By Alan Caruba
Founding member of the National Book Critics Circle
My Picks of the Month
Five Stars! If you want to learn how the U.S. got into the financial mess we’re in, I recommend you pick up a copy of Lost Decades: The Making of America’s Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery by Menzie D. Chinn and Jeffrey A. Frieden ($26.95, W.W. Norton). It is singularly one of the best books on the subject I have read as the authors present an interesting history of what is shaping up to be the Great Depression 2.0. Not only does the reader learn of the history of the Great Depression and the measures that emerged that turned what should have been a relatively short recession cascaded into a period between 1929, through the 1930s, and ending with the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the nation into World War Two. While we speak of globalization these days, the 1920s was a period in which the developed nations were closely linked financially with considerable lending and investment back and forth across the Atlantic. When the U.S. slid into the Depression, Europe followed soon after. A very nearly comparable scenario is playing out now. Then, as now, the remedies the political class put forth failed as we have seen more recently with the “stimulus” programs and other programs that have not stemmed increasing unemployment, foreclosures, and the misery that characterizes such crises. The book provides a clear, concise, and impartial explanation of how we got here.
Four Stars! The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival by Hirsh Goodman ($26.99, Public Affairs) looks at the conditions threatening Israel’s future, offering his view that it is demography, the growing Arab population within and beyond Israel that is the greatest challenge and one that requires the acceptance of a Palestinian state. There is a parity between Israel’s Arab and Jewish populations, but in a decade this will shift to the Arabs. This is one of the best books you will ever read on the history of Israel’s struggle to survive and the threats that exist today. Goodman is a longtime journalist who now holds a senior research position at the Institute for National Security Studies at the University of Tel Aviv. All around the Middle East nations are in upheaval and everyone awaits the outcome of the turmoil in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere. Achieving peace with the Palestinians may be difficult, he argues, but holds the key to the future. Anyone concerned with the welfare and future of Israel will find his analysis of great interest. The Ayatollahs’ Democracy: An Iranian Challenge ($15.95, W.W. Norton, softcover) by Hooman Majd provides valuable insights to Iranian politics, controlled by a small group of fanatical Islamists intent on achieving Middle East hegemony and, of course, nuclear weapons parity while opening threatening Israel with annihilation. Majd, a former Iranian, a journalist, spells out what has occurred since the ayatollahs took control of Iran in 1979 and how they use draconian methods to stay in power. While our concerns have turned inward toward our own economic survival, we need to remain alert to external threats and both Iran and China are at the top of the list these days.
Four Stars! A second revolution of sorts occurred in the 1950’s and 60’s when the Civil Rights movement was instrumental in ending segregation and the Jim Crow oppression of Blacks in the South. It was so successful that, by 2008, Americans elected their first Black President. Even so, the Black population in America has been outpaced by every other minority and suffers from a pathology that has destroyed its family structure and rendered much of its youth ignorant and unskilled with a large portion of its men incarcerated. Dr. Seth A. Forman, a social scientist who teaches government and public policy at Stony Brook University, has just had American Obsession: Race and Conflict in the Age of Obama published ($17.95, Booklocker.com, softcover). I heartily recommend it for the manner in which the author links facts, history, and sociology together to render a portrait of what the Black community is doing to itself, how it is influencing the politics and social policies of our times, and how Whites, who made great strides in erasing the ills of the past, are reacting at both the local and national level. Its examination of President Obama’s racial identification and adoption of black liberation theology and politics is masterful. Those interested in politics will enjoy his examination of the 2008 election. In many ways this is a courageous book for the truths it addresses that hinder Black assimilation into the larger society and its values. It comes as America’s first Black President begins a campaign to be reelected. His polling numbers are all plummeting. The 2012 election is likely to be a massive rejection of Obama and the Democratic Party.
Also in the area of policy, I recommend David H. Brown’s Full Body Scam: The Naked View of Current Airport Security ($14.95, Authorhouse, softcover). What Brown doesn’t know about aviation and air travel is probably not worth knowing. As far back as the late 1960s, Brown was the press officer for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Task Force on the Deterrence of Air Piracy. He was a response to a spate of airline skyjackings to Cuba. After 9/11 an understandable panic set in because three airliners were used to perpetrate it. The problem was the response in the form of the Transportation Safety Administration and its insane practice of treating 100% of all travelers, including babies and elderly invalids, as potential terrorists. Brown has written books on this topic heretofore and has combined two of them into this new look that raises serious questions about the erosion of Constitution rights to privacy Americans used to take for granted. I am happy to recommend this book to anyone with an interest or concern about the way the TSA has turned air travel into a very unpleasant experience for everyone without once having actually found a terrorist waiting for a pat down or a body scan.
It’s no secret that I love reading history and occasionally a book comes along that provides an unusual insight beyond the standard telling of a given event. Signing Their Rights Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the United States Constitution ($19.95, Quirk Books) is the work of Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese who previously introduced us to the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and their fates. Now they have turned their attention to the 39 men who met in the summer of 1787 to create the Constitution and to sign their names to it. Though rarely taught in our schools, the Constitution, written behind closed doors in Philadelphia, was a response, eleven years after the Revolution, to save the new nation from the chaos of the former Articles of Confederation. The nation was facing political collapse, citizens feared a strong central government, banks were issuing their own currencies, and out of that came the oldest living constitution in the world! The book chronicles how these men put aside their personal gain for the greater good of the nation, arrived at compromises, and combined the knowledge of legal scholars, those who had served in war, and were just as quirky and flawed as elected officials today. It is a truly fascinating story that puts their achievement in perspective.
Does it say something about a society in which a creature called a “metrosexual” has emerged? Most certainly, Hollywood keeps churning out films with cartoon super heroes that make men look puny by comparison. An entertaining and useful new book, Manskills: How to Avoid Embarrassing Yourself and Impress Everyone Else by Chris Peterson ($15.99, Creative Publishing International, distributed by Quayside Publishing Group softcover) provides short, page to page instructions on things like how to catch a fish without a rod and reel, iron a dress shirt, and be a great host. In truth, this would be a great gift for young men in high school or college, as well as older men who never learned fundamental skills from jumping a dead battery to selecting the best steak. Indeed, for the “foodies” among us (and I most certainly am one) there’s a delightful book by Albert Jack, What Caesar Did For My Salad: The Curious Stories Behind Our Favorite Foods ($18.00, Perigee, Berkley Publishing Group). You will be the hit of any dinner party as you explain that the word “salary” comes from the practice of paying Roman soldiers in salt. It is also why we often say someone is worth his salt. Black pepper has been in use for seven thousand years. I have a cousin who loves Cob Salad, but I bet he doesn’t know it was invented by Robert H. Cobb, founder of the famed Brown Derby restaurant chains in Los Angeles. He made it from whatever he found in the refrigerator for Sidney Grauman, owner of the Chinese Theatre, who loved it and began ordering it to a point where it caught on and became part of the menu. The book is filled with the history of foods and makes for great reading.
It is no secret that the nation’s educational system has been so dumbed down since around the 1960s that the kids passing through are being fed a diet of diversity, sex education, and distorted history, among other ills. Ron Clark was named America’s teacher of the year by Disney and deemed phenomenal by Oprah. His Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta has been visited by more than 10,000 teachers from around the world to learn how to improve education. He’s written The End of Molasses Classes: Getting Our Kids Unstuck ($23.00, Touchstone, a division of Simon and Schuster) offering real solutions for parents and teachers in which he spells out his recommendations for parents who want to instill the right attitudes and skills in their children from an early age and for teachers who need strategies to help every students achieve success in school. He also has advice for communities as to what they can do. This is a man on a mission and I recommend this book to one and all. It’s clear to anyone who was educated long ago when mastery of the English language was an essential part of learning that entire generations are deficient.
Those of my generation grew up enjoying Ripley’s Believe It or Not, a syndicated newspaper column that was filled with oddities. The Ripley’s empire has recently published Ripley’s Believe It or Not: Strikingly True ($28.95, Ripley Publishing), a collection of incredible and bizarre facts, stories, interviews, lists, and features that adds up to hours of entertaining reading. Begun in 2004, this annual reference has a million copies worldwide in circulation and, in 2010, made it to The Wall Street Journal bestseller list. It is just page after page, lavishly illustrated, that provide the kind of diversion that only a book can. Keep it handy at bedside or in the bathroom to pass the time.
Lastly, this month marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and it is to be expected that some publisher would put out a book to do so. Lyons Press has published 9/11: The World Speaks ($24.95) offering a selection of the cards expressing the thoughts of some of the two million people who visited the World Trade Center Visitor Center. Regrettably, they are mostly rather banal and predictable. I wish I could say it was inspiring, but it is not.
Memoirs, Biographies, Real People
Five Stars! Do you know someone who is a huge fan of Judy Garland? A big coffee table book, Judy: A Legendary Film Career by John Fricke ($30.00, Running Press) will be a birthday or holiday gift that will dazzle them. This year marks the 75th anniversary of her film debut, as well as other achievements that made her a superstar for the generations that flocked to her films and live performances. Fricke is the preeminent Garland historian and tells her story in unprecedented detail, augmented by more than 500 photos and illustrations. This has got to be the ultimate Garland book for all the information it contains. From 1936 to 1963, she provided memorable performances, singing, dancing and acting. Her life and career left an indelible imprint on her era. She was a great entertainer and now she has a book that matches her talents.
Before there was Martin Luther King Jr., there was Martin Luther King Sr., a driving force for civil rights in Atlanta from the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Murray A. Silver, an attorney, has written Daddy King and Me: Memories of the Forgotten Father of the Civil Rights Movement ($29/95, Continental Shelf Publishing, Savannah, GA), a slim memoir that encompasses the author’s experience at the heart of the civil rights movement, aiding not just King Jr., but all the key players in that great struggle of the 1950s and 60s. Especially close to King Sr., he was an eye witness to the events and personalities. His memoir is especially useful for anyone interested in that period of U.S. history. It is a warm, fact-filled selection of the highlights of that period and one that takes the reader behind the veil of history into the homes of his family and Dr. King Sr’s. Since his wife and Coretta Scott King shared a birthday, they celebrated together, but this book is particularly interesting for the depth of emotional attachment it reveals that kept the various participants strong in periods of shared tragedy. The power of Daddy King’s faith and his capacity for love was the platform from which his son led a revolution.
Coming in October is Paul Johnson’s short biography of Socrates ($25.95, Viking) taking the reader back to the fifth century B.C. in Athens, demonstrating how his thoughts still shape our actions, our understanding of body and soul, and providing a portrait of a middle class citizen of that nation-state whose philosophy shaped the thoughts of generations that followed. Mary Bowman-Kruhm has written a biography of anthropologist, Margaret Mead ($17.00, Prometheus Books, softcover) who came to prominence when her book “Coming of Age in Samoa” was published in 1928, swiftly becoming a bestseller. For the next five decades, she became the public face of anthropology in the U.S., generating both acclaim and controversy. She had a career at the American Museum of Natural History, three marriages, and at one time came to the aid of the American Anthropological Association when it was in financial straits. She encouraged a whole generation of anthropologists. The author has written more than thirty books for children and young adults, but the book will serve the interest of older readers. Just out this month is Einstein On the Road by Josef Eisinger ($25.00, Prometheus Books) that tells the story of how Albert Einstein, at the height of his fame traveled around the world between 1922 and 1933. At that point, the Nazi takeover of Germany caused him to leave for sanctuary in Princeton, NJ, where he became an American citizen as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein kept notes of his observations as he traveled to places such as Japan, Spain, the British mandate of Palestine that would become the state of Israel, and to America, meeting with royalty, presidents, movie stars, and the greatest scientists and physicists of his era. Einstein was interested the advances, the arts and the culture of his day. Anyone interested in Einstein and the history of his times will find this a very enjoyable read.
The human side of the practice of medicine is revealed in The Man Who Lived in an Eggcup: A Memoir of Triumph and Self-Destruction by Dr. John Camel, MD ($14.95, Bascom Hill Publishing Group, softcover). The publisher describes it, saying, “In the corridors of every hospital lurk tales of triumph and tragedy, lives won and lost to the world of medicine. But the complexity of the human psyche cannot be stripped down to mere science. Indeed, it’s in this environment—where people remain at their most vulnerable—that the human condition manifests itself the strongest.” This is a look behind the scenes in hospitals where life can hang in the balance and when diagnosis, success and failure, includes the human component of emotions brought on by tragedy. Tragedy involving a mentally ill mother is the theme of The Memory Palace: A Memoir by Mira Bartok ($15.00, Free Press, softcover) “Even now, when the phone rings late at night, I think it’s her. I stumble out of bed ready for the worst. The last time my mother called it was in 1990. I was thirty-one and living in Chicago. She said if I didn’t come home right away she’d kill herself.” Norma Bartok was a piano prodigy in her youth, but a severe case of schizophrenia created a hellish upbringing for Mira and her sister. To survive, the decided to stay away and, for 17 years, her contact was through letters to a post office box so her mother could not find her. The author of 28 books for children, this memoir will interest anyone who has a family member suffering from this mental illness. It debuted to an avalanche of much deserved praise.
In 1946, Tomas Castellano, age 17, set sail from Franco’s fascist rule in Spain. Without telling them of his plans, he had to leave his family behind, but his desire for freedom was so great that he stole a sailboat and set sail across the Atlantic for America. The story is told in Journey ($13.40, Authorhouse.com, softcover) by his son, Stephen Mateo. It took 90 days to make the journey and a lifetime for the story to unfold. It is filled with many interesting people who helped Tomas fulfill his dream and who became a part of his life. It was not until 1955 that he was able to return to Spain and visit with the family he had left behind. In America he would marry and raise a family in freedom. It’s too easy for a story like this to slip by unnoted, but this one deserves a wide readership.
Life upon the ocean waves and the search for the treasure of sunken ships below is the subject of Capt. Syd Jones’ account, Atocha Treasure Adventures: Sweat of the Sun, Tears of the Moon: A True Story ($25.00, autographed copy, order from www.atochatreasureadventures.com, softcover). It presents three individual story lines that eventually come together as it tells the story of Treasure Salvors, Inc’s occasionally desperate and often self-destructive search for shipwrecked Spanish treasure galleon riches. The story is told through the experiences of the actual people and events, some reaching back four hundred years ago, in such a way the reader gets to experience the thrills and disappointments of today’s real treasure hunters with all the human elements of adventure, romance, tragedy, betrayal, greed, and uncommon optimism involved in finding the richest treasure galleons ever, as told by one of its participants.
I knew nothing of the Boyce-Sneed feud until I read Vengeance is Mine: The Scandalous Love Triangle that Triggered the Boyce-Sneed Feud by Bill Neal ($24.95, University of North Texas Press). It became a legend in West Texas when it erupted in bloodshed in 1912. Almost a half century later, the author has pieced together the elements of the story that featured Lena Snyder Sneed, a high spirited, headstrong wife; Al Boyce, Jr., Lena’s reckless, romantic lover; and John Beal Sneed, Lena’s arrogant and vindictive husband who responded to her plea for a divorce by having her locked up in an insane asylum. When Al rescued Lena from the asylum, the chase was on as the lovers fled to Canada. Sneed would assassinate Al’s father and later Boyce. He was twice acquitted of murder. It was a crime of passion and trials that were dramatic for the tactics used. It is great social history.
Marriage, Parenting Skills
Marriage is the greatest leap of faith anyone can make and it behooves those who plan to get married to know how to avoid one that will turn out badly. Psychotherapist Isabelle Fox, PhD, and attorney Robert M. Fox, have written The Prospective Spouse Checklist: Evaluating Your Potential Partner ($14.95, New Horizon Press, softcover) that is officially due out in October. The authors provide a rational approach to evaluating the person in order to avoid emotion-driven and unwise marriages. This is a good idea given the high rate of divorce in America and the too-frequent emotional and other damage involved. The book provides 35 keys to evaluate including ten red-flag warning signs. I would not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone contemplating marriage.
After marriage (and sometimes without) come children. Annie Murphy Paul has written Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our lives ($15.00, Free Press, softcover). Childbearing has long been the subject of various myths and advice. The author sorts it out in ways that make this book an absolute must-read for expectant mothers and those who care about them. The mysteries of pre-natal development are explored in ways that make the experience less stressful and can lead to a successful, healthy birth. The Hour that Matters Most: The Surprising Power of the Family Meal by Les and Leslie Parrott. Psychologists, with Stephanie Allen and Tina Kuna ($15.99, Tyndale House, softcover) particularly resonated with me because, in my family, the evening dinner always began at 5 PM and, since my Mother was a teacher of gourmet cooking, it was always a special treat. More importantly, it was an opportunity for my older brother, myself and my parents to exchange information that was useful to them and to us. It created a strong bond, built on good food, camaraderie, and love. If dinner hour at your home is a scattershot affair, you need to read this book and benefit from it. Keeping Your Child in Mind by Dr. Claudia M. Gold, MD, ($15.00, Da Capo Press, softcover) focuses more on “what to be” as a parent, as opposed to “what to do” with children. A pediatric physician, the author bring a lot of experience and knowledge that helps the reader understand the world from the child’s perspective so that various behavior problems can quickly and effectively be addressed while controlling one’s own strong emotions. The book looks at various ages and stages of development, imparting excellent advice that will make the job of parenting much easier.
Bullying has become a major problem at schools and this particularly affects teenagers. Every parent wants to help their bullied teenager and Hey, Back Off: Tips for Stopping Teen Harassment by Jennie Withers with Phyllis Hendrickson, M.Ed. ($14.95, New Horizon Press, softcover) is filled with advice that provides tens and parents the proven tools, tips and strategies to stop bullying as well as ways to prevent them from becoming bullies. In an age of cell phones, texting, and social networks like Facebook, there has been a rise in this behavior and it behooves all concerned parents to learn what to do.
Kid’s Books
How was it that early pioneers on isolated farms or in towns where one school taught all ages were able to teach an entire generation or two of children how to read and do their sums when today’s schools often pass them through, totally illiterate, to graduation? And what role do parent’s play in encouraging youngsters to acquire a love of reading? Given the vast quantity of new and existing books for younger readers, including pre-schoolers, there is no excuse for this.
One of my favorite publishing houses for younger readers is American Girl and it is, of course, directed at girls and their particular interests. They have a number of excellent new books for the autumn. Among them are Stand Up for Yourself Journal ($9.95) that offers quizzes and questions to help girls stand strong against bullying. Feeling Great: A Girl’s Guide to Fitness, Friends & Fun ($8.95) discusses various strength exercises, yoga poses, and games for girls to explore for a healthier lifestyle. These girls, ages 7 to 10, will also enjoy A Crafty Girl’s Planner ($9.95) that is filled with ideas of things to make and do that are far more fun than just staring at the television. In a similar fashion Just Grandma and Me ($10,95) offers lots of ideas that girls can do with their grandmothers to create a bond and memories that will last a lifetime. The reader age 8 to 11 will enjoy the Innerstar University series that includes A Surprise Find and Dive Right In ($8.95 each) that explore sharing and how to accept someone more talented or skilled into your life. Growing up is filled with questions and challenges and A Smart Girl’s Guide to Knowing What to Say: Finding the Words to Fit Any Situation ($9.95) is a great way to prepare a girl to deal with all kinds of situations from asking a teacher for help to standing up to a bully.
Another favorite children’s book house I like is Kids Can Press. They, too, have a raft of new books for kids. Reaching by Judy Ann Sadler and illustrated by Susan Mitchell ($16.95) uses rhyming verse to describe a sunny afternoon with the family as a baby experiences new things and is helped in many ways. A young child with a new baby in the family would benefit greatly from having this read or, as a early reader, reading it on their own. Just for fun, there’s Binky Under Pressure by Ashley Spires ($16.95), part of a popular series about a cat. Told largely through cartoons, it follows his adventures adjusting to another cat in the house and is very funny. Another cartoon book is Big City Otto: Elephants Never Forget by the prolific and talented Bill Slavin ($16.95) who writes and illustrates his books. Otto has a good memory and cannot stop thinking about his long lost friend, Georgie, a chimp, snatched from the jungle. With his parrot pal, Crackers, they set off for America to find him and thus begins a hilarious story for the younger reader, Cartoons are also the format for Luz Sees the Light by Claudia Davila ($16.95) that explores when a blackout occurs and her mother experiences financial difficulties, introducing Luz and the reader to a future with less of everything. Finally, there’s Space Tourism for the Machines of the Future series. Written by Peter McMahon and illustrated by Andy Mora, it not only discusses future space flight, but offers some fun projects to demonstrate things like gravity and propulsion for those ages 8 to 12.
From Tanglewood Books comes Ashlee Fletcher’s first book for children, My Dog, My Cat ($13.95) that’s perfect for the earliest readers, preschoolers or those just learning their ABCs and words as it explores the pet lovers’ views of whether dogs or cats are their preferred pet. It is very simple and direct with illustrations by the author that any child will enjoy. From Reader’s Digest came two books for youngsters, Write (Or Is That ‘Right’?) Every Time by Lottie Stride ($9.95) and My Grammar and I…Or Should That Be Me? How to Speak and Write It Right by Caroline Taggart and J.A. Wines ($14.95) that take the mystery out of writing and speaking correctly and well. Perhaps no other two skills separate winners from losers in this society and these two books would be a terrific help to so many students passing through elementary and high schools these days without grasping the importance of the many elements of the language to determine sentence structure and of grammar, the proper way of speaking and writing.
Love jazz? Want to pass that love along to your children? Then pick up a copy of Anna Harwell Celenza’s wonderful book, Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite ($19.95, Charlesbridge, Watertown, MA), illustrated by Don Tate and it includes a CD recording! Together with his friend, Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington composed, orchestrated, and recorded some of the greatest jazz classics. When offered a recording contract and told he could do anything he wanted, Strayhorn, a classically trained musician, playfully suggested he do a version of the Nutcracker Suite and soon enough the Sugar Plum Fairy became the Sugar Rum Cherry! This one is a keeper!
Novels, Novels, Novels
Though it may be hard to believe, I receive one or two emails daily from authors who have published their own books. This trend has been increasing over the years and, in particular, for novels. It is understandable that many do not wish to put themselves through the meat grinder process involved. Unspoken in this rush to self-publish, however, is the fact that most will not likely sell any copies, even if they turn them into e-books. The market place is over-saturated and one good way to know if a novel has any merit whatever is whether a mainstream publisher, large or small, has published it.
The popularity of the new film version of Planet of the Apes may well be reflected in J.E. Fishman’s new novel, Primacy ($24.95, Verbitrage). The novel takes readers from New York’s Central Park to the jungles of the Congo River where researcher Liane Vinson discovers that her bonobo Bea has begun to communicate to other bonobos in a decipherable language. She is a monkey Liane had once performed chemical and genetic testing, but Bea knows secrets that must never see the light of day. Major ethical questions arise. Does she have a memory? Can she decipher human language? The author raises questions about the experimentation on animals, vertebrates, but the reader needs to also know that major medical and pharmaceutical breakthroughs have resulted from such science. Suffice to say that animal rights advocates will love this book and there’s enough suspenseful action to please the general reader. A very different story is told in Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side ($24.95, Viking) just out this month. The narrator is 81-year-old Lilly Bere. As a teenager Lilly and her fiancé, Tadg Bere, were forced to flee Ireland under threat of death from the IRA. They came to America where they settle in Chicago where Tadg is brutally murdered. Lilly moves to Cleveland where she marries, finds happiness, enduring the Depression and World War II. Becoming pregnant at 43, her husband mysteriously disappears and Lilly moves to Washington, DC where she finds work as a cook for a wealthy family and raises her son. This novel is just one tragedy upon another as Lilly strives to survive against the odds.
Wunderkind by Nikolai Grozni ($24.00, Free Press) is drawn from the author’s life as a piano prodigy growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Sofia, Bulgaria. As a teenager he wins a competition that gives him the opportunity to stay with a welcoming Italian host-family during which he becomes fully aware of the oppression under a communist government’s social and psychic dictatorship. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the author left for the United States where he studied jazz and composition. For a look at life under communism, this book provides many insights, enough to make the reader value the freedoms we take for granted in America. World War Two is the background for Klara by Joseph Leary ($14.95, Dog Ear Publishing, softcover). Set in the 1970s America, it is a look at the thousands of Polish, Ukrainian and other residents of Chicago’s ethnic enclaves, many of whom escaped the horrors in their homelands during World War Two. A seemingly kind Ukrainian carpenter, a single parent raising his young daughter, comes under suspicion of having been a truck driver who transported children to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. Klara’s memories of her escape are beginning to invade her dreams. The novel looks at the way decent, hard-working people who had experienced unfathomable horrors tried to forget a past that confronts them years later and how a local parish becomes the center for that past. It is a powerful story.
Heaps of softcover novels stack up each month. Here is a selection from among them.
Winner of the prestigious Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award, The Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger ($15.00, Touchstone-Simon and Schuster) marks the author’s American debut novel. Based on the real lives of famed traveler, Lady Duff Gordon and her maid, the novel takes the reader on a journey from the high society of Victorian England to the uncharted far reaches of Egypt’s Nile Valley. A bout of tuberculosis causes the move to a drier climate. In Cairo, she and her maid, Sally Naldrett, are joined by Omar as a servant and guide as they travel to Luxor. Lady Duff goes native, begins language lessons, and throws herself into weekly salons with local community leaders. Sally finds romance and, when she asks for more freedom than her status permits, she is brutally reminded that she is mistress of nothing. This is a great read. The Price of Guilt by Patrick M. Garry ($17.50, Kenric Books) marks the sixth or seventh novel this author has written. It is a modern morality tale with a suspenseful plot that explores the destructiveness of misguided guilt. It is told as a flashback as Thomas Walsh sits in a jail cell. An accident that occurred when he was age 12, one that left a classmate blind and orphaned has plagued Walsh. Years later as a prominent lawyer, though reeling from a recent political scandal and mired in marital problems, Walsh seeks out his childhood friend only to become drawn into events that leave him wondering who was really the blind one. I previously reviewed Garry’s “A Bomb Shelter Romance”, and he continues to demonstrate he is one of America’s best unknown novelists!
The British seem to have a special gene in the DNA when it comes to novels, both serious and fanciful. Helen Smith is testimony to this with her new novel, Alison Wonderland ($13.99, Amazon Encore) which is set in today’s London. After discovering her husband has been unfaithful, 20-something Alison divorces him and joins an all-female detective agency. Though exciting and fulfilling at first, Alison grows bored by the routine of catching cheating spouses. It convinces her not to wait around for “Mr. Wonderful.” Then she is put on an odd case involving genetic testing and animal mistreatment. Suffice to say it is filled with memorable characters as Alison and her friend Taron become involved with some scary folks, their evil projects, and the prospect of new romance. Two Amazon Encore novels take the reader to places in America rarely visited. The Dummy Line by Bobby Cole ($13.95) is a white-knuckle ride into the backwoods of Alabama where a man must either kill or watch his only daughter be killed. What should have been a spring evening spent shooting pool with his tomboyish, clever daughter turns into a life and death nightmare in which Jake Crosby must put his hunter’s and backwoods skills to work in a cat-and-mouse thriller. In Johnny Shaw’s Dove Season($13.95) Jimmy Veecher heads home to the Imperial Valley, a hotbed for Mexican border crossings to visit his ailing father Big Jake one last time. When asked to locate a Mexican prostitute, Yolanda, he is joined by his friend Bobby Maves, to fulfill his father’s request to bring her to him. Mission performed, he wakes up days later with a huge hangover to discover that Yolanda’s body has been found floating at the bottom of a cistern. It gets very busy for Jimmy after that and I will not spoil the fun with more details.
That’s it for September! Tell your book loving friends and family members about Bookviews.com and come back in October for more news about the latest in non-fiction and fiction books hot off the presses.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Bookviews - August 2011
By Alan Caruba
Founding Member of the National Book Critics Circle
My Picks of the Month
Occasionally one receives a book for review that is simply astonishing for its lack of candor and common sense. Clean Energy Nation by Rep. Jerry McNerney, PhD, and Martin Cheek ($27.95, Amacom) is subtitled “Freeing America from the tyranny of fossil fuels.” What tyranny is McNerney talking about? The entire world runs on coal, oil, and natural gas. All transportation depends on gasoline or diesel. Fifty percent of all the electricity produced in the U.S. depends on coal and the U.S. is often described as the Saudi Arabia of coal because we have such vast reserves of it. We also have over an estimated trillion worth of untapped barrels of oil. To argue that this should be abandoned in favor of solar, wind, or biofuels energy, none of whose producers would exist without large government subsidies backed up by mandates for their use is a kind of willful ignorance or insanity.. Suffice to say, this is an extraordinarily silly book.
America is often called a Christian nation based on its historical roots and majority population of Christians, so one can only imagine what a chilly reception The End of Christianity, edited by John W. Loftus, ($11.99, Prometheus Books, softcover) will receive. Loftus is a former minister and now recognized as a leading spokesperson for atheism. The contributors to this book are also noted atheists. What makes the book interesting, however, is its historical review of how Christianity came into being, what religious beliefs preceded it in the ancient world, and how, theologically, it challenges believers to accept some extraordinary beliefs on pure faith. This book is not some screed decrying Christianity, but rather a studied effort to understand its roots, its spread, and the assertions on which it is based. As such, it makes for some very interesting reading. We all need our beliefs challenged on occasion to determine the strength of one’s faith. By contrast, Beginner’s Grace: Bringing Prayer to Life by Kate Braestrup ($15.00, Free Press, softcover) offers practical suggestions on how to incorporate prayer into one’s life for all occasions and situations, as well as the role that parents can play in instructing children in faith. A chaplain to the Maine Warden Service that engages in search-and-rescue, the author shares her experiences and insights.
There are currently more than 6,000 languages spoken around the world and yet one can say “hello” anywhere and be understood. The English language is the lingua franca of the world, required for everything from business and science, diplomacy and education, and entertainment. In China, more people speak English than in America as it taught in its schools to prepare Chinese to go out into the wider world. The English is Coming! How One Language is Sweeping the World by Leslie Dunton-Downer ($14.00, Touchstone, softcover) takes the reader on a journey across commerce and culture, war and peace, to show how everyday English words have become a shared piece of understanding and the way people around the world communicate with one another. This is a wonderful book for anyone who loves words and loves the language that has gone global.
Compared with the work involved in writing a book, fiction or nonfiction, getting it published is often as arduous and difficult as task. Literary history is filled with now famous writers being rejected over and over again. Mike Nappa has written 77 Reasons Why Your Book was Rejected (and how to make sure it won’t happen again!) ($14.99, Sourcebooks, softcover). It is often brutally honest, but this is made more palatable by the humor he brings to this awful task. A literary agent, Nappa knows most of the reasons given for rejection as well as the ones never expressed. The fact is that, with the invention of the computer, just about everyone has become convinced they can and should write a book. In addition, there are many affordable outlets that will publish it for you, for a fee. With thousands of book proposals flooding agents and editors, it would be useful for the aspiring writer or one who has been rejected to know why one’s book simply cannot find a publisher. I suspect Nappa grew tired of explaining over and over again why a book was rejected. Now he need only hand them his new book and, if you have a book you want published, you should read it!
While wandering the aisles of the Book Expo, I came across Urban Farming: Sustainable City Living in Your Backyard, in your Community, and in the World ($24.95, Bowtie Press, softcover) by Thomas J. Fox. I confess I am not enamored of all the tree-hugger talk of sustainability because it often masks an agenda to control people’s lives, but this book offers a lot of information about how to grow healthy vegetables and fruits in an urban setting. It is a practical guide filled with how-to advice, enhanced by many handsome full-color photos. Our little backyard in New Jersey always had space set aside where Mother would plant a variety of items that graced our dinner plates with fresh vegetables throughout the spring, summer, and into early fall.
Dog owners are a special breed—no pun intended—and some write wonderful books about their furry companions. Stanley Coren has established himself as an expert with two previous books on “How Dogs Think” and “How to Speak Dog.” His latest is a delightful memoir, Born to Bark: My Adventures with an Irrepresible and Unforgettable Dog ($16.00, Free Press, softcover). Coren writes “For Christmas the woman who would become my wife bought me a dog—a little terrier. The next year her Christmas gift to me was a shotgun. Most of the people in my family believe that the two gifts were not unrelated.” The dog was Flint and this psychologist’s memoir will provide lots of laughter as he relates his experience with an extraordinary, willful pooch and those that had preceded it.
Getting Down to Business (Books)
Those in the field of marketing are always searching for answers to why we purchase what we purchase. In interesting book will help answer that question. The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature by Gad Saad ($25.00, Prometheus Books) answers what it is that all successful fast-food restaurants have in common. Why women are more likely to be compulsive shoppers than men, but men more likely to become addicted to pornography. How the fashion industry plays on our innate need to belong and many other questions that involve the underlying evolutionary basis for most of our consumer behavior. While culture is important, says Dr. Saad, a professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, there are deeper forces at work in our psyche that range from survival to reproduction to kin selection. All of which makes this a very interesting book to read for any reason whatever. In a somewhat similar fashion Glued to Games: How Video Games Draw Us in and Hold Us Spellbound by Scott Rigby and Richard M. Ryan ($34.95, Praeger) explores the heart of gaming’s powerful psychological and emotional allure. Indeed, it is no longer just kids and teens who are hooked on them, but adults as well. Parents, researchers, and those who love these games will find this book of interest, particularly if there’s someone in the family or a friend who is addicted to them. Both authors come to the subject with backgrounds in psychology and related research, so this is a serious book about an entertaining topic.
It’s a topic that politicians, business executives, celebrities, and many others find of great interest, Elements of Influence: The Art of Getting Others to Follow Your Lead ($26.00, Amacom). Terry R. Bacon says it is not some kind of magic power, but rather something that we do all the time whenever we want someone to do something, to believe something, to agree with us or to behave differently. While it is not possible to influence anyone to do anything, it is possible to develop the skills necessary and the author explains how influence really actually works, ethically, consensually, and productively, in business, in everyday life, and in a world of cultural diversity. It does, however, require “a great deal of adaptability, perceptiveness, and insight into other people” says the author. Backed by decades of research, I have no doubt that this book would prove useful to anyone seeking to improve their ability to influence those around them. In the world of business, the best result is leadership.
On a lighter level there’s Dumbemployed: Hilariously Dumb and Sadly True Stories About Jobs Like Yours by Phil Edwards and Matt Kraft ($13.00, Running Press, softcover) that is filled with more than 800 short paragraphs that demonstrate you are not alone if your workplace sometimes resembles a madhouse. Divided into five chapters, bosses, customers, just dumb, overtime and weird shift, it is a chronicle of every workplace misery you could imagine, plus some you can’t. These short takes will make you laugh (or groan) from page to page.
Let’s Get Cooking
Cookbooks come in all sizes and varieties, but one especially good idea is one that comes in a five-ringed binder that permits the cook to lay it flat on the counter top and, when you add in tabbed sections, the ease of use is matched by the quality of its recipes. This is the case of the Taste of Home Baking: All-New Edition ($29.95, Taste of Home Books) that is officially due out this September. It offers 786 recipes that are accompanied by more than 730 color photos in 510 pages. This is a hefty book that is likely to serve its user for a lifetime with its comprehensive collection of recipes on just about every kind of baked item from cakes to breads and everything in between. It would make an ideal gift for the newly married homemaker who wants to bake but does not want to deal with often daunting recipes. Instead, if offers all the tips and advice one could want for a beginner, but plenty of recipes for the most advanced baker.
Put your order in now to get your copy of All About Roasting by Molly Stevens ($35.00, W.W. Norton) due in the bookstores in November. If I could only eat food prepared in one fashion, it would be “roasted” because it brings out the taste of meats. The author describes when to use high, moderate or low heat to get the best results in juicy, well-seared meats, caramelized drippings, and concentrated flavors. There are 150 recipes that include beef, lamb, pork and poultry, as well as herb-roasted shrimp and basted broccoli. Suffice to say this is a book for anyone who is really serious about producing meals that will linger in the memory of family and guests for years after. The author has won both the James Beard and IACP cookbook awards, and is a contributing editor at Fine Cooking magazine. It will become a treasured reference and guide on the bookshelves of those who purchase it.
From Da Capo Press come two food-oriented books, two of which are devoted to the vegan lifestyle. Just out in July is Vegan for Life: Everything You Need to Know to be Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet by Jack Norris, RD, and Virginia Messina, MPH, RD ($17.00, softcover) and Sinfully Vegan: More than 160 Decadent Desserts to Satisfy Every Sweet Tooth by Lois Dieterly ($18.00, softcover). The former book addresses how difficult it is to give up meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and all other animal-derived ingredients and it acknowledges that “many new vegans can suddenly find themselves suffering from deficiencies of fundamental nutrients like protein, calcium, and iron.” That a warning sign worth considering insofar as the human body, over millennia is designed and intended to eat meat. There are teeth in everyone’s mouth whose purpose is to chew meat. For those who, for whatever reason, intend to become vegans, this book will be helpful, but I personally do not recommend the vegan diet. As for vegan desserts, you will find plenty in the latter book.
Women have their special needs and an interesting book, Eat to Defeat Menopause: The Essential Nutrition Guide for a Healthy Midlife---with more than 130 Recipes ($19.00, Lifelong Books, softcover) by Karen Giblin and Mache Seibel,.MD. The midlife “change” is subject to myths, uncertainties, and some trepidation. It makes sense that what one eats can have good or bad effects on the body’s changing chemistry. The good news is that black bean and rice salads, lobster and duck chow mein, and chocolate mouse pie are among the many ways to satisfy every craving or mood swing. You will learn why eating foods that contain phytoestrogens, such as soy and garlic, combat hot flashes, mood swings are stabilized by eating omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin B. There is a lot of excellent and interesting dietary information in this food.
I have seen so many diet books over the years that I am wary of most, but Timothy S. Harlan, MD, has penned Just Tell Me What to Eat! The Delicious 6-Week Loss Plan for the Real World ($25.00, Da Capo Press). It addresses the fact that there are an estimated 145 million Americans, aged 25 and up, who are overweight. After hearing from patients complain how confused they were by all the various diet plans, he decided to write one of his own. It is not a fad diet, nor a typical diet plan because it not only tells the reader what to eat, but why to eat it. The recipes reflect a variety of cuisines from Italian and French to Spanish and American. It even discusses convenience food alternatives when there isn’t time to prepare a meal. It is an informed and informative book about dieting that should prove helpful to take its advice and stick to it.
Science & Math Stuff
As someone who has difficulty with sums, I am in awe of those who can do them in their head and actually think math is fun! For them, there’s Here’s Looking at Euclid by Alex Bellos ($15.00, Free Press, softcover) “From counting ants to games of chance, an awe-inspiring journey through the world of numbers”, says the subtitle. The book is full of interesting information such as the fact that numbers of not innate to humans, but came into use about 8,000 years ago. There’s a tribe in the Amazon that can only count to five. Apparently they need one hand to count the fingers on the other. Who knows? If you love numbers, odds are you will enjoy this book. Even more arcane is The Wave Watcher’s Companion by Gavin Pretor-Pinney ($15.00, Perigee, softcover) that will appeal to anyone who has wondered about the motions we call waves, from brain waves to sound waves, infrared waves, to all manner of comparable patterns that appear to have a similarity. This book isn’t just for those into science, but also natures, history, and even surfing.
There has been controversy about the theory of evolution since Charles Darwin put it forth and, indeed, a friend of mine, Robert W. Felix, disputes it in his book “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps” that correlates such phenomenon with mass extinctions and the sudden emergence of new species. The Fact of Evolution by Cameron M. Smith ($18.00, Prometheus Books, softcover) asserts that evolution is, well, a fact. He offers all manner of real-world examples to show that not only does it happen, but that it must happen. Suffice to say this is some very deep scientific writing about things such as “phyletic gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium.” Don’t ask me what any of that means. You will have to read the book to find out, but I have my doubts about anything that has to come up with arcane, undecipherable language to describe its views. From the same publisher comes The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe is Not Designed for Us by Victor J. Stenger ($28.00, Prometheus Books). Stenger is a physicist who goes after the view that the universe was the creation of God and why nature is not part of a divine plan. A great deal of effort is expended in this effort and, if you’re an atheist, you will find comfort in the author’s conclusion. If you’re not, reading it will not likely change your mind. I doubt the universe really cares what anyone thinks.
National Issues
As the 2012 election begins to loom in the minds of Americans who will be tasked to select a President and Congress, it is not surprising that there are books offering to provide information and a point of view on national issues.
People who self-identify as patriots, members of the Tea Party movement, and other groups devoted to the U.S. Constitution and national values are being derided regularly these days by those who want to change America into something it was never intended to be. If you would like to learn what that is, I recommend that you read The Patriot’s History Reader: Essential Documents for Every American ($17.00, Sentinel, softcover). The editor, Larry Schweikart, first came to notice with his book, “A Patriot’s History of the United States”, and other books based on history, a subject he teachers at the University of Dayton. This new book contains a whole range of reading matter from the original Articles of Confederation (that were replaced by the Constitution) to Barack Obama’s “A New Beginning” speech in 2009. There are many such documents from our history that provide valuable insights to the choices we made and the nation we became.
Dr. L. Lynn Cleland, Ph.D., has authored Save Our System, subtitled “Why and how ‘We the People’ must reclaim our liberties now.” We know that too many Americans have passed through the educational system without receiving the knowledge they need to understand the Constitution and what it was the Founding Fathers had in mind when they fashioned the federal government, a republic composed of separate republics, the States. The book ($16.95, Two Harbors Press, softcover) is not a diatribe against either political party, but it does identify the nation’s systemic problems, along with their causes, evolution, solutions, and actions citizens can take to return the nation to its fundamental principles. You will learn what effect “career politicians” have on both creating and distorting the answer to problems, government systems that are near failure, and much more in this excellent “textbook” to bring any reader up to speed to make important decisions about the future at election time.
Adrift: Charting Our Course Back to a Great Nation by William C. Harris and Steven C. Beschloss ($25.00, Prometheus Books) brings together Harris, the president of Science Foundation Arizona and other science-related organizations, and Beschloss, a journalist who was a Pulitzer Prize nominee. The authors offer their diagnosis of what they deem to be critical systemic weaknesses plaguing America. The blueprint they propose leans a tad to liberal solutions, but their proposals are worth considering.
There’s considerable irony that all the proposals offered by President Obama during his 2008 campaign and first year in office regarding issues involving the programs put in place by former President Bush were abandoned in their favor and continued maintenance. In National Security, Civil Liberties, and the War on Terror ($21.00, Prometheus Books, softcover), those issues are hotly debated in a collection of essays edited by M. Katherine B. Darmer, a professor of law at Chapman University School of Law and an assistant US Attorney in New York, NY, and Richard D. Fybel, an associate justice of the California Court of Appeal in Santa Ana, CA.
Novels, Novels, Novels
Novels arrive daily and my office table has more than forty of them in various stacks during any given month. They come from the mainstream publishers, large and small, some university presses, and self-published authors. (See my Pick of the Month book on why most authors have their books rejected.) Humans are story-telling creatures from the days they huddled around fires in caves.
One of this year’s most exciting new novels reflects recent headlines that the Pentagon has been under cyber attack from a foreign nation. Its timing could not be much better. If I could, I would want everyone in the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon, and the business community to read The Chinese Conspiracy by John Mariotti ($22.95, iUniverse, softcover). It is a thrilling novel of cyber war whose author has established himself as a successful writer of nine non-fiction books, as well as a contributor to blogs on the Forbes and American Express websites. The story begins with a scenario of America’s vital communications and elements of its infrastructure system, including the Pentagon, shut down by an unknown cyber enemy. Imagine the chaos if all the traffic lights in New York turned green at the same time? Mariotti uses his extensive knowledge of commerce and computer technology to envision an America in which no one can talk via their cell phones or access the Internet. It is one in which millions of computers have been invaded by a “worm” that controls their use. This may, in fact, be the way a future war will be fought, but for now this novel offers a globe-spanning story that will remind you of novels by Tom Clancy. If you read just one thriller this year, make sure it is this one. The best place to purchase this novel is via Amazon.com.
The itch to write a novel is one that so seizes some people that it would be better described as an addiction. The authors that amaze me are those who managed to put thousands of words on page after page. The only rule I apply is whether they manage to hold your attention. This was the task before Sam Djang who spent eight years and traveled to many nations—Russia, China, Mongolia, among others—to research the life of Genghis Khan. To the extent that Genghis Khan: The World Conqueror (Volumes I and II) is 90% factual, held together by a skein of fiction, he has more than succeeded in capturing the life, the times, and the impact of a man who, in his lifetime, conquered more land than Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, or the size of the Roman Empire, surely makes him a worthy topic. By 2010 A.D., the Mongol Empire measured 13,754,663 square miles, the largest in history. Volume One and Volume Two are both 420 pages in length ($29.95/$19.95, New Horizon Books, hard and softcover editions.) Khan’s was the age when human civilization gained knowledge of the compass, paper, gun powder, astronomy, mathematics, and developed techniques to make glass. Anyone who loves history will thoroughly love this book.
If you are in the mood for a courtroom thriller, pick up a copy of Margaret McLean’s Under Fire ($24.99, Forge) who has already been hailed as one of next new faces of Boston crime fiction with her debut. On a tragic night, a Boston firefighter is shot and killed in the line of duty while rescuing Amina Diallo and her 15-year-old son, Malick, from their burning store. A Senegalese Muslim immigrant, she is arrested for arson and murder, facing a likely conviction given Boston’s unease with its growing immigrant and Muslim population. Her defense attorneys are facing more than just prejudices, but attacks on their client and key defense witness. Ms. McLean, a former prosecutor, trial attorney, and currently a professor at Boston College, joins a well-worn path from attorney to novelist with her first novel and does so in ways that will keep you turning the pages.
Another debut novel is Luke Williams’ The Echo Chamber ($25.95, Viking) that was published in Great Britain in May to rave reviews and is available now in America. The reader is invited into the world of Evie Steppman, born in 1946 during the dying days of the British Empire in Nigeria. Evie has acute hearing and, to her, the world is a loud, cacophonous place. She is too young to make sense of all the sounds, but she hoards them in a vast internal sonic archive. The novel is narrated by a 54-year-old Evie, now living in Scotland, sorting through an attic filled with objects from her past. Her powers of hearing are beginning to fade and she sets out to record her history before it disintegrates on her. Family, empire, and memory coalesce in a novel that is an amazing feat of imagination. This one is surely worth reading. And still another novelist makes his debut with The Butterfly Cabinet ($22.99, Free Press). Bernie McGill has spun a tale based on a true story of the death of the daughter of an aristocratic Irish family at the end of the 19th century. It begins with a former nanny, now in her 90s, who received a letter from the last of her charges that evokes a secret she has been keeping for more than 70 years about what really happened on the last day in the life of Charlotte Orman, the four-year-old, only daughter in a house where she was employed. If you’re thinking of the recent Casey Anthony trial, this novel suggests that such events have a way of repeating themselves.
Cheryl Crane, the daughter of movie star, Lana Turner, gained fame when in 1957, at the age of 14, she stabbed to death one of her mother’s lovers, a Hollywood hoodlum, who was threatening to kill her mother. She has written a number of books and has authored The Bad Always Die Twice ($24.00. Kensington). It goes on sale officially on August 30. This novel draws on her own life in real estate and debuts a Nikki Harper series based pm a realtor-turned-amateur sleuth. It closely reflects her own life as a realtor to the stars. It begins with a frenzied call from Nikki’s business partner, Jessica Martin, saying that a TV has-been, Rex March, has been found dead in Jessica’s bed. Especially shocking is that, as far as anyone knew, Rex had died six months earlier. It’s obvious that Jessica is being framed and Nikki knows she must act swiftly to find out who the killer is. This is a very lively, fast-paced thriller that is sure to please fans of this genre. You Never Know by Lilian Duval ($21.95, Wheatmark, Tucson, AZ) explores what happens when extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. The author is a survivor of the 9/11 attack and lives in New Jersey where the novel’s protagonist, Tobias Hillyer, has a life filled with both tragedy and extraordinary luck. This is a novel in which the characters intertwine in an ever-changing landscape of events, capped by Hillyer’s win of a MegaMillions lottery that, despite the millions involved, evoke a whole new set of problems. It an intriguing story filled with unexpected twists and turns.
There are scores of softcover novels. Just out this month there’s The Whole Package by Cynthia Ellingen ($15.00, Berkley) who makes her debut with a novel about three women approaching forty who find that even though things haven’t gone according to plan, their friendship and resourcefulness present them with the perfect opportunity for a new venture, a restaurant staffed exclusively by handsome men. Women, of course, will enjoy this one. There’s love and lust to spare in Francine Thomas Howard’s novel, Paris Noire, (14.95, AmazonEncore) about African American and Caribbean immigrants to France as the U.S. Army liberates Paris in 1944. The widowed mother of two young adults is concerned as they embark on their romances and contemplates a new one for herself in a story that explores race, sex, and a vivid time in history.
That’s it for August and ahead are the many new books that are published each autumn. Be sure to come back to Bookviews as we select from the torrent, leaving the bestsellers to the mainstream media while we mine for lesser literary gems. Tell your book-reading friends and family members about Bookviews, bookmark it, and come back in September.
Founding Member of the National Book Critics Circle
My Picks of the Month
Occasionally one receives a book for review that is simply astonishing for its lack of candor and common sense. Clean Energy Nation by Rep. Jerry McNerney, PhD, and Martin Cheek ($27.95, Amacom) is subtitled “Freeing America from the tyranny of fossil fuels.” What tyranny is McNerney talking about? The entire world runs on coal, oil, and natural gas. All transportation depends on gasoline or diesel. Fifty percent of all the electricity produced in the U.S. depends on coal and the U.S. is often described as the Saudi Arabia of coal because we have such vast reserves of it. We also have over an estimated trillion worth of untapped barrels of oil. To argue that this should be abandoned in favor of solar, wind, or biofuels energy, none of whose producers would exist without large government subsidies backed up by mandates for their use is a kind of willful ignorance or insanity.. Suffice to say, this is an extraordinarily silly book.
America is often called a Christian nation based on its historical roots and majority population of Christians, so one can only imagine what a chilly reception The End of Christianity, edited by John W. Loftus, ($11.99, Prometheus Books, softcover) will receive. Loftus is a former minister and now recognized as a leading spokesperson for atheism. The contributors to this book are also noted atheists. What makes the book interesting, however, is its historical review of how Christianity came into being, what religious beliefs preceded it in the ancient world, and how, theologically, it challenges believers to accept some extraordinary beliefs on pure faith. This book is not some screed decrying Christianity, but rather a studied effort to understand its roots, its spread, and the assertions on which it is based. As such, it makes for some very interesting reading. We all need our beliefs challenged on occasion to determine the strength of one’s faith. By contrast, Beginner’s Grace: Bringing Prayer to Life by Kate Braestrup ($15.00, Free Press, softcover) offers practical suggestions on how to incorporate prayer into one’s life for all occasions and situations, as well as the role that parents can play in instructing children in faith. A chaplain to the Maine Warden Service that engages in search-and-rescue, the author shares her experiences and insights.
There are currently more than 6,000 languages spoken around the world and yet one can say “hello” anywhere and be understood. The English language is the lingua franca of the world, required for everything from business and science, diplomacy and education, and entertainment. In China, more people speak English than in America as it taught in its schools to prepare Chinese to go out into the wider world. The English is Coming! How One Language is Sweeping the World by Leslie Dunton-Downer ($14.00, Touchstone, softcover) takes the reader on a journey across commerce and culture, war and peace, to show how everyday English words have become a shared piece of understanding and the way people around the world communicate with one another. This is a wonderful book for anyone who loves words and loves the language that has gone global.
Compared with the work involved in writing a book, fiction or nonfiction, getting it published is often as arduous and difficult as task. Literary history is filled with now famous writers being rejected over and over again. Mike Nappa has written 77 Reasons Why Your Book was Rejected (and how to make sure it won’t happen again!) ($14.99, Sourcebooks, softcover). It is often brutally honest, but this is made more palatable by the humor he brings to this awful task. A literary agent, Nappa knows most of the reasons given for rejection as well as the ones never expressed. The fact is that, with the invention of the computer, just about everyone has become convinced they can and should write a book. In addition, there are many affordable outlets that will publish it for you, for a fee. With thousands of book proposals flooding agents and editors, it would be useful for the aspiring writer or one who has been rejected to know why one’s book simply cannot find a publisher. I suspect Nappa grew tired of explaining over and over again why a book was rejected. Now he need only hand them his new book and, if you have a book you want published, you should read it!
While wandering the aisles of the Book Expo, I came across Urban Farming: Sustainable City Living in Your Backyard, in your Community, and in the World ($24.95, Bowtie Press, softcover) by Thomas J. Fox. I confess I am not enamored of all the tree-hugger talk of sustainability because it often masks an agenda to control people’s lives, but this book offers a lot of information about how to grow healthy vegetables and fruits in an urban setting. It is a practical guide filled with how-to advice, enhanced by many handsome full-color photos. Our little backyard in New Jersey always had space set aside where Mother would plant a variety of items that graced our dinner plates with fresh vegetables throughout the spring, summer, and into early fall.
Dog owners are a special breed—no pun intended—and some write wonderful books about their furry companions. Stanley Coren has established himself as an expert with two previous books on “How Dogs Think” and “How to Speak Dog.” His latest is a delightful memoir, Born to Bark: My Adventures with an Irrepresible and Unforgettable Dog ($16.00, Free Press, softcover). Coren writes “For Christmas the woman who would become my wife bought me a dog—a little terrier. The next year her Christmas gift to me was a shotgun. Most of the people in my family believe that the two gifts were not unrelated.” The dog was Flint and this psychologist’s memoir will provide lots of laughter as he relates his experience with an extraordinary, willful pooch and those that had preceded it.
Getting Down to Business (Books)
Those in the field of marketing are always searching for answers to why we purchase what we purchase. In interesting book will help answer that question. The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature by Gad Saad ($25.00, Prometheus Books) answers what it is that all successful fast-food restaurants have in common. Why women are more likely to be compulsive shoppers than men, but men more likely to become addicted to pornography. How the fashion industry plays on our innate need to belong and many other questions that involve the underlying evolutionary basis for most of our consumer behavior. While culture is important, says Dr. Saad, a professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, there are deeper forces at work in our psyche that range from survival to reproduction to kin selection. All of which makes this a very interesting book to read for any reason whatever. In a somewhat similar fashion Glued to Games: How Video Games Draw Us in and Hold Us Spellbound by Scott Rigby and Richard M. Ryan ($34.95, Praeger) explores the heart of gaming’s powerful psychological and emotional allure. Indeed, it is no longer just kids and teens who are hooked on them, but adults as well. Parents, researchers, and those who love these games will find this book of interest, particularly if there’s someone in the family or a friend who is addicted to them. Both authors come to the subject with backgrounds in psychology and related research, so this is a serious book about an entertaining topic.
It’s a topic that politicians, business executives, celebrities, and many others find of great interest, Elements of Influence: The Art of Getting Others to Follow Your Lead ($26.00, Amacom). Terry R. Bacon says it is not some kind of magic power, but rather something that we do all the time whenever we want someone to do something, to believe something, to agree with us or to behave differently. While it is not possible to influence anyone to do anything, it is possible to develop the skills necessary and the author explains how influence really actually works, ethically, consensually, and productively, in business, in everyday life, and in a world of cultural diversity. It does, however, require “a great deal of adaptability, perceptiveness, and insight into other people” says the author. Backed by decades of research, I have no doubt that this book would prove useful to anyone seeking to improve their ability to influence those around them. In the world of business, the best result is leadership.
On a lighter level there’s Dumbemployed: Hilariously Dumb and Sadly True Stories About Jobs Like Yours by Phil Edwards and Matt Kraft ($13.00, Running Press, softcover) that is filled with more than 800 short paragraphs that demonstrate you are not alone if your workplace sometimes resembles a madhouse. Divided into five chapters, bosses, customers, just dumb, overtime and weird shift, it is a chronicle of every workplace misery you could imagine, plus some you can’t. These short takes will make you laugh (or groan) from page to page.
Let’s Get Cooking
Cookbooks come in all sizes and varieties, but one especially good idea is one that comes in a five-ringed binder that permits the cook to lay it flat on the counter top and, when you add in tabbed sections, the ease of use is matched by the quality of its recipes. This is the case of the Taste of Home Baking: All-New Edition ($29.95, Taste of Home Books) that is officially due out this September. It offers 786 recipes that are accompanied by more than 730 color photos in 510 pages. This is a hefty book that is likely to serve its user for a lifetime with its comprehensive collection of recipes on just about every kind of baked item from cakes to breads and everything in between. It would make an ideal gift for the newly married homemaker who wants to bake but does not want to deal with often daunting recipes. Instead, if offers all the tips and advice one could want for a beginner, but plenty of recipes for the most advanced baker.
Put your order in now to get your copy of All About Roasting by Molly Stevens ($35.00, W.W. Norton) due in the bookstores in November. If I could only eat food prepared in one fashion, it would be “roasted” because it brings out the taste of meats. The author describes when to use high, moderate or low heat to get the best results in juicy, well-seared meats, caramelized drippings, and concentrated flavors. There are 150 recipes that include beef, lamb, pork and poultry, as well as herb-roasted shrimp and basted broccoli. Suffice to say this is a book for anyone who is really serious about producing meals that will linger in the memory of family and guests for years after. The author has won both the James Beard and IACP cookbook awards, and is a contributing editor at Fine Cooking magazine. It will become a treasured reference and guide on the bookshelves of those who purchase it.
From Da Capo Press come two food-oriented books, two of which are devoted to the vegan lifestyle. Just out in July is Vegan for Life: Everything You Need to Know to be Healthy and Fit on a Plant-Based Diet by Jack Norris, RD, and Virginia Messina, MPH, RD ($17.00, softcover) and Sinfully Vegan: More than 160 Decadent Desserts to Satisfy Every Sweet Tooth by Lois Dieterly ($18.00, softcover). The former book addresses how difficult it is to give up meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and all other animal-derived ingredients and it acknowledges that “many new vegans can suddenly find themselves suffering from deficiencies of fundamental nutrients like protein, calcium, and iron.” That a warning sign worth considering insofar as the human body, over millennia is designed and intended to eat meat. There are teeth in everyone’s mouth whose purpose is to chew meat. For those who, for whatever reason, intend to become vegans, this book will be helpful, but I personally do not recommend the vegan diet. As for vegan desserts, you will find plenty in the latter book.
Women have their special needs and an interesting book, Eat to Defeat Menopause: The Essential Nutrition Guide for a Healthy Midlife---with more than 130 Recipes ($19.00, Lifelong Books, softcover) by Karen Giblin and Mache Seibel,.MD. The midlife “change” is subject to myths, uncertainties, and some trepidation. It makes sense that what one eats can have good or bad effects on the body’s changing chemistry. The good news is that black bean and rice salads, lobster and duck chow mein, and chocolate mouse pie are among the many ways to satisfy every craving or mood swing. You will learn why eating foods that contain phytoestrogens, such as soy and garlic, combat hot flashes, mood swings are stabilized by eating omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin B. There is a lot of excellent and interesting dietary information in this food.
I have seen so many diet books over the years that I am wary of most, but Timothy S. Harlan, MD, has penned Just Tell Me What to Eat! The Delicious 6-Week Loss Plan for the Real World ($25.00, Da Capo Press). It addresses the fact that there are an estimated 145 million Americans, aged 25 and up, who are overweight. After hearing from patients complain how confused they were by all the various diet plans, he decided to write one of his own. It is not a fad diet, nor a typical diet plan because it not only tells the reader what to eat, but why to eat it. The recipes reflect a variety of cuisines from Italian and French to Spanish and American. It even discusses convenience food alternatives when there isn’t time to prepare a meal. It is an informed and informative book about dieting that should prove helpful to take its advice and stick to it.
Science & Math Stuff
As someone who has difficulty with sums, I am in awe of those who can do them in their head and actually think math is fun! For them, there’s Here’s Looking at Euclid by Alex Bellos ($15.00, Free Press, softcover) “From counting ants to games of chance, an awe-inspiring journey through the world of numbers”, says the subtitle. The book is full of interesting information such as the fact that numbers of not innate to humans, but came into use about 8,000 years ago. There’s a tribe in the Amazon that can only count to five. Apparently they need one hand to count the fingers on the other. Who knows? If you love numbers, odds are you will enjoy this book. Even more arcane is The Wave Watcher’s Companion by Gavin Pretor-Pinney ($15.00, Perigee, softcover) that will appeal to anyone who has wondered about the motions we call waves, from brain waves to sound waves, infrared waves, to all manner of comparable patterns that appear to have a similarity. This book isn’t just for those into science, but also natures, history, and even surfing.
There has been controversy about the theory of evolution since Charles Darwin put it forth and, indeed, a friend of mine, Robert W. Felix, disputes it in his book “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps” that correlates such phenomenon with mass extinctions and the sudden emergence of new species. The Fact of Evolution by Cameron M. Smith ($18.00, Prometheus Books, softcover) asserts that evolution is, well, a fact. He offers all manner of real-world examples to show that not only does it happen, but that it must happen. Suffice to say this is some very deep scientific writing about things such as “phyletic gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium.” Don’t ask me what any of that means. You will have to read the book to find out, but I have my doubts about anything that has to come up with arcane, undecipherable language to describe its views. From the same publisher comes The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe is Not Designed for Us by Victor J. Stenger ($28.00, Prometheus Books). Stenger is a physicist who goes after the view that the universe was the creation of God and why nature is not part of a divine plan. A great deal of effort is expended in this effort and, if you’re an atheist, you will find comfort in the author’s conclusion. If you’re not, reading it will not likely change your mind. I doubt the universe really cares what anyone thinks.
National Issues
As the 2012 election begins to loom in the minds of Americans who will be tasked to select a President and Congress, it is not surprising that there are books offering to provide information and a point of view on national issues.
People who self-identify as patriots, members of the Tea Party movement, and other groups devoted to the U.S. Constitution and national values are being derided regularly these days by those who want to change America into something it was never intended to be. If you would like to learn what that is, I recommend that you read The Patriot’s History Reader: Essential Documents for Every American ($17.00, Sentinel, softcover). The editor, Larry Schweikart, first came to notice with his book, “A Patriot’s History of the United States”, and other books based on history, a subject he teachers at the University of Dayton. This new book contains a whole range of reading matter from the original Articles of Confederation (that were replaced by the Constitution) to Barack Obama’s “A New Beginning” speech in 2009. There are many such documents from our history that provide valuable insights to the choices we made and the nation we became.
Dr. L. Lynn Cleland, Ph.D., has authored Save Our System, subtitled “Why and how ‘We the People’ must reclaim our liberties now.” We know that too many Americans have passed through the educational system without receiving the knowledge they need to understand the Constitution and what it was the Founding Fathers had in mind when they fashioned the federal government, a republic composed of separate republics, the States. The book ($16.95, Two Harbors Press, softcover) is not a diatribe against either political party, but it does identify the nation’s systemic problems, along with their causes, evolution, solutions, and actions citizens can take to return the nation to its fundamental principles. You will learn what effect “career politicians” have on both creating and distorting the answer to problems, government systems that are near failure, and much more in this excellent “textbook” to bring any reader up to speed to make important decisions about the future at election time.
Adrift: Charting Our Course Back to a Great Nation by William C. Harris and Steven C. Beschloss ($25.00, Prometheus Books) brings together Harris, the president of Science Foundation Arizona and other science-related organizations, and Beschloss, a journalist who was a Pulitzer Prize nominee. The authors offer their diagnosis of what they deem to be critical systemic weaknesses plaguing America. The blueprint they propose leans a tad to liberal solutions, but their proposals are worth considering.
There’s considerable irony that all the proposals offered by President Obama during his 2008 campaign and first year in office regarding issues involving the programs put in place by former President Bush were abandoned in their favor and continued maintenance. In National Security, Civil Liberties, and the War on Terror ($21.00, Prometheus Books, softcover), those issues are hotly debated in a collection of essays edited by M. Katherine B. Darmer, a professor of law at Chapman University School of Law and an assistant US Attorney in New York, NY, and Richard D. Fybel, an associate justice of the California Court of Appeal in Santa Ana, CA.
Novels, Novels, Novels
Novels arrive daily and my office table has more than forty of them in various stacks during any given month. They come from the mainstream publishers, large and small, some university presses, and self-published authors. (See my Pick of the Month book on why most authors have their books rejected.) Humans are story-telling creatures from the days they huddled around fires in caves.
One of this year’s most exciting new novels reflects recent headlines that the Pentagon has been under cyber attack from a foreign nation. Its timing could not be much better. If I could, I would want everyone in the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon, and the business community to read The Chinese Conspiracy by John Mariotti ($22.95, iUniverse, softcover). It is a thrilling novel of cyber war whose author has established himself as a successful writer of nine non-fiction books, as well as a contributor to blogs on the Forbes and American Express websites. The story begins with a scenario of America’s vital communications and elements of its infrastructure system, including the Pentagon, shut down by an unknown cyber enemy. Imagine the chaos if all the traffic lights in New York turned green at the same time? Mariotti uses his extensive knowledge of commerce and computer technology to envision an America in which no one can talk via their cell phones or access the Internet. It is one in which millions of computers have been invaded by a “worm” that controls their use. This may, in fact, be the way a future war will be fought, but for now this novel offers a globe-spanning story that will remind you of novels by Tom Clancy. If you read just one thriller this year, make sure it is this one. The best place to purchase this novel is via Amazon.com.
The itch to write a novel is one that so seizes some people that it would be better described as an addiction. The authors that amaze me are those who managed to put thousands of words on page after page. The only rule I apply is whether they manage to hold your attention. This was the task before Sam Djang who spent eight years and traveled to many nations—Russia, China, Mongolia, among others—to research the life of Genghis Khan. To the extent that Genghis Khan: The World Conqueror (Volumes I and II) is 90% factual, held together by a skein of fiction, he has more than succeeded in capturing the life, the times, and the impact of a man who, in his lifetime, conquered more land than Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, or the size of the Roman Empire, surely makes him a worthy topic. By 2010 A.D., the Mongol Empire measured 13,754,663 square miles, the largest in history. Volume One and Volume Two are both 420 pages in length ($29.95/$19.95, New Horizon Books, hard and softcover editions.) Khan’s was the age when human civilization gained knowledge of the compass, paper, gun powder, astronomy, mathematics, and developed techniques to make glass. Anyone who loves history will thoroughly love this book.
If you are in the mood for a courtroom thriller, pick up a copy of Margaret McLean’s Under Fire ($24.99, Forge) who has already been hailed as one of next new faces of Boston crime fiction with her debut. On a tragic night, a Boston firefighter is shot and killed in the line of duty while rescuing Amina Diallo and her 15-year-old son, Malick, from their burning store. A Senegalese Muslim immigrant, she is arrested for arson and murder, facing a likely conviction given Boston’s unease with its growing immigrant and Muslim population. Her defense attorneys are facing more than just prejudices, but attacks on their client and key defense witness. Ms. McLean, a former prosecutor, trial attorney, and currently a professor at Boston College, joins a well-worn path from attorney to novelist with her first novel and does so in ways that will keep you turning the pages.
Another debut novel is Luke Williams’ The Echo Chamber ($25.95, Viking) that was published in Great Britain in May to rave reviews and is available now in America. The reader is invited into the world of Evie Steppman, born in 1946 during the dying days of the British Empire in Nigeria. Evie has acute hearing and, to her, the world is a loud, cacophonous place. She is too young to make sense of all the sounds, but she hoards them in a vast internal sonic archive. The novel is narrated by a 54-year-old Evie, now living in Scotland, sorting through an attic filled with objects from her past. Her powers of hearing are beginning to fade and she sets out to record her history before it disintegrates on her. Family, empire, and memory coalesce in a novel that is an amazing feat of imagination. This one is surely worth reading. And still another novelist makes his debut with The Butterfly Cabinet ($22.99, Free Press). Bernie McGill has spun a tale based on a true story of the death of the daughter of an aristocratic Irish family at the end of the 19th century. It begins with a former nanny, now in her 90s, who received a letter from the last of her charges that evokes a secret she has been keeping for more than 70 years about what really happened on the last day in the life of Charlotte Orman, the four-year-old, only daughter in a house where she was employed. If you’re thinking of the recent Casey Anthony trial, this novel suggests that such events have a way of repeating themselves.
Cheryl Crane, the daughter of movie star, Lana Turner, gained fame when in 1957, at the age of 14, she stabbed to death one of her mother’s lovers, a Hollywood hoodlum, who was threatening to kill her mother. She has written a number of books and has authored The Bad Always Die Twice ($24.00. Kensington). It goes on sale officially on August 30. This novel draws on her own life in real estate and debuts a Nikki Harper series based pm a realtor-turned-amateur sleuth. It closely reflects her own life as a realtor to the stars. It begins with a frenzied call from Nikki’s business partner, Jessica Martin, saying that a TV has-been, Rex March, has been found dead in Jessica’s bed. Especially shocking is that, as far as anyone knew, Rex had died six months earlier. It’s obvious that Jessica is being framed and Nikki knows she must act swiftly to find out who the killer is. This is a very lively, fast-paced thriller that is sure to please fans of this genre. You Never Know by Lilian Duval ($21.95, Wheatmark, Tucson, AZ) explores what happens when extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. The author is a survivor of the 9/11 attack and lives in New Jersey where the novel’s protagonist, Tobias Hillyer, has a life filled with both tragedy and extraordinary luck. This is a novel in which the characters intertwine in an ever-changing landscape of events, capped by Hillyer’s win of a MegaMillions lottery that, despite the millions involved, evoke a whole new set of problems. It an intriguing story filled with unexpected twists and turns.
There are scores of softcover novels. Just out this month there’s The Whole Package by Cynthia Ellingen ($15.00, Berkley) who makes her debut with a novel about three women approaching forty who find that even though things haven’t gone according to plan, their friendship and resourcefulness present them with the perfect opportunity for a new venture, a restaurant staffed exclusively by handsome men. Women, of course, will enjoy this one. There’s love and lust to spare in Francine Thomas Howard’s novel, Paris Noire, (14.95, AmazonEncore) about African American and Caribbean immigrants to France as the U.S. Army liberates Paris in 1944. The widowed mother of two young adults is concerned as they embark on their romances and contemplates a new one for herself in a story that explores race, sex, and a vivid time in history.
That’s it for August and ahead are the many new books that are published each autumn. Be sure to come back to Bookviews as we select from the torrent, leaving the bestsellers to the mainstream media while we mine for lesser literary gems. Tell your book-reading friends and family members about Bookviews, bookmark it, and come back in September.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Bookviews - July 2011
By Alan Caruba
A founding Member of the National Book Critics Circle
Biographies, Autobiographies and Memoirs ~ Lots of Advice ~ Business Books ~ Summer Reading for Kids & Teens ~ Novels
My Picks of the Month
This report has recommended three previous books devoted to President Obama’s life and eligibility to hold the highest office in the land. In retrospect, as carefully documented as they were, the nation was not ready to consider that fact, nor ready to accept the consequences. Lyndon B. Johnson, however, surprised the nation with his announcement that he would not run for reelection in 1968 and, in 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first President to resign from office in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Prior to Obama’s election, however, Dr. Jerome R. Corsi, PhD, had authored “The Obama Nation”, warning that his credentials and life history was suspect. Now he has written Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama is Not Eligible to be President ($25.95, WND Books). More than 380 pages, complete with appendices and footnotes, meticulously reveal that he was not and is not eligible. I believe this book will lead to Obama’s resignation in the run up to the September 2012 Democratic Party nominating convention. I also believe that the mainstream media that formerly ignored or deriding all those who raised this issue are moving inexorably away from that position. Simply stated, Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution requires that a President be a “naturally born” citizen and Obama, as is widely known, is the son of a Kenyon citizen. Natural born requires that both parents be American citizens. How and why this was ignored in Obama’s case is examined in Corsi’s book, along with a massive cover up of the documentation that would and should disqualify him. Ignoring the Constitution has serious implications for the rule of law, the keystone of the American Republic.
I recommend you add Catherine Herridge’s new book to your summer reading list. It is The Next Wave: On the Hunt for Al Qaeda’s American Recruits ($25.00,.Crown Forum). If you watch Fox News then you know that Ms. Herridge is a national correspondent based out of Washington, D.C., and you know she has been following the story of terrorism directed against the nation for a long time. As a result, she has contacts deep inside the counterintelligence community as well as having traveled to Guantanamo many times to cover the proceedings there regarding some of the most evil people on Earth. She devotes a lot of the book to connecting the dots involving the life and activities of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born imam who facilitated the movement of several of the 9/11 terrorists before the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon. His knowledge of American culture has made him a valuable al Qaeda asset, so much so that he is the only American on a CIA hit list. He is currently believed to be hiding out in Yemen, but distance is nothing to the Internet and he is a master of recruiting disaffected American Muslims to attack their fellow Americans. One of them was Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood killer. Jihad is not just a present-day conflict; it is generational, and it is now a movement as opposed to a top-down vertical organization. The failed underwear bomber and Time Square bomber should not make us forget that there are new plots to kill Americans being hatched every day.
Two companion volumes to the Herridge book will explain a lot to anyone who has not been paying any more attention to al Qaeda or Hezbollah for the last decade or longer. The first is Peter l. Bergen’s The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al Qaeda ($16.00, Free Press) now in softcover is authored by a man widely regarded as a leading expert on al Qaeda, a national security analyst who has been in the belly of the beast. His book provides a comprehensive history of an organization devoted to terrorism for the ultimate purpose of imposing Islam on the West and everywhere else. Your grandchildren will be dealing with this threat. Consider Israel, now more than sixty year’s since its founding, but still facing implacable enemies. One of them is Hezbollah and Thanassis Cambinis has written A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel ($15.00, Free Press, softcover). Part standing army, part terrorist group, party political party, and part theological movement, it joins al Qaeda and Hamas it its intention to remake the map of the Middle East. An influential movement, this book will surprise you with its description of the people who are willing to die for it, people who span economic classes and religious sect for its apocalyptic beliefs. Based in Lebanon, the Party of God, has influence well beyond its borders.
I have a friend who has spent most of his life accompanied by dogs and presently has two who regard him as the alpha male of the pack. His love for dogs makes up for a distinct skepticism about humans and it is difficult to disagree with him much of the time. Dog lovers will love The Dog Next Door and Other Stories of the Dogs We love, edited by Callie Smith Grant ($12.99, Revell, softcover). There are an estimated 77.5 million dogs in the U.S. with 39% of U.S. households owning at least one while 24% own two. Americans love their dogs and they will love this follow-up to “A Prince Among Dogs” for the 35 true stories Grant has collected to celebrate these tail-waggers. Another passion for many Americans is baseball and 1961: The Inside Story of the Maris-Mantle Home Run Chase by Phil Pepe ($20.00, Triumph Books) tells of the year-long power surge that approached Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs for the 1927 New York Yankees. Maris would surpass it. The book is about an era when the game was not beset with doping scandals and raw power and real skill determined the outcome. Pepe has written more than fifty books on sports and this one is a wonderful look behind the scenes as well as on the field.
I cannot imagine what it must be to pilot a fighter jet, but a new book, Viper Force: 56th Fighter Wing by John M. Dibbs, an award-winning air-to-air photographer with text by Lt. Col. Robert ‘Cricket’ Renner, ($40.00, Zenith Press) will get you as close to the experience as one can have by enjoying page after page of extraordinary photos and a text provided by as 1988 Air Force Academy graduate who retired in 2010 after 22 years of active duty service that included 37 combat sorties over Iraq. If a machine can be called beautiful, than surely the F-16 Fighting Falcon, known to its pilots and crews as the Viper, is a thing of beauty and the photos are testament to that. Reading this book gives one a wonderful insight to the lives of those associated with this fighter jet and a sense of its lethal capacity to protect the nation that built it. From the same publisher comes Burt Rutan’s Race to Space by Dan Linehand ($30.00, Zenith Press). Rutan has earned a reputation as an aerospace visionary and he is seeking to make private space travel affordable and accessible these days. The book is the story of that endeavor. I suspect, however, that its appeal will be mostly to those steeped in the engineering aspects of the effort and those for whom this quest remains the ultimate expression of pushing the envelope.
Odds and Ends: My Mother taught gourmet cooking, mostly French and European cuisine, so I am partial to cookbooks (she wrote two) that share their enthusiasm and recipes for this gastronomic genre. I first encountered Chef Jacques Haeringer through the “Chez Francois Cookbook”, the bible of classic Alsatian cuisine. The chef lives in Northern Virginia where L’Augberge Chez Francois in Great Falls attracts not only the locals, but some famous DC folk as well. His new book is Two for Tonight ($26.95, Bartleby Press) and is a gourmet’s dream of romance when you combine great recipes, a nice bottle of wine, and a summer al fresco meal. These are meals for dining outdoors whether it’s his Alsatian fish stew or any of the other mostly fish dishes with the occasional lamb chop, veal scallopini, or Kobe beef dish for meat-eaters. The color photos are mouthwatering and, yes, I miss Mom's wonderful dinners. While recently attending the Book Expo in New York, I came across a book that I think many older computer users will find of interest. It’s Windows® 7 for Seniors: Quicksteps by Marty Matthews ($20.00, McGraw-Hill, softcover). It has many advantages in that it uses a larger print size, has lots of illustrations, and is filled with how-to tips that will enhance the use of this popular operating program. It is comprehensive and anyone taking advantage of it will discover how remarkable Windows®7 can be.
Many book lovers also aspire to be writers and for those who think they have a novel in them, there’s A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, edited by Andrea Barrett and Peter Turchi ($19.95, Trinity University Press, softcover). It features twenty contributors offering some excellent advice that will answer many of the questions a beginner may have. I have always been a non-fiction writer and concluded long ago that my brain is not equipped to write fiction. That requires a whole different set of sensibilities as well as the development of specific skills. This book will help future and current fiction writers hone those skills.
Let me finish with the thought that I do not normally take note of a specific poet’s work, preferring to deal only with anthologies of poetry. The reason is simple and cruel. If I feature one poet, I receive the books of others and great poetry is usually produced in relatively small amounts in any given era. I am going to make an exception for Maxine Kumin whom I met long ago when we were both young. I was at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, famed even then as a Middlebury College legacy of Robert Frost. I was there to write about it for Publishers Weekly and Kumin was one of the writers there to give readings and share their insights on the craft with aspiring writers. I was, at that point, already an aspiring and published poet but it would be my first and last time. I was old school, but Maxine was a modernist. All this returned to me when I received Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 ($16.95, W.W. Norton, softcover). Maxine is the author of 17 poetry collections, as well as numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. She’s won the Pulitzer Prize and a raft of other literary awards. If you were to choose a present day poet to read, you would discover she writes poetry that goes straight into your mind and heart. There is no way to “describe” a particular poet’s work, though I am sure many try. To read a modern poet, Maxine Kumin would be a very good choice.
Biographies, Autobiographies and Memoirs
The thing about some memoirs is that one often ends up wondering why the writer thought their life was all that significant or why the publisher did. Not all lives are equal in this respect, but I suppose one can learn something from a memoir if it reflects one’s own questions about life or illuminates some dark, unexplored corner.
My AOL address book was recently hacked for the second time and I am searching for software to prevent that occurring again. Serendipitously Mafiaboy: A Portrait of a Hacker as a Young man, arrived. Told by Michael Calce with Craig Silvermann ($22.95, Lyons Press), it is his account of what it was like to be a 15-year-old boy who, in the spring of 2000, was exposed as “Mafiaboy”, the cybercriminal who had crippled the websites of Yahoo!, Amazon, CNN, E*Trade, eBay and Dell. Not only were people asking how some adolescent could pull off devastating denial-of-service attacks, but why? Due out officially in August, Calce reveals the story of how his prodigious talent for unraveling and manipulating computer technology evolved into a teenage obsession. He was too young to realize the scope of the damage he was doing, but joining a gang of hackers gave him a sense of power and mission. In the end, the FBI joined with Canadian authorities in a manhunt to find out who he was. Calce acknowledges how reckless and stupid his attacks were. He was caught, spent eight months in a group home for troubled adolescents, and a year on probation with restricted access to computers. Cyber-folk will find this book of interest. Where’s My Wand? by Eric Poole ($15.00, Berkley, softcover) is an entertaining tale of growing up gay and Baptist in the 1970s. It is not a gay polemic as one might assume, but rather a hilarious recounting of confused gender at a time and place, and in the person of a very clever youngster looking for a way to make sense of it and come to peace with it. Gay folk will no doubt enjoy it, but the surprise is that straight folk will too. A comparable search for identity is told by Maise Houghton in Pitch Uncertain: A Mid-Century Middle Daughter Finds Her Voice ($24.95, Tide Pool Press, Cambridge, MA). It is the story of how she slowly decoded her parent’s marriage as the middle child coming of age in the 1950s. Her parents had an estranged by oddly loyal relationship and the author captures the era and genteel culture of the time. I am not sure who would find this book of interest except for someone of the same age and gender, but it is a well-told account. A very different memoir is told by Kelle Groom, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl ($23.00, Free Press) that recounts her young life as an addict and how, at age 19, she became pregnant with a son that she would end up losing twice, first to adoption, and then, within a year to cancer. This is a look into an addictive personality who discovered alcohol at age 15 and was an out-of-control alcoholic by age 19. The child’s death only hastened her downward spiral. The memoir, based in part on journals she kept at the time, is about her search for that lost son. In recovery she became a poet, earning a spot in Best American Poetry 2010, along with other accolades. Anyone who has known an alcoholic knows how totally destructive this addiction can be unless the pattern is broken. In a very real way, writing saved her life.
Sex, Mom, & God by Frank Schaeffer ($26.00, Da Capo Press) recounts what it was like to grow up in L’Abri, the Swiss chalet/Christian community that his parents, Evangelicals Francis and Edith Schaffer ran. He was surrounded by women, beautiful women, but the one who influenced his sexuality was his devout, but candid, mother who was at ease answering his questions about Jesus or sex, believing that conservative religion wasn’t about ruining sex for believers and others. Part memoir, part exploration of Evangelical views on issues such as abortion, premarital sex, and contraception, the book explores the harsh attitude organized religion has toward women and sex, while demonstrating that faith and fun can actually co-exist. Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy by Carlos Eire, the National Book Award winning author of “Waiting for Snow in Havana” ($15.00. Free Press, softcover) recounts what it was like to come of age as a Cuban émigré attached to the memories of his youth in that island nation. He explores the tension between Carlos the Cuban and Charles the American as he eventually embraced his continual reinvention as someone distinctly American.
Nica’s Dream: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness by David Kastin ($26.95, W.W. Norton) is a fascinating biography of Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonic “Nica” de Koenigswater, a British Rothchild who flew her own plane before she was twenty-one. Her husband was a French baron and, during World War II, they joined the French Resistance and went to North Africa where she drove ambulances at the front lines of battle against Rommel. That might have been enough for a biography, but in 1953 she moved to New York to pursue who overwhelming love of jazz and never left. As a patron of jazz, she befriended jazz legends and, indeed, both Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk died in her home. There is much to explore in her extraordinary life and the author, a music critic and journalist, plums it for its history of the powerful forces at work in a remarkable chapter in American history when jazz defined American modernism, mid-century New York, self-invention, and race. Any fan of jazz will want to read this book.
New York plays a role in Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted by Justin Martin ($30.00, Da Capo Press). Olmsted is best known as the designer of Central Park and Prospect Park, as well as other famous sites including Stanford University in California, and the Capitol Grounds in Washington, D.C. He was likely the most famous landscape architect of his times and since, but he was also a champion of abolition to American and British audiences in the 1850s and 60s. He was a forerunner of environmentalists to preserve public places that included Niagara Falls and Yosemite. This is a life well-lived and filled with achievements that still touch the lives of all who enjoy the fruits of his labors.
Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist by Peter L. Berger is subtitled “How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore” ($26.00, Prometheus Books) doesn’t live up to its promise. Essentially a memoir of an extraordinary and distinguished career as a sociologist, author and educator, it still manages to spend a lot of time on minutia that may interest his colleagues and former students, but didn’t motivate this reader to engage to the end. Is it just me? That’s a question I often ask, but if an author doesn’t capture and hold my attention, I tend to blame them. By contrast, James Hesketh is a freelance journalist and former motorcycle columnist for The Miami Herald. His memoir is Riding a Straight and Twisty Road ($15.95, Central Recovery Press, softcover) and recounts his life and his love of motorcycling, calling motorcycle riders “motion addicts” in ways that only other cyclists could understand. For them motorcycling is “a celebration of life.” Hesketh tells of a life initially affected by a childhood trauma and then a struggle for recovery to reclaim his life from another sort of addiction. In the course of his memoir, we learn about the changing history of motorcycle culture, a cross-country ride in response to a personal crisis, and the new serenity he found at the end of the road. It is a well-told tale that is sure to resonate with many readers who love motorcycling and/or are seeking recovery from their own addictions.
Lots of Advice
There is no end to books offering advice about every aspect of life and, having seen many of them, I still believe they perform a useful service. I particularly liked Better by Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong by Alina Tugend ($22.95, Riverhead books). As we all know, we’re told that it’s okay to make mistakes so long as we learn from them and don’t repeat them. Ms. Tugend points out that, in reality, we are frequently punished for making mistakes. She points out that mistakes occur all the time, but her book focuses on how we can identify them correctly and, in the process, improve not only ourselves, but our families, our work, and even the world around us. She has done a lot of research about the cultural attitudes regarding mistakes, how they can affect us from the earliest stages of our lives, and shape us into adults who are risk-averse and reluctant to take on challenges. This is one of those unexpected books, the kind that looks at something commonplace and provides a complete new understanding of it.
Overcoming Anxiety, Worry, and Fear: Practical Ways to Find Peace is one of those titles that tell you everything you need to know about the book. Gregory L. Jantz, PhD, along with Ann McMurray ($13.99, Revell, softcover).has added a new book to the more than 25 he has already written, several coauthored with Ms. McMurray. There is no question that we are living in times that are fraught with anxiety that comes at us from the media and is generated in our own lives as many struggle to make a living and get on with life’s other tasks. This new book offers a whole-person approach to coping with and eliminating anxiety. It is a combination of common sense, biblical wisdom, and therapeutic advice that can free the readers from being anxiety all the time. If this describes you or someone you know, the book will prove a good investment.
I suspect most mothers simply ask themselves “what would my mother do?” by way of raising their own children. I have no doubt that raising children can prove quite overwhelming for many young mothers. Momsense: A Common-Sense Guide to Confident Mothering by Jean Blackmer ($12.99, Revell, softcover) is there to help. The book features “real mom” stories along with proven and practical advice, encouraging them not to seek perfection, but to honestly assess their skills and develop their own mothering style. If you’re a new mom or know one, this book will prove a blessing. It makes a lot of momsense! Books on better parenting abound and I particularly liked Smart Parenting for Smart Kids: Nurturing Your Child’s True Potential by Eileen Kennedy-Moore, PhD and Mark S. Lowenthal, PsyD ($16.95, Jossey-Bass, softcover) in which the two authors combine their expertise to provide strategies to help children develop social and emotional skills that will need to become capable, confident, and caring people. Among the chapters are “building connection”, “developing motivation” and “finding joy.” In a society beset by fear-mongering, endless testing in school, and mixed messages about personal conduct, raising a child is a real challenge, but most parents can do it with a bit of guidance. This book provides that guidance and the children will be the beneficiaries. The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up by Barbara K. Hofer, PhD, and Abigail Sullivan Moore ($15.00, Free Press, softcover) advises parents on how to stay connected to college-bound youngsters while giving them the space they need to become independent adults. The advent of cell phones, email, and texting, many kids turn to their parents for instant answers on how to handle a variety of problems they encounter. The authors suggest that too much guidance at this stage in life results in kids that never really emerge as adults in their own right. This is a significant book in a new era of connectiveness and one I would recommend to any parent whose child is going off to college.
Getting Down to Business (Books)
With unemployment verging on or exceeding 14 million, Unbeatable Resumes by Tony Beshara ($16.95, Amacom, softcover) is a very timely book indeed. As the author explains, it is a sales tool to get the attention of a hiring authority. Based on 38 years as a placement and recruitment specialist, the author knows what makes a resume effective. This book takes the mystery and the agony out of writing a resume that has a high probability of winning a candidate a face-to-face interview. His survey of more than 3,000 hiring decision-makers, managers and human relations specialists, reveals the hallmarks of a well-written resume. For those seeking employment, this could well be the best investment in yourself that you could make.
Another book on this topic that I would recommend is from the “Knock’m Dead” series that has sold more than five million books to date. Secrets & Strategies for Success in an Uncertain World by Martin Yate ($14.95, Adams Media, softcover) not only deals with resumes, but offers tips on turning interviews into job offers and tips about job security and promotions, understanding key career choices and career change strategies. This book addresses how to take control of your job search, your career, and your life. Career Mapping by Ginny Clarke and Echo Garrett ($17.95, Morgan James Publishing, softcover) isn’t officially due out until next month, but it takes a look at the world of work and concluded that it has changed forever. The only way to thrive in this highly competitive, technology-driven economy is to think of yourself as a free agent says the author. In short, you have to have a plan and her book is devoted to that. She too has been a recruiter and a career coach, so she is well positioned to understand the changes and how to adjust and take advantage of them. This book will work for the newcomer to the job marketplace as well as people nearing retirement age who want to switch gears. Books like this give those out of work a real advantage.
Everyone in business is looking for ways to secure an advantage over their competition. Front Runners: Lap your Competition with 10 Game-changing Strategies for Total Business Transformation by Mahesh Rao ($24.95, Bascom Hill Publishing Group) offers a step-by-step program that has been successfully implemented by numerous executives of Fortune 100 companies over the past decade. Rao has been an executive consultant with more than twenty years of business experience, as well as a coach to top executives, who has spent many years building strategies, managing global business and technology operations. With a degree in engineering and an MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management, he holds 14 US and international patents. The book comes with endorsements from the president of Global Brands and Commercial, Hilton Worldwide, and an executive vice president of Cisco Systems.
The “buzz” these days is all about “social media” and anyone seeking to master these rapidly growing communications vehicles would do well to read one or both books that have been recently published. Social Boom! How to Master Business Social Media by Jeffrey Gitomer ($22.99, FT Press--Financial Times) discusses how this tool is the best, least expensive, most direct way of communicating with your customers and how you can take advantage of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. It is easy to read and easy to implement. How to Make Money with Social Media by Jamie Turner and Reshma Shad, PhD ($24.99, FT Press, Pearson Education Inc) offers comparable advice and comes with glowing endorsements from top level executives. It is self-described as an in-the-trenches guide” written by experts who have developed money-making marketing campaigns for many of the world’s largest companies. This is not for lightweights because it discusses how to set objectives, assess one’s competition, craft strategies, select platforms, and integrate social media into broader marketing programs. Marketers, executives, and entrepreneurs can all benefit from its advice.
Summer Reading for the Kids & Teens
I have a number of favorite publishers of children’s and young adult books, and among them is Charlesbridge Publishing of Watertown, Massachusetts. Year after year, season after season, their editors and writers provide books for young readers and the latest batch is no exception. There’s Little Pig Joins the Band written and illustrated by David Hyde Costello ($14.95). This one is for the very earliest reader, age 5 or so, and of course can be read to the pre-school set. Being quite small Little Pig finds most musical instruments too big for him to play. It turns out that that he has a natural talent as the leader of the band! Those further along in reading skills, ages 7 and up, will enjoy Leo Landry’s Grin and Bear It ($12.95) about a bear who can write funny jokes by gets stage fright when he tries to tell them. Readers with a Hispanic heritage will especially enjoy Under the Mambo Moon by Julia Durango, illustrated by Fabricio VanderBroeck ($12.95) filled with wonderful poetry and short tales it is a tribute to Latin American cultures and music. What child does not love animals? Cool Animal Names by Dawn Cusick is lavishly illustrated by color photos of all manner of creatures, including insects and fish, who share the Earth. Those in the early grades in school will enjoy Miss Martin is a Martian, a Children’s Book Award Winner by Colleen Murray Fisher, illustrated by Jared Chapman ($7.95) and told from the point of view of one of her students who cannot imagine how she knows so much and is on to all his tricks! For the younger reader age pre-teen and older, there is a spooky, scaring, completely fascinating novel, Escape from Zobadak by Brad Gallagher about a mysterious box that leads to an antique maze of wooden corridors. This story is so complex that it draws the reader in and won’t let go until the last page.
Kids Can Press is another favorite of mine and a visit to its website will reveal why. Two recent books are Totally Human: Why We Look and Act the Way We Do by Cynthia Pratt Nicolson and illustrated by Dianne Eastman ($16.95). Aimed at those aged 8 and up, it is a clever, frank discussion of why humans hiccup, burb, shake when they’re scared, crave surgery food, and many other common characteristics. It’s a great introduction to the human race. Mathemagic! Number Tricks by Lynda Colgan and illustrated by Jane Kurisu ($16.95) will intrigue younger readers with an interest or flair for mathematics, and particularly good for those who need a reason to develop these skills.
There’s a world of fun in How Back-Back Got His Name by Thomas and Peter Weck and illustrated by Len DiSalvo ($15.95, Lima Bear Press) just out this month with a story about Lima Bear and his animal pals who help Plumpton the opossum when his back disappears! Ideal for those aged 4 to 8, it is fully of laughs. The Adventures of Blue Ocean Bob ($16.99, Children’s Success Unlimited LC) is aimed at children aged 5 and up. It quite deliberately intends to share its philosophy of life to motivate young minds to make the most of every day using the creatures of the sea to impart it. For the child that needs a nudge in this direction, it is a good book to share. In a similar fashion, two books from New Horizon Press are intended to help children be team players and to teach the value of perseverance. They are Joni and the Fallen Star by Cindy Jett Pilon, illustrated by John Hazard ($9.95) and The Tale of the Teeny, Tiny Black Ant by Teresa R. Allen, illustrated by Tea Seroya ($9.95). Both are geared to either pre-schoolers to whom they can be read or early readers aged 5 and up.
For the older reader, ages 10 and teens, there’s The Lucy Man: The Scientist Who Found the Most Famous Fossil Ever! ($16.00, Prometheus Books softcover) by CAP Sacier. It is a biography of Dr. Donald C. Johanson who found Lucy, (Australopithecus afarensis) in 1974. A paleoanthropologist, the skeleton was the first up-right walking human ancestor that was mostly complete. Any youngster showing an interest in such things will be immersed for hours in this book. Its foreword is provided by the subject of the book. Just published this month is a novel by Karen DelleCava, A Closer Look, ($16.95, WestSide Books, Lodi, NJ) for those aged 14 and older. It is about alopecia, an affliction that causes a person’s hair to fall out. How Cassie deals with this, at first trying to keep it a secret, and then confronting it when the secret is exposed, is the heart of a story about dealing with setbacks and still achieving one’s goals in life. This may seem a bit creepy, but I suspect many teenagers will find it a reflection in some way of their own lives.
Novels, Novels, Novels
Summer is traditionally a time for taking a novel to the beach or just the backyard to catch some sun and pass some time. I have stacks and stacks of novels and can only share news of some, so here goes.
Rules of Civility marks the debut of Amor Towles ($26.95, Viking) that is in many ways a throwback to the way novels were written in earlier times and, in particular, its theme of rising from humble beginnings to reach great heights, a classic American tale. It is the story of an irresistible young woman that is set in the late 1930s. On New Year’s Eve in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, 25-year-old secretary, Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse roommate meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker. Both fall for him, but the meeting sets Katey on a year-long journey through the upper echelons of New York society where she encounters a glittering new world of wealth and station, along with all the other emotions and behaviors that lurk beneath the surface. Katey is made of stern stuff and good values. Towles was born and raised just outside of Boston, graduated from Yale University, and an MA from Stanford University. He is a principal at an investment firm in Manhattan. He has just joined the ranks of promising new authors.
A very intriguing story is told by Kevin Klesert in The Other Side of Light ($32.95,
(http://www.theothersideoflight.com/). A combination of science fiction and historical fiction, Klesert asks what would happen if a modern U.S. Naval Task Force with the Secretary of Defense on board to watch how new technology can render the entire task force invisible to the enemy only to have it go awry and transport them back to December 3, 1941, four days before Pearl Harbor! Knowing what happened, they must wrestle with the question of changing history by intervening. I am not going to tell you much more because it would spoil the plot. This one is a fascinating take on the twists and turns of history. The genre of the science of genetics and its unexpected events is the background to The Genius Gene ($34.95 hardcover, $14.95 softcover, $4.99 Kindle, http://www.geniusgenebook.com/) by Howard Bernberg. We are introduced to geneticist Catherine Fox and archeologist Paul Butler, attractive, accomplished, ethical, and widely acclaimed. Political, religious, and scientific institutions are trying to cope with rapid medical advances that allow the potential of our own genomes to be unlocked. This is a complex story of an older Nobel Prize winning geneticist who has developed a package of genetic enhancements he wants to legalize, the purpose of which is to create superior humans and make all others obsolete. The plot's twists and turns will have you turning the pages in this compelling and scary story. Fans of supernatural thrillers will want to glom onto the first four of a five-book series you can check out at http://www.mannyjonesseries.com/. Eli Just has chosen a very different kind of hero to battle the forces of evil, a live-and-let-live bachelor with a minor but successful music career. Strange things begin to happen to Manny when his band takes a break. I am not a fan of this kind of fantasy genre, but Just makes it work. The Manny Jones series is priced at $29.95.
Among the softcover novels available there are several that stand out. On the light side, there’s Why I Love Singlehood by Elisa Lorella and Sarah Girrell ($13.95, Amazon Encore). Eva Perino is single and the proud owner of The Grounds, a bustling coffee shop in the heart of a North Carolina college town. She’s busy, she’s happy, and there is no need, she feels, for a man in her life. It has been two years since her live-in boyfriend broke her heart and her blog about singlehood is a big hit, but Eva begins a secret and very funny search for love when she secretly joins an online dating site. It is soon time to decide between her lifestyle choices. A very different story is told by Christina Ali Farah in Little Mother ($22.95, Indiana University Press). The Somali-Italian author provides an insight to the Somali diaspora, the result of that torn nation’s civil wars. She tells the story of two cousins, Domenica Axad and Barni, forced to flee. Barni ekes out a living in Rome and Domenica wonders Europe in a painful effort to reunite her broken family. After ten years the two women meet again and, when Domenica gives birth to a son, Barni, an obstetrician, is there by her side. It is a powerful story of the strength of women, family, and the tenacious yearning for a homeland that has been denied to them. Short stories make for good summer reading and you will find some excellent ones in Stolen Pleasures by Gina Berrialt ($15.95, Counterpoint Press). She died in 1999 after receiving many awards for her four novels, short story collections, and several screenplays. Novelist and screenwriter, Leonard Gardner, shared her life for many years and selected the stories in this collection. No two of the stories is alike and each taps into the fundamental emotions that drive our lives.
Being New Jersey born and bred, I naturally want to give a nod to a fellow resident, Janet Stafford, who has written an excellent new novel, Saint Maggie, ($16.00, Squeaking Pips Press, Box 5854, Hillsborough, NJ 08844, softcover). Set in the days just before the Civil War, this debut novel has a full cast of characters who share a rooming house on the square of a small New Jersey town. It is run by Maggie Blaine, a compassionate Christian woman who participates is the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves moving north. When the new minister moves in, sparks begin to fly and we are treated to a bit of history and a bit of romance. All in all, a very good story from beginning to end.
That’s it for July! We are now more than halfway through the year and hundreds of great new books await us. Come back in August for news of the best in fiction and nonfiction. Don’t keep Bookviews a secret! Tell your friends, coworkers, and others!
A founding Member of the National Book Critics Circle
Biographies, Autobiographies and Memoirs ~ Lots of Advice ~ Business Books ~ Summer Reading for Kids & Teens ~ Novels
My Picks of the Month
This report has recommended three previous books devoted to President Obama’s life and eligibility to hold the highest office in the land. In retrospect, as carefully documented as they were, the nation was not ready to consider that fact, nor ready to accept the consequences. Lyndon B. Johnson, however, surprised the nation with his announcement that he would not run for reelection in 1968 and, in 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first President to resign from office in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Prior to Obama’s election, however, Dr. Jerome R. Corsi, PhD, had authored “The Obama Nation”, warning that his credentials and life history was suspect. Now he has written Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama is Not Eligible to be President ($25.95, WND Books). More than 380 pages, complete with appendices and footnotes, meticulously reveal that he was not and is not eligible. I believe this book will lead to Obama’s resignation in the run up to the September 2012 Democratic Party nominating convention. I also believe that the mainstream media that formerly ignored or deriding all those who raised this issue are moving inexorably away from that position. Simply stated, Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution requires that a President be a “naturally born” citizen and Obama, as is widely known, is the son of a Kenyon citizen. Natural born requires that both parents be American citizens. How and why this was ignored in Obama’s case is examined in Corsi’s book, along with a massive cover up of the documentation that would and should disqualify him. Ignoring the Constitution has serious implications for the rule of law, the keystone of the American Republic.
I recommend you add Catherine Herridge’s new book to your summer reading list. It is The Next Wave: On the Hunt for Al Qaeda’s American Recruits ($25.00,.Crown Forum). If you watch Fox News then you know that Ms. Herridge is a national correspondent based out of Washington, D.C., and you know she has been following the story of terrorism directed against the nation for a long time. As a result, she has contacts deep inside the counterintelligence community as well as having traveled to Guantanamo many times to cover the proceedings there regarding some of the most evil people on Earth. She devotes a lot of the book to connecting the dots involving the life and activities of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born imam who facilitated the movement of several of the 9/11 terrorists before the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon. His knowledge of American culture has made him a valuable al Qaeda asset, so much so that he is the only American on a CIA hit list. He is currently believed to be hiding out in Yemen, but distance is nothing to the Internet and he is a master of recruiting disaffected American Muslims to attack their fellow Americans. One of them was Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood killer. Jihad is not just a present-day conflict; it is generational, and it is now a movement as opposed to a top-down vertical organization. The failed underwear bomber and Time Square bomber should not make us forget that there are new plots to kill Americans being hatched every day.
Two companion volumes to the Herridge book will explain a lot to anyone who has not been paying any more attention to al Qaeda or Hezbollah for the last decade or longer. The first is Peter l. Bergen’s The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al Qaeda ($16.00, Free Press) now in softcover is authored by a man widely regarded as a leading expert on al Qaeda, a national security analyst who has been in the belly of the beast. His book provides a comprehensive history of an organization devoted to terrorism for the ultimate purpose of imposing Islam on the West and everywhere else. Your grandchildren will be dealing with this threat. Consider Israel, now more than sixty year’s since its founding, but still facing implacable enemies. One of them is Hezbollah and Thanassis Cambinis has written A Privilege to Die: Inside Hezbollah’s Legions and Their Endless War Against Israel ($15.00, Free Press, softcover). Part standing army, part terrorist group, party political party, and part theological movement, it joins al Qaeda and Hamas it its intention to remake the map of the Middle East. An influential movement, this book will surprise you with its description of the people who are willing to die for it, people who span economic classes and religious sect for its apocalyptic beliefs. Based in Lebanon, the Party of God, has influence well beyond its borders.
I have a friend who has spent most of his life accompanied by dogs and presently has two who regard him as the alpha male of the pack. His love for dogs makes up for a distinct skepticism about humans and it is difficult to disagree with him much of the time. Dog lovers will love The Dog Next Door and Other Stories of the Dogs We love, edited by Callie Smith Grant ($12.99, Revell, softcover). There are an estimated 77.5 million dogs in the U.S. with 39% of U.S. households owning at least one while 24% own two. Americans love their dogs and they will love this follow-up to “A Prince Among Dogs” for the 35 true stories Grant has collected to celebrate these tail-waggers. Another passion for many Americans is baseball and 1961: The Inside Story of the Maris-Mantle Home Run Chase by Phil Pepe ($20.00, Triumph Books) tells of the year-long power surge that approached Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs for the 1927 New York Yankees. Maris would surpass it. The book is about an era when the game was not beset with doping scandals and raw power and real skill determined the outcome. Pepe has written more than fifty books on sports and this one is a wonderful look behind the scenes as well as on the field.
I cannot imagine what it must be to pilot a fighter jet, but a new book, Viper Force: 56th Fighter Wing by John M. Dibbs, an award-winning air-to-air photographer with text by Lt. Col. Robert ‘Cricket’ Renner, ($40.00, Zenith Press) will get you as close to the experience as one can have by enjoying page after page of extraordinary photos and a text provided by as 1988 Air Force Academy graduate who retired in 2010 after 22 years of active duty service that included 37 combat sorties over Iraq. If a machine can be called beautiful, than surely the F-16 Fighting Falcon, known to its pilots and crews as the Viper, is a thing of beauty and the photos are testament to that. Reading this book gives one a wonderful insight to the lives of those associated with this fighter jet and a sense of its lethal capacity to protect the nation that built it. From the same publisher comes Burt Rutan’s Race to Space by Dan Linehand ($30.00, Zenith Press). Rutan has earned a reputation as an aerospace visionary and he is seeking to make private space travel affordable and accessible these days. The book is the story of that endeavor. I suspect, however, that its appeal will be mostly to those steeped in the engineering aspects of the effort and those for whom this quest remains the ultimate expression of pushing the envelope.
Odds and Ends: My Mother taught gourmet cooking, mostly French and European cuisine, so I am partial to cookbooks (she wrote two) that share their enthusiasm and recipes for this gastronomic genre. I first encountered Chef Jacques Haeringer through the “Chez Francois Cookbook”, the bible of classic Alsatian cuisine. The chef lives in Northern Virginia where L’Augberge Chez Francois in Great Falls attracts not only the locals, but some famous DC folk as well. His new book is Two for Tonight ($26.95, Bartleby Press) and is a gourmet’s dream of romance when you combine great recipes, a nice bottle of wine, and a summer al fresco meal. These are meals for dining outdoors whether it’s his Alsatian fish stew or any of the other mostly fish dishes with the occasional lamb chop, veal scallopini, or Kobe beef dish for meat-eaters. The color photos are mouthwatering and, yes, I miss Mom's wonderful dinners. While recently attending the Book Expo in New York, I came across a book that I think many older computer users will find of interest. It’s Windows® 7 for Seniors: Quicksteps by Marty Matthews ($20.00, McGraw-Hill, softcover). It has many advantages in that it uses a larger print size, has lots of illustrations, and is filled with how-to tips that will enhance the use of this popular operating program. It is comprehensive and anyone taking advantage of it will discover how remarkable Windows®7 can be.
Many book lovers also aspire to be writers and for those who think they have a novel in them, there’s A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, edited by Andrea Barrett and Peter Turchi ($19.95, Trinity University Press, softcover). It features twenty contributors offering some excellent advice that will answer many of the questions a beginner may have. I have always been a non-fiction writer and concluded long ago that my brain is not equipped to write fiction. That requires a whole different set of sensibilities as well as the development of specific skills. This book will help future and current fiction writers hone those skills.
Let me finish with the thought that I do not normally take note of a specific poet’s work, preferring to deal only with anthologies of poetry. The reason is simple and cruel. If I feature one poet, I receive the books of others and great poetry is usually produced in relatively small amounts in any given era. I am going to make an exception for Maxine Kumin whom I met long ago when we were both young. I was at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, famed even then as a Middlebury College legacy of Robert Frost. I was there to write about it for Publishers Weekly and Kumin was one of the writers there to give readings and share their insights on the craft with aspiring writers. I was, at that point, already an aspiring and published poet but it would be my first and last time. I was old school, but Maxine was a modernist. All this returned to me when I received Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 ($16.95, W.W. Norton, softcover). Maxine is the author of 17 poetry collections, as well as numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. She’s won the Pulitzer Prize and a raft of other literary awards. If you were to choose a present day poet to read, you would discover she writes poetry that goes straight into your mind and heart. There is no way to “describe” a particular poet’s work, though I am sure many try. To read a modern poet, Maxine Kumin would be a very good choice.
Biographies, Autobiographies and Memoirs
The thing about some memoirs is that one often ends up wondering why the writer thought their life was all that significant or why the publisher did. Not all lives are equal in this respect, but I suppose one can learn something from a memoir if it reflects one’s own questions about life or illuminates some dark, unexplored corner.
My AOL address book was recently hacked for the second time and I am searching for software to prevent that occurring again. Serendipitously Mafiaboy: A Portrait of a Hacker as a Young man, arrived. Told by Michael Calce with Craig Silvermann ($22.95, Lyons Press), it is his account of what it was like to be a 15-year-old boy who, in the spring of 2000, was exposed as “Mafiaboy”, the cybercriminal who had crippled the websites of Yahoo!, Amazon, CNN, E*Trade, eBay and Dell. Not only were people asking how some adolescent could pull off devastating denial-of-service attacks, but why? Due out officially in August, Calce reveals the story of how his prodigious talent for unraveling and manipulating computer technology evolved into a teenage obsession. He was too young to realize the scope of the damage he was doing, but joining a gang of hackers gave him a sense of power and mission. In the end, the FBI joined with Canadian authorities in a manhunt to find out who he was. Calce acknowledges how reckless and stupid his attacks were. He was caught, spent eight months in a group home for troubled adolescents, and a year on probation with restricted access to computers. Cyber-folk will find this book of interest. Where’s My Wand? by Eric Poole ($15.00, Berkley, softcover) is an entertaining tale of growing up gay and Baptist in the 1970s. It is not a gay polemic as one might assume, but rather a hilarious recounting of confused gender at a time and place, and in the person of a very clever youngster looking for a way to make sense of it and come to peace with it. Gay folk will no doubt enjoy it, but the surprise is that straight folk will too. A comparable search for identity is told by Maise Houghton in Pitch Uncertain: A Mid-Century Middle Daughter Finds Her Voice ($24.95, Tide Pool Press, Cambridge, MA). It is the story of how she slowly decoded her parent’s marriage as the middle child coming of age in the 1950s. Her parents had an estranged by oddly loyal relationship and the author captures the era and genteel culture of the time. I am not sure who would find this book of interest except for someone of the same age and gender, but it is a well-told account. A very different memoir is told by Kelle Groom, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl ($23.00, Free Press) that recounts her young life as an addict and how, at age 19, she became pregnant with a son that she would end up losing twice, first to adoption, and then, within a year to cancer. This is a look into an addictive personality who discovered alcohol at age 15 and was an out-of-control alcoholic by age 19. The child’s death only hastened her downward spiral. The memoir, based in part on journals she kept at the time, is about her search for that lost son. In recovery she became a poet, earning a spot in Best American Poetry 2010, along with other accolades. Anyone who has known an alcoholic knows how totally destructive this addiction can be unless the pattern is broken. In a very real way, writing saved her life.
Sex, Mom, & God by Frank Schaeffer ($26.00, Da Capo Press) recounts what it was like to grow up in L’Abri, the Swiss chalet/Christian community that his parents, Evangelicals Francis and Edith Schaffer ran. He was surrounded by women, beautiful women, but the one who influenced his sexuality was his devout, but candid, mother who was at ease answering his questions about Jesus or sex, believing that conservative religion wasn’t about ruining sex for believers and others. Part memoir, part exploration of Evangelical views on issues such as abortion, premarital sex, and contraception, the book explores the harsh attitude organized religion has toward women and sex, while demonstrating that faith and fun can actually co-exist. Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy by Carlos Eire, the National Book Award winning author of “Waiting for Snow in Havana” ($15.00. Free Press, softcover) recounts what it was like to come of age as a Cuban émigré attached to the memories of his youth in that island nation. He explores the tension between Carlos the Cuban and Charles the American as he eventually embraced his continual reinvention as someone distinctly American.
Nica’s Dream: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness by David Kastin ($26.95, W.W. Norton) is a fascinating biography of Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonic “Nica” de Koenigswater, a British Rothchild who flew her own plane before she was twenty-one. Her husband was a French baron and, during World War II, they joined the French Resistance and went to North Africa where she drove ambulances at the front lines of battle against Rommel. That might have been enough for a biography, but in 1953 she moved to New York to pursue who overwhelming love of jazz and never left. As a patron of jazz, she befriended jazz legends and, indeed, both Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk died in her home. There is much to explore in her extraordinary life and the author, a music critic and journalist, plums it for its history of the powerful forces at work in a remarkable chapter in American history when jazz defined American modernism, mid-century New York, self-invention, and race. Any fan of jazz will want to read this book.
New York plays a role in Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted by Justin Martin ($30.00, Da Capo Press). Olmsted is best known as the designer of Central Park and Prospect Park, as well as other famous sites including Stanford University in California, and the Capitol Grounds in Washington, D.C. He was likely the most famous landscape architect of his times and since, but he was also a champion of abolition to American and British audiences in the 1850s and 60s. He was a forerunner of environmentalists to preserve public places that included Niagara Falls and Yosemite. This is a life well-lived and filled with achievements that still touch the lives of all who enjoy the fruits of his labors.
Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist by Peter L. Berger is subtitled “How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore” ($26.00, Prometheus Books) doesn’t live up to its promise. Essentially a memoir of an extraordinary and distinguished career as a sociologist, author and educator, it still manages to spend a lot of time on minutia that may interest his colleagues and former students, but didn’t motivate this reader to engage to the end. Is it just me? That’s a question I often ask, but if an author doesn’t capture and hold my attention, I tend to blame them. By contrast, James Hesketh is a freelance journalist and former motorcycle columnist for The Miami Herald. His memoir is Riding a Straight and Twisty Road ($15.95, Central Recovery Press, softcover) and recounts his life and his love of motorcycling, calling motorcycle riders “motion addicts” in ways that only other cyclists could understand. For them motorcycling is “a celebration of life.” Hesketh tells of a life initially affected by a childhood trauma and then a struggle for recovery to reclaim his life from another sort of addiction. In the course of his memoir, we learn about the changing history of motorcycle culture, a cross-country ride in response to a personal crisis, and the new serenity he found at the end of the road. It is a well-told tale that is sure to resonate with many readers who love motorcycling and/or are seeking recovery from their own addictions.
Lots of Advice
There is no end to books offering advice about every aspect of life and, having seen many of them, I still believe they perform a useful service. I particularly liked Better by Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong by Alina Tugend ($22.95, Riverhead books). As we all know, we’re told that it’s okay to make mistakes so long as we learn from them and don’t repeat them. Ms. Tugend points out that, in reality, we are frequently punished for making mistakes. She points out that mistakes occur all the time, but her book focuses on how we can identify them correctly and, in the process, improve not only ourselves, but our families, our work, and even the world around us. She has done a lot of research about the cultural attitudes regarding mistakes, how they can affect us from the earliest stages of our lives, and shape us into adults who are risk-averse and reluctant to take on challenges. This is one of those unexpected books, the kind that looks at something commonplace and provides a complete new understanding of it.
Overcoming Anxiety, Worry, and Fear: Practical Ways to Find Peace is one of those titles that tell you everything you need to know about the book. Gregory L. Jantz, PhD, along with Ann McMurray ($13.99, Revell, softcover).has added a new book to the more than 25 he has already written, several coauthored with Ms. McMurray. There is no question that we are living in times that are fraught with anxiety that comes at us from the media and is generated in our own lives as many struggle to make a living and get on with life’s other tasks. This new book offers a whole-person approach to coping with and eliminating anxiety. It is a combination of common sense, biblical wisdom, and therapeutic advice that can free the readers from being anxiety all the time. If this describes you or someone you know, the book will prove a good investment.
I suspect most mothers simply ask themselves “what would my mother do?” by way of raising their own children. I have no doubt that raising children can prove quite overwhelming for many young mothers. Momsense: A Common-Sense Guide to Confident Mothering by Jean Blackmer ($12.99, Revell, softcover) is there to help. The book features “real mom” stories along with proven and practical advice, encouraging them not to seek perfection, but to honestly assess their skills and develop their own mothering style. If you’re a new mom or know one, this book will prove a blessing. It makes a lot of momsense! Books on better parenting abound and I particularly liked Smart Parenting for Smart Kids: Nurturing Your Child’s True Potential by Eileen Kennedy-Moore, PhD and Mark S. Lowenthal, PsyD ($16.95, Jossey-Bass, softcover) in which the two authors combine their expertise to provide strategies to help children develop social and emotional skills that will need to become capable, confident, and caring people. Among the chapters are “building connection”, “developing motivation” and “finding joy.” In a society beset by fear-mongering, endless testing in school, and mixed messages about personal conduct, raising a child is a real challenge, but most parents can do it with a bit of guidance. This book provides that guidance and the children will be the beneficiaries. The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up by Barbara K. Hofer, PhD, and Abigail Sullivan Moore ($15.00, Free Press, softcover) advises parents on how to stay connected to college-bound youngsters while giving them the space they need to become independent adults. The advent of cell phones, email, and texting, many kids turn to their parents for instant answers on how to handle a variety of problems they encounter. The authors suggest that too much guidance at this stage in life results in kids that never really emerge as adults in their own right. This is a significant book in a new era of connectiveness and one I would recommend to any parent whose child is going off to college.
Getting Down to Business (Books)
With unemployment verging on or exceeding 14 million, Unbeatable Resumes by Tony Beshara ($16.95, Amacom, softcover) is a very timely book indeed. As the author explains, it is a sales tool to get the attention of a hiring authority. Based on 38 years as a placement and recruitment specialist, the author knows what makes a resume effective. This book takes the mystery and the agony out of writing a resume that has a high probability of winning a candidate a face-to-face interview. His survey of more than 3,000 hiring decision-makers, managers and human relations specialists, reveals the hallmarks of a well-written resume. For those seeking employment, this could well be the best investment in yourself that you could make.
Another book on this topic that I would recommend is from the “Knock’m Dead” series that has sold more than five million books to date. Secrets & Strategies for Success in an Uncertain World by Martin Yate ($14.95, Adams Media, softcover) not only deals with resumes, but offers tips on turning interviews into job offers and tips about job security and promotions, understanding key career choices and career change strategies. This book addresses how to take control of your job search, your career, and your life. Career Mapping by Ginny Clarke and Echo Garrett ($17.95, Morgan James Publishing, softcover) isn’t officially due out until next month, but it takes a look at the world of work and concluded that it has changed forever. The only way to thrive in this highly competitive, technology-driven economy is to think of yourself as a free agent says the author. In short, you have to have a plan and her book is devoted to that. She too has been a recruiter and a career coach, so she is well positioned to understand the changes and how to adjust and take advantage of them. This book will work for the newcomer to the job marketplace as well as people nearing retirement age who want to switch gears. Books like this give those out of work a real advantage.
Everyone in business is looking for ways to secure an advantage over their competition. Front Runners: Lap your Competition with 10 Game-changing Strategies for Total Business Transformation by Mahesh Rao ($24.95, Bascom Hill Publishing Group) offers a step-by-step program that has been successfully implemented by numerous executives of Fortune 100 companies over the past decade. Rao has been an executive consultant with more than twenty years of business experience, as well as a coach to top executives, who has spent many years building strategies, managing global business and technology operations. With a degree in engineering and an MBA from Kellogg Graduate School of Management, he holds 14 US and international patents. The book comes with endorsements from the president of Global Brands and Commercial, Hilton Worldwide, and an executive vice president of Cisco Systems.
The “buzz” these days is all about “social media” and anyone seeking to master these rapidly growing communications vehicles would do well to read one or both books that have been recently published. Social Boom! How to Master Business Social Media by Jeffrey Gitomer ($22.99, FT Press--Financial Times) discusses how this tool is the best, least expensive, most direct way of communicating with your customers and how you can take advantage of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. It is easy to read and easy to implement. How to Make Money with Social Media by Jamie Turner and Reshma Shad, PhD ($24.99, FT Press, Pearson Education Inc) offers comparable advice and comes with glowing endorsements from top level executives. It is self-described as an in-the-trenches guide” written by experts who have developed money-making marketing campaigns for many of the world’s largest companies. This is not for lightweights because it discusses how to set objectives, assess one’s competition, craft strategies, select platforms, and integrate social media into broader marketing programs. Marketers, executives, and entrepreneurs can all benefit from its advice.
Summer Reading for the Kids & Teens
I have a number of favorite publishers of children’s and young adult books, and among them is Charlesbridge Publishing of Watertown, Massachusetts. Year after year, season after season, their editors and writers provide books for young readers and the latest batch is no exception. There’s Little Pig Joins the Band written and illustrated by David Hyde Costello ($14.95). This one is for the very earliest reader, age 5 or so, and of course can be read to the pre-school set. Being quite small Little Pig finds most musical instruments too big for him to play. It turns out that that he has a natural talent as the leader of the band! Those further along in reading skills, ages 7 and up, will enjoy Leo Landry’s Grin and Bear It ($12.95) about a bear who can write funny jokes by gets stage fright when he tries to tell them. Readers with a Hispanic heritage will especially enjoy Under the Mambo Moon by Julia Durango, illustrated by Fabricio VanderBroeck ($12.95) filled with wonderful poetry and short tales it is a tribute to Latin American cultures and music. What child does not love animals? Cool Animal Names by Dawn Cusick is lavishly illustrated by color photos of all manner of creatures, including insects and fish, who share the Earth. Those in the early grades in school will enjoy Miss Martin is a Martian, a Children’s Book Award Winner by Colleen Murray Fisher, illustrated by Jared Chapman ($7.95) and told from the point of view of one of her students who cannot imagine how she knows so much and is on to all his tricks! For the younger reader age pre-teen and older, there is a spooky, scaring, completely fascinating novel, Escape from Zobadak by Brad Gallagher about a mysterious box that leads to an antique maze of wooden corridors. This story is so complex that it draws the reader in and won’t let go until the last page.
Kids Can Press is another favorite of mine and a visit to its website will reveal why. Two recent books are Totally Human: Why We Look and Act the Way We Do by Cynthia Pratt Nicolson and illustrated by Dianne Eastman ($16.95). Aimed at those aged 8 and up, it is a clever, frank discussion of why humans hiccup, burb, shake when they’re scared, crave surgery food, and many other common characteristics. It’s a great introduction to the human race. Mathemagic! Number Tricks by Lynda Colgan and illustrated by Jane Kurisu ($16.95) will intrigue younger readers with an interest or flair for mathematics, and particularly good for those who need a reason to develop these skills.
There’s a world of fun in How Back-Back Got His Name by Thomas and Peter Weck and illustrated by Len DiSalvo ($15.95, Lima Bear Press) just out this month with a story about Lima Bear and his animal pals who help Plumpton the opossum when his back disappears! Ideal for those aged 4 to 8, it is fully of laughs. The Adventures of Blue Ocean Bob ($16.99, Children’s Success Unlimited LC) is aimed at children aged 5 and up. It quite deliberately intends to share its philosophy of life to motivate young minds to make the most of every day using the creatures of the sea to impart it. For the child that needs a nudge in this direction, it is a good book to share. In a similar fashion, two books from New Horizon Press are intended to help children be team players and to teach the value of perseverance. They are Joni and the Fallen Star by Cindy Jett Pilon, illustrated by John Hazard ($9.95) and The Tale of the Teeny, Tiny Black Ant by Teresa R. Allen, illustrated by Tea Seroya ($9.95). Both are geared to either pre-schoolers to whom they can be read or early readers aged 5 and up.
For the older reader, ages 10 and teens, there’s The Lucy Man: The Scientist Who Found the Most Famous Fossil Ever! ($16.00, Prometheus Books softcover) by CAP Sacier. It is a biography of Dr. Donald C. Johanson who found Lucy, (Australopithecus afarensis) in 1974. A paleoanthropologist, the skeleton was the first up-right walking human ancestor that was mostly complete. Any youngster showing an interest in such things will be immersed for hours in this book. Its foreword is provided by the subject of the book. Just published this month is a novel by Karen DelleCava, A Closer Look, ($16.95, WestSide Books, Lodi, NJ) for those aged 14 and older. It is about alopecia, an affliction that causes a person’s hair to fall out. How Cassie deals with this, at first trying to keep it a secret, and then confronting it when the secret is exposed, is the heart of a story about dealing with setbacks and still achieving one’s goals in life. This may seem a bit creepy, but I suspect many teenagers will find it a reflection in some way of their own lives.
Novels, Novels, Novels
Summer is traditionally a time for taking a novel to the beach or just the backyard to catch some sun and pass some time. I have stacks and stacks of novels and can only share news of some, so here goes.
Rules of Civility marks the debut of Amor Towles ($26.95, Viking) that is in many ways a throwback to the way novels were written in earlier times and, in particular, its theme of rising from humble beginnings to reach great heights, a classic American tale. It is the story of an irresistible young woman that is set in the late 1930s. On New Year’s Eve in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, 25-year-old secretary, Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse roommate meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker. Both fall for him, but the meeting sets Katey on a year-long journey through the upper echelons of New York society where she encounters a glittering new world of wealth and station, along with all the other emotions and behaviors that lurk beneath the surface. Katey is made of stern stuff and good values. Towles was born and raised just outside of Boston, graduated from Yale University, and an MA from Stanford University. He is a principal at an investment firm in Manhattan. He has just joined the ranks of promising new authors.
A very intriguing story is told by Kevin Klesert in The Other Side of Light ($32.95,
(http://www.theothersideoflight.com/). A combination of science fiction and historical fiction, Klesert asks what would happen if a modern U.S. Naval Task Force with the Secretary of Defense on board to watch how new technology can render the entire task force invisible to the enemy only to have it go awry and transport them back to December 3, 1941, four days before Pearl Harbor! Knowing what happened, they must wrestle with the question of changing history by intervening. I am not going to tell you much more because it would spoil the plot. This one is a fascinating take on the twists and turns of history. The genre of the science of genetics and its unexpected events is the background to The Genius Gene ($34.95 hardcover, $14.95 softcover, $4.99 Kindle, http://www.geniusgenebook.com/) by Howard Bernberg. We are introduced to geneticist Catherine Fox and archeologist Paul Butler, attractive, accomplished, ethical, and widely acclaimed. Political, religious, and scientific institutions are trying to cope with rapid medical advances that allow the potential of our own genomes to be unlocked. This is a complex story of an older Nobel Prize winning geneticist who has developed a package of genetic enhancements he wants to legalize, the purpose of which is to create superior humans and make all others obsolete. The plot's twists and turns will have you turning the pages in this compelling and scary story. Fans of supernatural thrillers will want to glom onto the first four of a five-book series you can check out at http://www.mannyjonesseries.com/. Eli Just has chosen a very different kind of hero to battle the forces of evil, a live-and-let-live bachelor with a minor but successful music career. Strange things begin to happen to Manny when his band takes a break. I am not a fan of this kind of fantasy genre, but Just makes it work. The Manny Jones series is priced at $29.95.
Among the softcover novels available there are several that stand out. On the light side, there’s Why I Love Singlehood by Elisa Lorella and Sarah Girrell ($13.95, Amazon Encore). Eva Perino is single and the proud owner of The Grounds, a bustling coffee shop in the heart of a North Carolina college town. She’s busy, she’s happy, and there is no need, she feels, for a man in her life. It has been two years since her live-in boyfriend broke her heart and her blog about singlehood is a big hit, but Eva begins a secret and very funny search for love when she secretly joins an online dating site. It is soon time to decide between her lifestyle choices. A very different story is told by Christina Ali Farah in Little Mother ($22.95, Indiana University Press). The Somali-Italian author provides an insight to the Somali diaspora, the result of that torn nation’s civil wars. She tells the story of two cousins, Domenica Axad and Barni, forced to flee. Barni ekes out a living in Rome and Domenica wonders Europe in a painful effort to reunite her broken family. After ten years the two women meet again and, when Domenica gives birth to a son, Barni, an obstetrician, is there by her side. It is a powerful story of the strength of women, family, and the tenacious yearning for a homeland that has been denied to them. Short stories make for good summer reading and you will find some excellent ones in Stolen Pleasures by Gina Berrialt ($15.95, Counterpoint Press). She died in 1999 after receiving many awards for her four novels, short story collections, and several screenplays. Novelist and screenwriter, Leonard Gardner, shared her life for many years and selected the stories in this collection. No two of the stories is alike and each taps into the fundamental emotions that drive our lives.
Being New Jersey born and bred, I naturally want to give a nod to a fellow resident, Janet Stafford, who has written an excellent new novel, Saint Maggie, ($16.00, Squeaking Pips Press, Box 5854, Hillsborough, NJ 08844, softcover). Set in the days just before the Civil War, this debut novel has a full cast of characters who share a rooming house on the square of a small New Jersey town. It is run by Maggie Blaine, a compassionate Christian woman who participates is the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves moving north. When the new minister moves in, sparks begin to fly and we are treated to a bit of history and a bit of romance. All in all, a very good story from beginning to end.
That’s it for July! We are now more than halfway through the year and hundreds of great new books await us. Come back in August for news of the best in fiction and nonfiction. Don’t keep Bookviews a secret! Tell your friends, coworkers, and others!
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