BookPage June 2011

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june

2011

america’s book review

Mystery in the

AMAZON STATE OF WONDER In Ann Patchett’s gripping novel, a journey to the heart of darkness

paperback picks penguin.com

Been There, Done That

The Cobra

The Liar’s Lullaby

The Mullah’s Storm

Plenty of thirtysomething women would be thrilled to look like a teenager. But journalist Kathy Hopkins’s youthful appearance is forcing her into an undercover assignment she could do without: posing as a college freshman to get an exposé on a secret prostitution ring.

For decades, the West has been fighting the cocaine cartels—and losing—until the president decides enough is enough and asks one man to take charge. His task: to destroy the cocaine industry. His name: Cobra. It is the ultimate secret war. But only one side can win.

9780425241950 • $7.99

9780451233561 • $9.99

When a controversial female singer is murdered during a concert, forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett fears the act was political. Now, Jo finds herself in a race to extinguish the conspiracy rumor mill before it incites a level of violence that reaches America’s highest corridors of power.

For navigator Michael Parson and female Army interpreter Sergeant Gold, a battle for survival begins against not only the hazards of nature, but the treacheries of man: the Taliban stalking them, the villagers whose loyalties are unknown, and a prisoner who would very much like the three of them to be caught.

Nauti Dreams

The Templar Legion

Vampire in Atlantis

You Belong to Me

Natches Mackay separated himself from his family years ago, except for the two cousins who became the only family he knows. Now, he’s being dragged back into his father’s life in a way that could destroy him and the only woman he’s ever felt a spark for.

Retired Army Ranger Lt. Col. John Holliday is swept into an adventure as deadly as it is secretive when an archaeologist friend makes a bizarre find in Ethiopia. But when he follows a trail of clues through the chaotic and lawless horn of Africa, he finds himself hunted as he comes closer to a priceless treasure that can only be found by those who can solve a riddle from the past.

Daniel is a fierce vampire and Night Guild mage. But even the strongest alliance can be destroyed when a vampire’s oath crosses paths with a maiden’s quest, and an eleven-thousand-year-old desire is reborn.

Homicide Detective J.D. Fitzpatrick has seen a lot of violence, but nothing like the trail of tortured bodies that are turning up throughout the city. And now he’s starting to suspect that his medical examiner, Dr. Lucy Trask, may be shielding a dark secret that could connect her to these vicious killings—and put her next on the killer’s hit list.

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The #1 New York Times bestselling Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series continues!

The Harlequin have been the bogeymen of the vampire world for more than a thousand years. Now they are here in America, hunting weretigers—and human police. They serve the Mother of All Darkness, the first vampire, who needs a new body—and she’s decided that she wants Anita Blake’s. When the police call in Anita and Edward to catch a serial killer, Edward believes these gruesome murders are a trap to lure Anita closer to the most dangerous vampire they’ve ever hunted.

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NOW IN PAPERBACK

BERKLEY

A Member of Penguin Group (USA)

9780425241134 • $27.95

contents

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

features

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12 june is audio month David Baldacci raves about the actors who narrate his audiobooks

cover story

ann patchett

Deep in the heart of the jungle, one woman’s search for a missing scientist reveals shocking truths in Patchett’s latest tale of the human heart

16 marcus sakey This thriller writer has big ideas

Cover illustration © istockphoto.com/Taily

17 travel Sightseeing across the country— and on a budget

18 father’s day From dads who cook to dads who golf

20 civil war

reviews 22 Fiction

top pick:

150 years later, we are as fascinated by the Civil War as ever

24 ann brashares Meet the author of Sisterhood Everlasting

25 lisa see One novel wasn’t enough to tell these women’s stories

27 michael sims A fresh look at a classic children’s book

29 kathryn erskine Drawing on lessons from her own children’s lives

31 matthew myers Meet the illustrator of Tyrannosaurus Dad

The Astral by Kate Christensen a l s o r e v i e w e d : The Summer of the Bear by Bella Pollen; Vaclav & Lena by Haley Tanner; Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson; The Borrower

by Rebecca Makkai; The London Train by Tessa Hadley; Sister by Rosamund Lupton; Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee; To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal; Dreams of Joy by Lisa See

26 NonFiction top pick:

The Man in the Rockefeller Suit by Mark Seal a l s o r e v i e w e d : The Greater Journey by David McCullough; Fire and Rain

by David Browne; The Story of Charlotte’s Web by Michael Sims; The Last Gunfight

by Jeff Guinn; Marriage Confidential by Pamela Haag; The Big Roads by Earl Swift; Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch

30 Children’s top pick:

Beauty Queens

by Libba Bray a l s o r e v i e w e d : Blackout

by John Rocco; Junonia

by Kevin Henkes; Lexie by Audrey Couloumbis; The Midnight Palace by Carlos Ruiz Zafón; What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay by Amanda Cockrell

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departments 04 04 05 06 06 08 10 11 12

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CHILDREN’S BOOKS

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columns This month’s best paperbacks for reading groups

SEEKING HAPPY ENDINGS The Nobodies Album (Anchor, $15, 320 pages, ISBN 9780767930581) by Carolyn Parkhurst, author of the best-selling novel The Dogs of Babel, is a captivating contemporary mystery with a spirited narrator at its heart. Novelist and widow Octavia Frost has been estranged from her son Milo for four years. When Milo, a rock musician, is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Octavia decides it’s time to reactivate their relation-

book clubs

author enablers

by julie hale

by kathi kamen goldmark & Sam Barry

immerses herself in Andrew’s life, acting as his housekeeper, chauffeur and secretary, but as she soon learns, maintaining a sense of self while being part of a pair is one of marriage’s greatest challenges.

When Andrew’s unorthodox theories about science and the universe take on a hysterical tone, Margaret finds herself with a new concern— that her husband might be mad.

Spanning six decades, this wellplotted novel ranks among Smiley’s best. It’s a compassionate, richly detailed exploration of the difficulties of intimacy and identity.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS

ship. Traveling to San Francisco, where Milo has been arrested, she hopes to discover if the accusations against him are true. Mixed in with the story of this investigative quest are bits of Octavia’s own writing (revised endings, all of them happy, to her already published novels), and the presence of these extra narratives gives the novel a multifaceted feel. Octavia is a perceptive and eloquent narrator of events, and her pursuit of the truth—during which she crosses paths with expensive lawyers, annoying reporters and hard-living musicians—makes for delightful reading. Full of surprises, this is an intriguing novel from an author who consistently produces provocative fiction.

AN AMERICAN SAGA

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With Private Life (Anchor, $15.95, 416 pages, ISBN 9781400033195), Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley presents a poignant look at marriage and the ways in which relationships change over time.

Margaret Mayfield saves herself from spinsterhood by marrying, at the age of 27, a man she knows little about. Her husband, a quirky scientist named Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, is stationed at a naval base in San Francisco, and the two settle there in 1905. Margaret

A must-read for fans of the elusive poet, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds is the first substantive biography of Dickinson to appear in 10 years. Author Lyndall Gordon offers revelations aplenty in a narrative that’s both fascinating and illuminating. Arguing persuasively that epilepsy was the main reason Dickinson lived as a recluse, Gordon offers a lively portrayal of the artist, depicting her as a woman tormented by personal passions and by the betrayal of her brother Austin, whose illicit affair with the beautiful Mabel Todd tore the family apart. The legal clashes over Dickinson’s poetry that took place among family members after her death are surprising and unfold with genuine drama. Drawing on the poet’s medical records, diaries and correspondence, Gordon has crafted an irresistible investigation of a distant figure. Thanks to this rewarding work, a notoriously enigmatic artist seems more accessible and human.

Lives Like Loaded Guns

By Lyndall Gordon Penguin $18, 512 pages ISBN 9780143119142

biography

Practical advice on writing and publishing for aspiring authors

GOING UP? Dear Author Enablers, I have written a historical children’s book. Are there any publishers who would consider this type of unusual but enlightening book? This book discovers and twists around a first lady and her homemade craft, her philanthropy through her craft, how to master this craft and her pattern, lessons on how to write your own life history book and most of all how to help others unselfishly through your own passion. This book also demonstrates how adults can document a family craft into a book when a family member is under home hospice care. Needing your help and guidance.

Shirley Lewis Mt. Vernon, Indiana It’s possible that a publisher would consider such a book if you could present a clearer description.

In marketing, the term “elevator pitch” refers to an imaginary circumstance in which you’ve got just a few moments to sell your idea to a big shot. What do you say? You need a short, one-sentence description that instantly summarizes and sells your book. This pitch has got to be some of the tightest writing you’ve ever done.

Something that all authors must remember is that publishing is a business. We may write for love, but the people who publish our books do so to make money. We recommend that you read How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen.

This book, and the act of writing a book proposal, will help you clarify the nature of your own book—and how to sell it.

DIY publishing Dear Author Enablers, Is self-publishing the death blow to a writing career? I published my first novel, Heartfelt Cases, when I was in college. The process was so easy that I published another novel, Ashlynn’s Dreams. Have I sealed my own doom? Also, are there any authors who write in very different genres? I write Christian fiction, YA fiction and science fiction, and I wanted to know if that’s odd.

Julie Gilbert New Jersey

Sam was just in a meeting in which an acquisitions editor expressed strong interest in an author.

Exhibit A: copies of the author’s self-published books. Self-publishing is not a death knell for a writing career; in some cases it is a writing career, since some authors, especially in recent months, are doing just fine publishing themselves.

Keys to getting a publisher’s attention with self-published works are documentable sales and a growing platform.

Once established, many authors branch out into different genres.

What allows them to do this is proven success. It’s a lot of work to establish a writing career; for now, you should concentrate on getting one well-written book published.

Craft of Writing Spotlight We asked Meg Waite Clayton, author of The Four Ms. Bradwells, how she remembers ideas that come at odd times and places: “I’m the world’s worst rememberer. Phone numbers, even my own.

Names. And those great ideas that come just as I’m falling asleep, or out for a run, in the shower, at the theater. My solution for the ideas: always, always, always write them down.

“This means always always always having paper and pencil or pen at hand. I used to ‘borrow’ pencils from libraries and golf courses. When I discovered boxes of them at the office supply store, though, I started taking them to the library and leaving them there.

A smartphone works, too: You can just email ideas to yourself. But my fingers are more adept with the little pencil than the little keyboard, and I prefer the feel of a pencil in hand anyway. I’d often like to say to folks I’ve just met, ‘Hold on while I write down your names,’ but sadly, that doesn’t work quite as well.”

Email your questions about writing to authorenablers@gmail.com. Please include your name and hometown.

BUZZ GIRL Lisa See has introduced readers to a world of women and fascinating periods of history in China. I cannot wait to see where she is going to take us next.”

See’s latest novel, Dreams of Joy, is now on sale. Look for a review— and a Q&A with See—in the fiction section of this issue.

Chernow on grant

Our publishing insider gets the skinny on tomorrow’s bestsellers

two more from lisa see Best-selling author Lisa See (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Shanghai Girls) has recently closed a two-book deal with Random House, her current publisher. See’s longtime editor, Bob Loomis, said of the news: “Through her novels,

After winning the Pulitzer Prize for Washington: A Life in April, Ron Chernow is turning his attention to another historical heavy hitter: Ulysses S. Grant. Chernow has signed a deal with Penguin Press to write a “comprehensive biography” of the former president.

Chernow has previously written about J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Alexander Hamilton, and is known for his fantastic writing, compelling chernow narratives and

meticulous attention to detail.

george harrison’s life George Harrison’s widow, Olivia Harrison, is writing a book about her late husband. On sale this fall from Abrams, Living in the Material World: George Harrison will include a foreword by Martin Scorsese (whose Harrison documentary hits theaters this fall) and an introduction by Paul Theroux. It will draw on Harrison’s personal archive of never-before-seen photographs, letters, diaries and memorabilia.

Fun fact: The book is named for Harrison’s 1973 solo album.

Paolini’s finale The final book in Christopher Paolini’s four-part Inheritance Cycle will be published on November 8, and Random House has recently announced that the title will be— wait for it—Inheritance.

Combined, the first three books in the series (Eragon, Eldest and Brisingr) have sold more than 25 million copies around the world.

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

7 hit list

By Laurell K. Hamilton Berkley, $27.95, ISBN 9780425241134 Hit men are headed for St. Louis, and Anita Blake, JeanClaude and Richard are the targets in Hamilton’s 20th Vampire Hunter novel.

14 folly beach

By Dorothea Benton Frank Morrow, $25.99, ISBN 9780061961274 In Frank’s latest Lowcountry tale, a woman returns to the past to find her future in an enchanting story of loss, acceptance and love.

21 smokin’ seventeen

By Janet Evanovich

Bantam, $28, ISBN 9780345527684 The body count is rising just as Stephanie Plum’s love life heats up in Evanovich’s 17th Plum novel.

USA TODAY bestselling author

RaeAnne Thayne will charm and inspire you with a heartwarming tale of love and healing.

“If you’re going to read only one book this season, make it Blackberry Summer.”

—Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Pick up your copy today!

11_104_BookPage_Blackberry.indd 1

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columns

lifestyles

WELL READ

by joanna brichetto

by robert Weibezahl

Books for handy dads Ken Dunmead, the best-selling author of Geek Dad, returns with more fabulously fun things to make and do in The Geek Dad’s Guide to Weekend Fun (Gotham, $18, 240 pages, ISBN 9781592406449). All 28 projects are pitched to fit into an average weekend with parents and kids working together. Goaloriented folks take note: It’s the process which is key, including the gathering and perhaps buying of materials. Some projects only require stuff already lying around, like the NERF Dart Blowgun and Lego Trebuchet. Some, like the Zip Line, need a specific new component to ensure safety. But the range of hacks, games, edibles and crafts is

wide and varied. Highlights include making a Sound Box with a musical greeting card, a steadicam from a smartphone, candy molds with Hot Wheels cars, ice cream from dry ice, stenciled T-shirts with freezer paper, Alien Drums from PVC pipe and art with shaving cream. How to choose?

Every project is rated by cost, difficulty, duration, reusability, tools and materials, which makes it easy to decide what is feasible for the weekend at hand.

Techno treasures

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Unscrewed (Chicago Review Press, $16.95, 224 pages, ISBN 9781569766040) by Ed Sobey is a great resource for computer geeks, techno-users, workbench hobbyists, DIYers and those who simply feel compelled to take things apart. Dismantling discarded appliances and gadgets isn’t just fun, it’s “reverse engineering.” Creative destruction can teach how something works (or used to work), yield costly components for free and perhaps result in a nifty new hack. Sobey, author of The Way Toys Work, The Way Kitchens Work and other must-haves, is also the founder of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He brings his expertise to bear on 50 deconstruction projects, ranging from a child’s bubble gun to a wireless router.

reinventing history

Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo is set in a fictitious Latin American republic named Costaguana, and based in part on his travels to Colombia and its then-dependent state, Panama. From this tantalizing bit of literary genesis, Colombianborn writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez has crafted The Secret History of Costaguana, an ingenious novel that purports to tell the real story that Conrad appropriated and made his own. As he constructs his own cunning fiction from this rich raw material, Vásquez offers an incisive A Colombian rumination novelist blurs on the elastic Top Pick For Lifestyles nature of histhe lines tory and truth, Looking for a “simpler, more susand the ways in tainable and authentic” approach to between which fiction daily life? Anyone, anywhere—even fact and both. city dwellers with only a sunny fiction—with distorts Vásquez, windowsill—can “take control of a little help while researchtheir own food supply, live more ing a Spanishlightly on the planet and make their from Joseph language own corner of the world safer and Conrad. biography of cleaner.” The City Homesteader Conrad, disshows how, with sensible and simple instructions for a wide range covered that one of the sources he of skills. Author Scott Meyer, former tapped when writing Nostromo was a Colombian diplomat living in Loneditor-in-chief of Organic Gardendon. Vásquez imagines a scenario ing magazine, presents options for wherein that real-life Colombian inany level of experience and comtroduces Conrad to a man who has mitment. Grow food in containers, witnessed the perpetual turmoil in raised beds, up a pole or in a jar, Panama, where European financiers and learn how to preserve it for struggle to build the inter-oceanic later or prepare it now. Don’t miss canal and chronic war and civil unthe chapter on foraging: A surprisrest eventually give way to imperfect ing number of yard “weeds” are independence. This invented narnutritious salad components. Plus, find basics for raising small animals rator is José Altamirano, the bastard son of an influential journalist and, (bees, poultry, rabbits, goats) and like Conrad, something of a man home/apartment care, with details about composting, rain barrels, pest without a country.

The Secret History of Costaguana control and home remedies. The author throws in a growing guide for begins on August 7, 1924, the day 54 vegetables and herbs suitable for Conrad is buried in Canterbury, England. That night, Altamirano small spaces, along with a list of resources for further eco-exploration. begins to write his own version of the events he shared with Conrad 20 years before. It is a story that The City Homesteader extends back a century, begins with the birth of his father, Miguel,

By Scott Meyer and parallels the uneasy history of Running Press Colombia and Panama. A political $20, 272 pages radical, the elder Altamirano flees ISBN 9780762440856 Bogotá, eventually settling in Colón, eBook available where his boosterism in the EuroGARDENING pean press helps fuel enthusiasm and gain financing for the proposed canal. But Colombia—and by extension, the state of Panama—is a “convulsive” country, where the tumult of politics is outstripped only by the

Discover new uses for a hair dryer, digital camera, remote control toy, floppy drive, ink-jet printer, shredder, computer mouse and more. Each project is assessed according to overall coolness factor, “treasures to collect,” disposal concerns and tools required. Step-by-step instructions and photos make all the take-aparts clear, and anything with a capacitor comes with ramped-up safety warnings.

havoc of disease, earthquakes and apocalyptic weather.

Over many years, the canal project faces countless obstacles and, ultimately, bankruptcy, with Miguel’s reputation suffering in the bargain.

When José, the son that Miguel does not know he sired, is serendipitously reunited with his father in Colón, he takes on the mantle of chronicler. He becomes involved with a distraught French widow, who gives him a daughter, Eloísa, who in turn becomes the recipient of this written testimony. While this generational through-line shapes the story, the novel is less a family chronicle than a narrative of a country’s history as refracted through individual experience. It is a colorful and bloody history to be sure, featuring fleeting cameos by Sarah Bernhardt and Paul Gauguin, among others. And it constantly hovers under the shadow of Conrad, an important if infrequent presence in the book, and his reinvention of history for his own literary purposes.

On one level, The Secret History of Costaguana is a political novel, exploring how foreign intervention, by the U.S. and others, shaped (and continues to shape) Colombia and Panama. On another, it both exploits and subverts beloved Latin American literary conventions. Mostly, though, Vásquez’s book is a dazzling consideration of how fiction is shaped by history and, not inconsequentially, how history is shaped by fiction. “Here is a humble revelation,” José Altamirano tells us, “the lesson I’ve learned through brushing up against world events: silence is invention, lies are constructed by what’s not said.”

The Secret History of Costaguana

By Juan Gabriel Vásquez Translated by Anne McLean Riverhead $26.95, 304 pages ISBN 9781594488030 eBook available

Literary fiction

The new resident in 221A Baker Street is about to give Sherlock Holmes a run for his magnifying glass!

To re ad and v a chapte iew th r e vide sample jason o, vis lethc it oe.co m/ho lmes

When Griffin is sent to stay with his detective uncle at 221A Baker Street for the summer, he is certain that his uncle must be the great Sherlock Holmes! But Griffin is disappointed to discover that Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street.

When Griffin meets a woman who claims that her husband was eaten by the Loch Ness Monster, he and his uncle team up to prove monsters aren’t real…or are they?

If God wanted April Grace to be kind to her neighbors, He should have made them nicer!

Growing up in the country is never easy, but it sure is funny—especially if you happen to have a sister obsessed with being glamorous, a grandma just discovering make-up, hippie friends who never shower, and brand new neighbors from the city who test everyone’s patience. From disastrous dye jobs to forced apologies and elderly date tagalongs, you’ll laugh ‘til you cry as you read the Confessions of April Grace!

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7

columns

Whodunit

by Bruce Tierney

Every rose has its thorn The title of Ruth Rendell’s latest mystery, Tigerlily’s Orchids (Scribner, $26, 272 pages, ISBN 9781439150344), is perhaps something of a misnomer: Tigerlily is not really the girl’s name, and her orchids—well, they’re not exactly orchids either. Not a problem, however, for Stuart Font, smitten at first sight with the attractive Asian lass from across the street. Stuart is even considering marriage, a first for him, thinking just how wonderful it would be to have the lovely Oriental flower at his beck and call. Never mind that the two have barely spoken, or that he already has a girlfriend (who is married to someone else)—should things with Tigerlily come to fruition, well, that relationship could be sidelined. There are forces at work, however, that militate against any affair with the comely Tigerlily: another would-be lover waiting in the wings; Tigerlily’s unsavory flatmates; and the husband of Stuart’s current amour, who would cheerfully dispatch Stuart to

A mother’s worst nightmare.

An investigative team’s toughest challenge….

On sale now.

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his final reward, should the opportunity arise. As is always the case with Rendell’s books, Tigerlily’s Orchids is drily humorous, insightful and instantly recognizable as having been penned by the reigning doyenne of British mystery.

Bending all the rules From time to time, it has to happen, I suppose: An author wins the Edgar, Gumshoe and Shamus awards, gets Notable Book mentions in the New York Times, and still I haven’t read anything by him.

Such was the case with Steve Hamilton, whose latest novel, Misery Bay (Minotaur, $24.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9780312380434), I just finished. Alex McKnight is a textbook example of the reluctant detective: a retired cop with a bullet lodged adjacent to his heart, now eking out a living renting holiday cabins in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. One wouldn’t think that the UP would be crime central, but darkness lurks in the hearts of men everywhere, and in this case it is pitch black.

A specialized serial killer is targeting the children of law enforcement officers, making their deaths appear to be suicides. McKnight is dragged into the investigation by his longtime nemesis, Sault Ste. Marie police chief Roy Maven, who concludes grudgingly that some things can be better accomplished by a PI amenable to bending the rules. And clearly McKnight is no stranger to bending the rules. If Misery Bay is your first Hamilton book, you’ll definitely be back for more.

Kicking butt, taking names There are quite a few suspense novelists who write excellent “one-offs,” but I have always had a warm spot in my heart for a wellwritten series, with the attendant character development that comes into play therein. The Ranger (Putnam, $25.95, 352 pages, ISBN 9780399157486) marks the beginning of Ace Atkins’ first series, which author John Sandford says “should propel him to the top of the bestseller lists.” I agree. Army Ranger Quinn Colson, who neatly splits the difference between Jack Reacher and John Rambo, returns to his Mississippi hometown for his uncle’s funeral, and overstays his welcome long enough to rout a meth ring, take down a local underworld figure and seriously piss off three counties’ worth of law enforcement officers.

He does this with the panache of a military professional, which is to say, almost without trying. He has help, to be sure: an attractive cop reputed to be a gung-ho lesbian and a one-armed army burnout with a boulder-sized chip on his truncated

shoulder.

Together, the unlikely troika takes on all comers, few of whom will be left standing by page 350. Fans of grit, gore and violence, the line starts here.

Mystery of the Month One of the mysteries of a Håkan Nesser novel is the setting: It could be Sweden, but the place names sound distinctly Dutch, as does the surname of the protagonist, Inspector Van Veeteren. The action plays out in and around Maardam, a fictitious city “somewhere in Northern Europe,” with landscapes distinctly more Scandinavian than Benelux. Another mystery is why it took 14 years for Kommissarien och tystnaden, published in 1997, to finally appear in English as The Inspector and Silence. In any event, let us be glad that it has arrived, as it is perhaps the best of the series thus far, sympathetically rendered by veteran translator Laurie Thompson. Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is called upon to investigate the rape and murder of an adolescent girl, a member of Pure Life, a cultlike religious sect led by a reclusive guru.

There will be no assistance forthcoming from the Pure Life flock— they have been sworn to silence on the matter, and refuse any comment whatsoever. The only clues are being rationed out by an unidentified phone caller, and they prove to be but the tip of a very large and dangerous iceberg. Although nearing retirement, Van Veeteren shows no signs of losing his edge, as you will no doubt deduce from Nesser’s latest expertly crafted thriller. The Inspector and Silence is an absolute must for fans of Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbø and Karin Fossum.

The Inspector and SilencE

By Håkan Nesser Pantheon $24.95, 304 pages ISBN 9780375425233 eBook available

thriller

Eliza’s peaceful summer with family is shattered by a letter from her long-buried past.

“THE BEST SUSPENSE NOVEL OF THE YEAR.” —S T E P H E N K I N G , Entertain ment Weekly

“The best suspense novel of the year.”

—STEPHEN KING, Entertainment Weekly

“Lippman is at the height of her powers.”

—People HHHH New York Times Bests elleR

LAi ’UR A LIP PM AN d kn

The A r t of

ow you any where

Say ing Goodbye a

novel

“A deeply felt and beautiful story that portrays what friends can mean to each other. Bache has perfect pitch. I can’t wait to read what she writes next. Bravo!”

—Dorothea Benton Frank, author of Folly Beach

“A terrify ing story about a death-row inmat e obses sed with the only victim he left alive.” —O, The Oprah Maga zine

Fr o m t h e b e gin n in g t h ey k n e w t h a t s ay in g g o o db ye w a s t h eir l a s t gi f t o f f r i e n d s h ip

E l l y n

When faith and facts collide, Jo March sets off on an unlikely quest.

It’s a story of forbidden love and familial dysfunction—and a powerful reminder of the joys and tragedies that shape us all.

The Sweetness of Tears i n T e r n AT i O n A l ly b e s T s e l l i n g A u T h O r

NAFISA HAJI

“A talented new writer of sense and a distinct sensibility.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

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T R A d E

P A P E R B A c K

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columns ’Tis the season for rubbing and brining, marinating and glazing and putting practically everything under the sun on the grill.

To get you going, there are two terrific, very different new additions to the ever-growing group of grilling guides. In Just Grill This!

(Wiley, $19.95, 272 pages, ISBN 9780470467930), Sam Zien, aka Sam the Cooking Guy, brings his signature simple, straightforward style to food cooked on a grill. His “equipment” section is only two

pages long, and his basic seasoning rub is brown sugar and your favorite seasoning salt, with these succinct instructions: “Mix. Use.” Even his elegant (definitely not a Sam word) Sea Bass with Lemon & Capers or whole filet of beef rubbed with garlic and rosemary are the essence of easy. From “Small Things,” including The Most Basic (and Best) Bruschetta Ever, to “Things Not Normally Grilled,” like Grilled Hearts of Romaine, to “Grilling Inside” and even desserts, Sam covers the territory, has a grand time doing it and encourages you to follow his irreverent lead.

All fired up

bookpage.com

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by sybil PRATT

Get ready, get set, grill!

The scoop on the best new books for kids and teens.

We have something for everyone at

cooking

Andrew Schloss and David Joachim, grilling advocates extraordinaire, know that “these days, it’s all about the ingredients.” So, in Fire It Up (Chronicle, $24.95, 416 pages, ISBN 9780811865050), with fabulous full-color photos throughout, they explain the best ways to grill over 290 foods from abalone to edamame, goat and goose to zucchini. Each ingredientbased chapter has an “at-a-glance chart,” showing different cuts and/ or varieties, alternate names used in the marketplace, good substitutions and those all-important “best grilling methods.” The recipes are sensational, offering new ways and new ideas to make grilling more thrilling—just consider Chimichurri Beef Kebabs with Yams and Chorizo, Mixed Grilled Beets with

OrangeHazelnut Gremolata, PestoStuffed Prawns with Guacamole Vinaigrette and Amaretto-Seared Apricots with Almond Praline.

Helpful header notes, detailed directions and “Know-How” notes, with must-have info, make each dish a different, doable delight.

Cookbook of the Month Seafood is a big, beautifully designed book, elaborately and engagingly illustrated with fullcolor photos and packed to the gills with information and more than 300 recipes. And there’s nothing fishy about its emphasis on making responsible buying choices, checking on where your sole or salmon comes from and using sustainable alternatives for overfished varieties. As you browse these fabulous recipes, you’ll find a fish dish to satisfy every piscatorial yearning, from savory starters, soups, pastas, pies, risottos and curries to fish and shellfish that are baked, broiled, fried, roasted, poached and grilled. Some are tried-andtrue, like Maryland Crabcakes and Linguine alle Vongole, while others are more exotic and new, such as Keralan Prawn Soup and Grilled Sea Bass with Roast Artichokes and Fennel. A comprehensive section on techniques leaves nothing to the imagination. In step-by-step photos you’ll actually see how to skin a skate wing, clean squid, make gravadlax, slice fish for sushi, serve a whole cooked fish and more; then the Fish Gallery offers a who’s who that lets you get up close and personal with all your old and new fine-finned friends. Seafood is an essential kitchen companion and a perfect gift for foodie fathers.

Seafood DK $35, 400 pages ISBN 9780756675547

seafood

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

A second chance at love Phillipa Ashley reunites former lovers in Wish You Were Here (Sourcebooks, $9.99, 304 pages, ISBN 9781402241444). Eight years after she’d been loved and left by dashing travel guide Jack Thornfield, Beth Allen runs into him again—when he interviews her for a job she urgently needs. After her widowed father’s serious accident, Beth has been looking after the family business, her dad’s recovery and her younger sister. With her

unaware of the danger, she knows the handsome duke poses trouble for her heart. Still, she’s persuaded to accept his attentions. The intrigue becomes more tangled as the delectable Lucinda gives Will a new belief in love. Lucinda falls for him, too— but she curses that feeling once she discovers Will’s ulterior motive.

Readers will root for the reluctant lovers in this sensuous Regency tale spiced with danger.

Romance of the Month

sister accepted at a prestigious drama school, Beth is eager to shore up their finances by taking a six-month job with an adventure travel company in London. But she’s shocked to discover that her would-be boss is the exact same man who asked her to marry him so long ago, and then promptly disappeared. Though he persuades her to take the position, Beth knows her heart won’t trust him again. As they work together, however, old yearnings resurface. Now older, wiser and still not over Beth, Jack wonders if their romance might be rekindled.

But their past is in the way, not to mention current love interests who present more obstacles to a happy ending. A sun-drenched expedition to Corsica adds sparkle to this charming story.

Duke’s dilemma A rakish duke woos a lovely heiress in Stefanie Sloane’s The Devil in Disguise (Ballantine, $7.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9780345517395). William Randall, the Duke of Clairemont, has been adamantly against marriage—and so has the object of his attention, Lady Lucinda Grey.

But this season they appear to have changed their minds—or have they?

What Lady Lucinda doesn’t know is that Will is one of the Young Corinthians, a group sworn to serve England. His current assignment is to protect Lucinda from a kidnapping threat—and courtship provides the perfect cover. While Lucinda is

Prepare to enter a dark, exotic world in Colleen Gleason’s The Vampire Narcise. In the course of business dealings with a vampir, Giordan Cale sets eyes on Narcise Moldavi. The circumstances are startling: Narcise’s brother forces her to fight for his entertainment.

If she wins, she walks away; if she loses, her opponent gets to use her body for the night. Giordan is repulsed by the contest, but instantly enamored of Narcise, and he is determined to liberate her from her depraved sibling. But Giordan’s attempt requires a great sacrifice, and ultimately it is another, a mortal vampire hunter, who sets her free.

While Narcise is grateful to her rescuer Chas Woodmore and the two become lovers, Giordan’s memory and his perceived betrayal still haunt her. When Narcise’s brother sets a trap to lure her and Giordan back, she must face the demon who imprisoned her and the truth of her feelings for Giordan as they struggle together to stop evil. Lush details, lavish love scenes and characters both noble and violent make this a thrilling ride not for the faint of heart.

The Vampire Narcise

By Colleen Gleason MIRA $14.95, 384 pages ISBN 9780778329954 eBook available

paranormal

by

Novel Reads

HARPERCOLLINS HarperCollins.com • AvonRomance.com The Reluctant Vampire

by Lynsay Sands

Rogue hunter Drina Argenis (from the Spanish side of the Argeneau family) has been many things in her years as an immortal, but bodyguard/babysitter to a teenage vampire is something new. There’s an incentive, however: the other vampsitter, Harper Stoyan, may be Drina’s life mate.

9780061894596, $7.99

Blood of the Wicked

by Karina Cooper

As an independent witch living off the grid, Jessie Leigh has spent her life running, trying to blend in among the faceless drudges in the rebuilt city. She thought she was finally safe, but now she’s been found in a New Seattle strip club—by a hard-eyed man on a mission to destroy her kind.

Look for Lure of the Wicked in July also by Karina Cooper 9780062046857, $7.99

Devil’s Plaything

by Matt Richtel

Nat Idle is nearly gunned down in Golden Gate Park. He quickly learns it was no random attack. Suddenly he’s running for his life through the shadows of Silicon Valley, a human lab animal caught in a deadly maze of neurotechnology and institutional paranoia.

His survival rests in the hands of his 85-year-old grandmother, Lane, who’s suffering from dementia and can’t remember the secret at the heart of the world-changing conspiracy.

9780061999697, $9.99

Lord Langley is Back in Town

by Elizabeth Boyle

Lord Langley and Minerva, Lady Standon, began their faux engagement with three simple rules set down by the baron’s all-too-proper (and utterly unlikely) bride-to-be. The wily Lord Langley will keep his word—but that doesn’t mean he won’t use every rakish trick he knows to get Minerva to break her own proper rules, especially once he realizes that this convenient arrangement has led him to the only woman he’s ever loved .

9780061783517, $7.99

The Sins of Viscount

by Samantha James

Claire Ashcroft has good reason to despise Viscount Grayson Sutherland. A wildly unpredictable man with a frightening reputation, Sutherland is responsible for a death that deeply pains her. She’d kill him if she could. Instead, she’ll employ her feminine wiles to make him pay. And once he’s deeply, irreversibly in love with her, she’ll shatter his vulnerable heart.

9780061765544, $7.99

All available as eBooks Visit LibraryLoveFest.com for more great reading

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columns The joy of cooking The chef/owner of Prune, a small but hugely successful Manhattan restaurant, Gabrielle Hamilton has shied away from the celebrity chef route; she’s not on TV, doesn’t churn out cookbooks, doesn’t have an eponymous line of products. But she is an eloquent cook and writer—and, as it happens, an eloquent narrator—and her memoir Blood, Bones & Butter (Random House Audio, $40, 10 hours unabridged, ISBN 9780739332443) simmers and sizzles. Food—making it, serving it, eating it, thinking about it—is the constant that trumps everything else in Hamilton’s life. Her French mother was a fabulous cook, and her parents loved to entertain.

Left mostly on her own when they

divorced, she worked in local restaurants, upped the ante with a wild bout of waitressing in New York, made her way through Europe taking food-related jobs, prepped for soulless catering companies and kept at it while getting an MFA in creative writing. Tantalizingly, she omits much about her non-cooking life. She left her Michigan girlfriend to marry an Italian doctor; they have two boys, but live apart. These parts of Hamilton’s life are served as a tasting menu, rather than full courses—but it’s always best to leave the table wanting more.

A mingled yarn

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The “web of good and ill” that Kate Atkinson weaves in her latest Jackson Brodie novel, Started Early, Took My Dog (Hachette Audio, $34.98, 12.5 hours unabridged, ISBN 9781607886785), is wonderfully intricate, told in her easy, playful prose and perfectly performed

by Graeme Malcolm. Jackson, now a semi-retired private investigator with enough time on his hands to roam the English countryside, quote Emily Dickinson and ponder his losses, has been hired to search for a young woman’s birth family. His somewhat casual sleuthing disturbs the decades-old cover-up of the nasty murder of a Leeds pros-

audio

SPOTLIGHT

by sukey howard

By David Baldacci

titute and the disappearance of her children.

When he gets to Leeds, Jackson “liberates” an abused little dog, just as Tracy Waterhouse, a supersized former cop with a superabundance of love to share, “liberates” a four-year-old girl from her abusive hooker mother. A young cop when the Leeds murder investigation was summarily buried, Tracy is on Jackson’s “to talk to” list, but until their paths cross, Atkinson weaves Tracy’s story, with seamless flashbacks, into Jackson’s, making the parts as intriguing as their sum.

Audio of the Month The Trinity Six, Charles Cumming’s second novel, is a marvelous mix of actual history, possible history, fast-paced, thriller-diller intrigue and credibly drawn characters. What if the famed Trinity Five—the bright young Cambridge students who spied for the Soviets from the 1930s through WWII and the Cold War—were really the Trinity Six? Cumming plays out that “what if” brilliantly by adding Edward Crane, now 91 and having the time of his long life doling out bits of information to Sam Gaddis, a professor of Russian history at University College London. When Gaddis digs into Crane’s story, he triggers the attention of both MI6 and its Russian counterpart—attention that could stop his hunt and his heart. As he follows leads and possible informants through Europe, then back to London, the dangerous, covert world of espionage, with its lethal liabilities, begins to close in on him. John Lee performs this smart, sophisticated spy story with his usual skill and virtuosity.

The Trinity Six

By Charles Cumming Macmillan Audio $39.99, 11.5 hours unabridged ISBN 9781427211408

THRILLER

David Baldacci and Ron McLarty

A great ride for readers and authors

A

udiobooks give you two bangs for the buck.

You get the written story in all its glory, but you also get a performance of the written material by talented readers who pour their heart and soul into the story. One of my favorite readers is Ron McLarty, who is also a good friend of mine.

Ron has been in tons of movies and TV shows and he has a voice like few others—once you hear it you will never forget it. He’s read many of my novels and if he’s available, I always ask for Ron to read my books.

I was on a plane going somewhere when I was listening to one of my books (then on cassette tape if you can believe it), Last Man Standing. This was my first experience with Ron’s reading style. There was a character in Last Man Standing called Big F. He was an NFL-sized dangerous drug kingpin, who also had a soft side. When I heard Ron inhabit the character of Big F and that voice shot over my headphones, I would have come out of my seat on the plane except for the handy-dandy seatbelt. I did yell out something like, “Holy s—.”

It was a miracle the air marshals didn’t tackle me. But Ron’s voice for Big F came from his toes and up his legs, passed through his torso and exploded out of his mouth like a howitzer. It had all the nuances you would want to have in the delivery: the underlying lethalness, the fact that Big F is not someone you can ever fool.

But there’s also that soft side, the humanity buried deeply within a bear of a man who has had to fight his entire life, kill or be killed, in order to survive.

As a novelist, try as I might, I could never bring that experience to the reader because I don’t have the tools to do it. I put the words on the page, as well as I possi-

bly can. But they’re still simply words. Readers like Ron McLarty, exceptional actors really, can deliver that experience. It’s like watching a movie without the pictures. You just hear it all. It’s the reverse of the old silent films.

It will catapult you beyond the pages, and into another entertainment world.

When Ron read another book of mine, Stone Cold, I sat in my garage with the car running listening to the last five chapters of that story over and over again because I was mesmerized by Ron’s performance. And I knew how it was going to end, since I wrote it.

Another reader I discovered recently is Orlagh Cassidy. She read my novel Hell’s Corner along with Ron. He did the male voices and the narrative and she did all the female voices, including a number with accents. Now I am a big Orlagh Cassidy fan too. Like wanting to see a favorite actress on the screen in every scene, I waited eagerly for Orlagh’s voice to come on the CD. She nailed every performance in that book.

So, audiobooks. You laugh, you cry, you get angry, your pulse pounds, your heart skips—all from the voice speaking those words. It’s a ride for the reader and I can tell you it’s a ride for the author.

Next time you want a ride like that, pick up an audiobook, buckle in and prepare to be enthralled by that voice speaking those words.

Fallen The New York Times best-selling author electrifies with a new Georgia thriller! When Faith Mitchell finds her mother’s front door open…and bloodstained, her worlds—the personal and the criminal—collide.

AudioGO • 9781609982645 • $29.95

Killed at the Whim of a Hat Jimm Juree, a disgruntled journalist banished to the Thailand hinterlands, stumbles on the story of her life—if only she can live to write it. “Remarkably fresh.”—Library Journal [starred review] HighBridge Audio • 9781611744965 • $34.95

State of Wonder Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author Ann Patchett returns with a provocative and assured novel of morality and miracles, science and sacrifice set in the Amazon rainforest. Performed by Hope Davis.

HarperAudio • 9780062072474 • $39.99

Hothead When an editor from the school paper threatens to do a story on Connor’s temper, he realizes that he has to clean up his act. Can he do it in time to help his baseball team win the championship?

Listening Library • 9780307916440 • $27

My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business Dick Van Dyke’s memoir tells a lively, heartwarming story of a performer who still thinks of himself as a “simple song-and-dance man,” but who is, in every sense of the word, a classic entertainer.

Random House Audio • 9780307914293 • $35

One Summer #1 New York Times best-selling author David Baldacci delivers a moving family drama about learning to love again after terrible heartbreak and loss. Read by Ron McLarty with Orlagh Cassidy.

Hachette Audio • 9781609412951 • $34.98

The Greater Journey The Greater Journey is the remarkable story of the generations of American artists, writers and doctors who traveled to Paris, fell in love with the city and its people, and changed America through what they learned there.

Simon & Schuster Audio • 9781442344181 • $49.99

Against All Enemies Brand new from Tom Clancy: Meet ex-Navy SEAL Maxwell Moore who works for the CIA. He’s a new hero for a new era of warfare… against a new kind of threat. On sale June 14, 2011.

Brilliance Audio • 9781455829132 • $39.99

The Borrower Lucy Hull, a young children’s librarian, finds herself chauffeur to her favorite patron, ten-year-old Ian, when he runs away from his oppressive family. “Smart and engaging and learned and funny.” —Richard Russo HighBridge Audio • 9781611744460 • $34.95

LISTEN UP! Frankenstein Book 5 in the Frankenstein series from Dean Koontz!

Scattered survivors band together to make their last, best stand against the creatures let loose by Victor Frankenstein as the fate of humanity hangs in the balance.

Brilliance Audio • 9781441818416 • $29.99

The Great Gatsby Tim Robbins performs this classic tale which also includes letters written by Fitzgerald to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, his agent, Harold Ober, and friends Willa Cather, H.L. Mencken, John Peale Bishop and Gertrude Stein.

Caedmon • 9780060098919 • $19.99

The Inspector and Silence The latest of five in Sweden’s best-selling Inspector Van Veeteren series, all available from HighBridge. “Wonderfully enigmatic…intense.”—Guardian “Wry, thought provoking and often surprisingly funny.”—The Spectator HighBridge Audio • 9781611742695 • $34.95

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cover story

Ann PaTchett © Melissa Ann Pinney

by Katherine Wyrick

W

Exotic setting frames a tale of intrigue

e recently made a call to Ann Patchett at her favorite spot on the globe— the handsome red brick house she shares with her husband on a tree-lined street in Nashville. The first part of our conversation is taken up with talk of dogs; Rose, Patchett’s great love and the subject of several essays, is now 15 years old.

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The author admits to carrying the dog in a baby sling on walks since the terrier mix lost the use of her back legs. “It makes me feel like an insane person, but I couldn’t do the stroller,” Patchett says with a laugh.

We all have our limits. (Friend and fellow writer Donna Tartt, who has an ancient paraplegic pug, has been hugely supportive, offering empathy and advice on physical therapy.)

This world of charming homes and coddled pets could not be farther from the exotic one Patchett conjures up in her latest and possibly finest novel to date, State of Wonder.

Set deep in the heart of the Amazonian jungle, State of Wonder tells the story of Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a Minnesota pharmaceutical company dispatched to Brazil to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson.

The enigmatic and elusive Swenson, who has virtually disappeared while working on a potentially valuable new drug, does not, however, want to be found; the last person sent to look for her, Marina’s research partner and friend Anders Eckman, died in the process. Hoping to find clues about Anders’ death, Marina reluctantly sets out on a fact-finding mission that will alter the course of her life.

Patchett points out that she wrote State of Wonder “much, much more quickly” than any of her five previous novels. “When I finished Run, which was a book that took me for-bloody-ever, I didn’t have an idea for a book, and that’s really rare,” she says. A conversation with friends changed all that. In 2008, A woman’s she and her search for husband were having dinher mentor with Edgar in the South ner Meyer, the acAmerican claimed Nashjungle leads ville double player, and to a shocking bass his wife. Patchdiscovery. ett and Meyer were bemoaning the fact that they were spending too much time on the road and not enough time at the desk. Patchett recalls, “Edgar said, ‘You know, I had this revelation. I put a notebook at the door to my studio, and I clock in, and I clock out. I’ve discovered that the more hours I spend trying to write, the more I write.’ ” Patchett exclaims, with feigned amazement, “And I thought, wow! What a great idea! I’ve never done that . . . so I made a pledge to write every day and finished the book about a year later.”

At the outset, Patchett knew she wanted to explore a specific kind of relationship, though she wasn’t sure what it would look like. The jungle setting she opted for may be foreign, but relationships are familiar terrain for Patchett, an expert on the intimacies between people and the language of the heart. “I wanted to write about the relationship between a teacher and a student once they had grown up, a student who did everything in her life to please the teacher and to shape herself like the teacher, but the teacher has no idea who the student is, which is a very common scenario—it was a common scenario for me as a student and for me as a teacher. So that was the central relationship and then from there . . .”

Well, from there, let’s just say the narrative takes flight—like a big, scary and strangely beautiful insect you might find in the Amazon. The intricate plot lines twist and turn as the characters encounter poison arrows, anacondas and even a tribe of cannibals. The most threatening thing Singh confronts, however, might be Swenson herself—as formidable now in her 70s as she was during Singh’s student days at Johns Hopkins. The adventure reaches a fever pitch when she learns that Swenson’s initial assignment, to

develop an antimalarial drug, has led to a discovery that could have a profound effect on Western society.

South America was also the setting for Bel Canto, Patchett’s most successful novel to date, which won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the UK’s Orange Prize in 2002 and has sold more than a million copies.

Asked if that continent holds a certain allure for her, Patchett explains, “Malaria may be more obvious in Africa or India, but I couldn’t figure out a way to develop a drug in those places. I thought, oh, I can’t write another book set in South America because it would be seen as cashing in on Bel Canto. Then I thought, who cares? It’s a big continent. Plus, I never actually say in Bel Canto that it’s in South America.”

Her lush descriptions of the jungle are so finely wrought, you can almost feel the dense, humid air.

Patchett says her research did lead her to visit part of South America— though not the area she recreates in the novel. She had planned to go to Manaus, where Singh lands before heading into the jungle, to see friend and celebrated soprano Renée Fleming perform at the opera house there, but the trip fell through when Fleming’s schedule changed.

Instead she watched the opening scene of Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo “about 300 times” to familiarize herself with the Manaus opera house where a dramatic scene from the book takes place. In the movie, as in the novel, the opera house is “the only thing that’s keeping anybody sane,” she says.

Patchett writes so convincingly about the Lakashi, the tribe being studied by Dr. Swenson and her team, that one assumes they must actually exist. (They don’t.

Elsewhere, Patchett has remarked that she named the tribe after her favorite cereal.) “People ask, where are the Lakashi? How did you find them? And I’m like, are you out of your mind?” she laughs.

Though many details in the book came from her own rich imaginings, Patchett did rely on her husband, Karl VanDevender, an internist, as well as other doctor friends, to make sure the pharmaceutical elements of the novel were scientifically accurate. “Karl and I talked about building that world . . . how can you be developing a drug and find another one in the process?” Patchett recalls.

“That’s what we sit around and talk about in the evenings.”

Though the book is neither an indictment of the profit-driven drug industry nor a treatise on medical ethics, it raises profound questions about morality, life and death.

Witnessing Swenson’s unorthodox approach and willingness to make extreme sacrifices in the name of science, Singh is forced to search her own heart for what truth lies there—as the reader is forced to recalibrate his or her own moral compass.

With these themes and narrative structure, comparisons to Heart of Darkness are inevitable. “It’s funny because when I wrote this book I was trying to do something modeled on The Ambassadors, my very favorite Henry James novel, which is about someone who goes to Paris to bring back the errant son of someone he works with,” Patchett says.

“Somehow the lines crossed along the way, and I kept thinking, this is really seeming a lot more like Heart of Darkness than The Ambassadors.

But you know, it’s one of those archetypal themes—character A is dispatched to bring back character B. . . . You’re going to find the other, but what you find is yourself.”

Of the book’s dramatic, somewhat cryptic conclusion, Patchett says, “One of my great goals in the book is to turn the reader out, to have an interactive story where you have to draw conclusions that will lead you forward. I want people to stretch.”

Which is exactly what happens. This story lingers, uncoiling itself like a snake, its revelations coming days after the last page is turned. It is a journey into the heart of darkness, but one that offers a glimpse of what lies beyond.

State of Wonder

By Ann Patchett, Harper, $26.99, 368 pages ISBN 9780062049803, audio, eBook available

Debut author unforgettable story about friendship, loss and love is destined to become the sleeper hit of the summer.

’s

Samantha Wheland struggles with her life after losing childhood friend Mina to cancer. With a little help from friends and family, and a glimpse into a world far removed from the one in which she belongs, she must learn to trust her heart—and follow it.

“Cloyed’s writing is as unique and stunning as the story she tells.”

—Diane Chamberlain, bestselling author of The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes

15

interviews

marcus sakey

MYSTERY MAN IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT

I

n The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, Marcus Sakey has written a seriously good thriller. Really good.

So of course we can’t tell you too much about it.

“It drives me crazy when people [he means reviewers] give away all the stuff I worked so hard to make surprises,” Sakey says during a call to his home in Chicago, where, he reports, “life is a little chaotic.” He and his wife g.g. just moved to new digs a mile and a half west of Wrigley Field two days before our call.

Chicago’s neighborhoods have been the setting for all four of Sakey’s previous novels, including the highly regarded The Blade Itself (2007) and Good People (2008), the film version of which will be produced by and star Tobey Maguire.

It gives nothing away to say the new book is, therefore, a departure, opening in Maine and ending in Los Angeles, with a crazy sort of road trip in between. Nor will it deprive readers of the edge-of-the-seat,

smack-to-the-forehead pleasures of every nasty twist and turn of the plot to let them know that the title character suffers from amnesia.

When the man awakens to find himself lying naked on a desolate beach, he has no idea who he is or how he got there.

Sakey’s publishers are so happy with the new book that they are calling it “a breakthrough achievement.” Sakey himself sounds more circumspect. Despite the truly scary, brutal edges of some of the characters he imagines, Sakey seems like a good-humored guy you’d enjoy having a beer with. He says he likes calling into reading group discussions about his books.

He admits to “pet peeves” rather than towering rages. One of his pet peeves, he says, is discourtesy. “I’m

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Author Troy Parfitt undertakes an investigative journey to test whether China is truly ascending toward global hegemony. The result is an epic adventure and exposé, vital for understanding China’s past, present, and future.

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Reveals the timing of catastrophic end-time events that will escalate worldwide and result in total demise of the United States in coming years, while explaining reasons such destructive events must come to pass.

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a big fan of courtesy. I think it’s basic human decency to be courteous to one another.”

So, is his latest thriller a breakthrough? “That’s a hard question to answer. I will say that I feel it’s my most ambitious book. And it was a monster to write. It’s the book I’ve thrown away the most of. I reached a point where I realized that what I was writing was kind of bleak and joyless. I wasn’t enjoying it and I didn’t think others would either. So I had to throw out probably 150 pages. Which is pretty much a call for martinis.”

One of the biggest challenges, Sakey says, was finding a way to make all the plot twists and thematic layers of his story work together. “I wanted to make them honest surprises, where each significant discovery Daniel makes takes the book in a different direction. . . . And—I hope this doesn’t sound pretentious; I don’t think I’m pretentious—I was really trying in the way I told the story to say something about memory and about what stories mean. I think memory is just a story we tell ourselves, and if that’s true, then our identity is always malleable. There’s no certainty in who we are; it’s just the choices we make.”

But themes and ideas, Sakey acknowledges, are a touchy subject when it comes to writing a thriller.

“There’s this perception that, ‘oh, you’re a thriller writer,’ pat on the head. But if a book doesn’t have ideas, I don’t understand why you’d read the book, much less write it. Without that, it’s just run, run, chase, chase, shoot, shoot. That doesn’t give me anything to anchor to as a reader and certainly not as a writer.”

Sakey grounds his ideas and twisty plots in small, vivid details.

“I’m a big fan of the pull-out detail that makes you feel it. I like the little bit of verisimilitude rather than two pages of explanation.” And that tendency extends to his scariest characters. “A lot of times when people try to make things scary, they go into this weird slasher-movie mode. Like the more ridiculous and bloody harm they can make a

© Brett Carlson

by Alden Mudge

character do while laughing the better. I just don’t buy that. I get annoyed by authors who do that.”

Which prompts Sakey to talk about another of his pet peeves.

“I’ll hear some authors say that they don’t read while they’re writing. I don’t understand. Because first of all I am writing all the time, so then when is it I’m allowed to read?”

Sakey says he reads widely in his genre—Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, Richard Price, to name a few—“but I probably read more outside the genre than within it. My tastes run to David Foster Wallace, David Mitchell, Thomas Pynchon, Michael Ondaatje, Michael Chabon, Michael Cunningham. It’s like somebody once said: There are two kinds of writing, good writing and bad writing. I don’t really care what the genre is, I read the good stuff.”

You can put Sakey’s The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes right up there with the good stuff.

The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes

By Marcus Sakey, Dutton, $25.95, 400 pages ISBN 9780525952114, audio, eBook available

features

travel

By LINDA M. CASTELLITTO

From sea to shining sea

W

hat will you do on your summer vacation?

Whether you’re a traveler on a budget, a history buff or an art aficionado, these new travel guides offer exciting options for seeing the U.S.A.

The bottom line When it comes to planning a trip, the sheer number of options can be overwhelming, even when working with a limited budget. To the rescue: The 100 Best Affordable Vacations ($19.95, 288 pages, ISBN 9781426207181), the latest in National Geographic’s 100 Best Vacations series. Jane Wooldridge and Larry Bleiberg have created a list that will tempt any would-be traveler. Trips range from eating excursions along the “Barbecue Trail” to cave tours to camping by the sea.

The authors include suggestions for the occasional splurge, plus details about everything from cow culture to Nashville’s reputation as Music City. The authors note that readers may be “craving . . . a vacation that replaces the worry-worn space in your soul with possibilities,” and they offer 100 ways to do just that.

Bear witness to history The Civil War remains a pivotal chapter in American history, with hundreds of battles and 600,000 lives lost. Small wonder, then, that the Civil War Preservation Trust found it difficult to narrow down the choices in The Civil War 150: An Essential To-Do List for the 150th Anniversary (Lyons Press, $14.95, 272 pages, ISBN 9780762772070).

Suggestions include handling artifacts (“Hold a Minie Ball in Your Hand”), researching ancestors and, of course, visiting battlefields. Each entry provides context and fascinating detail. There are photos and maps on nearly every page, and 14 thoughtful essays offer insight into the war’s history and impact. The book’s structure ensures it can be used as a travel guide as well as an educational tool (each page offers a brief, well-written history lesson).

The Civil War 150 is sure to get readers thinking—and doing.

State of the art Sumptuous photographs, intuitive itineraries and expert commentary make The Art Lovers’ Guide: New York (Skira Rizzoli, $19.95, 240 pages, ISBN 9780847836277) a

traveler’s delight. Readers can use the guide to find all the works in New York City by a particular artist or explore a style or movement.

As Morgan Falconer writes in the introduction, “We tour the city’s galleries almost as if the walls have melted away and we are able to gather all the art together at once.”

The book’s five sections (including Egyptian & Near Eastern Art, Asia and The Middle Ages) offer in-depth examinations of artists, individual works and museum exhibits, while “Artists in Focus” essays provide additional tidbits on the likes of Picasso, Pollock and Warhol. Falconer’s knowledge of— and passion for—art is impressive, and this volume will make for exciting art-centric adventures in NYC.

2010 to offer a compact summary of a destination’s highlights— will welcome two new additions: Discover San Francisco ($19.95, 304 pages, ISBN 9781742202624) and Discover California ($24.99, 416 pages, ISBN 9781742202747). The always fun, always funky city of San Francisco is divided into seven regions with a “Top 25 Experiences” list for each region. Readers may plan by date, time frame (day trip, two-week tour) or theme (Mission murals, seafaring adventures).

The “If You Like” feature is back, too: Those who like City Hall can check out “other history-making San Francisco institutions,” for example. The California guide takes a broader view, offering similarly detailed must-see, -do, -taste and -try information for L.A., San Francisco,

the Bay Area, Wine Country, the Deserts and the Coast. Would-be visitors will find whatever they need for a short jaunt or an extended vacation, and will be interested to know that “actually, some people do walk in L.A.” (The guide, of course, reveals where.)

An alternative approach Travel guides to off-the-beatenpath destinations, quietly hip restaurants and little-known but mustsee sights are popular for a reason: It’s appealing to feel in-the-know in an unknown place. Graphic USA: An Alternative Guide to 25 U.S. Cities (Cicada, $30, 272 pages, ISBN 9780956205322) taps into that vein and adds its own twist: recommendations from (and terrific artwork by) graphic designers. The reasoning, according to editor Ziggy Hanaor, is that graphic artists “will often seek out the unexpected and inspirational elements in their environments.” Graphic USA is a visual treat, and its recommendations are spot-on, from Julian’s restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island, to Miller Park baseball stadium in Milwaukee. Each designer gives voice and feeling to the various locales; for example, Laura Feraco describes the grandeur of the mountain ranges in Anchorage, Alaska, and combines topographic maps with line drawings of fish. Graphic USA is a great addition to a fashionable travel bag—and to any design aficionado’s bookshelf.

Discover the golden state Fans of the Lonely Planet Discover guides—a series launched in

June is audiobook month!

Listen and be swept away. www.HachetteAudio.com

17

features

father’s day

By Martin Brady

COOKING UP A SPECIAL TREAT FOR DAD

F

atherhood can be a challenge filled with responsibility, frustration and even pain, when life and relationships don’t go smoothly. But love, hope, pride and a sense of personal reward are the fulfilling part of the deal, and this selection of new titles helps to express the importance of the tie that binds.

AT HOME IN THE KITCHEN

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A cartoonist, and also an editor and writer for The New Yorker, John Donohue exploits a wonderful idea about men and food and emerges with Man with a Pan: Culinary Adventures of Fathers Who Cook for Their Families (Algonquin, $15.95, 320 pages, ISBN 9781565129856).

Fact is, many of the world’s great chefs are men, so there’s no startling revelation here about males being savvy in the kitchen. But Donohue deftly links the phenomenon to the societal changes in modern-day life, where women and men are increasingly exchanging traditional roles, a situation that has opened the doors wide to average guys exercising culinary muscles—and proving to be pretty darn good at it.

Donohue solicits testimony mostly from writers, editors and journalists—including Stephen King—who supply interesting accounts of their personal excursions into the cooking life and recommendations for their favorite cookbooks, plus a few recipes each. Screenwriter Matt Greenberg’s Grilled Burgers with Herb Butter look straight-ahead delicious, as does musician and short story author Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s Peanut Butter Soup. King’s

Pretty Good Cake seems simple enough (and tasty), yet the range of the submissions overall is ethnically rich (Manuel Gonzales’ Mexican Chocolate Pie!) and occasionally exotic (Shankar Vedantam’s Yashoda’s Potatoes), and some creations are doubtless more difficult to achieve than others (for example, Slate contributor Jesse Sheidlower’s BaconWrapped Duck Breast Stuffed with Apples and Chestnuts). Donohue cleverly peppers the text with funny, sophisticated cartoons, making Man with a Pan uniquely smart and also very useful. A must-have for kitchen-friendly dads, this volume should reap rewards down the road for family appetites everywhere.

GOING THE DISTANCE Veteran CBS newsman Jim Axelrod has had an interesting career covering presidents and world events and hobnobbing with broadcast journalism icons like Dan Rather and Ted Koppel. Yet when shifting fortunes at his job filled him with self-doubt, Axelrod went into reflective mode.

His resultant book, In the Long Run: A Father, a Son, and Unintentional Lessons in Happiness (FSG, $26, 304

pages, ISBN 9780374192112), is essentially a memoir of his upbringing, adulthood and working life, but the book’s main thrust concerns Axelrod’s sudden and quixotic attempt to match his late father’s running time in the New York Marathon. The senior Axelrod, a lawyer who wreaked some emotional havoc on his own family, serves as focal point for his son, who strives to reconcile their relationship and adopt his father’s achievementoriented approach to running as a way to reconnect with the past and his memory of a loving man. The middle-aged Axelrod endures some expected physical lumps in getting into shape, but more importantly, his very readable text imparts some heartfelt lessons about the fatherson bond.

THE GAME OF LIFE Author/journalist Steve Friedman also strives to reconnect with Dad, and in his case golf is the activity that must serve as the linking metaphor. Not so easy, though, since the author despised the game growing up, mainly because he saw it as a barrier between him and his father, who played constantly. Friedman’s Driving Lessons: A Father, a Son, and the Healing Power of Golf (Rodale, $15, 128 pages, ISBN 9781605291253) tells the story of his return to his hometown in the St. Louis suburbs, resolved to learn golf under his father’s tutelage and make the conscious attempt to understand the game—and also dear old Dad. This brief book offers warm, funny and ironic chapters in which we view the author learning to golf—not an easy task, mind you, once you hit a certain age—and assessing his own life and career status, but mainly benefiting from his father’s encouragement and simple life philosophy. Both warm and cautiously unsentimental, Driving Lessons is a welcome little read and a great gift idea.

COMING HOME AT LAST Finally, in the category of gutwrenching fatherhood experiences comes A Father’s Love: One Man’s Unrelenting Battle to Bring His Abducted Son Home (Viking, $26.95, 272 pages, ISBN 9780670022625).

Co-authored with Ken Abraham, David Goldman’s personal tale is one of intense confusion, misunderstanding and deep hurt, not to mention a years-long investment of time and money in a battle in international courts to regain custody of his son.

Seemingly happily married in 2004 and the father of young son Sean, former successful model Goldman was stunned to discover that when his Brazilian wife, Bruna Bianchi, left the U.S. for a vacation with their son in her homeland, she had no intention of ever returning. So began Goldman’s five-year nightmare of attempting to have Sean returned to him, a journey of unimaginable heartache and loss in which he encountered stiff legal challenges, negotiated the thicket of long-distance international diplomacy, raised awareness among American government officials and the media, and combated the determined resistance of Bianchi’s Brazilian family, who refused to return Sean to his father even after his mother’s sudden death.

Goldman’s account seems repetitive at times, mainly because there were so many starts and stops in the process, but ultimately his tireless pursuit of Sean—by way of working the complicated legal system and marshaling support from lawyers, high-profile American officials and TV networks—does pay off. His bittersweet reunion with his son, and a sense of hope for their future together, concludes the coverage.

The Goldman story gained a fair amount of attention in the States, and this eventful recounting should draw many interested readers.

HISTORY

BUFF OR

WHISKEY BUFF

FISHERMAN OR WHEELMAN

ROCK STAR OR STAR

CHEF

CAMERA

MAN AND

JUST ABOUT

EVERY MAN DK has Father’s Day covered.

DISCOVER MORE • us.dk.com

19

features

civil war B y D a v i d M a dd e n

THE CIVIL WAR, 150 years later

T

he war that interests Americans most profoundly, the war with which they identify most intimately, even personally, is the Civil War. Thousands of books have responded to that abiding interest. Armed with these four new releases, readers can march confidently into the sesquicentennial, the four-year-long 150th anniversary of the war.

A MORAL AWAKENING Since many books on the Civil War are so similar, books that provide fresh perspectives are always welcome, especially during the anniversary now under way.

The freshest of the four books in hand is America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (Bloomsbury, $35, 640 pages, ISBN 9781596917026) by David Goldfield. The list of his previous books is impressive—seven major books and eight edited works on race and religion in the rural and urban South, past and present. Now he

Press INDIANA University

poses a crucial question for the Civil War sesquicentennial: “Can anyone say anything new about the Civil War?” Goldfield’s unique argument, brilliantly executed in a distinctive style, is that one effect of the Second Great Awakening was to create a religious fervor that enflamed secular debate over slavery and economic forces from the 1830s to the end of Reconstruction. Contrasting concepts of good and evil across the nation led to the failure of the American experiment, and religious and political bombast lit the fuse at Fort Sumter. Out of the human carnage and destruction of the war that ended slavery evolved the great Northern industrial success and the still-lingering religion of the Lost Cause that kept the South in relative ignorance and poverty until the late 1960s.

A TURNING POINT

HC 9780253356086 $29.95

Paradise Kitchen Daniel Orr

Combining the flavors of the Caribbean with the best of Chef Orr’s worldly cuisine, this delightful cookbook, memoir and travel guide invites home cooks to the culinary joys of paradise.

PB 9780253223272 $21.95

Tasting the Good Life George Gmelch and Sharon Bohn Gmelch

20

Experiencing the world through all five senses, visitors and locals alike tell the story of Napa tourism, providing extraordinary insight into an iconic American place, its beauty, luxury and flavor.

Readers will find another fresh take in 1861: The Civil War Awakening (Knopf, $28.95, 460 pages, ISBN 9781400040155) by Adam Goodheart. Plenty of historians have focused, with various emphases, upon the fateful year of 1861, but Goodheart wants us to know about some little-known actors in the dramatic effort to remake the country. He shows us a nation that had strayed from the vision of the Revolution into a country where democratic morality and liberty would prevail, with a cast of characters that includes an acrobatic militia colonel, an explorer’s wife, a regiment of New York City firemen, a close-knit band of German immigrants and a young college professor, James J. Garfield, destined to become our second assassinated president.

Goodheart is an amateur historian, not an academic scholar. His

initial inspiration was the discovery in 2008 of a huge trove of family papers in the attic of a ruined plantation house in Maryland—13 generations, 300 years of American history. While his narrative will appeal to the broadest audience, scholars would do well to delve into this excellent, well-researched and convincingly argued study of those months in which forces tending toward either war or peace clashed in a final battle in which war prevailed. But ultimately, the winner was the conviction of many kinds of people that a second American revolution demanded the freeing of the slaves.

AT WAR WITH LINCOLN Coming out of the bicentennial of his birth in 2009, it is altogether fitting that books on Lincoln, who remains the major Civil War figure, remain at the forefront of our consciousness. Although many books have collected Lincoln’s speeches and writings, Harold Holzer’s claim for Lincoln on War (Algonquin, $24.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9781565123786) is that it is the first book to collect the president’s writings on the Civil War. In fact, he creates a very useful context for the Civil War pieces by including writings from Lincoln’s earlier life as well. The speeches, letters, memoranda, orders, telegrams and casual remarks are in chronological order, and Holzer, major-domo of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, comments upon and interprets each entry. The collection “embraces the soaring, practical, comic, distraught, and hectoring,” with topics including tactics, military strategy, the responsibilities of overseeing an army and even Lincoln’s interest in military technology.

In his introduction, Holzer notes that “Abraham Lincoln’s official White House portrait still dominates the State Dining Room.” And so, one hopes, his words still ring in the ears of the presidents and

statesmen and women who dine there, such as this famous line: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

PICTURING THE CIVIL WAR Not so well remembered is the statement by Robert E. Lee emblazoned on the back of The Civil War: A Visual History (DK, $40, 360 pages, ISBN 9780756671853): “I wish that I owned every slave in the South. I would free them all to avoid this war.”

The Smithsonian has dared to add yet another lavishly illustrated picture book to the hundreds already on coffee tables and shelves—and it is one of the finest in every respect, especially the vivid page designs. Many of the best photographs, newspaper cartoons, maps, drawings and paintings are seldom seen in other books, so that for the general reader the images taken together will provide a fresh impression of every aspect of the war and Reconstruction, including the role of black soldiers, spies, politics and the home front. New photographs show galleries of uniforms, flags, pistols, artillery and other artifacts of the time, such as medical instruments. Two-page spreads provide timelines for each year, and the text that weaves in and out among the well-designed pages gives an excellent gallery of people and a summary of the war.

The first three books mentioned here may inspire readers to meditate on the war and its legacy, while the Smithsonian’s visual history may stimulate the commemoration impulse. Living in a time of civil wars that affect us all, we do well to experience our own in books such as these, especially during this major anniversary. As Shelby Foote said, the Civil War is “the crossroads of our being.”

21

reviews

FICTION VACLAV & LENA

The Astral

By Haley Tanner Dial $25, 304 pages ISBN 9781400069316 Audio, eBook available

Breakdown in Brooklyn

Debut fiction

Review by Megan Fishmann

Kate Christensen is no slouch when it comes to creating impressive and memorable male characters. In her PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel The Great Man, readers were introduced to the story of Oscar Feldman, a fictional 20th-century New York figurative painter, told by the voices of the women influencing his life. Now comes The Astral, another important novel in which Christensen perfectly embodies the voice of a male poet in crisis, Harry Quirk.

In Brooklyn, New York (a city where one can find more writers per capita than, perhaps, any other city), Harry—a middle-aged poet whose career is slowly coming to a standstill—finds himself kicked out of the house by his wife, Luz. Convinced that Harry is having an affair with his childhood best friend (which he is not), Luz refuses to let Harry move back to their apartment located in The Astral, a sprawling building that dominates a large block in the neighborhood of Greenpoint. Forced to live in an apartment

By Kate Christensen, Doubleday, $25.95, 320 pages directly beneath his previous home with Luz, Harry struggles with marital ISBN 9780385530910, audio, eBook available problems, career woes and, most interestingly, immense difficulties with his devout son Hector, who has somehow become the leader of a cult.

While Harry and his freegan, dumpster-diving daughter Karina plot to convince Hector—recently dubbed Bard—that he is not his Christian cult’s newest messiah, Harry spends the rest of his time attempting to remember and rewrite his last batch of poems that Luz had destroyed before she threw him out. Plagued by a failing marriage and a son floundering among the religious ideals of others, Harry struggles to remain connected with his family before the ties are completely severed and he finds himself alone for good.

Christensen is a master at nailing Harry’s antagonizing voice, and her protagonist does not disappoint. Readers will be sucked into extremely realistic familial dramas while Christensen perfectly captures her Brooklyn backdrop—from dive bars to hipsters drinking overpriced coffee in trendy cafes. With acute perception and witty humor, this bittersweet novel moves along at a tremendous pace, entertaining until its climactic final scene.

THE SUMMER OF THE BEAR

By Bella Pollen Atlantic Monthly $24, 448 pages ISBN 9780802119742

literary fiction

22

It is 1980 in Bella Pollen’s The Summer of the Bear, and the Outer Hebrides, a remote island chain off the northern coast of Scotland, has some unexpected visitors. Letty Fleming and her three children are there to mourn the death of their husband and father, Nick, and a domesticated bear has escaped from his owner and made the sea caves his temporary home. The ways in which these characters cope, find solace and even help each other survive are the unexpected pleasures in this imaginative novel.

Nick had a posting in the diplomatic corps and the family was living in Germany when he fell to his death from the roof of their apartment. With suspicions of a leak in the department, his death leaves many unanswered questions: Was it an accident, murder or suicide?

Even worse, was Nick a traitor?

A former resident of the Hebrides, Letty hopes that returning to its safe embrace will be beneficial for her and her children as they try to piece their lives back together, but the isolation of the island reinforces each person’s loneliness.

Instead of coming together, the family fractures even more, with Letty hovering ineffectually in the background, alternately digging into her husband’s past and taking to her bed in periods of unrestrained grief.

The portrayal of the Fleming children is the novel’s greatest strength. The dutiful oldest daughter Georgie tries to make sense of a trip to Berlin she took with her father and the enigmatic events that occurred there. Youngest boy Jamie,

in his confusion and sorrow, continues to believe that his father is still alive and that the escaped bear might hold a clue to his current whereabouts. Stuck in the middle is Alba, burning with rage, cruel to her brother and jealous of her sister, and furious with the many ways the world has let her down.

The story of the escaped bear was drawn from an actual event in Pollen’s childhood when a trained animal named Hercules got loose while filming a commercial on the Hebrides. The bear roamed the island the entire summer, adding a dreamlike element to Pollen’s childhood memory. That spark of the unexpected lies at the heart of The Summer of the Bear. Though the novel occasionally suffers from the choppy rhythm resulting from multiple storytellers (even the bear narrates his own chapters), readers will be captivated by Pollen’s characters and the warmth with which her magical tale unfolds.

—Lauren BufferD

Haley Tanner’s debut novel is a wistful, honest story of friendship and first love as they blossom in the lives of two Russian immigrant children trying to make their way in the confusing new world of modernday Brooklyn.

Spurred by the accomplishments of his idols Houdini and David Copperfield, 10-year-old “Vaclav the Magnificent” spends hours after school in his bedroom with his assistant, “the Lovely Lena,” practicing illusions from The Magician’s Almanac. Vaclav’s Holy Grail isn’t television or Broadway; it’s the Coney Island sideshow, his certainty he’ll succeed there fueled by a conviction that “sometimes a young magician must remind himself that his dreams are written in the stars.”

He’s voluble and enthusiastic; Lena is quiet, her behavior displaying all the signs of a troubled soul.

Vaclav’s and Lena’s lives are moving in opposite directions, and the reasons for that quickly become evident. Raised by striving parents, it’s easy to see Vaclav someday making the long climb from his workingclass roots to the professional class.

Lena has been relegated to what loosely might be called the “care” of a woman Vaclav’s mother derisively refers to as “the Aunt,” who leaves the girl to fend for herself while she works in a strip club. Eventually, Lena is removed to a safe new home, wrenching her out of Vaclav’s life, and the scars of her early years haunt her.

Seven years after their forced separation Vaclav and Lena reconnect, and as teenagers their relationship is complicated more by their physical and emotional attraction than by whether Vaclav will be able to master the Ancient Egyptian Sarcophagus of Mystery. As the novel’s affecting climax reveals, his most amazing trick has nothing to do with sleight of hand. Instead, it’s one that reminds us vividly of the enduring power of a great story and

FICTION of the way fiction sometimes lights the way to truth.

In Vaclav & Lena, Tanner has created two appealing protagonists whose troubles may not be the stuff of high drama, but whose triumph over them is what real magic is all about.

—Harvey Freedenberg

TEN THOUSAND SAINTS

By Eleanor Henderson Ecco $26.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780062021021 eBook available

fiction

weight of so much detail. But the novel shines when she focus on the characters, whom she writes about with care and affection, digging below rough exteriors to find the source of their anger, frustration, boredom and indifference.

From this gritty, often under-theradar subculture, Henderson culls warmth and humanity, and proves herself at the same time a deft and promising storyteller.

—Rebecca Shapiro

THE BORROWER

By Rebecca Makkai Viking $25.95, 336 pages ISBN 9780670022816 Audio, eBook available

Debut fiction

Countless children of the 1960s rebelled against their straight-laced parents by turning to rock music, sexual freedom and, perhaps most importantly, drugs. But would such an uninhibited cohort curb the rebellion in their own children, a generation later? In her vibrant debut, a sweeping coming-of-age novel set against the pulsing New York City punk scene of the late 1980s, Eleanor Henderson asks this and much more, bringing to life both a set of achingly real characters and the unique time in which they lived in Ten Thousand Saints.

For Jude Keffy-Horn, adopted at birth by Vermont hippies who later divorced, boredom and drugs are the mainstays of his small-town life.

But things take a drastic turn on his 16th birthday, when his best friend, Teddy, dies of an accidental overdose. In desperation, his mother sends Jude to live with his pot-dealing father in the East Village, taking a gamble that it might straighten him out. Oddly, the plot works, as Jude eschews his father’s alternative lifestyle for one of his own—the hardcore, straight-edge punk scene.

As Jude weans himself off the vices of his childhood (not just drugs, but also alcohol and even meat), he builds an unconventional but tightknit family around two friends— Teddy’s older brother, Johnny, a tattoo artist in a hardcore band, and Eliza, a scared prep-school dropout likely carrying Teddy’s baby.

Henderson’s debut is ambitious, and though she has clearly researched extensively, the prose sometimes struggles under the

mile, it becomes harder to justify turning back, so Lucy hits the gas and sees where the road ahead will take them.

It may seem inappropriate to call a novel involving a kidnapping heartwarming, but that’s exactly what The Borrower manages to be.

Even as Lucy and Ian make ostensibly poor choices, you can’t help but root for this unlikely duo. Makkai tackles difficult subject matter like sexuality and identity with warmth and humor, and deftly avoids veering into overly saccharine territory.

The Borrower is a wonderful celebration of books and friendship, brimming with literary references and plenty of laughs. Bump it up your own library queue, because this is one book you won’t want to miss.

—Stephenie Harrison

THE LONDON TRAIN What do you get when you pair a children’s librarian—whose father may be connected to the Russian mafia—with a curious 10-year-old boy whose dubious sexuality has caused his evangelical parents to enroll him in an anti-gay class and strictly monitor his library material?

What sounds like the setup to a joke of questionable humor transforms into a charming debut novel in Rebecca Makkai’s hands.

Lucy Hull is a children’s librarian working in a small town in Missouri, struggling against the clichés of her job, determined to become something more than a spinster surrounded by cats. Although she had always dreamed of a slightly more glamorous life, Lucy can’t deny the thrill she gets in helping youngsters discover a love of reading. In particular, she is charmed by Ian Drake, a young boy with an appetite for books that nearly matches her own. It’s clear to Lucy that Ian is a special child in need of nurturing, so the two work together to circumvent his overbearing mother’s overly restrictive list of “acceptable materials.”

While reading everything from Roald Dahl to Greek mythology, the two forge a firm friendship, but everything is turned on its head when Lucy discovers that Ian has run away from home. Before she knows it, the two are out on the open road, and Lucy can now add “child abductor” to her resumé. With every

By Tessa Hadley Harper Perennial $14.99, 352 pages ISBN 9780062011831 eBook available

fiction

The London Train, Tessa Hadley’s elegant novel, tells two linked stories. In the first half, a middle-aged man, Paul, goes on a journey. His daughter from his first marriage, Pia, is pregnant—and living with some disreputable people. Paul imagines he might save Pia, but as he considers how unhappy he is in his own current domestic situation, he decides he might take a page from his daughter’s book. He lives with her for a while. When he snaps to his senses and returns to his marriage and his bourgeois life, he must decide if he can resume being the person he once was.

Then, in the second half, a woman named Cora struggles with some weighty problems of her own.

Most pressing: Her estranged husband has gone missing. It emerges that Cora once had an affair with Paul, the man from the first half of the book, and this is why she is now separated from her husband, Robert. As she searches for Robert, she thinks about her (now-defunct) affair and about the wreckage of her marriage. She wonders if maybe she

doesn’t want to be divorced after all.

Throughout both halves of the novel, Hadley’s literary talents are on display. She takes great care to describe the irrational ways in which people behave—especially the way in which a person’s train of thought can get derailed when that person spends too much time on his or her own. She notices how comically hypocritical people can be when they give advice, and notes how a person can become exhausted by inhabiting a slightly false personality. It’s clear that Hadley loves and closely watches the people around her, and that she has a real gift for explaining how the mind works.

Fans of Hadley’s absorbing New Yorker stories won’t want to miss The London Train. And anyone who is unfamiliar with her work but enjoys the graceful prose and psychological insight of Roxana Robinson or Penelope Lively should pick up a copy of this paperback original.

—Dan Barrett

#1

New York Times bestselling author

Also available as an eBook

The dazzling first installment of the Smythe-Smith Quartet AvonRomance.com • JuliaQuinn.com

23

Q:

What’s the title of your new book?

Q: Describe the book in one sentence.

© BEAU BRASHARES

meet ANN BRASHARES

reviews SISTER

By Rosamund Lupton Crown $24, 336 pages ISBN 9780307716514 Audio, eBook available

Suspense

Tibby, Lena, Bridget and Carmen are now in their late 20s.

Q: What

has been the biggest change in these young women from ­adolescence to adulthood?

has your best friend taught you?

Q: What

the hardest part of maintaining friendships as an adult?

Q: What’s

Q: If you could tell your teenage self one thing, what would it be? is your favorite place for a summer getaway?

Q: What

Q: W ords to live by?

SISTERHOOD EVERLASTING

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The term “page-turner” is undoubtedly used much too often to describe a gripping novel of suspense, but Sister, a terrific debut by British author Rosamund Lupton, certainly fits the bill. And more than that, it’s a poignant and perceptive depiction of the emotional bonds between two sisters—bonds which remained strong even as years passed and an ocean came between sisters Beatrice and Tess.

Lupton uses an intriguing device throughout the novel—writing in the form of a letter from Beatrice, the older sister who has moved to New York, to her dead sister Tess, who stayed in London to be near their mother. The letter begins just as “the trial” is about to begin—so the reader knows that suicide was not the cause of Tess’ death, as the police first surmised—but it’s the whole thread of events leading up to the trial that provides the novel’s never-ending suspense.

Bea, who is usually in touch daily with Tess, has been on a trip with no cell or Internet service for several days, and so she learns of Tess’ disappearance from their mother, and flies immediately to London. She moves into Tess’ flat and is in constant contact with the police until Tess’ body is found in an abandoned park restroom, her arms slashed. Bea’s letter to her sister moves back and forth in time, relating all the details of her suspicions that Tess was murdered and her investigations into Tess’ relationships in search of possible suspects, including the married father of her recently stillborn child, her psychiatrist and a student who was obsessed with her. Then the letter shifts to the present, where Bea is giving detailed testimony to the prosecuting attorney.

The result is a superb thriller, full of twists and turns, false leads and a surprise ending—all seamlessly woven into a touching story of a sisterly bond that one imagines

FICTION closely matches that of the talented first-time author and her own (still very much alive) sister.

—Deborah Donovan

MISS NEW INDIA

By Bharati Mukherjee HMH $25, 336 pages ISBN 9780618646531 eBook available

literary fiction

In “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman writes, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Many stories set in rapidly transforming India feature heroes and heroines with Whitmanesque contradictions— characters who are struggling to maintain their connections to the past while coping with their nation’s surge to the future. In the spirit of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India features a young Indian woman trapped between her provincial lower-income life and the career promised to her in Bangalore, a city obsessed with its own growth and inevitable Americanization.

Mukherjee, an award-winning American writer born in India, introduces readers to Anjali Bose, a rebellious 19-year-old who flees an arranged marriage in search of her own future in the booming metropolis at the cusp of its digital age. With help from her secretly gay American teacher, Anjali finds refuge in the remains of the oncegreat Bagehot House, a boarding house which holds the memories of a colonized India and the wounds Britain once inflicted on the nation.

The girls who lease rooms there are the new women of India, competent and eternally hopeful. Unfortunately, Anjali’s promised call center job does not live up to its expectations, and her search for a suitor never wanes, even when her own career begins to crumple.

Miss New India is a brilliant, seismic coming-of-age story that encourages hope in the “Photoshop world” of today’s India, a country buoyed by incredible promise, but still burdened by false hopes.

— C a t D . Ac r e e

TO BE SUNG UNDERWATER

By Tom McNeal Little, Brown $24.99, 448 pages ISBN 9780316127394 eBook available

fiction

DREAMS OF JOY

By Lisa See Random House $26, 368 pages ISBN 9781400067121 Audio, eBook available

Historical fiction

“Deer can jump fences, but antelope can’t . . . it’s a failing that almost costs them their lives,” Willy Blunt once told Judith Whitman.

For Judith, it’s little tidbits like this—and other cherished memories from her past—that don’t bear their full weight until life comes full circle nearly 30 years after she left her childhood home. What—and who—Judith chose to leave behind in Rufus Sage, Nebraska, leaves her wondering if she’s missed her chance at real happiness.

Judith begins withdrawing from her meticulous California life to revisit her past in Rufus Sage. While reinventing parts of her past years, Judith travels back to a period where love and living were simpler.

These times were filled discussing literature with her caring father and spending lazy afternoons at the lake with her first love, Willy. The lifelong regret Judith feels from leaving Willy when she went to college inspires her to pack up and re-experience life with him. With one phone call, she abruptly leaves her husband, her teenage daughter and her life on the West Coast to return to Rufus Sage and spend time with Willy.

Little does Judith realize that bridging the gap between the past and present is always more complicated than it seems.

To Be Sung Underwater beautifully sings the story of one woman’s wrestling with the present realities of a life she created after shedding her hometown skin and abandoning the lover who knew her best.

Author Tom McNeal (Goodnight, Nebraska) intricately develops the emotional ties between his characters, capturing the essence of the human heart while rejoicing in the restorative power of reconnection.

The novel shows that we may not be able to bring our past with us into the present, but by looking back, we might see just where we are truly meant to be.

In 2009, Lisa See won the hearts of readers with her novel Shanghai Girls, which followed the trials and tribulations of two of her most spirited and vibrant heroines to date. Through the eyes of Pearl and May Chin, readers were transported to war-torn Shanghai and became privy to the unconscionable struggles faced by women in arranged marriages as well as Chinese immigrants in the United States.

Readers who found themselves wondering about dutiful Pearl and tempestuous May will be happy to discover that See herself agreed that one book about the Chin sisters simply wasn’t sufficient. In Dreams of Joy, See picks up the narrative in 1957 with Pearl’s 19-year-old daughter, Joy, who is living in California.

Devastated by the discovery that her mother is not who Joy thought she was, Joy departs America in a haze of confusion, determined to find her real father and take up her rightful place in the New Society of Red China. When Pearl discovers Joy’s plan, she relinquishes the safety and security she has struggled for and follows Joy headlong into her past, returning to a country where both of their lives and ideals will constantly be at risk.

In Dreams of Joy, See revisits themes of friendship, romantic and familial love, identity and loss, all told through the lens of two remarkable women. In the hands of a lesser writer, Mao’s China could easily become a faded backdrop against which the personal drama of Joy and Pearl’s journey plays out, but not with See. Ever the consummate historian, See brings to life the realities of China during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, providing a fascinating and frightening new world for her readers to immerse themselves in. Succeeding as both a sequel and a stand-alone novel, Dreams of Joy is an immensely satisfying and edifying read.

— T a r a P e tt i t

—Stephenie Harrison

q&a

LISA SEE

A READER-REQUESTED SEQUEL

T

he author of Shanghai Girls brings back three of her favorite characters in a new novel set during one of China’s darkest periods.

Dreams of Joy is a sequel to one of your previous novels, Shanghai Girls. What made you decide to revisit that story and its characters?

I didn’t plan to write a sequel. I thought the end of Shanghai Girls was a new beginning. Readers thought otherwise. Absolutely everyone, including my publisher, asked for a sequel. I loved spending more time with Pearl, Joy and May. I’ve now been thinking and writing about them for four years, so I know them really well. It was interesting to go even deeper emotionally with all of them.

This novel offers a vivid picture of the hardships endured by the Chinese people during Mao’s Great Leap Forward. How did you conduct your research on that period and what obstacles did you encounter?

There are a handful of nonfiction books written about the Great Leap Forward, which helped me with the straight facts. When I was in China, I interviewed people in Huangcun Village who had lived through that time. I also talked to younger people in China to see what their impressions were of the Great Leap Forward and what their parents had gone through. The main obstacle I encountered, even with young, educated people, is the belief—after years of education— that the famine that occurred during the Great Leap Forward was caused by “three years of bad weather.”

Your books are rooted in fact and real historical events, so why do you choose to write fiction rather than nonfiction?

What I love about books—as a reader myself—is opening the pages, stepping into another world, connecting to the characters, and by extension to larger things like an historical moment. I’m willing to go on a journey and read about history if there are characters, relationships and emotions I can connect to. It’s those things that keep me turning the pages, and along the way I learn a lot. That’s

© Patricia Williams

FICTION

what I love in the books I read, and that’s what I hope for readers of the books I write.

Your fiction has opened a new window on China and its people for many American readers.

Do you feel that there are any stereotypes about China that continue to persist despite your efforts?

I actually think people are very confused about China. Is it an economic global superpower or a rigid Communist country known for its human rights violations? Is it one of the most advanced countries in the world in terms of gender equality or is it a place where people give up their daughters for adoption?

Is it the country with the third largest number of millionaires and billionaires in the world or a country of dire poverty? On any given day, any stereotype can be accurate, even in this country.

The movie version of your novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan will premiere this summer. How does it feel to see your characters come to life on the screen?

It’s both wonderful and weird.

The parts of the film that are true to the book are absolutely true—lifted word for word from the novel. But I’m sure that many readers of the book will be just as surprised as I was to see a singing and dancing Hugh Jackman.

Dreams of Joy makes references to the Chinese zodiac: Dogs are likeable, Dragons are ferocious, etc. Your Chinese zodiac is the Sheep; how well do you think you embody your sign?

A Sheep really loves home. I also love to be at home. It’s one of the reasons I became a writer. I can stay at home all day.

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reviews the man in the rockefeller suit

NONFICTION

Lives of the rich and fake Review by Pete Croatto

Millions of immigrants have found success in America through hard work, pluck and a little ingenuity. Christian Gerhartsreiter took a more duplicitous approach. In 1978, the 17-year-old German schemed his way into the United States and didn’t stop. He worked himself into affluent environments by claiming to be anything from a TV producer to a baronet.

In 1992, Gerhartsreiter unveiled his greatest creation: Clark Rockefeller, a scion of the famed wealthy family. Amazingly, nobody discovered this elaborate lie until—divorced, cut off from money and desperate—he kidnapped his young daughter in July 2008. The incident, involving a fake Rockefeller no less, was national news.

Mark Seal, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair who previously wrote about the Rockefeller saga for the magazine, chronicles the con man’s brazen odyssey in The Man in the Rockefeller Suit. Relying on loads of

By Mark Seal, Viking, $26.95, 336 pages research and nearly 200 interviews, Seal captures the essence of a man ISBN 9780670022748, eBook available whose soul was buried underneath countless façades. Seriously, it’s next to impossible to tally all the lies and shifty identities. Even when he was brought down, Gerhartsreiter was still delivering falsities with a smile on his face.

How did he remain out of trouble for 30 years? Regardless of his alias, Gerhartsreiter was charismatic, told well-researched, convincing lies and immersed himself in American culture. He was unbeatable at Trivial Pursuit, and Gilligan’s Island’s Thurston Howell III provided patrician inspiration. “For Clark, things that are imaginary were very, very real,” explains Patrick Hickox, who befriended Clark Rockefeller in Boston. The only real thing in Rockefeller’s life, he adds, may have been his daughter.

Seal’s first-person approach can be distracting at times, but he brings color and depth to this most unusual immigrant story—one that is brave, bizarre and utterly enthralling.

THE GREATER JOURNEY

By David McCullough Simon & Schuster $37.50, 576 pages ISBN 9781416571766 Audio, eBook available

history

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A populist writer with a gift for readable biography and a reverence for America’s past, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough delivers another compelling work of narrative history in The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.

In early America, pioneers were the people who headed west. Deftly re-conceptualizing that notion, McCullough focuses on those Americans who, with the U.S. established and thriving in the first part of the 19th century, set sail eastward, bound for Paris, to experience Euro­pean culture and fill in the blanks that a callow U.S. could not.

With coverage beginning around 1830, McCullough compiles a

scrapbook of adventures starring notable Americans from James Fenimore Cooper to Samuel F.B. Morse, each of whom had to endure a wretched voyage, sometimes six weeks in duration. “All who set sail for France,” he writes, “were taking their lives in their hands, and to this could be added the prospect of being unimaginably far from friends, family and home, entirely out of touch with familiar surroundings.”

In lively prose, McCullough introduces his reader to a Paris that, while still “a medieval city,” was nevertheless a thriving mecca of opera, theater, art, books, music, fashion, architecture, science and medicine. It was also a place of freer societal attitudes, yet one that remained a haven for tradition.

Interspersing biographical details within the historical narrative, McCullough covers the flow of American travelers to Paris through about 1900. His subjects are artists like Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent; politicians like the abolitionist Charles Sumner and ambassador Elihu Washburne; persons of letters such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson

and Harriet Beecher Stowe; and the great showman P.T. Barnum.

The City of Light’s obvious charms—and its identity as the center of just about everything—ripple through McCullough’s text. Readers will savor this portrait of a vibrant city whose connection to America’s founding and cultural sustenance forms a permanent bond.

— M A R TI N B R A D Y

FIRE AND RAIN

By David Browne Da Capo $26, 392 pages ISBN 9780306818509

MUSIC

It wasn’t obvious as it was happening, but, as David Browne shows in Fire and Rain, 1970 turned out to be a watershed year in popular music. By this time, the Beatles were not only fractured but fractious toward each other. Paul Simon

and Art Garfunkel were spinning in different directions, too, with the former contemplating a solo career and the latter immersed in movie acting. The members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were demonstrating in every way that their harmony was musical, not fraternal.

While these superstars were getting the lion’s share of public attention, a mellow voice with a wry wit out of North Carolina was casually moving into the spotlight. Folkish though James Taylor’s sound and songs were, they carried virtually none of the political content or selfrighteousness that characterized folkies of the 1960s. His songs were more like easy-listening landscapes of the soul.

Even though the three bands Browne chronicles were twisting apart, the albums they released in 1970—the Beatles’ Let It Be, Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and CSN&Y’s Déjà vu—became instant classics. The same was true for Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, also delivered in 1970, which featured the song that gives this book its title. During the course of this year, the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State University, Charles Manson went on trial for the “Helter Skelter” murders and the Vietnam War continued to rage.

Proceeding chronologically, Browne alternates between closeups of studio sessions and personal relationships and wide shots of how these situations affected or were affected by the overall culture. He sprinkles his narrative with fascinating vignettes: Simon teaching a songwriting course at New York University, Nash and Stills sparring over the affections of Rita Coolidge, Ringo Starr recording his first album in Nashville. Wonder of wonders, he makes all these voluminous details, which might have led to factual overload in lesser hands, eminently readable.

Now a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, Browne gleaned much of his information by interviewing primary sources, among them Crosby, Stills, Nash, Taylor, Coolidge, record executive Clive Davis, singers Bonnie Bramlett and Peter Yarrow and such omnipresent sidemen as Russ Kunkel and Leland Sklar. Browne’s engrossing account of this fertile but volatile period sets the standard by which comprehensive musical histories should be judged.

— Ed w a rd M o rr i s

NONFICTION THE STORY OF CHARLOTTE’S WEB

By Michael Sims Walker $25, 320 pages ISBN 9780802777546

BIOGRAPHY

Before Harry Potter came along, Charlotte’s Web was the best-selling children’s book in America. Generations of kids found real magic in Zuckerman’s barn, through young Fern’s relationship with Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider. Charlotte’s Web set its talking animals alongside realistic lessons about the cycles of life and death in the barnyard, a naturalism that emerged from author E.B. White’s own farm in Maine and his lifelong fascination with animals.

The Story of Charlotte’s Web, Michael Sims’ slice-of-life biography of E.B. White, focuses on those elements that directly contributed to the creation of Charlotte’s Web. The first section of the book is stunning, an almost novelistic recreation of the child Elwyn’s imaginative world. The youngest of seven children, Elwyn was shy and anxious, happiest when rambling alone in Maine’s lake country or watching chicks hatch in a barn. He was equally drawn to reading and writing about the natural world, becoming a published author at age nine with a poem entitled “To a Mouse.” Sims shows us how Elwyn’s childhood reading, from the animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton to Don Marquis’ comic verses about Archy and Mehitabel, influenced the writer White would become.

Sims’ imaginative re-enactment of pivotal scenes in White’s life is unconventional yet compelling. A wonderful example of this occurs when 26-year-old Andy (as White was known after college) peruses a magazine stand in Grand Central Station in 1925: Sims vividly details the covers of Film Fun and Time magazine before focusing his lens on Andy’s life-changing purchase of the first issue of The New Yorker.

The staging of this scene helps Sims build out the literary and cultural contexts in which Andy becomes a professional writer, grounding the drama in solid historical research.

The adult Andy—successful New Yorker writer, married to editor Katharine White, dividing his time between Manhattan and a farm in Maine—is perhaps not so intriguing as the child Elwyn, until he becomes fascinated with orb weaver spiders, spending two years obsessively studying their habits in preparation for the creation of Charlotte A. Calvatica. Sims deftly handles the writing and publication of Charlotte’s Web, building thumbnail portraits of the legendary children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom and illustrator Garth Williams. But this biography is at its best in the barnyard, illuminating that “sacred space” E.B. White brought to life in his beloved children’s book.

—Catherine Hollis

THE LAST GUNFIGHT

By Jeff Guinn Simon & Schuster $27, 416 pages ISBN 9781439154243 Audio, eBook available

HISTORY

By the time legendary frontier lawman Wyatt Earp, then 31, showed up in the mining boomtown of Tombstone, Arizona, in 1879, he had moved at least 12 times and lived in at least nine different states and territories. We can’t be sure of the exact number because he was much prone in later life to obfuscation, especially about the horse theft allegation and his stints as a brothel bouncer. But it is clear that he was a restless soul, a trait he shared with his father and brothers.

As author Jeff Guinn shows convincingly in The Last Gunfight, a new approach to the O.K. Corral shootout saga, the Earps were a perennially frustrated family, always disappointed in their status, and always scanning the horizon for the next chance at a big score. And in that, he argues, they were emblematic of an important factor in the settlement of the West: the neverending search for a quick buck.

For much of the 20th century, the story of the lethal encounter in Tombstone—three killed immediately, and at least three more slain in subsequent revenge killings—

q&a

MICHAEL SIMS

BRINGING A CLASSIC TO LIFE

W

hile writing his delightful biography of E.B. White, The Story of Charlotte’s Web, Michael Sims gained a new appreciation for this childhood classic and its eccentric creator.

Do you remember reading Charlotte’s Web as a child?

Sadly, I didn’t read it in childhood, for two dumb reasons.

First, I thought that it was about a girl and I wasn’t reading much about girls at the time. And second, I decided that I didn’t like the name Charlotte. So I was a teenager when I actually read Charlotte’s Web—and fell in love with it even at that late date.

You write so vividly about young Elwyn’s adventures in barns and outdoors. What led you to write about his childhood in this almost novelistic way?

For me the theme of the book is the unpredictability of creativity. To recreate the unusual way that White’s imagination responded to the natural world, I had to take him out into it. His letters and essays provide all kinds of texture about his daily life, so I started with those. I also built on them from my other research and my own observations on numerous visits to Maine.

Your subtitle refers to E.B. White’s “eccentric life”—what made him so eccentric?

I think that from early childhood White simply had to go his own way. The word eccentric comes from two Greek words meaning “off center,” and he was that way from birth. In young adulthood he was already nostalgic; he looked for nature in the city; he enjoyed being a husband and father and stepfather, but he spent most of his time in the company of animals. So by eccentric I mean, I think, that he was unconsciously original.

Why were Don Marquis’ stories about Archy and Mehitabel so influential for White?

Marquis is at his best in these antic poems and sketches about a free-verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach in the Jazz Age. White read them when they were new and fell in love with Marquis’ combination of skepticism, humor and compassion.

Then in 1949 he was asked to

write an introduction to them, and rereading the whole series helped kick-start Charlotte’s Web. What was it like visiting the Whites’ farm in Maine?

I found it surreal and thrilling.

Walking through E.B. White’s barn, hitting my head on the rope that Avery and Fern swing on, seeing the barn cellar looking very much like Garth Williams’ illustrations of Wilbur’s home— those moments made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

You talk about the barnyard as “sacred space” for White.

What can we learn from life in a barn?

White claimed that Charlotte’s Web is a straightforward report from the barn, but of course he himself was very sentimental about it as a place in which he had spent many great hours in contact with the most elemental aspects of life. He saw it as a miniature cosmos, but also as a place where he had always been innocently happy—on his own, nurturing an animal, thinking his own thoughts.

Is Charlotte’s Web still relevant for 21st-century children?

Very much so, I think. First, of course, it’s a wonderful story, a mix of humor and lyricism and heartbreak; and it was one of the first children’s books to deal with death. But also, over most of the world, the second decade of the 21st century is far more urbanized than the mid-20th century, when the book was published.

As much as anything else White wanted to immortalize a sense of natural rhythms—days, seasons, birth, death. What could be more relevant for our children today?

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reviews was told simplistically and inaccurately: brave lawmen confronting a gang of evil outlaws. But historians in recent decades have exploded that myth, and Guinn now takes the research a step further, to explain the wider socioeconomic context and the specific missteps that led to the showdown between somewhatshady cops and somewhat-shady ranchers.

Wyatt Earp himself had no particular interest in law enforcement, only in the tax collection commissions that came with a county sheriff’s job. The Earps were trying to impress the town’s Republican business establishment. The ranchers they killed were certainly allied with rustlers, but also with Southern Democratic rural interests that saw the likes of the Earps as big-government thugs. The bloodshed was the result of deep mistrust and misread intentions, fueled by alcohol and machismo.

Guinn lays it all out beautifully: the Western settlement engine shifting from farming to hunting to mining; the quick rise and fall of Tombstone’s silver industry; the cattle rustling that no one cared about because the victims were Mexicans; the political machinations that the Earps completely misunderstood. Decades later, Wyatt, living in “genteel poverty” in Los Angeles, puffed up the heroic version in a totally characteristic last attempt to cash in. Guinn’s dissection is notably more enthralling.

—Anne Bartlett

MARRIAGE CONFIDENTIAL

By Pamela Haag Harper $25.99, 352 pages ISBN 9780061719288 eBook available

RELATIONSHIPS

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Much like Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique unveiled “the problem that had no name” in 1963, Marriage Confidential tackles a modern-day social dilemma: the semi-happy marriage.

I don’t agree with everything author Pamela Haag posits, but I do admire her honest, wonderfully nonjudgmental examination of marriage in the 21st century. Her

NONFICTION husband (who is either a saint or crazy for agreeing to let his wife unwrap their union for all the world to see) is apparently fine with Haag admitting right up front that she can’t tell whether her own marriage is woeful or sublime. “Marriage . . . has its own CNN-style ticker at the bottom of the screen, scrolling a fractured mental subtext of unarticulated grievances, deferred fulfillments, and lost ecstasy,” she writes.

But this book, thankfully, is not Haag indulging in navel-gazing about her own marriage. Rather, she wittily and meticulously explores what sets apart those who suffer quietly in their semi-happy marriages from those who take action—whether that action is working to improve the situation, splitting up, retreating to a man cave or having an affair. On this last point, Haag finds that the Internet has changed infidelity—she calls it “the accidental cheater in the age of Facebook and Google.” Who hasn’t peeked at an old flame’s profile photo on Facebook? But sometimes it goes further: “Facebook blurs the bright line between the illicit and the merely nostalgic and delivers temptation to your door,” she writes. “It slides the marital affair right into normal, online everyday socializing.”

So what is a married couple to do? Just when you’re starting to feel desperately pessimistic about the future of marriage, Haag concludes that it’s not a lost cause. Couples just need to worry less about convention and focus on what works for them. Ol’ Blue Eyes may have called marriage “an institute you can’t disparage,” but as Haag finds, it may just be one you can re-imagine.

—Amy Scribner

THE BIG ROADS

By Earl Swift HMH $27, 384 pages ISBN 9780618812417 eBook availablee

HISTORY

President Dwight D. Eisenhower is widely credited with being the driving force behind the building of

the nation’s interstate highway system. While most of the construction of these 47,000 miles of roadway took place in the late ’50s and early ’60s, one of its inspirations occurred some 40 years earlier when Eisenhower, then a young soldier, joined a convoy of Army vehicles on a cross-country journey to test the nation’s road system. What Ike found was a jumble of asphalt, gravel, dirt and mud roads, an unreliable system of transportation that would remain that way until he got behind the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956.

This little nugget is just one of the treasures of Earl Swift’s The Big Roads, which examines the movers and shakers who built our interstate highway system. Swift got the idea for the book during a road trip with his sixth grade daughter and her friend. During the long trip, he became curious about the genesis behind an interstate system we now take for granted, and discovered that it was others besides Eisenhower who made it happen. The key players included high-profile characters such as Carl G. Fisher, who helped build the Lincoln Highway, the nation’s first cross-country highway, in the early 1900s. Fisher is also notable for being one of the founders of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Then there were more low-key federal bureaucrats like Frank Turner, a civil engineer who supervised the completion of the interstate system.

The Big Roads isn’t simply a history of the highways. It also explores the economic, social and environmental ramifications of building the interstates. These roads have been blamed for killing towns large and small, either by passing them by or by hastening people’s exodus from city to suburbs. They have been blamed for ruining pastures and prairies and accelerating construction of shopping malls and fast food chains. Yet it’s undeniable that the interstates also greatly eased motor travel and contributed to our economic growth.

As we prepare for our summer road trips, Swift’s book is a good primer, summarizing all we love and hate about life on the highway.

Gasoline is no longer a quarter a gallon, and the GPS has replaced the road map, but Americans still love a good road trip story, and The Big Roads delivers.

When her sister Anne-Marie died after a brief but debilitating illness, Nina Sankovitch took refuge in her old purple chair, surrounded by stacks of books that both she and her sister loved. Much as Joan Didion launched into her “year of magical thinking” following the death of her husband, Sankovitch launched into a year of magical reading as her own suspension in time between the overwhelming sorrow of her sister’s death and the future that awaited her.

Knowing how easy it would be to lose herself and her grief in the many busy little things that make up everyday life, Sankovitch allowed herself a year not to run, worry, control or make money. As she turned 46 (the age at which her sister died), she and her husband raised a toast to the commencement of her year of reading books— one book every day. “All the books would have been the ones I would have shared with Anne-Marie if I could have,” she writes.

Sankovitch inaugurated a website, ReadAllDay.org, where she reflected daily on the book she had just read. Seeking to bask in the memories of her sister’s life, to fill the void left by her death and to share her highs and lows with other readers, she feasted upon a banquet of books that ranged from Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog and W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants to Ross MacDonald’s The Ferguson Affair and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, devouring themes from love and death, to war and peace, to loss and hope.

In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, her affectionate and inspiring paean to the power of books and reading, Sankovitch gracefully acknowledges that her year of reading was an escape into the healing sanctuary of books, where she learned how to move beyond recuperation to living.

—J o h n T. S l a n i a

— H e n r y L . Ca r r i g a n J r .

TOLSTOY AND THE PURPLE CHAIR

By Nina Sankovitch Harper $23.99, 256 pages ISBN 9780061999840 eBook available

MEMOIR

children’s books

KATHRYN ERSKINE i n t e r v i e w B Y L IN D A M . C A S TE L L ITT O

A VALUABLE LESSON TO LEARN

F

or Kathryn Erskine, art imitates life—deliberately.

“I love reading and learning things from fiction,” she says, “and I figured others would, too.”

They certainly do: Her third novel, the 2010 National Book Award winner Mockingbird, features a fifth grader named Caitlin, who was inspired by Erskine’s daughter; both have Asperger’s syndrome.

In Erskine’s engaging new novel, The Absolute Value of Mike (Philomel, $16.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9780399255052, ages 9 to12), the main character has a math-related learning disability that creates friction with his engineeringobsessed father. Once again, Erskine drew on the experiences of a family

member—her son, who has a learning disability. The author says she’s learned a lot from him and wanted to incorporate those lessons in The Absolute Value of Mike. “I was a kid who got straight A’s, and thought that’s what you should do, that it meant you were smart,” she says by phone from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia. “My son does fine, but he’s not a straight-A kind of kid, and I realized he has all these life skills— he understands people, and he’s a problem-solver. I’ve learned great grades don’t guarantee success.”

The author wants kids to understand that, too. “I see children with learning disabilities or other issues who are down on themselves,” Erskine says. “I’d like them to take the message away that we all have something to contribute, and we need to

follow whatever our passion is.”

Young readers will empathize with Mike’s frustration at his father’s insistence that math would be easier if he only tried harder—and they’ll share his trepidation when he’s sent to stay with relatives in rural Pennsylvania for the summer and work on an engineering project.

Mike becomes impatient with the project, but he is intrigued when he learns of a town-wide effort to raise money to adopt a little boy from Romania. Readers will be moved as Mike becomes part of something bigger than himself—and gains selfconfidence in the process.

While a young Erskine wouldn’t have been daunted by a Pennsylvania trip (she lived in several countries as a child, thanks to her parents’ foreign-service jobs), she does know about international adoption—both her children are from Russia. “[Adoption] is something I thought others might not know that much about, but they’d be interested.”

Right now, Erskine is herself inter-

ested in a few different projects: an adult novel “for a change of pace”; a picture book “as an exercise to force myself to use very few words to get my point across”; and historical fiction for middle-grade readers.

“I don’t even want to use the h-word, because it turns kids off sometimes, but history is like a fantasy world—except it really happened!” Readers won’t need convincing. Thanks to books like Mockingbird and The Absolute Value of Mike, it’s clear that, if anyone can make learning an enjoyable experience, Erskine can.

“Are we there yet? . . . I HOPE not!”

B

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children’s books Beauty Queens

reviews

girls gone radical Review by Norah Piehl

Libba Bray’s last novel, the award-winning Going Bovine, was heralded as a departure for the author, who had previously been best known for a trilogy of Victorian-era supernatural romances. Now, in Beauty Queens, Bray further pushes the boundaries in a work of social satire that skewers race, gender, standards of beauty and our hyper-saturated media culture.

Oh, and did I mention that it’s also wicked funny?

When a plane carrying 50 contestants in the Miss Teen Dream pageant crash-lands on a (seemingly) deserted island, will it turn into Lord of the Flies? Or something else entirely? At first, the girls do split up into tribes—the Lost Girls and the Sparkle Ponies—but before long, they come to see their isolation as something of an opportunity. “There was something about the island that made the girls forget who they had been. . . . They were no longer performing. Waiting. Hoping. They were

By Libba Bray, Scholastic, $18.99, 400 pages becoming. They were.” But what happens when these self-actualizing ISBN 9780439895972, audio, eBook available (and very, very fetching) young women encounter the hunky stars of Ages 13 and up reality TV’s “Captains Bodacious IV: Badder and More Bodaciouser”?

The surviving Miss Teen Dream contestants comprise a veritable United Nations of diversity—there’s the black girl, the Indian girl, the transgender contestant, the uptight virgin, the deaf one, the lesbian . . . but each girl’s remarkably distinctive voice and deeply personal backstory results in a narrative that’s equal parts compelling and crazy. Beauty Queens is pointed, riotous and unapologetically feminist, with each swerve toward preachiness cleverly counterbalanced with a hilarious barb or perfectly placed one-liner. “Do you think my new feminism make me look fat?” one character asks. Turns out, Bray shows us, feminism can look pretty darn hot after all.

BLACKOUT

By John Rocco Hyperion $16.99, 40 pages ISBN 9781423121909 Ages 4 to 8

picture book

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John Rocco takes a child’s-eye view of one special summer night in Blackout. At first glance, this captivating picture book seems to offer a straightforward view of a night when a family is forced to move away from their electronic life to a simpler time, a time when families played board games and enjoyed each other’s company.

Taking a closer look at the illustrations does for the reader just what the blackout does for the family in the story, allowing us to slow down and appreciate the moment all the more.

Let’s start with the very first image—even before the title page.

Here is the main character, a little girl with a screen flickering behind her. Given her dour expression, it appears that the screen isn’t

bringing her much joy. Moving to the first pages of the book, we see a busy street in Brooklyn, beneath the bridge. Careful observers will recognize that same girl again in a brownstone window. In other tiny windows, we spot four of the main characters, busy with their work and too busy for the little girl, who wants to play a board game.

In a beautiful moment, the lights of the city slowly dim, prompting the startled child to summon help with a cry of “MOM!” The family adjourns to the roof for a joyous time with neighbors under the starry night (which looks a lot like the Van Gogh painting of the same name).

Then it’s back to the street for free ice cream from the ice cream vendor. As the story unfolds, astute readers will note slight changes in perspective and light that let the reader observe the passage of time, but in a slowed-down world without electricity.

Adults know that a power outage can be a pain in the neck, but to a child, it is just another adventure.

In Rocco’s beautifully told story, a blackout brings one family together and allows a child to see her city in a whole new light . . . a flashlight.

—Robin Smith

JUNONIA

Mallory and Alice begin to see they may have something in common.

Henkes’ heartwarming story is enriched by his beautiful illustrations on the endpapers and at the beginning of each chapter. He creates a very full book in relatively few pages through his well-chosen words. Like Alice finding rare shells on the beach, readers will find rich, evocative, image-filled language sprinkled throughout the book: Alice’s hands have that “wonderful, warm sunscreen smell” and the ocean crests are as “strips of lace laid out on folds of steel blue cloth.”

Junonia’s plot builds quietly, with the gentle crests and valleys of the ocean on a breezy day. Henkes relies not on twists and jerks to tear your breath from you, but instead on lushly worded phrases and tender moments between families to take your breath away.

—Kevin Delecki

LEXIE

By Audrey Couloumbis Random House $15.99, 208 pages ISBN 9780375856327 eBook available Ages 9 to 12

middle grade

By Kevin Henkes Greenwillow $15.99, 192 pages ISBN 9780061964176 Ages 9 to 12

middle grade

Alice Rice is nine (going on 10), and likes things to be the way they are supposed to be: neat, organized, simple. Unfortunately, in Kevin Henkes’ Junonia, nothing goes as planned. On their annual trip to Sanibel Island in Florida, Alice and her family discover that most of the people who usually join them for their visit are staying at home—and the one family friend who will be coming is bringing her new boyfriend and his six-year-old daughter, Mallory.

The one thing Alice loves above all else is hunting for seashells along the beach. She will pick up any shell but is most interested in rare shells, especially the Junonia.

Shell hunting changes, though, when Alice is made to hunt with grumpy, whiny Mallory and her tattered doll Munchkey. Yet soon

At the beginning of this story, almost-11-year-old Lexie’s mom tells her, “A big part of growing up is dealing with things we don’t like.”

What she doesn’t tell her is how to deal with those things. This is something Lexie must discover for herself while on vacation with her father at the family beach house.

Lexie’s parents divorced about a year earlier, and as much as she dislikes going to the beach without her mom, she is looking forward to some time alone with her father. It isn’t until they arrive, however, that her dad tells her that his girlfriend is coming as well. And just when Lexie thinks she can get past this new thing that she doesn’t like, she finds that the girlfriend has brought her sons, Harris and Ben, too.

The reader can feel the tension mount as everyone tries to make a “nice vacation” and no one talks about the changes in their families.

There are glimpses of Lexie learning how to make decisions for herself, especially when she realizes “that somebody had to stand up for me

and I guess it had to be me.” But she says nothing until young Harris lets it slip that her father and his mother are planning to get married.

We are as relieved as Lexie when she finally confronts her father and clears the air.

Lexie is a sweet, short story that will appeal particularly to young girls. Newbery Honor-winning author Audrey Couloumbis very deftly shows us the growth of her character in the passing of just a few days. Yes, growing up is dealing with things we don’t like, and Lexie will show you how to do it.

—J e n n i f e r K i t c h e l

deeply moving. Fans of Zafón will love this book for its rich storytelling and commingling of fantasy and reality, and new readers will quickly become fans after visiting The Midnight Palace.

TEEN

When a group of orphans in Calcutta form a secret society, they vow to protect one another as a family would. Little do they know how much that pledge will demand of them later. As the children prepare to “graduate” from the orphanage to the real world, Ben learns he has a twin sister, Sheere, whose grandmother separated the two at birth to protect them from a force of evil that travels under the name Jawahal. Ben entreats his fellow society members to help secure Sheere’s safety and find out what Jawahal wants. Welcome to The Midnight Palace.

Author Carlos Ruiz Zafón (Shadow of the Wind) has created a dark and unforgiving world for these children to navigate. The stench of raw sewage seems to leap off the page, and Jawahal is a truly frightening and violent character.

But this bleak backdrop is warmed by the love Ben feels for his friends and newfound family, and by several small mysteries that they must solve along the way. Even the perilous final showdown with Jawahal takes the form of a game: Ben must reach into boxes, hoping to withdraw the names of his friends to win their release . . . but one box contains a poisonous snake.

The story’s conclusion is explosive, literally and emotionally, and

of: Q: Illustrator

would you describe Q: How

the book?

—Heather Seggel

WHAT WE KEEP IS NOT ALWAYS WHAT WILL STAY

By Amanda Cockrell Flux $9.95, 264 pages ISBN 9780738726151 Ages 12 and up

has been the biggest influence on your work?

Q: Who

TEEN

THE MIDNIGHT PALACE

By Carlos Ruiz Zafón Little, Brown $17.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780316044738 Audio, eBook available Ages 12 and up

meet MATTHEW MYERS © Mai Endo

reviews

was your favorite subject in school? Why? Q: What

In the fictional town of Ayala, California, where orange groves and old Spanish missions dot the landscape, 15-year-old Angie Arnaz is confiding her troubles to Felix, a saint of questionable origin who lives in her church basement.

Angie’s mother has abruptly left her stepfather without any indication why and insists that Angie move out of their home too. When Angie doesn’t budge, her mother threatens to call the police. Angie says, “I’m mad but I’m sort of enjoying how nuts it’s driving her.”

Meanwhile, 19-year-old Jesse Francis has just returned home from fighting in Afghanistan and has enrolled in Angie’s high school. Angie is the only one who doesn’t treat him like a freak or a victim. Against everyone’s advice, the two quickly form a romantic relationship.

Despite their age gap, Angie really loves Jesse’s maturity and sensitivity. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know how to handle his violent outbursts or erratic behavior. Suddenly her desire to save him is at odds with her desire to save herself.

In What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay, Amanda Cockrell has created an engaging, sharp and endearing protagonist who speaks to the reader like a best friend. Angie is instantly likable, as are supporting characters such as goofball Noah, lovable and wry Grandpa Joe and St. Felix, Angie’s stand-in shrink who doles out the tough advice, even if it isn’t what she wants to hear. Angie’s voice will resonate with anyone facing difficult choices and wondering if anyone is listening.

— K i m b e r ly G i a r r a t a n o

was your childhood hero?

Q: Who

Q: W hat books did you enjoy as a child?

Q: What one thing would you like to learn to do?

Q: W hat message would you like to send to children?

TYRANNOSAURUS DAD Artist Matthew Myers worked as an advertising art director until 1998, when he quit his day job to paint full time. His lush and fanciful illustrations enliven the new picture book Tyrannosaurus Dad (Roaring Brook, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9781596435315), which was written by Liz Rosenberg. Myers lives in Brooklyn.

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WORDNOOK

By the editors of Merriam-Webster

NO ERRORS HERE Dear Editor, What is the correct pronunciation of the word err? I say it like “ur,” but my aunt says it is related to error, and should be pronounced like “air.”

Which of us is right?

A. P. Keene, New Hampshire The pronunciation of err has been a bone of contention since at least the 19th century. As with many such controversies, there’s really no correct answer.

The “air” pronunciation is the oldest. As early as Shakespeare’s time, though, the “ur” pronunciation had come along. We know this because Shakespeare used err to rhyme with her. Alexander Pope, who gave us the phrase “to err is human” and is thus at least partly responsible for the continued familiarity of this humble stump of a word, used it to rhyme with prefer.

Despite this pedigree for the “ur” pronunciation, however, in the last 50 years the “air” pronunciation has become the more common one.

Your aunt is correct that err is related to error, so “air” has a certain logic on its side. In addition, some speakers avoid the “ur” pronunciation because of its indistinct vowel. Our verdict is that either pronunciation is acceptable, and that you are both saying it correctly.

MONKEY BUSINESS

Dear Editor, I’ve always been puzzled by the term monkey wrench. Why monkey?

Does it really have anything to do with monkeys?

P. W. Canton, Connecticut Unlike the mechanical crane, which is named for its resemblance to the bird, the monkey wrench appears to have nothing to do with actual monkeys. While it is vaguely possible the tool was named for the slight resemblance of its business end to a monkey’s jaws, most popular theories hold that it was named for its inventor. One suggests a London blacksmith named Charles Moncke, but most theorists point in-

stead to inventive Americans, whose names are variously given as Monk, Monck, Monky, Monkey, Monckey, Moncay, Moneke and Munkey.

The most popular explanation traces monkey wrench to a New England mechanic named Monk, who is said to have invented the tool in 1856 while employed in Springfield, Massachusetts. The wrench was at first called by another name, but Monk’s co-workers soon began calling it a monkey wrench, and the name stuck. Our earliest evidence for this explanation, however, comes from an article in the Boston Transcript of Winter 1932-33, at an 80-year remove from the time of the invention. No one has yet produced any hard evidence substantiating the existence of the supposed Mr. Monk. We’re afraid the real story about monkey wrench may never be known.

IT TAKES A THIEF Dear Editor, I keep hearing the word thug used in connection with the uprisings in the Middle East. Can you tell me

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.

crossword solution

23. Kung Fu actor Philip 24. “Don’t ___ surprised!”

27. Martini’s partner 28. Rapper Tone ___ 29. ___-disant (self-proclaimed) 30. Dons clothes 32. Ocean condiment 35. Roswell crash victim, supposedly 36. The Three Musketeers protagonist 38. One of the Leeward Islands 40. Savings 43. Dangerous siren 45. Old World deer 46. Highly rated 48. Makes level 49. Emma of “Dynasty” 51. Psychedelic of the ‘60s 52. Splinter group 53. Down for the count 54. Part of P.R. 55. Club alternative 56. The Three Musketeers author 58. Crayola choice

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Thug, meaning “a brutal ruffian or assassin,” comes to English directly from the Hindi word thag, which means literally “thief.” The earliest known use of thug in English is dated 1810.

Originally a thug was a member of a confederacy of professional thieves and assassins in India. Their practice was to gain the confidence of travelers and, when an opportunity presented itself, slip a noose or handkerchief around the necks of their victims and strangle them.

These thugs worshipped the Hindu goddess of destruction, Kali, and possessed a jargon called “Ramasi” and signs by which members identified themselves to each other. The organization existed for some 300 years before it was finally quashed in the 19th century.

Send correspondence regarding Word Nook to: Language Research Service P.O. Box 281 Springfield, MA 01102 6

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59. Prefix meaning “ear” 60. Plant swelling 61. C oeur d’___, Idaho 62. Neighbor of Turk.

63. Explode 64. Bridges in movies

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14

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The Three musketeers ACROSS 1. Orbital point 6. City where the three musketeers met 11. Jim Croce’s “Time __ Bottle” 14. Conceited 15. Europe’s “boot” 16. Fallen space station 17. Takes a stab at 18. One of three Ottoman sultans 19. Green legume 20. Salt Lake City students 21. Sterile places: Abbr.

22. Composed

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where it comes from?

O. F. Williamsburg, Iowa

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27 30 34

36 38

31 35

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DOWN 55 1. De facto 59 2. Extroverted one of the three muske62 teers 3. Systematically arranged body of facts 4. Turner and Eisenhower 5. Lead-in for op 6. Actress Zadora 7. Oldest of the three musketeers 8. Strict disciplinarian 9. Seine sights 10. Old cartoonist Hoff 11. Deadlock 12. Big name in ratings 13. Musketeer who was brought up in a monastery

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33

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41 45

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22. Triangular ratio 24. Besets 25. Unrefined 26. Knight fight 27. Tells 31. Kidnapper’s demand 33. Coming 34. Catch some rays 37. Starting point 38. Newness 39. Kind of set 41. Classic Italian astronomer

47

51

53 56

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42. Hometown of 36-Across 43. Sappho’s home 44. Fraternal twin, in chemistry 47. Like an idol 50. Presidential name 53. African antelope 54. Somersault 56. She has a ball 57. Didn’t play 58. James Dean’s East of Eden role

L E S B O S A C T U A L

N O V E L T Y P O R T H O S

E R E C T O R

S I C K I E E S N C E A D V E N T

S P A I T Y A H S O A C T S S O I S A L T A R T A I S N L E I S A S K O D D U M A E D E M B U R S

S A T G E R M

R I A L M E R S O D R A N S O M

S I N Y M I D P E C A L R O S S E S S E L I E N A N T E G G E A A S L S R I C C O L O A L E N L L O Y

A D O R E D A R A M I S