

University Press of New England

Hachette

Free Press

HC 9780316034388 $29.99

HC 9781439183311 $25

www.hachettebookgroup.com

www.simonandschuster.com

Schooner

In Too Deep

by Alison Shaw and Tom Dunlop

by Stanley Reed and Alison Fitzgerald

Vineyard Stories

Bloomberg Press

HC 9780615342672 $44.95

HC 9780470950906 $24.95

www.vineyardstories.com

www.wiley.com

www.temple.edu/tempress

HC 9781584659273 $24.95

J.K. Lasser’s Your Income Tax 2011

The Cigar Lover’s Compendium

Oogy

Dog Walks Man

by J. K. Lasser

by Lawrence Dorfman

by Larry Levin

by John Zeaman

Wiley

Lyons Press

Grand Central

Lyons Press

PB 9780470597224 $19.95

HC 9781599219370 $14.95

HC 9780446546317 $19.99

HC 9781599219639 $22.95

www.wiley.com

www.globepequot.com

www.hachettebookgroup.com

www.globepequot.com

www.upne.com

Radically Simple

Desserts 4 Today

Harvest to Heat

by Rozanne Gold

by Abigail Johnson Dodge

by Darryl Estrine and Kelly Kochendorfer

The Kosher Baker

by Paula Shoyer

Rodale

Taunton Press

Taunton Press

Brandeis University Press

HC 9781605294704 $35

HC 9781600852947 $17.95

HC 9781600852541 $40

HC 9781584658351 $35

www.rodale.com

www.taunton.com

www.taunton.com

www.upne.com

The Bike Ride

Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook

How to Squeeze a Lemon

The Cazuela That the Farm Maiden Stirred

by Weight Watchers

by Editors, Contributors & Readers of Fine Cooking

by Samatha R. Vamos

by Nelson Goose

Wiley

Taunton Press

Charlesbridge

Vineyard Stories

HC 9780470614518 $29.95

HC 9781600853265 $19.95

HC 9781580892421 $17.95

HC 9780982714621 $21.95

www.wiley.com

www.taunton.com

www.charlesbridge.com

www.vineyardstories.com

National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book of Animals

Wild Alphabet

The Classic Treasury of Childhood Wonders

A Call for a New Alphabet

by Susan Magsamen

by Jef Czekaj

National Geographic Children’s Books

Charlesbridge

HC 9781426307157 $19.95

HC 9781580892285 $12.95

www.ngchildrensbooks.org

www.charlesbridge.com

National Geographic Kids World Atlas

The Book of … What?

My First Ballet Book

Bamboo People

by National Geographic Society

by Ray Bryant

by Kate Castle

by Mitali Perkins

National Geographic Children’s Books

Kingfisher

Kingfisher

Charlesbridge

PB 9781426306877 $12.95

PB 9780753464175 $7.99

PB 9780753465097 $7.99

HC 9781580893282 $16.95

www.ngchildrensbooks.org

www.kingfisherbooks.com

www.kingfisherbooks.com

www.charlesbridge.com

by Catherine D. Hughes

National Geographic Children’s Books HC 9781426307041 $14.95 www.ngchildrensbooks.org

by Dan Green

Kingfisher HC 9780753464724 $19.99 www.kingfisherbooks.com

reviews

NONFICTION AMERICAN ROSE

breathe in, breathe out

Poser

biography

Review by Amy Scribner

Claire Dederer admits to an occasional, tiny bit of anxiety. It’s part of the reason she started doing yoga, coupled with an attempt to eradicate some nagging back pain after the birth of her daughter. So it’s probably no surprise that yoga itself caused her some moments of worry: “I was troubled by what I perceived as the inauthentic nature of my yoga practice,” Dederer writes in Poser, her awesomely funny and candid ode to life, love and yoga.

“I had a feeling that doing yoga in a class, without knowing the philosophic and historical underpinnings, made me kind of a jerk. I had begun to notice that I felt guilt whenever I met a person of Indian descent.”

As it turns out, you can learn a lot about the history and many forms of yoga in Poser, and Dederer uses the centuries-old practice as the fascinating backdrop to her deeply personal story. In late-’90s Seattle (“Where the sun won’t shine and the rain won’t rain and there’s a kind of high, bright,

By Claire Dederer, FSG, $25, 352 pages, headache-inducing light that makes you want to go to the movies for the ISBN 9780374236441, Audio, eBook available rest of the day, or maybe the rest of the winter”), Dederer and her husband are raising their young family and grappling with their choice to be freelance writers. On the one hand, what freedom! On the other hand, they are besieged by constant worries over money and work.

When she first steps into a yoga studio, Dederer is transformed by what simple poses could do for her body and mind: “There was a pleasure in becoming something new. You could will yourself into a fresh shape. Now all I had to do was figure out how to do it out there, in my life.” Figuring that out takes two children, a few years’ escape to Boulder, Colorado, away from her loving but dysfunctional parents, and many, many yoga studios: in strip malls, in rundown cinderblock buildings, in cottages that look like noodle joints. It also takes some delving into her own family history, which she writes about with clarity and an amazing lack of self-pity.

Poser is ultimately about one woman’s rambling journey to self-acceptance. “Here’s the truth,” Dederer writes. “The longer I do yoga, the worse I get at it. I can’t tell you what a relief it is.”

THE MEMORY PALACE

By Mira Bartók Free Press $25, 320 pages ISBN 9781439183311 Audio, eBook available

memoir

26

In a literary marketplace flooded with memoirs, I approached the reading of The Memory Palace with apprehension. The title sounds awfully familiar, and the publisher’s press release makes no apologies, announcing that the book follows “in the footsteps of The Glass Castle and The Liars’ Club.” I took a deep breath and prepared for another harrowing tale of how a mother ruined a daughter’s life.

But I set my skepticism aside after reading the first chapter of The Memory Palace, when I discovered that Mira Bartók’s account of her tortured upbringing by a schizophrenic mother is as compelling

as the two best-selling memoirs to which it is compared. The book also boasts a strong storyline and eloquent writing. Bartók hooked me with this early passage: “We children of schizophrenics are the great secret-keepers, the ones who don’t want you to think that anything is wrong.”

Norma Herr is a musical prodigy whose schizophrenia slowly takes control of her life. After she gives birth to two daughters, Mira and Rachel, her husband leaves her.

As her illness worsens, Norma struggles to raise her children, and fails. Her head is filled with voices, images of dangerous animals and of alien abductors. She threatens to kill herself, and threatens her daughters, too, should they reveal her terrible secret. She keeps detailed diaries and hoards small knickknacks and mementos.

As she reaches adulthood, Mira Herr is able to escape her mother by moving to another town and becoming Mira Bartók, an accomplished artist and children’s book author. (She makes the painful decision to change her name, tak-

By Karen Abbott Random House $26, 448 pages ISBN 9781400066919 Audio, eBook available

ing the last name of Hungarian composer Bela Bartók, in order to avoid poison-pen letters, midnight phone calls and unannounced visits from her deranged mother.)

But Bartók’s life takes an ironic twist when, at age 40, she is involved in a car accident that affects her memory. Suddenly, she is fighting to retrieve her memories; like her mother, she is engaged in a battle with her brain. When she later discovers her mother is dying of cancer, Bartók ends her estrangement. Finding her mother’s trove of diaries, letters and the arcane items she had collected, Bartók uses them to construct a “memory palace,” and is able to reconstruct portions of her childhood.

Bartók’s story overcame my memoir phobia with a page-turning plot, sophisticated writing and, as a bonus, vivid illustrations from the author. It does indeed deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as The Glass Castle and The Liars’ Club, and readers of those memoirs will find The Memory Palace richly rewarding.

—J o h n T. S l a n i a

Gypsy Rose Lee’s performance didn’t end after she stepped off the stage. The famed striptease artist used her brazen, quick-witted public image as a fortress. “Over and over I catch myself staring the mask of youth off you,” Gypsy’s old friend, George Davis, the fiction editor of Harper’s Bazaar, observed in a letter. “And what I see scares the bejeesus out of me. Not for myself, but for you.” In her sparkling, jawdropping biography of Gypsy, Karen Abbott pries the mask off, revealing a grotesque, fascinating face of bitterness, jealousy and ambition.

American Rose resembles a Greek tragedy with chorus girls or a terrific novel in which the family unravels as the protagonist undresses. Abbott shuffles between Gypsy’s itinerant childhood playing vaudeville theaters, where she and her sister learned “that they would never be normal, everyday people”; the rise of burlesque in the United States, spearheaded by the forever hustling Billy Minsky; and Gypsy’s unconventional path to stardom. “I cannot sing. I cannot dance,” she once told her son, Erik. “But just remember your mother’s a star.”

Abbott’s story doesn’t revel in old anecdotes or talk much about Gypsy, the play and movie that immortalized its subject. Instead, Abbott explores why Gypsy never let her defenses down: She had no choice. Gypsy’s mother, Rose, was a distrustful, conniving stage mother who wielded her status as matriarch/manager (and the family’s controversial, murderous past) like a blunt object. Their relationship was so combustible that they literally wrestled on Rose’s deathbed.

The only man Gypsy ever loved refused to marry her, and her younger sister, actress June Havoc, was more of a competitor and an object of pity than a sibling. At one point, Gypsy willingly sent a struggling June to a sex party to make connections. “I was no sister,” Havoc tells

NONFICTION Abbott. “I was a knot in her life. I was nothing.”

The best biographies do more than detail the life of a subject— they completely embed the reader in that person’s life and mindset.

They combine tenacious reporting with writing that belongs to a first-rate novelist. American Rose is the rare biography that captures the imagination and doesn’t let go.

It would scare the bejeesus out of Gypsy Rose Lee, and it’s guaranteed to enthrall readers.

—Pete Croatto

UNLESS IT MOVES THE HUMAN HEART

By Roger Rosenblatt Ecco $13.99, 176 pages ISBN 9780061965616 eBook available

WRITING

Unless It Moves the Human Heart is a nonfiction book described by author Roger Rosenblatt as “fiction, top to bottom.” But don’t expect Oprah Winfrey to dress him down in the town square. Rosen blatt, who has taught writing for 40 years, has merely recreated from memory the highlights of some classes he taught in the winter and spring of 2008 at Stony Brook University. Nobody drinks to excess or ends up in rehab, but neither are any of the lines attributed to students verbatim quotes. What we get is an approximation of Rosenblatt’s “Writing Everything” class, which includes short fiction, poetry and the essay.

At a mere 176 pages, Unless It Moves the Human Heart can be devoured in an afternoon over a pot of tea. The wry humor and banter between the students, who range in age from 20- to 70-something, and their teacher, who occasionally makes a point by bopping someone on the head, is a pleasure to take in. And Rosenblatt’s easy wit (he has 12 students and calls it “a very good number for a writing class, as it is for juries and apostles”) makes for fun reading. But there’s terrific advice and analysis going on as well, from the critiques of student work (real samples of which are included) to discussion of some

classic literature and exercises that promote leaner, sharper prose.

The class reunites for dinner one year after their last class, and Rosenblatt answers their questions about agents, editors and the writing life. As with the rest of the book, good humor abounds, but his replies are helpful and to the point: Good editors are in short supply, but can only benefit an author; if you want to write, do it, but find a way to support yourself as well. In a final letter he sends to them, he writes, “Both you and the human heart are full of sorrow. But only one of you can speak for that sorrow and ease its burdens and make it sing—word after word after word.” Writers, or those who have always dreamed of writing, will take much away from this lovely book.

—Heather Seggel

TOWARD THE SETTING SUN

By Brian Hicks Atlantic Monthly $26, 416 pages ISBN 9780802119636

AMERICAN HISTORY

ences of the Cherokees’ principal chief John Ross and his fellow tribal leaders, as they struggled with their no-win choices.

Ross, elected chief at 38 in 1828, was emblematic of the tribe’s attempts to come to terms with the new order: He was only one-eighth Cherokee, the scion of Scottish traders and their part-Indian wives.

He barely spoke the native language, and was indistinguishable from any successful plantation owner. But Hicks argues that Ross, though not perfect, was the statesman among his peers, always putting what he perceived as the tribe’s best interest first. Sadly, too many of the other chiefs behaved more like violent gangster bosses.

Toward the Setting Sun culminates with Ross’ desperate, and only marginally successful, efforts to alleviate suffering along the Trail.

It’s a gripping story, told by Hicks with perception and sensitivity. The author rightly compares it to Gone

Discover

with the Wind or The Godfather in its scope and drama. Ironically, Hicks notes, the real-life equivalents of Scarlett O’Hara’s father stole their land in Georgia from the Cherokees.

—Anne Bartlett

BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER

By Amy Chua Penguin Press $25.95, 256 pages ISBN 9781594202841 Audio, eBook available

MEMOIR

In parenting (and war), do the ends ever justify the means? If your eighth grader gives a piano recital at Carnegie Hall, does that accomplishment justify the 6–10 hours of practice daily with a mother who

our world of quality books

In the first decades of the 19th century, the Cherokees did everything possible to adapt to the white settler culture that was encroaching on their homeland. They established farms, cooperated with missionaries, developed a written language, elected a government.

When they were threatened, they lobbied Congress and won a Supreme Court case.

It made no difference. Enabled by politicians like Andrew Jackson, the settlers believed they were entitled to Indian land. The federal government ignored the court ruling, reneged on every treaty and forced some 16,000 Cherokees onto the Trail of Tears, the 1838 trek west to Oklahoma from their appropriated properties in Tennessee and Georgia. At least 4,000 died.

It’s a particularly horrific chapter in the consistently shocking record of the United States’ treatment of Native Americans. Brian Hicks, a South Carolina journalist, adroitly relates this tragedy in Toward the Setting Sun through the experi-

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reviews

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plishment justify the 6–10 hours of practice daily with a mother who says things like “Oh my God, you’re just getting worse and worse”? Does it justify never allowing your daughter a play-date, unstructured time or a trip to the mall?

Amy Chua would say yes, emphatically. A tenured professor at Yale Law School and a respected author of books on law and ethnicity in the developing world, Chua turns to the differences between Chinese and Western parenting in her provocative memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Unlike the “weak-willed and indulgent” Western parents she criticizes, strict Chinese parents create a “virtuous circle” of achievement by insisting that their children memorize, practice and repeat. As her book graphically demonstrates, a Chinese parent (most often a mother in this book) must force the child to work; once the child begins to excel, self-confidence follows.

Fortunately for the readability of this memoir, Chua meets her foil in the person of her younger daughter Lulu, whose indomitable will and rebellious nature challenge her mother’s certainty at every turn.

Unlike the pliable older daughter Sophia, whose success at the piano justifies the “virtuous circle” theory, Lulu’s own achievement on the violin comes at the cost of vicious arguments and tears. Chua’s Jewish husband Jed plays only a small part in this story, as an “American husband who believed that childhood should be fun,” and it would have been enlightening to get his perspective. Nonetheless, Chua is unafraid of portraying herself in a less than flattering light, and this honesty serves her purpose well, dramatizing the sacrifices involved with this model of parenting.

Sure to generate controversy, Chua’s candid family memoir offers valuable insight into larger cultural debates in children’s education, such as the place of testing and rote repetition. By demonstrating both the successes and the unvarnished personal costs of Chua’s method, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother leaves the reader wondering about the feasibility of some middle educational way, where discipline and self-expression unite. Perhaps it is up to Sophia and Lulu to write that book.

—Catherine Hollis

NONFICTION I SHALL NOT HATE

By Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish Walker & Company $24, 256 pages ISBN 9780802779175 Audio, eBook available

MEMOIR

On January 16, 2009, as the threeweek-long Israeli Army assault on the Gaza Strip that was intended to stop Hamas rocket attacks was winding down, an explosion ripped through a bedroom in the apartment of Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish.

With his oldest daughter, Dr. Abuelaish rushed to the bedroom and discovered his 17-year-old daughter gravely wounded and his 15-year-old daughter decapitated.

Moments later, as he ran to the street for help, another Israeli tank round slammed into the house, killing his oldest daughter, her 14-year-old sister and a cousin. The distraught doctor called an Israeli television reporter he knew, and their anguished conversation was broadcast live to the Israeli public.

This incident, retold in harrowing detail near the end of I Shall Not Hate, is the exclamation point in an eye-opening story of a remarkable person. Born in poverty in a Palestinian refugee camp after his family was forced from ancestral lands now owned by Ariel Sharon, Abuelaish seems to have been hard-working, ambitious and independent-minded almost from birth. At the age of 12, during the Six Day War in 1967, he discovered that “almost no one behaved the way I expected them to. . . . It made me more aware of what people say versus what they do.” At 15 years old, in the same year that he saw the Israeli army plow down his family’s modest home so their tanks could roll freely through the refugee camp, he worked on an Israeli farm where the family treated him fairly and showed him great kindness.

Later, he became the first Palestinian doctor on staff at an Israeli hospital. “All of my adult life I have had one leg in Palestine and the other in Israel, an unusual stance in this region,” he writes.

All of this gives Abuelaish a truth-

to-power authenticity in his depiction of the systematic humiliations visited upon residents of Gaza, even such a moderate and wellrespected figure as the good doctor.

Abuelaish can be repetitive and his prose is sometimes infelicitous, but oddly enough, the occasionally awkward writing often adds to the book’s power. Even more powerful, however, is Abuelaish’s persistent message of peace and his call for coexistence. Despite his unimaginable loss, he writes near the end of I Shall Not Hate, “To those who seek retaliation, I say, even if I got revenge on all the Israeli people, would it bring my daughters back?

Hatred is an illness. It prevents healing and peace.”

—Alden Mudge

American Uprising

By Daniel Rasmussen Harper $26.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780061995217

AMERICAN HISTORY

The largest slave rebellion in U.S. history took place in the New Orleans area in January 1811. This resistance was much greater than the better-known revolts led by Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, yet it is little-known because law enforcement officials and plantation owners declared it “criminal activity” rather than a revolt, and documentation has been hard to come by.

Fortunately for those of us who want to know as much as we can about American history—good and bad—historian Daniel Rasmussen uses extensive original research and superb narrative skill to vividly recount what happened in American Uprising. Beyond the story of approximately 500 men who yearned to be free and were willing to put their lives on the line to achieve it, Rasmussen’s book is about the expansion of the United States and how greed and power worked to distort America’s highest ideals.

Rasmussen provides a many-sided picture of events set in a violent era when most slaves, because of the harsh conditions in which they lived and worked, did not survive

beyond a few years after their arrival from Africa. New Orleans was the most diverse, cosmopolitan city in North America at that time, but it was also a sugar colony whose economy was based on slave labor.

The white elite—French, Spanish and American—was caught up in petty disputes and failed to realize that the primary conflict at the heart of the city was not between the French and the Anglo-Americans but between the white elite and the huge African underclass. By 1810, slaves made up more than 75 percent of the total population, and almost 90 percent of households owned slaves.

Two slaves, Kook and Quamana, decided soon after they arrived from Africa in 1806 to begin plotting rebellion. Over time, they developed an elaborate network of trust with other slaves of similar mind, including Charles Deslondes, an ambitious, light-skinned black man who had risen quickly through the ranks to become a slave driver for a planter with a reputation for cruelty. After years of elaborate planning, always in secret, the notvery-well-armed slave army headed for New Orleans with the intention of establishing a black republic, much as the slaves of Saint Dominique (now Haiti) had done not long before. Betrayal and bad luck, however, led to grave and tragic consequences, and this dream was never realized.

Rasmussen carefully gives the historical context of events and deftly traces the movement of both the slave rebels and those opposed to them—the planters, the militia and the law enforcement officials— who saw the slaves as terrorists about to shatter what they considered to be the natural order of things. He shows that the immediate effect of the uprising, in fact, was to strengthen the institution of slavery, and explains that the slave rebels of 1811 were just among the first victims of a drive to eliminate any threats to American power, which would later include the Trail of Tears and the Mexican War. American Uprising is certainly difficult to read in places because of the grim nature of the subject, but anyone interested in slavery in the U.S. or in the history of our country will find it illuminating as we strive to better understand our past.

—Roger Bishop

children’s books

tim tharp INTERVIEW BY LINDA M. CASTELLITTO

WHEN A SOLDIER COMES HOME

T

im Tharp didn’t start out writing novels for teens.

But after visiting book clubs to talk about his first book, Falling Dark (winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize), he says, “I had such a good time talking to high school students about it, I thought, I’m going to write a novel for them.”

The idea stuck—and it’s been working well, to say the least. His debut YA novel, Knights of the Hill Country, was named to the ALA Best Books of 2007 list. His second, The Spectacular Now, was a 2008 National Book Award finalist and has been optioned for a movie.

His newest, BADD, is a creative and moving exploration of what happens when a young soldier named Bobby returns home from war, no longer able to relate to the life—or self—he’d left behind.

Bobby always was a rebellious sort, a charming risk-taker whose antics inspired the book’s title, as explained by narrator Ceejay, Bobby’s adoring younger sister: “He was wild and he was B-A-D-D, BADD.” Things got worse when he stole a car; that’s when he had to choose between the army or jail.

But after several tours of duty, he’s finally coming home, and Ceejay is unbearably excited, not least because of her big plan: They’ll move in together, get jobs and escape their small town. She plans to surprise Bobby with the idea, but is herself surprised when she sees him in town—which can’t be right, because that’d mean he was home early, and didn’t tell her he was coming.

Soon, a lot of things don’t seem right to Ceejay, who’s already frustrated from her arguments with Captain Crazy, a wildly eccentric local man whose anti-war protests make her angry and defensive.

Then there are her parents—her unfailing perky mom, and her dad, who doesn’t understand anything, least of all her.

The inspiration for BADD was drawn from a mix of old and new influences, Tharp says from his home outside Oklahoma City. “It was partially inspired by what’s going on in our country right now, but it was also a story idea I’d had in mind for years. This one was going to be a post-World War I novel.”

The idea morphed into something different when some of his

students at a local community college began coming back from Iraq.

“A few of them had post-traumatic stress disorder. . . . I started thinking that was something important to take a look at,” he recalls.

Tharp took an additional layer of care with an already delicate subject because “the suburb I live in is an Air Force town. There is that feeling of wanting to do them justice.”

In fact, the author’s father was a WWII veteran who told Tharp stories about his experiences. “I always thought having the perspective of a young person on a returning soldier would be interesting,” he says.

“But really, the driving force was to investigate different aspects of courage, besides just facing physical violence like you see in Exploring movies.”

That off-thedifferent field courage is kinds of a quality Ceejay courage, on possesses, though she and off the doesn’t know it battlefield. at first. She’s occupied with her confusion and hurt at the changes in her brother, who, to her shock, starts spending time with Captain Crazy. And her mother’s perkiness, at first annoying, reveals itself to be something else entirely: a choice to remain upbeat, no matter what—itself a type of strength.

“Ceejay has to rely on different kinds of courage, like perseverance and standing up behind someone you love. The kind she draws upon is something I think women have more access to than men, who are supposed to put on a tough act,” Tharp says. “Ceejay starts looking around and realizes she’s more like the women in her family than she thought she was.”

That’s a challenging emotional journey for people of any age, but Tharp said it doesn’t occur to him to shy away from what some might view as heavy topics for a YA book.

fun!

READING S

Find the best new books to share with your favorite young readers “I grew up hearing those war stories from my dad, and both my parents died of cancer. I’ve gone through those kinds of battles myself, so I drew upon them.”

After all, he adds, “Kids do go through these kinds of things. I think it’d be good for them to have a book, so if they’re going through something, they see the characters are, too. . . And a lot of kids read adult novels. Why not bring that complexity to the YA novel itself?”

It’s the very complexity of BADD that makes it such a memorable read; amid the struggle and catharsis are humor, beauty, wonder and hope. Tharp says it wasn’t an easy book to write: “It was kind of draining, but satisfying at the same time, like doing a good physical workout.”

Turning the last page of BADD is sure to leave readers feeling the same—a little worn out, a lot more clear-eyed and suffused with the glow that comes from knowing they’ve just finished something important.

readinG co rner Our reader-friendly e-newsletter offers recommendations on the top new releases for children and teens

BADD

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By Tim Tharp, Knopf, $16.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9780375864445, Ages 14 and up

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children’s books fall for anything

reviews

A trail of photographic clues Review by Heather Seggel

Eddie Reeves’ father took his own life, and she found his body. Her mother is catatonic with grief, and family friend Beth has moved into the house to restore order, largely by yelling at Eddie, who only wants some answers. In the quest to understand her dad’s death, Eddie is taking bigger and more dangerous chances with her safety. When she finds out her dad had a photography student, Culler Evans, who also wants to understand what happened, it seems like perfect timing. Maybe too perfect.

Fall For Anything flirts with being a mystery—when Eddie and Culler find messages that Eddie’s dad may have left behind as clues about his suicide, coded in a series of photos he took, they feel compelled to follow the trail. The darkness in the pictures is amplified when Eddie and Culler visit their locations; looking at these abandoned buildings and collapsed churches with a photographer’s eye for the quality of the light gives

By Courtney Summers, St. Martin’s Griffin, $9.99, everything an extra coating of film noir grime. (A fleabag motel they 224 pages, ISBN 9780312656737, ages 14 and up crash in is not just grungy—there’s even a used condom behind the bed.)

There’s also a bit of a love triangle, or love trapezoid: Though Eddie’s best friend Milo might be going out with another girl for the summer, he still feels threatened by Culler’s presence in Eddie’s life. Jealousy skews in all directions, which complicates relationships and leaves Eddie more isolated when she’s most in need of a friend.

Author Courtney Summers is not afraid to tackle dark subject matter, and balance it with equally dark humor. Things get much harder for Eddie before there’s any hope on the horizon, and even then there are no pat solutions to the problems she’s facing. Fall For Anything is full of hard truths and short on happy endings, but it is a relentless and captivating novel for older teens.

OLD BEAR AND HIS CUB

By Olivier Dunrea Philomel $16.99, 32 pages ISBN 9780399245077 Ages 4 to 8

PICTURE BOOK

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Pour a pot of tea and snuggle up with Old Bear and His Cub, the latest treasure from Olivier Dunrea.

Old Bear and Little Cub love one another with all their hearts. Even when one of them is a little ornery, their love is clear. When Old Bear insists that Little Bear eat his porridge, the petulant cub declares, “No, I won’t,” and is met with a quick reply: “Yes, you will.” Old Bear might be old, but he is no pushover.

Old Bear and Little Bear face off on the major issues of autonomy: scarf wearing, being careful on a high rock and taking a nap. But when they awake from their nap in the snow, Old Bear has caught a cold, and the tables are turned in a delightful way.

Dunrea, author of the beloved Gossie & Friends series, has penned

another winner here. The gentle pencil and gouache illustrations, set on very generous white space, draw the reader’s eyes to the relationship between the two generations. The brown tones of the bears and their surroundings nicely set off the red stripe in the porridge bowls, teapot, Old Bear’s cheeks and the scarf that keeps Little Bear warm, making this red a recurring reminder of unconditional love.

Whether you have a child or grandchild or are a Little Bear yourself, this perfect bedtime tale of familial love is one to cherish.

—Robin Smith

YOUNG FREDLE

By Cynthia Voigt Illustrated by Louise Yates Knopf $16.99, 224 pages ISBN 9780375864575 Ages 8 to 12

MIDDLE GRADE

In Angus and Sadie, Newbery Medalist Cynthia Voigt introduced

two border collie siblings, adopted

by Mister and Missus, a young Maine couple who own a farm. In Young Fredle, Voigt returns with another look at this busy farm from the point of view of a house mouse.

Residing along with his family in a wide nest behind the second shelf of the kitchen pantry, Fredle is often reprimanded for asking too many questions and following his reckless cousin, Axle. Even the threat of “went,” as in a mouse who “went” away after being caught in a trap, can’t deter his constant curiosity.

After being coaxed by Axle into eating the best food ever, a brown, smooth and sugary substance (which he later discovers is called chocolate), Fredle develops a horrible stomachache. Pushed out of his nest, as is the custom with sick mice, and scooped up by the Missus, the young mouse finds himself outside for the first time.

In Voigt’s adventurous tale, a delight of old-fashioned storytelling that’s complemented by adorable sketches, Fredle tries to find his way back home. While life outside of the house seems dangerous at first, with barn cats, a woodshed snake, pecking chickens, swooping rap-

tors and foraging raccoons, he also encounters the beauty of flowers, the taste of orange rind, a bright sky with no ceiling and a large, luminous object that changes shape each night.

As they follow the mouse’s journey, children will make their own discoveries about the differences among mice (house mice are gray and field mice are brown, for instance) and their habits. As he nears home, Fredle wonders why we can’t stay curious as we grow up. That’s a lesson for readers young and old to ponder.

—Angela Leeper

JUST GRACE AND THE TERRIBLE TUTU

By Charise Mericle Harper HMH $15, 176 pages ISBN 9780547152240 Ages 6 to 9

MIDDLE GRADE

Being a mother’s helper is going to be a breeze, or so young Grace Stewart believes, until she actually meets four-year-old Lily—a little French visitor to her neighborhood.

While the tutu-wearing toddler isn’t exactly terrible, she does try Grace’s patience.

But while Grace can’t seem to keep up with Lily’s unicorn-riding and jelly-doughnut-eating antics, she knows just who to call as her replacement. Grace’s best friend, Mimi—who soon will have her own little sister—is dying to take on the role. There’s just one problem: Lily sticks to Grace like peanut butter, but she treats Mimi like cold spaghetti.

As Grace summons her self-proclaimed superpowers of empathy, she is practically bursting with excitement as she concocts a surprisingly super plan to a) make Mimi happy again, b) make Lily like Mimi, and c) get everyone’s world back to “normal.”

In this sixth installment in the Just Grace chapter book series, Charise Mericle Harper once again hits high notes and proves herself a master of tweendom. Her casual language, cheeky attitude and punchy delivery are spot-on, and her playfully comic drawings (complete with word bubbles) add to the book’s pacing and flair. Grace is

reviews consistently funny, thoughtful and engaging: just the kind of BFF any girl would want.

This entertaining entrée into the world of chapter books will leave young readers laughing, pondering and eagerly anticipating Grace’s next adventure.

—Sharon Verbeten

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

By Beth Revis Razorbill $17.99, 400 pages ISBN 9781595143976 Ages 12 and up

meet LEO & DIANE DILLON

On Godspeed, Revis’ characters and young readers alike must think for themselves or risk the silent, and deadly, consequences.

— C a t D . Ac r e e

THE BIG CRUNCH

By Pete Hautman Scholastic $17.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780545240758 Ages 13 and up

teen

TEEN

Amy was supposed to spend 300 years as a cryogenically frozen passenger on the spaceship Godspeed.

She was supposed to sail through space, unaware of her arrested state, until finally being awoken on a new planet. She was supposed to see her parents again. But everything goes wrong when someone wakes her up 50 years before the scheduled landing—and nearly kills her in the process.

Amy finds herself trapped on Godspeed, desperate to see the sky and smell real air again. But it’s not long before she discovers that these are the least of her worries, as most of the passengers on Godspeed follow their leader, Eldest, without a single thought in their own heads.

Fortunately, Amy is not alone in this Brave New World scenario. Eldest’s rebellious protégé, Elder, is supposed to be spending all his time learning to be the next leader of the ship, but his interest in Amy seems to highlight more and more of Eldest’s secrets. Now Amy and Elder must race an unknown murderer to save the rest of the cryo-passengers, while Eldest’s thick sheen of lies grows thinner and thinner.

Beth Revis’ debut novel, Across the Universe, pushes the boundaries for teens who feel trapped, whether literally or figuratively. The world Amy encounters lacks the civil values that every teenager should learn as they grow up in modern society, such as free thought, respect for all races and the power of every person’s voice. Even sex has lost all significant meaning, reverting instead to mere animalistic urges.

If teenage June seems a bit sophisticated for her age, it’s because she’s had to be. Her father, who bails out sinking companies for a living, has relocated his wife and daughter to cities all over the country, most recently Chicago and now Minneapolis—or, more truthfully, the same-everywhere suburbs of these cities. Within days of starting at her new school, June figures out whom to befriend and whom to avoid.

She’s not conniving about it, just self-protective, if a little jaded.

But this isn’t only her story. From the first page we get to know both June and Wes, a floppy-haired boy who’s lived in this particular suburb his whole life. National Book Awardwinning author Pete Hautman has made them the co-stars of this powerful first-love story by switching between their perspectives every few paragraphs. The transitions are smooth, in part because the two are simpatico.

As a character, June is a gift, a funny-sad girl who is so realistically drawn it almost feels a shame to think of her as a character. Wes is different from the “dark and moody Chuck Palahniuk/Kurt Vonnegut/ Life-Sucks-and-Then-You-Die brooders” she’s met before, but he’s private and quiet too, and his feelings for June soon become intense.

With its lovely but underplayed creation-of-the-universe metaphor, The Big Crunch is evocative of their attraction to each other, viscerally so—it’s stomach-flipping at times.

June’s father’s job threatens to separate them, which complicates things and gives the novel a plot to hang on. But the salient detail here isn’t story but feelings, that magnetpull of first love.

—Katie Haegele

THE SECRET RIVER Husband-and-wife illustrators Leo and Diane Dillon have won the Caldecott Medal twice during their 50-year career. Their latest collaborative effort is The Secret River (Atheneum, $19.99, 56 pages, ISBN 9781416911791), a beautiful new edition of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ story about a girl who helps her family through hard times by catching fish in a magical river. The Dillons live in Brooklyn.

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WORDNOOK

By the editors of Merriam-Webster

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS Dear Editor, Could you please explain where the word Mirandize comes from?

A. L. Vallejo, California Mirandize is an example of the malleability of the English language, which allows for the transformation of nouns, even proper nouns, into verbs. Older examples of this phenomenon include bowdlerize and mesmerize, which derive from the names of Thomas Bowdler, British editor of Shakespeare, and Anton Mesmer, Austrian hypnotist and physician. Mirandize comes from the 1966 Supreme Court case “Miranda v. Arizona.”

In 1963 Ernesto Miranda was arrested for crimes committed in Phoenix, Arizona, to which he confessed after lengthy questioning by police. Upon examining the facts of Miranda’s case, the Court ruled that in order for evidence obtained from a police interrogation to be admissible in court, the individual in custody was entitled to be ad-

vised of certain rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. These procedural safeguards, as the Court called them, have become known as the “Miranda warnings.” They include advising the individual that he has the right to remain silent, that anything he says can be used against him in court, and that he has the right to consult an attorney and have one present during questioning.

Thus, to Mirandize people is to “read them their rights.” The verb was first recorded in 1984.

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME Dear Editor, I’ve been reading a book about the Civil War. It describes the use of morphine as a painkiller. Does the name of the drug have anything to do with the word morph, as in “to change” ?

S. B. Machias, Maine Your supposition is correct. The words morphine and morph both trace back to the Greek word mor-

EVERYTHING LITERARY

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Reprinted from The Everything Literary Crosswords Book by Charles Timmerman, published by Adams Media, an F+W Media, Inc. Co. Copyright ©2007, F+W Media, Inc.

The grapes of wrath ACROSS 1. Fleece 5. P.D. broadcast 8. Attacks 14. World’s largest sultanate 15. Feathered stole 16. Monetary unit of Portugal 17. Polygonal recess 18. Dot on the Rhine 19. Conceit 20. Eldest Joad daughter in The Grapes of Wrath 23. Soft & ___ (Gillette product) 24. Mount with spirit crossword solution

25. Seeps 29. Power source for Fulton 31. Awesome 33. WWII locale, in brief 34. Ammunition chest 38. Alphabet run 39. The Grapes of Wrath author 42. She played Julia on “Party of Five” 43. Is important 44. Comparing pair 45. CPO’s group 46. Writer Asimov 50. Soviet forced-labor camp 52. Fiend 56. New Deal org.

57. Main character’s earlier crime in The Grapes of Wrath 60. Presidential middle name 63. Architect Maya __ 64. “If it __ broke...”

65. Tater Tots maker 66. Ltd., in the U.S. 67. Driving force 68. Title role for Mia

BACK AND FORTH

phe, meaning “form, shape.”

Morph is simply a shortening of the word metamorphose, meaning “to be transformed.” Metamorphose goes back to the Latin metamorphosis, which itself comes from Greek.

The Greek word metamorphosis arose from the verb metamorphoun (“to transform”), a combination of the prefix meta-, meaning “among, with, after,” and morphe, meaning “form, shape.”

Morphine also traces back to morphe, but its story is found in Greek mythology. Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, had numerous sons, the Dreams. Prominent among the sons was Morpheus, who had the power to make human forms appear to dreamers.

The drug morphine was first isolated in 1806 by German pharmacologist Friedrich Wilhelm Adam Sertürner (1783-1841). Sertürner named this derivative of opium morphium after the god of dreams, for the deep sleep it induces in addition to relieving pain. English borrowed the French version of this name, morphine.

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DOWN 1. Planks 2. Foreign auto 3. Dog star 4. Baby bouncer 5. Behind 6. Aplomb 7. Get clean 8. Will of Jeremiah Johnson 9. Newsman Charles 10. __ Lodge (motel chain) 11. ___ generis 12. Computer pop-ups 13. T he Grapes of Wrath main character 21. Ottoman Empire founder 22. Nimble 26. Galvanizing metal 27. Furry Star Wars creature 28. Dip in liquid

Palindrome comes from the Greek word palindromos, which means “running back again.” Palindromos is a combination of Greek palin, meaning “back” or “again,” and dramein, a verb that means “to run.”

A palindrome can be a word, phrase or sentence. Some of the more famous palindromes are “Madam, I’m Adam” (Adam’s supposed first words to Eve); “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama”; “Lewd did I live, evil I did dwel.” Palindrome is even applied sometimes to numbers like the date 2002 that read the same in either direction.

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Dear Editor, Why is a word that is spelled the same way backwards and forwards, like dad, called a palindrome?

M. A. Tupelo, Mississippi

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48. Take vengeance for 49. Reagan’s predecessor 51. At full speed, at sea 53. Island of immigrants 54. Its motto is “Dirigo” 55. Preventive measure?

20. Oldest Joad son in The Grapes of Wrath 59. Burglar’s take 60. Homer Simpson exclamation 61. Prohibition ___ 62. Spy novelist Deighton

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