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!
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Bookviews - June 2011
By Alan Caruba
My Picks of the Month ~ Advice Books (Mostly) for Woman ~ The Story of America ~ Dogs of War ~ Books for Kids and Young Adults ~ Novels
My Picks of the Month
In 1984 I created a very popular media spoof called The Boring Institute© and it thrived until, after 9/11, I decided to put it on hiatus. Along the way I learned a lot about boredom and wanted to write a book about it, but publishers only wanted a “funny” book, not a serious one. Peter Toohey, a professor of classics in the University of Calgary’s Department of Greek and Roman Studies, has written Boredom, A Lively History ($26.00, Yale University Press). I had an opportunity to do a radio show with Prof. Toohey. He is an erudite and charming man, and an intellectual. Academics tend to squeeze a subject for all its juices. He has applied this to the subject of boredom and its fundamental attributes by referring to every painting, book, and every other historical and cultural reference. That said, he has done a very good job. I personally think that boredom has been a major driving factor throughout history and in our present culture. Prof. Toohey’s book is well written and well researched and, at this point, the definitive book on the subject.
When you see as many books as I do in the course of a month or a year, one is always on the look-out for those that stand out from the others. For example, I have a friend who has always had dogs as his companions, but did you know that Americans spend an estimated $45.4 billion annually on their cats, dogs, birds and other pets? This is money that is not being spent on ourselves as food, clothing and other necessities. In The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What makes Us Human by Pat Shipman, ($26.95, W.W. Norton) the author points out that, unlike other mammals, we are the only species that routinely adopts other species in this way. A paleoanthropologist, Shipman notes that our desire to keep and care for other animals in a uniquely human trait and, she says, our species’ greatest strengths. In a fascinating tour of the past, Shipman takes us through various milestones in our development, noting how humans related to other species. This is a wonderfully readable book that rates our domestication of other species as a major advance that defines our hominid lineage.
In a very different way, Waterford Press of Phoenix, AZ has published a unique booklet, Cat Care, a simplified owner’s manual ($7.95) that teaches you just about everything you need to know. It is quite brilliant even though it is quite short, taking the reader through the basics of food, health, playtime, the preparation before a cat becomes your pet, training fundamentals and everything else! This publishing house offers some wonderful Pocket Naturalist ® Guides, Travel, and Tutor guides, along with wildlife guides. Visit its website and be prepared to be excited by it. For sheer malicious fun, there’s a book of cartoons by Elia Anie. Evil Cat: A Fluffy Kitty Gets Mean ($10.95, Perigee, an imprint of the Berkley Publishing Group, softcover) featuring 95 versions of darkly humorous variations on an insidiously evil cat intent on destroying all decency. You will laugh!
In another section of this month’s report, the Zenith Press is noted for its many fine books on war, but it has also published two unusual books that anyone with an interest in history and engineering would enjoy. They are RMS Titanic Owner’s Workshop Manual and NASA Space Shuttle Owner’s Workshop Manual ($28.00 each). Extensively illustrated with photos, design and construction illustrations and plans, these two books relate why the Titanic suffered a tragic failure and sinking at sea and how the space shuttled defied gravity to fly its many missions to carry large payloads into space. First flown in 1981, six orbiters have been built before retirement after a thirty-year career.
There are a lot of college-bound young people as always and three softcover books will make that adventure a lot easier for them and their parents. They are published by Sourcebooks and cover the topics one really needs to know in order to make the transition. The Happiest Kid on Campus: A Parent’s Guide to the Very Best College Experience (for You and Your Child) by Harlen Cohen ($14.99) provides a wealth of advice on how to make the change work for both parents and the student. It’s all about the do’s and don’ts, and is a great companion for his other book, The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into in College ($14.99) that has already sold more than 125,000 copies to those smart enough to equip themselves for experiences they might not otherwise anticipate. Women will account for 58% of the enrollments in 2011 and they have their own special issues. These are happily addressed by Christie Garton in Chic U: The College Girl’s Guide to Everything ($14.99) that discusses everything from how to handle homesickness to the pros-and-cons of co-ed dorms, sororities, and the inevitable temptations of drinking, drugs and sex. I would not send my daughter to college without making sure she read this book first!
Combining history and humor, How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous ($17.99, Walker & Company) written by Georgia Bragg and illustrated by Kevin O’Malley is just page after page of fun. The history recounted is quite good and you will be astounded to learn how so many famous folks breathed their last. For example, a trip to London by Pocahontas, her two-year-old son, with her husband John Rolfe was literally the death of her. The air was so fetid that she soon developed respiratory problems and was dead at age 21 far from her home in Virginia. Beethoven was not only deaf and could not hear the music he composed, but he died a dreadful death made worse by the doctor’s effort to drain his stomach that had become bloated. George Washington was literally bled to death by his doctors. The novelist, Charles Dickens had a variety of illnesses including serious mental disease. A stroke killed him. I know all this sound ghoulish, but the various stories are fascinating compared to the usual things you have read about famous folks.
Advice Books (Mostly) for Women
Women must need a lot of advice these days because there are a number of new books that want to provide it.
Saundra Dalton Smith, M.D. has authored Set Free to Live Free: Breaking Through the 7 Lies Women Tell Themselves ($12.99, Revell, softcover). Apparently, perfection, envy, image, balance, control, emotions and limits represent a lot of problems for women and, since the author, a board-certified internal medicine physician, treats a lot of women, she sees a lot of the problems that arise as a result. Paula Renaye is a certified coach and motivational speaker with a passion for helping people face reality and take personal responsibility for their choices. Her latest book is The Hardline Self Help Handbook ($19.95, Diomo Books) and is billed as a fast-track course in self-discovery and self-empowerment that asks “What are you willing to do to get what you really want?” Both men and women can benefit from the advice she offers. Written for both adults and young adults, It’s Not Personal: Lessons I’ve Learned from Dealing with Difficult Behavior ($14.95, Orange Sun Press, softcover) by Cindy Hampel is filled with good advice. Hampel, whose won awards for investigative journalism and has a world of experience with corporate and non-profit organizations addresses how to handle fear and guilt tactics, stay poised under pressure, and the kind of attitude one needs to get through difficult encounters and experiences. Who hasn’t had to deal with bullies, a cranky neighbor, an unpleasant business encounter, and even a demanding elderly parent? Knowing how to deal with them lets you focus on your own goals and push life’s common disturbances aside. In the end, it’s really up to you.
Fans of Dr. Mehmet Oz of television fame know he has been married for 25 years to Lisa Oz who has also been a producer, entrepreneur, mother of four children, and the co-author of six bestsellers. One of them, Transforming Ourselves and the Relationships That Matter Most is now available in softcover ($14.00. Simon and Schuster). The author discusses how to “identify one’s authentic self and why it matters in a relationship, how your relationship with your body affects those with other people, tips for “conscious parenting”, and other advice that a reader might find of value. What Did I Do Wrong? What to Do When You Don’t Know Why the Friendship is Over is by Liz Pryor, Good Morning America’s advice guru ($14.00, Free Press, softcover). The book addresses breakups with your best girlfriends and, she says, they often come without warning and can be devastating. The book discusses why friendships fizzle, how to resolve old wounds, and even how to—sometimes—reconnect.
Think by Lisa Bloom is subtitled “straight talk for women to stay smart in a dumbed-down world ($25.99, Vanguard Press). The author thinks that women are in danger of spiraling into a nation of dumbed-down, tabloid media-obsessed, reality TV addicts. Paradoxically, women these days are excelling in education at every level, often out-performing their male counterparts in employment situations, but still spending too much time and money on their appearance, including, says the author, choosing plastic surgery in record-breaking numbers. Part of the problem, says Ms. Bloom is a culture that rewards beauty over brains. Are too many women just playing dumb or are they actually clueless? This is a very provocative book that will definitely make women readers think.
Then, of course, there is The Mommy Docs’ Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy and Birth by three OB/GYNs ($15.95, Da Capo Press, softcover) which, at 526 pages, is as complete a tome on the subject as one could want. Were there such books for our grandmothers and their grandmothers? Verily, if the answer you’re looking for in this guide cannot be found, the question is not worth asking. From preparing your body for pregnancy to birth, this is an impressive piece of work. Say Goodbye to Varicose & Spider Veins Now by Dr. Greg Martin ($14.95, Plentiful Publishing, softcover) discusses ‘how revolutionary new medical techniques can improve your health and quality of life by eliminating pain, swelling, cramps, restlessness and unsightliness in your legs.” According to the book, 80 million Americans, women and men, suffer from this condition. The author says this is a real health problem that should be addressed, increasing the risk for blood clots, phlebitis, and pulmonary embolisms. Have this problem or know someone who does? Get this book!
The Story of America
It’s no secret that I love reading history and American history is a particular favorite. I was born just before World War II and came of age in the years that followed. One of the enduring markers of that time was the fear that the Russians would lob an atom bomb at the U.S. and after the Sputnik satellite in 1957 some people started building bomb shelters. The fears reached their peak with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. During that time, the government issues all manner of Civil Defense brochures and pamphlets. Eric G. Sweden has gathered their content between the covers of Survive the Bomb: The Radioactive Citizens Guide to Nuclear Survival ($17.00, Zenith Press) and it is not only a stroll down memory lane, it is still has relevance today as many worry that Islamic extremists could use nuclear weapons against the U.S. Its advice would be useful to cope with any kind of natural or manmade disaster.
One of the great chapters of American history is brilliantly captured in Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White ($35.00, W.W. Norton. This MacArthur Award-winning historian cuts through the myths about “robber barons” are replaced with facts from the Gilded Age that reveal that many of the early investors in railroads were small-time grocers and merchants who were drawn to the subsidies and land grants of the Civil War Congress. A handful turned corporate and national economic disaster into personal fortunes. The railroads that opened up the West and connected the two coasts also made corruption a permanent fixture of the political system as favors were exchanged without even the need for bribery; such as favorable prices for stock, low-cost loans, and campaign contributions. Sounds like the recent housing bubble, eh? Well, there is so much more because the railroads are the sinews of modern America. This is great reading. A year or so ago I had praise for Colossus by Michael Hiltzik, a history of the building of the Hoover Dam during the Hoover and Roosevelt years. It is now available in softcover ($17.00, Free Press) and I am looking forward to his forthcoming history of “The New Deal”, coming in September. The dam was a great engineering achievement, but its human back-story reads like a suspense novel. If you want to talk about good times, let’s not forget the Roaring Twenties. David Wallace has written Capital of the World: A Portrait of New York City in the Roaring Twenties ($24.95, Lyons Press) and, in doing so, brings to life the era and personalities of the jazz loving customers, Prohibition gangsters who kept their glasses filled, and the music playing. It was the era of Mafia boss Lucky Luciano, Mayor Jimmy “Gentleman Jim” Walkers, the famed madam, Polly Adler, and comedienne Fanny Brice. Literary stars emerged such as the Round Table’s Alexander Woolcott and Dorothy Parker. You could go to the Cotton Club and hear Bessie Smith or the ballpark to watch Babe Ruth. Wallace has captured them and the fabled decade in which they thrived.
Another chapter of American history was the fabled gold rush and Howard Blum has written The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush ($26.00, Crown Publishers). It occurred in the last decade of the 1800s. The Wild West had been tamed and the men who tamed it had outlived their usefulness as “civilization” moved in to build towns and begin cities. When gold was discovered in Alaska and the adjacent Canadian Klondike, a giddy mix of greed and the lust for adventure sent men fleeing a worldwide economic depression, driven by dreams of wealth, to some of the most inhospitable regions of the northwest. All manner of greenhorns and grifters followed in their wake. It was, to say the least, a very colorful and dramatic time. This book never fails to ignite the imagination, particularly with its story of the Pinkerton detectives who tracked the men who stole a fortune in gold bars from the Treadwell Mine in Juneau, Alaska.
The Dogs of War
Much of what we call history is, in fact, the story of war. It holds a fascination for us because it is the ultimate drama for those who participated, were its victims and heroes, and because it is an expression of the aggressive aspect of our species, the one that for good or evil, defines humans. One sees it in its many forms all around us.
One publishing company, Zenith Press, devotes itself to reporting the events of war and, especially, World War Two. Their latest, a large format—coffee table—book is Bombs Away! The World War II Bombing Campaigns Over Europe by John R. Bruning ($50.00) and it is extraordinary. While battles were being fought on the ground with tanks, troops, and artillery, it was the war from the skies that rendered the relentless destruction of cities and specific military targets. Both the Nazis and the allies developed air warfare to a point never previously achieved. Bruning is among a handful of great military historians and his earlier books on “The Battle of the Bulge”, “The Air Battle for Korea”, and others are testimony to that. Filled with page after page of photos, this latest chapter from World War Two will provide hours of great reading while paying tribute to those whom we have come to call “the greatest generation.” 101st Airborne: The Screaming Eagles at Normandy by Mark Bando ($29.99, large format softcover) recounts one of the greatest days of this famed fighting unit that was composed of a cross-section of American men who volunteered to undergo rigorous training and who enjoyed a high degree of esprit de corps. This is an inspiring book and would make a great gift for the survivors as well as those following in their warrior tradition.
Other new Zenith Press titles include one that also involves the air war, Mission to Berlin by Robert F. Dorr ($28.00) that tells the story of the 314 bombing missions to Berlin between 1940 and 1945. Berliners did not expect to be bombed and in the early years of the war were not. Berlin, however, was a legitimate military target as the headquarters of the Third Reich and German armed forces. The sixth largest city in Europe, it was home to manufacturing facilities such as aircraft factories. Forty miles of defenses protected it, but the British and American fliers carried out a sustained effort that is well worth reading. Hitler’s most daring commando, Otto Skorzeny, who died in 1975, was called “the most dangerous man in Europe” for his exploits. His book, Skorzeny’s Special Missions, ($16.99, softcover) is a memoir of his war years and vividly depicts commando action. The recent mission to kill Osama bin Laden had its roots in these early exploits. Modern wars are also generating their histories and Zenith has published Dick Camp’s Battle for the City of the Dead: In the Shadow of the Golden Dome, Najaf, August 2004 ($30.00) tells of the spring and summer of that year when Iraq was coming apart at the seams, was rent by sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunnis, and Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Militia used the Imam Ali Mosque as its base of operations. A U.S. Marine battalion and two U.S. Army battalions broke the militia’s defenses in the cemetery and Najaf’s old city. This is an ugly story of war, but one that needs telling and is told well.
The role that bombers played in World War Two is also explored by David Sears in Pacific Air ($27.50, Da Capo Press) in a book that provides a panorama of the battle against Japan. Despite three years of sacrifices by fearless airmen who took on a strong military power, a combination of aeronautical ingenuity and aviators who refused to accept defeat turned the tide and led to victory. Anyone who loves military history will thoroughly enjoy the stories of the many young men who helped write it against daunting odds. In the end, Navy and Marine Corps pilots at the controls of F4F Wildcats, F6F Hellcats, and TBF Avengers destroyed more than 5,000 Japanese aircraft and scored a big win in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The Wolf: The Mystery Raider that Terrorized the Seas during World War I by Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen ($16.00, Free Press, softcover) reaches back to 1917 to tell the story of a disguised German raider ship that embarked on a 15-month wartime mission to capture or bomb every ship in its path, becoming at one point an international floating prison to more than 800 men, women and children, prisoners and crew as it sailed the world’s major oceans. Amazingly, it made it back to Germany, 64,000 miles and 444 days later. Gretel’s Story: A Young Woman’s Secret War Against the Nazis by Gretel Wachtel and Claudia Strachan ($24.95, Lyons Press) puts a human face on story of war as it recounts how a young, free-spirited woman was caught up in World War II and waged her own war against the Nazis by helping a local priest protect those hunted by the Gestapo, hid her Jewish doctor in the cellar of her house, allied herself with the Resistance, served as a typist in the Wehrmacht and passed along secrets learned from her work, finally to be arrested by the Gestapo in 1945, and liberated by the British army. It is an astonishing story. She moved to England in 1993 and died there in 2006. This memoir would make a great movie.
The Itch to Travel
There are folks who just love to travel. Throughout the 1980s as part of my work as a writer and photojournalist, I traveled all over the United States. With the exception of New England there were only a few States I did not visit, often several times. I have not gotten on a plane in so long I cannot recall. My idea of travel is the local supermarket. Leave the USA? No way. For those who do still want to travel, however, there are many excellent books to help satisfy that itch.
I recently attended the annual Book Expo in New York where thousands of new books are on display, often with authors to sign them, and long aisles of publishers promoting them. I paused at the East View MapLink booth and discovered their Crumpled City soft city maps for places like New York, Paris, London, Tokyo and others. They are literally on cloth so you can stuff them in your pocket or backpack when not using them to find your way around. It is a very clever idea. Check them out at http://www.evmaplink.com/.
Though not a “travel book” by definition, David Monagan’s Ireland Unhinged: Encounters with a Wildly Changing Country ($28.00, Council Oak Books) provides an intriguing look at today’s Ireland by someone born in Connecticut who moved himself and his family to Ireland in 2000 and established himself as one of its observers. His travel books include “Jaywalking With the Irish” and “Journey Into the Heart.” Monagan was there to observe its recent economic miracle declines swiftly into collapse. His book is a clear-eyed look at his adopted country. This is a highly personal story of Ireland and its people for whom Monagan has a depth of love and concern. It’s still a great place to visit and this book will provide insights you will likely not fine elsewhere.
Whereabouts Press of Berkeley, California, has a unique series that booklovers will want to tap before selecting a destination. It is “A Traveler’s Literary Companion” and one of the latest is devoted to India ($14.95, softcover), edited by Chandrahas Choudhury. It is a different way to experience that vast subcontinent as it serves up short fiction by accomplished writers, many of whom are famous in the English-speaking world beyond India. The foreword is by Anita Desai and one of the contributors is Salmon Rushdie. Its thirteen selections provide insights into Indian culture and history, representing eight (translated) languages and a dozen different cultures and regions. I have known about this series for a long time. Twenty different nations and cities are available from Argentina to Vietnam, Amsterdam to Vienna.
Michael Jacobs has written an exhaustive book about the Andes ($24.95, Counterpoint Press, softcover), a mountain range stretching 4,500 miles through South America, rivaled in height only by the Himalayas. Jacobs, a travel writer, takes one on a tour across seven different countries, from the balmy Caribbean to the inhospitable islands of Tierra del Fuego. His route begins in Venezuela and ends with the tip of the continent. Along the way you will learn of Simon Bolivar, the young Charles Darwin, and a host of other characters whose lives were intertwined with the Andes in some fashion. This is a hefty volume that is likely to be regarded as a travel classic in the years to come.
Alaska has become a destination for travels in part because of the fame acquired by its former Governor Sarah Palin, but it is also a place of great natural beauty as well as famed for its recreational opportunities. It is a huge place and the 63rd edition of The Milepost ® 2011: Alaska Travel Planner, edited by Kris Valencia ($29.95, softcover) is 784 pages with more than 700 color photos and 100 maps including the classic MILEPOST® Plan-A-Trip Map with mileage plus latitudes/longitudes for GPS users. It contains all the information needed and more. Where to stay, where to eat, where to visit. This book is a triumph and definitive for anyone who wants to visit Alaska, the Yukon, British Columbia, Alberta, or the Northwest Territories. Go not leave home without it!
Books for Kids and Young Adults
The next time some young person says “I’m bored”, tell them to go read a book. Not turn on the television and not play some video game. Nothing engages the mind and helps it to grow more positively than reading.
You can get the reading habit going even in the pre-school years by reading to a child. One of my favorite series for this stars Howard B. Wigglebottom by Howard Binkow and illustrated by Susan f. Cornelison. Aimed at ages 4 through 8, these books teach useful lessons in a delightful, entertaining way. You can learn more about them at http://www.wedolisten.com/. The latest is Howard B. Wigglebottom Learns Too Much of a Good Thing is Bad ($15,00, Thunderbolt Publishing) in which Howard, a white rabbit, does too much celebrating on his birthday, eating too much, buying too many balloons that carry him aloft, and generally giving him a tummy ache and scaring the wits out of him. It’s all good fun for the young reader who also will learn a valuable lesson. Also for the same age group, there’s Big Bouffant by Kate Hosford and illustrated by Holly Clifton-Brown ($16.95, Carol Rhoda Books, a division of Lerner Books). It’s the story of a trend-setting girl who is bored with the standard hairstyles in her classroom and, inspired by her grandmother’s bouffant, get one in order to stand apart from the pack. First mocked and then imitated, Annabelle experiences the thrill of trying something new and, yes, getting bored with it and ready to move onto to something else. It’s a clever story.
Beach Ball Books has published John Thorn’s First Pitch: How Baseball Began ($14.99) for ages 9 and up. Thorn is Major League Baseball’s Official Baseball Historian and former editor of “Total Baseball”, so you can be sure the facts are accurate as he traces the game back to its roots and dispels many of the myths about how it evolved. Handsomely illustrated with photos and artwork from its early years, readers will learn many fascinating things such as women have been playing baseball since at least 1798 and was being played in China in 1836. It’s popularity spread after the Civil War when it became a game played by professional athletes. The Ultimate Guide to Basketball by James Buckley, Jr. ($7.99) is an alternative book for the younger readers, ages 7 and up, that enjoy that game. The same publisher provides fun reading with Weird Sports ($6.99) that includes elephant soccer, extreme unicycling, and even bog snorkeling. To learn more about this and others, visit http://www.beachballbooks.com/.
For middle school young folk and teens, there are novels that both tackle serious topics or are just fun. In the latter citatory there’s Nerd Camp by Elissa Brent Weissman ($15.99, Atheneum Books for Young Readers), ideal for those ages 8 through 12. Told through 10-year-old Gabe’s eyes, he is looking forward to the Summer Center for Gifted Enrichment that other kids call the Smart Camp for Geeks and Eggheads. When he meets his super-cool, soon-to-be stepbrother, Gabe begins to wonder if he isn’t geeky-squared? All manner of trials ensue from a lice epidemic to a karaoke showdown, and the camp experience turns out to be far less stressful than he anticipated. Two new books from Westside Books will prove compelling for young adults, ages 14 and up.. They are A Kid from Southie by John Shea and Mike Harmon ($16.95) and Open Wounds by Joseph Lunievicz ($16.95). South Boston is where Aiden O’Connor, a high school senior, must sort out his loyalties to a local street gang and the benefits of a better life, a trip through temptation and the sacrifices it will take to make the right choices. Queens, New York, is the setting for the second novel in which Cid Wymann is almost a prisoner in his own home to avoid the harsh world outside. He loves Errol Flynn movies filled with swordplay and duels, deciding to become a great fencer. When his cousin Cid arrives from England, he introduces him to a Russian fencing master who provides training and, at age 16, he learns to channel his aggression through the discipline of the blade. Suffice to say, an adult could read these books with equal pleasure.
Novels, Novels, Novels
Time was a novelist had to run a gauntlet of publishing house editors in order to get published. They usually needed a literary agent as well. Not so today. Any author can publish their novel and even reach a large audience of readers if the “buzz” goes viral and people hear about it.
Jeffrey M. Anderson, a former book publicist, has gone the self-publishing route with Ephemera ($15.99, Creatorspace, softcover). It is a perfect book to take to the beach to read on a summer’s day for its length, 420 pages, and densely written, compelling story about Nester Cab, a second-rate magazine writer whose life is changed when a mysterious note left in his office awakens his curiosity. He begins a search for a missing soldier and, in the course of it, discovers a clandestine anti-government organization and a hidden world of government conspiracies, real and imagined. Anderson is particularly adept at character description and the dialogue rings true. The novel is filled with madmen, killers, and megalomaniacs. It is a modern day journey for truth told with a mixture of satire and sadness. Ephemera is defined as "a short-lived thing, printed matter of passing interest." Your interest will be grabbed from the beginning to the end of this novel.
I think former Sen. Bob Graham’s novel, Keys to the Kingdom ($25.99, Vanguard Press) is going to generate a lot of buzz, a suspense novel that has the particular benefit of the fact the author served in Congress, knows its secrets, was the former Chairman of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence for many years, and has written a timely story about terrorism, and nuclear proliferation. Sen. Graham’s writing style has an eye for detail that lends a verisimilitude to the story that begins with a New York Times opinion editorial by a Florida Senator who served as a co-chair of the 9/11 commission and is murdered not long after the piece is published. The issue raised is the full role that Saudi Arabia played in the 9/11 attack; something not seriously addressed by the commission. The Senator, sensing the danger he has provoked by his commentary, recruited an ex-Special Forces operative, Tony Ramos, providing him with detailed instructions for an investigation. Ramos joins forces with the slain senator’s daughter to uncover a shocking conspiracy linking Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda. It spans Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. At the heart of the novel is the question of whether Ramos and his team can stop an al Qaeda attack, this time nuclear, on American shores?
Vietnam haunts the collective memory of Americans who fought in or lived through the war in the 1970s. Daughters of the River Huong by Uyen Nicole Duong ($13.95, Amazon Encore, softcover) has the distinction of being told by a winner of the Vietnam National Honor Prize for Literature at age 16, who like many fled her native country in the wake of that war. Now, thirty years later, her debut novel tells a century-long tale that captures the complex history of Vietnam and its people. Told through the eyes of Simone, a precocious teenager, it is the story of a concubine of the extinct Kingdom of Champa, her daughters, and her mother. From monarchy to French colonial occupation, the American intervention, the fall of Saigon, and Communist rule, it is a compelling history as experienced by all elements of Vietnamese society. The author, a Harvard graduate, was the first Vietnamese-American appointed as a US judge. It is well worth reading for many reasons, not the least of which is its compelling story. Penguin Classics has published El Filibusterismo by Jose Rizal ($17.00, softcover) to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the author’s birth and the translation of his story, a revolutionary epic set in his native Philippines. A story of obsession and revenge, it has a rich cast of characters as it tells the story of resistance to colonial rule by a champion of Filipino nationalism and independence. This novel so angered Spanish authorities that, when the revolution broke out, the author was imprisoned and, at age 35, executed. Another nation’s history is captured in Knight of Swords by Ian Breckon ($14.95, Counterpoint, softcover), set in the winter of 1944 when northern Italy is a battlefield with Communist partisans battling the forces of Mussolini’s fascist Republic. A wounded fugitive finds shelter in an isolated and decaying castle in the mountains, home to a reclusive nobleman and his family. As he regains his strength, he discovers they have no intention of letting him leave. Snowed in during the long winter, the fugitive, the Baron, and his family are drawn into a complex game of power and seduction. India is the setting for An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy ($14.00, Free Press, softcover) marks her American debut. The place is a small town in Bengal where a family lives in solitude in a vast new house. This is pre-partition India of the 1940s and focuses on the relationship between an orphan of unknown caste, Mukunda, and Bakul, an orphaned daughter. Mukunda is banished to Calcutta where he prospers, but his thoughts are always of Bakul and he knows he must return. It is a richly romantic novel that explores many themes.
Another summer read is an erotic adventure novel, Captured Prey by Craig Odanovich ($14.95, Emerald Book Company, softcover). Its plot ranges from the windswept ranchlands of Texas to the back rooms of political power on a New Year’s Eve on the beaches of Rio. It is a romp, inside the bedroom and out as Misty, an elite fitness trainer to a well-heeled male clientele spins her web for the powerful men who come her way and gets snared by her own tap. A very different story is told by Marilyn Howell in Honor Thy Daughter ($16.95) published by the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Though fiction, it is a hard-hitting story of the author’s loss of her 32-year-old daughter to colon cancer and for anyone who has lost a loved one to cancer this story will strongly resonate. The unique aspect of the story is the use of psychedelic therapy to ease her daughter’s final days, making for a politically provocative and emotionally stunning tale. Howell makes a compelling case against the 40-year ban on research into psychedelic psychotherapy, especially as it relates to end-of-life issues as opposed to the chemotherapy drugs in wide use today.
Two softcover novels explore universal themes. In Long Drive Home author Will Allison returns after his literary sensation, “What You Have Left”, a 2007 novel that was widely heralded. In this novel, a sudden decision by a happily married suburban father who gives into an angry impulse when he jerks the steering wheel of his car to scare a reckless driver who dies as a result. It explores the moral ambiguities of personal responsibility as he tries to explain his action to his daughter. It is written in part as a confessional letter of a single event that alters both their lives. In Her Sister’s Shadow Katharine Britton ($15.00, Berkley, softcover) tells the story of two estranged sisters whose lives are brought together again after a sudden death. Forty years earlier Lilli Niles fled her family in White head, Massachusetts to escape her over-competitive sister Bea and a betrayal that has resonated ever since. Living in London, she received a call from Bea who has just lost her husband and wants Lilli to fly home for the funeral. It is a strong debut for the author who explores the bonds of sisterhood. Making his debut with The Descent of Man ($24.95, Unbridled Books) Kevin Desinger also employs the theme of a happily married man with a successful, quiet suburban life. Having survived the grief of his wife’s miscarriage, seen his marriage tremble, but stand, he refuses to lose her, and the questioned explored is how far he will go when he wakes one night to find two men trying to steal his car and, against her wishes, goes outside to get the plate number of the thieves’ truck, only to make the split-second decision to steal it! Sinister events ensue as his life spirals into a nightmare and he risks everything to regain of his life before that night.
For lovers of thrillers and the detective genre, there’s Fool’s Republic by Gordon W. Dale ($19.95, North Atlantic Books) and Wahoo Rhapsody: An Atticus Fish Novel by Shaun Morey ($13.95/$9.98, print and digital, Amazon Encore). The former is a masterful political thriller in which a man who has lived a normal life, barely noticeable, finds himself detained and accused of crimes against the state that are never specified.
He fights back using his only weapon, a high IQ, as the novel explores issues of freedom of action, of thought and the right to be left alone. The novel is a bit of an intellectual exercise. Shaun Morey’s story is a more traditional story about the motley crew, a captain, first mate, and novice deckhand aboard the fishing charter boat of the novel’s title. The crimes at its center are drug-running and murder. Atticus Fish, an expatriate American lawyer becomes involved when an old friend is murdered by a drug lord and Fish sets out to save the charter’s crew from becoming human chum. It is a very entertaining story told with a light touch.
That’s it for June. The summer holds the promise of many new fiction and non-fiction books to entertain and inform, so bookmark this site and tell all your book-loving friends and family about Bookviews. See you in July!
My Picks of the Month ~ Advice Books (Mostly) for Woman ~ The Story of America ~ Dogs of War ~ Books for Kids and Young Adults ~ Novels
My Picks of the Month
In 1984 I created a very popular media spoof called The Boring Institute© and it thrived until, after 9/11, I decided to put it on hiatus. Along the way I learned a lot about boredom and wanted to write a book about it, but publishers only wanted a “funny” book, not a serious one. Peter Toohey, a professor of classics in the University of Calgary’s Department of Greek and Roman Studies, has written Boredom, A Lively History ($26.00, Yale University Press). I had an opportunity to do a radio show with Prof. Toohey. He is an erudite and charming man, and an intellectual. Academics tend to squeeze a subject for all its juices. He has applied this to the subject of boredom and its fundamental attributes by referring to every painting, book, and every other historical and cultural reference. That said, he has done a very good job. I personally think that boredom has been a major driving factor throughout history and in our present culture. Prof. Toohey’s book is well written and well researched and, at this point, the definitive book on the subject.
When you see as many books as I do in the course of a month or a year, one is always on the look-out for those that stand out from the others. For example, I have a friend who has always had dogs as his companions, but did you know that Americans spend an estimated $45.4 billion annually on their cats, dogs, birds and other pets? This is money that is not being spent on ourselves as food, clothing and other necessities. In The Animal Connection: A New Perspective on What makes Us Human by Pat Shipman, ($26.95, W.W. Norton) the author points out that, unlike other mammals, we are the only species that routinely adopts other species in this way. A paleoanthropologist, Shipman notes that our desire to keep and care for other animals in a uniquely human trait and, she says, our species’ greatest strengths. In a fascinating tour of the past, Shipman takes us through various milestones in our development, noting how humans related to other species. This is a wonderfully readable book that rates our domestication of other species as a major advance that defines our hominid lineage.
In a very different way, Waterford Press of Phoenix, AZ has published a unique booklet, Cat Care, a simplified owner’s manual ($7.95) that teaches you just about everything you need to know. It is quite brilliant even though it is quite short, taking the reader through the basics of food, health, playtime, the preparation before a cat becomes your pet, training fundamentals and everything else! This publishing house offers some wonderful Pocket Naturalist ® Guides, Travel, and Tutor guides, along with wildlife guides. Visit its website and be prepared to be excited by it. For sheer malicious fun, there’s a book of cartoons by Elia Anie. Evil Cat: A Fluffy Kitty Gets Mean ($10.95, Perigee, an imprint of the Berkley Publishing Group, softcover) featuring 95 versions of darkly humorous variations on an insidiously evil cat intent on destroying all decency. You will laugh!
In another section of this month’s report, the Zenith Press is noted for its many fine books on war, but it has also published two unusual books that anyone with an interest in history and engineering would enjoy. They are RMS Titanic Owner’s Workshop Manual and NASA Space Shuttle Owner’s Workshop Manual ($28.00 each). Extensively illustrated with photos, design and construction illustrations and plans, these two books relate why the Titanic suffered a tragic failure and sinking at sea and how the space shuttled defied gravity to fly its many missions to carry large payloads into space. First flown in 1981, six orbiters have been built before retirement after a thirty-year career.
There are a lot of college-bound young people as always and three softcover books will make that adventure a lot easier for them and their parents. They are published by Sourcebooks and cover the topics one really needs to know in order to make the transition. The Happiest Kid on Campus: A Parent’s Guide to the Very Best College Experience (for You and Your Child) by Harlen Cohen ($14.99) provides a wealth of advice on how to make the change work for both parents and the student. It’s all about the do’s and don’ts, and is a great companion for his other book, The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into in College ($14.99) that has already sold more than 125,000 copies to those smart enough to equip themselves for experiences they might not otherwise anticipate. Women will account for 58% of the enrollments in 2011 and they have their own special issues. These are happily addressed by Christie Garton in Chic U: The College Girl’s Guide to Everything ($14.99) that discusses everything from how to handle homesickness to the pros-and-cons of co-ed dorms, sororities, and the inevitable temptations of drinking, drugs and sex. I would not send my daughter to college without making sure she read this book first!
Combining history and humor, How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous ($17.99, Walker & Company) written by Georgia Bragg and illustrated by Kevin O’Malley is just page after page of fun. The history recounted is quite good and you will be astounded to learn how so many famous folks breathed their last. For example, a trip to London by Pocahontas, her two-year-old son, with her husband John Rolfe was literally the death of her. The air was so fetid that she soon developed respiratory problems and was dead at age 21 far from her home in Virginia. Beethoven was not only deaf and could not hear the music he composed, but he died a dreadful death made worse by the doctor’s effort to drain his stomach that had become bloated. George Washington was literally bled to death by his doctors. The novelist, Charles Dickens had a variety of illnesses including serious mental disease. A stroke killed him. I know all this sound ghoulish, but the various stories are fascinating compared to the usual things you have read about famous folks.
Advice Books (Mostly) for Women
Women must need a lot of advice these days because there are a number of new books that want to provide it.
Saundra Dalton Smith, M.D. has authored Set Free to Live Free: Breaking Through the 7 Lies Women Tell Themselves ($12.99, Revell, softcover). Apparently, perfection, envy, image, balance, control, emotions and limits represent a lot of problems for women and, since the author, a board-certified internal medicine physician, treats a lot of women, she sees a lot of the problems that arise as a result. Paula Renaye is a certified coach and motivational speaker with a passion for helping people face reality and take personal responsibility for their choices. Her latest book is The Hardline Self Help Handbook ($19.95, Diomo Books) and is billed as a fast-track course in self-discovery and self-empowerment that asks “What are you willing to do to get what you really want?” Both men and women can benefit from the advice she offers. Written for both adults and young adults, It’s Not Personal: Lessons I’ve Learned from Dealing with Difficult Behavior ($14.95, Orange Sun Press, softcover) by Cindy Hampel is filled with good advice. Hampel, whose won awards for investigative journalism and has a world of experience with corporate and non-profit organizations addresses how to handle fear and guilt tactics, stay poised under pressure, and the kind of attitude one needs to get through difficult encounters and experiences. Who hasn’t had to deal with bullies, a cranky neighbor, an unpleasant business encounter, and even a demanding elderly parent? Knowing how to deal with them lets you focus on your own goals and push life’s common disturbances aside. In the end, it’s really up to you.
Fans of Dr. Mehmet Oz of television fame know he has been married for 25 years to Lisa Oz who has also been a producer, entrepreneur, mother of four children, and the co-author of six bestsellers. One of them, Transforming Ourselves and the Relationships That Matter Most is now available in softcover ($14.00. Simon and Schuster). The author discusses how to “identify one’s authentic self and why it matters in a relationship, how your relationship with your body affects those with other people, tips for “conscious parenting”, and other advice that a reader might find of value. What Did I Do Wrong? What to Do When You Don’t Know Why the Friendship is Over is by Liz Pryor, Good Morning America’s advice guru ($14.00, Free Press, softcover). The book addresses breakups with your best girlfriends and, she says, they often come without warning and can be devastating. The book discusses why friendships fizzle, how to resolve old wounds, and even how to—sometimes—reconnect.
Think by Lisa Bloom is subtitled “straight talk for women to stay smart in a dumbed-down world ($25.99, Vanguard Press). The author thinks that women are in danger of spiraling into a nation of dumbed-down, tabloid media-obsessed, reality TV addicts. Paradoxically, women these days are excelling in education at every level, often out-performing their male counterparts in employment situations, but still spending too much time and money on their appearance, including, says the author, choosing plastic surgery in record-breaking numbers. Part of the problem, says Ms. Bloom is a culture that rewards beauty over brains. Are too many women just playing dumb or are they actually clueless? This is a very provocative book that will definitely make women readers think.
Then, of course, there is The Mommy Docs’ Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy and Birth by three OB/GYNs ($15.95, Da Capo Press, softcover) which, at 526 pages, is as complete a tome on the subject as one could want. Were there such books for our grandmothers and their grandmothers? Verily, if the answer you’re looking for in this guide cannot be found, the question is not worth asking. From preparing your body for pregnancy to birth, this is an impressive piece of work. Say Goodbye to Varicose & Spider Veins Now by Dr. Greg Martin ($14.95, Plentiful Publishing, softcover) discusses ‘how revolutionary new medical techniques can improve your health and quality of life by eliminating pain, swelling, cramps, restlessness and unsightliness in your legs.” According to the book, 80 million Americans, women and men, suffer from this condition. The author says this is a real health problem that should be addressed, increasing the risk for blood clots, phlebitis, and pulmonary embolisms. Have this problem or know someone who does? Get this book!
The Story of America
It’s no secret that I love reading history and American history is a particular favorite. I was born just before World War II and came of age in the years that followed. One of the enduring markers of that time was the fear that the Russians would lob an atom bomb at the U.S. and after the Sputnik satellite in 1957 some people started building bomb shelters. The fears reached their peak with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. During that time, the government issues all manner of Civil Defense brochures and pamphlets. Eric G. Sweden has gathered their content between the covers of Survive the Bomb: The Radioactive Citizens Guide to Nuclear Survival ($17.00, Zenith Press) and it is not only a stroll down memory lane, it is still has relevance today as many worry that Islamic extremists could use nuclear weapons against the U.S. Its advice would be useful to cope with any kind of natural or manmade disaster.
One of the great chapters of American history is brilliantly captured in Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White ($35.00, W.W. Norton. This MacArthur Award-winning historian cuts through the myths about “robber barons” are replaced with facts from the Gilded Age that reveal that many of the early investors in railroads were small-time grocers and merchants who were drawn to the subsidies and land grants of the Civil War Congress. A handful turned corporate and national economic disaster into personal fortunes. The railroads that opened up the West and connected the two coasts also made corruption a permanent fixture of the political system as favors were exchanged without even the need for bribery; such as favorable prices for stock, low-cost loans, and campaign contributions. Sounds like the recent housing bubble, eh? Well, there is so much more because the railroads are the sinews of modern America. This is great reading. A year or so ago I had praise for Colossus by Michael Hiltzik, a history of the building of the Hoover Dam during the Hoover and Roosevelt years. It is now available in softcover ($17.00, Free Press) and I am looking forward to his forthcoming history of “The New Deal”, coming in September. The dam was a great engineering achievement, but its human back-story reads like a suspense novel. If you want to talk about good times, let’s not forget the Roaring Twenties. David Wallace has written Capital of the World: A Portrait of New York City in the Roaring Twenties ($24.95, Lyons Press) and, in doing so, brings to life the era and personalities of the jazz loving customers, Prohibition gangsters who kept their glasses filled, and the music playing. It was the era of Mafia boss Lucky Luciano, Mayor Jimmy “Gentleman Jim” Walkers, the famed madam, Polly Adler, and comedienne Fanny Brice. Literary stars emerged such as the Round Table’s Alexander Woolcott and Dorothy Parker. You could go to the Cotton Club and hear Bessie Smith or the ballpark to watch Babe Ruth. Wallace has captured them and the fabled decade in which they thrived.
Another chapter of American history was the fabled gold rush and Howard Blum has written The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush ($26.00, Crown Publishers). It occurred in the last decade of the 1800s. The Wild West had been tamed and the men who tamed it had outlived their usefulness as “civilization” moved in to build towns and begin cities. When gold was discovered in Alaska and the adjacent Canadian Klondike, a giddy mix of greed and the lust for adventure sent men fleeing a worldwide economic depression, driven by dreams of wealth, to some of the most inhospitable regions of the northwest. All manner of greenhorns and grifters followed in their wake. It was, to say the least, a very colorful and dramatic time. This book never fails to ignite the imagination, particularly with its story of the Pinkerton detectives who tracked the men who stole a fortune in gold bars from the Treadwell Mine in Juneau, Alaska.
The Dogs of War
Much of what we call history is, in fact, the story of war. It holds a fascination for us because it is the ultimate drama for those who participated, were its victims and heroes, and because it is an expression of the aggressive aspect of our species, the one that for good or evil, defines humans. One sees it in its many forms all around us.
One publishing company, Zenith Press, devotes itself to reporting the events of war and, especially, World War Two. Their latest, a large format—coffee table—book is Bombs Away! The World War II Bombing Campaigns Over Europe by John R. Bruning ($50.00) and it is extraordinary. While battles were being fought on the ground with tanks, troops, and artillery, it was the war from the skies that rendered the relentless destruction of cities and specific military targets. Both the Nazis and the allies developed air warfare to a point never previously achieved. Bruning is among a handful of great military historians and his earlier books on “The Battle of the Bulge”, “The Air Battle for Korea”, and others are testimony to that. Filled with page after page of photos, this latest chapter from World War Two will provide hours of great reading while paying tribute to those whom we have come to call “the greatest generation.” 101st Airborne: The Screaming Eagles at Normandy by Mark Bando ($29.99, large format softcover) recounts one of the greatest days of this famed fighting unit that was composed of a cross-section of American men who volunteered to undergo rigorous training and who enjoyed a high degree of esprit de corps. This is an inspiring book and would make a great gift for the survivors as well as those following in their warrior tradition.
Other new Zenith Press titles include one that also involves the air war, Mission to Berlin by Robert F. Dorr ($28.00) that tells the story of the 314 bombing missions to Berlin between 1940 and 1945. Berliners did not expect to be bombed and in the early years of the war were not. Berlin, however, was a legitimate military target as the headquarters of the Third Reich and German armed forces. The sixth largest city in Europe, it was home to manufacturing facilities such as aircraft factories. Forty miles of defenses protected it, but the British and American fliers carried out a sustained effort that is well worth reading. Hitler’s most daring commando, Otto Skorzeny, who died in 1975, was called “the most dangerous man in Europe” for his exploits. His book, Skorzeny’s Special Missions, ($16.99, softcover) is a memoir of his war years and vividly depicts commando action. The recent mission to kill Osama bin Laden had its roots in these early exploits. Modern wars are also generating their histories and Zenith has published Dick Camp’s Battle for the City of the Dead: In the Shadow of the Golden Dome, Najaf, August 2004 ($30.00) tells of the spring and summer of that year when Iraq was coming apart at the seams, was rent by sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunnis, and Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Militia used the Imam Ali Mosque as its base of operations. A U.S. Marine battalion and two U.S. Army battalions broke the militia’s defenses in the cemetery and Najaf’s old city. This is an ugly story of war, but one that needs telling and is told well.
The role that bombers played in World War Two is also explored by David Sears in Pacific Air ($27.50, Da Capo Press) in a book that provides a panorama of the battle against Japan. Despite three years of sacrifices by fearless airmen who took on a strong military power, a combination of aeronautical ingenuity and aviators who refused to accept defeat turned the tide and led to victory. Anyone who loves military history will thoroughly enjoy the stories of the many young men who helped write it against daunting odds. In the end, Navy and Marine Corps pilots at the controls of F4F Wildcats, F6F Hellcats, and TBF Avengers destroyed more than 5,000 Japanese aircraft and scored a big win in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The Wolf: The Mystery Raider that Terrorized the Seas during World War I by Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen ($16.00, Free Press, softcover) reaches back to 1917 to tell the story of a disguised German raider ship that embarked on a 15-month wartime mission to capture or bomb every ship in its path, becoming at one point an international floating prison to more than 800 men, women and children, prisoners and crew as it sailed the world’s major oceans. Amazingly, it made it back to Germany, 64,000 miles and 444 days later. Gretel’s Story: A Young Woman’s Secret War Against the Nazis by Gretel Wachtel and Claudia Strachan ($24.95, Lyons Press) puts a human face on story of war as it recounts how a young, free-spirited woman was caught up in World War II and waged her own war against the Nazis by helping a local priest protect those hunted by the Gestapo, hid her Jewish doctor in the cellar of her house, allied herself with the Resistance, served as a typist in the Wehrmacht and passed along secrets learned from her work, finally to be arrested by the Gestapo in 1945, and liberated by the British army. It is an astonishing story. She moved to England in 1993 and died there in 2006. This memoir would make a great movie.
The Itch to Travel
There are folks who just love to travel. Throughout the 1980s as part of my work as a writer and photojournalist, I traveled all over the United States. With the exception of New England there were only a few States I did not visit, often several times. I have not gotten on a plane in so long I cannot recall. My idea of travel is the local supermarket. Leave the USA? No way. For those who do still want to travel, however, there are many excellent books to help satisfy that itch.
I recently attended the annual Book Expo in New York where thousands of new books are on display, often with authors to sign them, and long aisles of publishers promoting them. I paused at the East View MapLink booth and discovered their Crumpled City soft city maps for places like New York, Paris, London, Tokyo and others. They are literally on cloth so you can stuff them in your pocket or backpack when not using them to find your way around. It is a very clever idea. Check them out at http://www.evmaplink.com/.
Though not a “travel book” by definition, David Monagan’s Ireland Unhinged: Encounters with a Wildly Changing Country ($28.00, Council Oak Books) provides an intriguing look at today’s Ireland by someone born in Connecticut who moved himself and his family to Ireland in 2000 and established himself as one of its observers. His travel books include “Jaywalking With the Irish” and “Journey Into the Heart.” Monagan was there to observe its recent economic miracle declines swiftly into collapse. His book is a clear-eyed look at his adopted country. This is a highly personal story of Ireland and its people for whom Monagan has a depth of love and concern. It’s still a great place to visit and this book will provide insights you will likely not fine elsewhere.
Whereabouts Press of Berkeley, California, has a unique series that booklovers will want to tap before selecting a destination. It is “A Traveler’s Literary Companion” and one of the latest is devoted to India ($14.95, softcover), edited by Chandrahas Choudhury. It is a different way to experience that vast subcontinent as it serves up short fiction by accomplished writers, many of whom are famous in the English-speaking world beyond India. The foreword is by Anita Desai and one of the contributors is Salmon Rushdie. Its thirteen selections provide insights into Indian culture and history, representing eight (translated) languages and a dozen different cultures and regions. I have known about this series for a long time. Twenty different nations and cities are available from Argentina to Vietnam, Amsterdam to Vienna.
Michael Jacobs has written an exhaustive book about the Andes ($24.95, Counterpoint Press, softcover), a mountain range stretching 4,500 miles through South America, rivaled in height only by the Himalayas. Jacobs, a travel writer, takes one on a tour across seven different countries, from the balmy Caribbean to the inhospitable islands of Tierra del Fuego. His route begins in Venezuela and ends with the tip of the continent. Along the way you will learn of Simon Bolivar, the young Charles Darwin, and a host of other characters whose lives were intertwined with the Andes in some fashion. This is a hefty volume that is likely to be regarded as a travel classic in the years to come.
Alaska has become a destination for travels in part because of the fame acquired by its former Governor Sarah Palin, but it is also a place of great natural beauty as well as famed for its recreational opportunities. It is a huge place and the 63rd edition of The Milepost ® 2011: Alaska Travel Planner, edited by Kris Valencia ($29.95, softcover) is 784 pages with more than 700 color photos and 100 maps including the classic MILEPOST® Plan-A-Trip Map with mileage plus latitudes/longitudes for GPS users. It contains all the information needed and more. Where to stay, where to eat, where to visit. This book is a triumph and definitive for anyone who wants to visit Alaska, the Yukon, British Columbia, Alberta, or the Northwest Territories. Go not leave home without it!
Books for Kids and Young Adults
The next time some young person says “I’m bored”, tell them to go read a book. Not turn on the television and not play some video game. Nothing engages the mind and helps it to grow more positively than reading.
You can get the reading habit going even in the pre-school years by reading to a child. One of my favorite series for this stars Howard B. Wigglebottom by Howard Binkow and illustrated by Susan f. Cornelison. Aimed at ages 4 through 8, these books teach useful lessons in a delightful, entertaining way. You can learn more about them at http://www.wedolisten.com/. The latest is Howard B. Wigglebottom Learns Too Much of a Good Thing is Bad ($15,00, Thunderbolt Publishing) in which Howard, a white rabbit, does too much celebrating on his birthday, eating too much, buying too many balloons that carry him aloft, and generally giving him a tummy ache and scaring the wits out of him. It’s all good fun for the young reader who also will learn a valuable lesson. Also for the same age group, there’s Big Bouffant by Kate Hosford and illustrated by Holly Clifton-Brown ($16.95, Carol Rhoda Books, a division of Lerner Books). It’s the story of a trend-setting girl who is bored with the standard hairstyles in her classroom and, inspired by her grandmother’s bouffant, get one in order to stand apart from the pack. First mocked and then imitated, Annabelle experiences the thrill of trying something new and, yes, getting bored with it and ready to move onto to something else. It’s a clever story.
Beach Ball Books has published John Thorn’s First Pitch: How Baseball Began ($14.99) for ages 9 and up. Thorn is Major League Baseball’s Official Baseball Historian and former editor of “Total Baseball”, so you can be sure the facts are accurate as he traces the game back to its roots and dispels many of the myths about how it evolved. Handsomely illustrated with photos and artwork from its early years, readers will learn many fascinating things such as women have been playing baseball since at least 1798 and was being played in China in 1836. It’s popularity spread after the Civil War when it became a game played by professional athletes. The Ultimate Guide to Basketball by James Buckley, Jr. ($7.99) is an alternative book for the younger readers, ages 7 and up, that enjoy that game. The same publisher provides fun reading with Weird Sports ($6.99) that includes elephant soccer, extreme unicycling, and even bog snorkeling. To learn more about this and others, visit http://www.beachballbooks.com/.
For middle school young folk and teens, there are novels that both tackle serious topics or are just fun. In the latter citatory there’s Nerd Camp by Elissa Brent Weissman ($15.99, Atheneum Books for Young Readers), ideal for those ages 8 through 12. Told through 10-year-old Gabe’s eyes, he is looking forward to the Summer Center for Gifted Enrichment that other kids call the Smart Camp for Geeks and Eggheads. When he meets his super-cool, soon-to-be stepbrother, Gabe begins to wonder if he isn’t geeky-squared? All manner of trials ensue from a lice epidemic to a karaoke showdown, and the camp experience turns out to be far less stressful than he anticipated. Two new books from Westside Books will prove compelling for young adults, ages 14 and up.. They are A Kid from Southie by John Shea and Mike Harmon ($16.95) and Open Wounds by Joseph Lunievicz ($16.95). South Boston is where Aiden O’Connor, a high school senior, must sort out his loyalties to a local street gang and the benefits of a better life, a trip through temptation and the sacrifices it will take to make the right choices. Queens, New York, is the setting for the second novel in which Cid Wymann is almost a prisoner in his own home to avoid the harsh world outside. He loves Errol Flynn movies filled with swordplay and duels, deciding to become a great fencer. When his cousin Cid arrives from England, he introduces him to a Russian fencing master who provides training and, at age 16, he learns to channel his aggression through the discipline of the blade. Suffice to say, an adult could read these books with equal pleasure.
Novels, Novels, Novels
Time was a novelist had to run a gauntlet of publishing house editors in order to get published. They usually needed a literary agent as well. Not so today. Any author can publish their novel and even reach a large audience of readers if the “buzz” goes viral and people hear about it.
Jeffrey M. Anderson, a former book publicist, has gone the self-publishing route with Ephemera ($15.99, Creatorspace, softcover). It is a perfect book to take to the beach to read on a summer’s day for its length, 420 pages, and densely written, compelling story about Nester Cab, a second-rate magazine writer whose life is changed when a mysterious note left in his office awakens his curiosity. He begins a search for a missing soldier and, in the course of it, discovers a clandestine anti-government organization and a hidden world of government conspiracies, real and imagined. Anderson is particularly adept at character description and the dialogue rings true. The novel is filled with madmen, killers, and megalomaniacs. It is a modern day journey for truth told with a mixture of satire and sadness. Ephemera is defined as "a short-lived thing, printed matter of passing interest." Your interest will be grabbed from the beginning to the end of this novel.
I think former Sen. Bob Graham’s novel, Keys to the Kingdom ($25.99, Vanguard Press) is going to generate a lot of buzz, a suspense novel that has the particular benefit of the fact the author served in Congress, knows its secrets, was the former Chairman of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence for many years, and has written a timely story about terrorism, and nuclear proliferation. Sen. Graham’s writing style has an eye for detail that lends a verisimilitude to the story that begins with a New York Times opinion editorial by a Florida Senator who served as a co-chair of the 9/11 commission and is murdered not long after the piece is published. The issue raised is the full role that Saudi Arabia played in the 9/11 attack; something not seriously addressed by the commission. The Senator, sensing the danger he has provoked by his commentary, recruited an ex-Special Forces operative, Tony Ramos, providing him with detailed instructions for an investigation. Ramos joins forces with the slain senator’s daughter to uncover a shocking conspiracy linking Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda. It spans Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. At the heart of the novel is the question of whether Ramos and his team can stop an al Qaeda attack, this time nuclear, on American shores?
Vietnam haunts the collective memory of Americans who fought in or lived through the war in the 1970s. Daughters of the River Huong by Uyen Nicole Duong ($13.95, Amazon Encore, softcover) has the distinction of being told by a winner of the Vietnam National Honor Prize for Literature at age 16, who like many fled her native country in the wake of that war. Now, thirty years later, her debut novel tells a century-long tale that captures the complex history of Vietnam and its people. Told through the eyes of Simone, a precocious teenager, it is the story of a concubine of the extinct Kingdom of Champa, her daughters, and her mother. From monarchy to French colonial occupation, the American intervention, the fall of Saigon, and Communist rule, it is a compelling history as experienced by all elements of Vietnamese society. The author, a Harvard graduate, was the first Vietnamese-American appointed as a US judge. It is well worth reading for many reasons, not the least of which is its compelling story. Penguin Classics has published El Filibusterismo by Jose Rizal ($17.00, softcover) to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the author’s birth and the translation of his story, a revolutionary epic set in his native Philippines. A story of obsession and revenge, it has a rich cast of characters as it tells the story of resistance to colonial rule by a champion of Filipino nationalism and independence. This novel so angered Spanish authorities that, when the revolution broke out, the author was imprisoned and, at age 35, executed. Another nation’s history is captured in Knight of Swords by Ian Breckon ($14.95, Counterpoint, softcover), set in the winter of 1944 when northern Italy is a battlefield with Communist partisans battling the forces of Mussolini’s fascist Republic. A wounded fugitive finds shelter in an isolated and decaying castle in the mountains, home to a reclusive nobleman and his family. As he regains his strength, he discovers they have no intention of letting him leave. Snowed in during the long winter, the fugitive, the Baron, and his family are drawn into a complex game of power and seduction. India is the setting for An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy ($14.00, Free Press, softcover) marks her American debut. The place is a small town in Bengal where a family lives in solitude in a vast new house. This is pre-partition India of the 1940s and focuses on the relationship between an orphan of unknown caste, Mukunda, and Bakul, an orphaned daughter. Mukunda is banished to Calcutta where he prospers, but his thoughts are always of Bakul and he knows he must return. It is a richly romantic novel that explores many themes.
Another summer read is an erotic adventure novel, Captured Prey by Craig Odanovich ($14.95, Emerald Book Company, softcover). Its plot ranges from the windswept ranchlands of Texas to the back rooms of political power on a New Year’s Eve on the beaches of Rio. It is a romp, inside the bedroom and out as Misty, an elite fitness trainer to a well-heeled male clientele spins her web for the powerful men who come her way and gets snared by her own tap. A very different story is told by Marilyn Howell in Honor Thy Daughter ($16.95) published by the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Though fiction, it is a hard-hitting story of the author’s loss of her 32-year-old daughter to colon cancer and for anyone who has lost a loved one to cancer this story will strongly resonate. The unique aspect of the story is the use of psychedelic therapy to ease her daughter’s final days, making for a politically provocative and emotionally stunning tale. Howell makes a compelling case against the 40-year ban on research into psychedelic psychotherapy, especially as it relates to end-of-life issues as opposed to the chemotherapy drugs in wide use today.
Two softcover novels explore universal themes. In Long Drive Home author Will Allison returns after his literary sensation, “What You Have Left”, a 2007 novel that was widely heralded. In this novel, a sudden decision by a happily married suburban father who gives into an angry impulse when he jerks the steering wheel of his car to scare a reckless driver who dies as a result. It explores the moral ambiguities of personal responsibility as he tries to explain his action to his daughter. It is written in part as a confessional letter of a single event that alters both their lives. In Her Sister’s Shadow Katharine Britton ($15.00, Berkley, softcover) tells the story of two estranged sisters whose lives are brought together again after a sudden death. Forty years earlier Lilli Niles fled her family in White head, Massachusetts to escape her over-competitive sister Bea and a betrayal that has resonated ever since. Living in London, she received a call from Bea who has just lost her husband and wants Lilli to fly home for the funeral. It is a strong debut for the author who explores the bonds of sisterhood. Making his debut with The Descent of Man ($24.95, Unbridled Books) Kevin Desinger also employs the theme of a happily married man with a successful, quiet suburban life. Having survived the grief of his wife’s miscarriage, seen his marriage tremble, but stand, he refuses to lose her, and the questioned explored is how far he will go when he wakes one night to find two men trying to steal his car and, against her wishes, goes outside to get the plate number of the thieves’ truck, only to make the split-second decision to steal it! Sinister events ensue as his life spirals into a nightmare and he risks everything to regain of his life before that night.
For lovers of thrillers and the detective genre, there’s Fool’s Republic by Gordon W. Dale ($19.95, North Atlantic Books) and Wahoo Rhapsody: An Atticus Fish Novel by Shaun Morey ($13.95/$9.98, print and digital, Amazon Encore). The former is a masterful political thriller in which a man who has lived a normal life, barely noticeable, finds himself detained and accused of crimes against the state that are never specified.
He fights back using his only weapon, a high IQ, as the novel explores issues of freedom of action, of thought and the right to be left alone. The novel is a bit of an intellectual exercise. Shaun Morey’s story is a more traditional story about the motley crew, a captain, first mate, and novice deckhand aboard the fishing charter boat of the novel’s title. The crimes at its center are drug-running and murder. Atticus Fish, an expatriate American lawyer becomes involved when an old friend is murdered by a drug lord and Fish sets out to save the charter’s crew from becoming human chum. It is a very entertaining story told with a light touch.
That’s it for June. The summer holds the promise of many new fiction and non-fiction books to entertain and inform, so bookmark this site and tell all your book-loving friends and family about Bookviews. See you in July!
Friday, April 29, 2011
Bookviews - May 2011
By Alan Caruba
My Picks of the Month; To Your Health; People (biographies and memoirs); Marriage and Parenting; Business books; Children’s and Younger Reader’s books; and new Novels
My Picks of the Month
For the best book on why the U.S. is in severe financial trouble. I recommend you read Dice Have No Memory: Bad Bets & Bad Economics from Paris to the Pampas by Bill Bonner (29.95, Wiley, hardcopy and e-Book). For more than thirty years, Bonner has analyzed and commented upon the challenges facing the U.S. economy as the president/CEO of Agora Publishing, one of the world’s largest financial newsletter companies. His newsletter, The Daily Reckoning, has six global daily editions and he has coauthored three previous bestsellers. This book is a collection of his columns since the new millennium, all just dead-on regarding the way the Federal Reserve and other central bankers have historically and currently created financial havoc for nations and individuals. Bonner writes with such a light touch, with humor, that the reader has to remind themselves how serious things are. This book will make it much easier to grasp that is happening and to make smarter personal financial decisions.
Regular readers of Bookviews know that I come from the “boost, don’t knock” school of reviewing. If I receive a book that I find wanting in some respect, it simply does not show up among the notice taken of those which I think will be of interest to readers.
I am going to make an exception for two books because they represent a genre I have seen now for decades. They are books that tell readers that everything around them is lethal or hazardous in some respect. They arrived about the same time that the Centers for Disease Control announced that life expectancy in the United States is an astounding 78 years of age on the average, the highest ever! You wouldn’t know that from reading The Healthy Home: Simple Truths to Protect Your Family from Hidden Household Dangers by Dr. Myron Wentz and Dave Wentz ($21.99, Vanguard Press, imprint of Perseus Book Group) that is just page after page of generally idiotic warnings against non-stick pots and pans, wrinkle-free sheets, and electrical appliances of all kinds. Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in the Age of Environmental Crisis by Sandra Steingraber ($26.00, Da Capo Press) is equally idiotic in its own paranoid way. To begin with, there is no “environmental crisis.” The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and doing what it has always done, sustaining life. To read this book is to be advised to forego all the advances of modern life, including bug spray, on the grounds that children are threatened by them. Take away the bug spray and all that’s left is the bugs, Nature’s most effective means of spreading disease. Avoid these books. Read poetry instead.
While on the subject of toxic books, another to avoid is Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future by Steve Hallett with John Wright ($26.00, Prometheus Books) that is surely one of the greatest collections of lies about energy to come along in a while. Having made enormous leaps forward over the past two centuries or so using coal and oil, the authors would have you believe that the Earth is running out of both these energy sources when is most certainly is not. The United States by itself is a huge storehouse of coal and oil, but access to it has been systematically denied, thus making the nation dependent on expensive imported oil and thwarting access to hundreds of years’ worth of coal reserves. The book claims that “global warming” exists when this hoax was exposed in 2009, advances the debunked “peak oil” myth, and throws in “wealth inequality” for good measure. The latter could have come right out of the Communist Manifesto. Avoid this book like the plague.
Since the 1980s we have been hearing about “global warming”, but in late 2009, the leak of emails between the small group of “climate scientists” whose data fed the fraud, based on reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore’s propaganda machine, drove a stake into the heart of it. The problem is that this bad science has been wired into our society from health to education, law, defense, international development, trade, and academic publishing. A clear-eyed look at this is found in Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and our Lives, edited by Patrick J. Michaels ($24.95, Cato Institute). We continue to be flooded with apocalyptic scenarios when the real threats, earthquakes, tsunamis, and others are equated with the false ones. In chapter after chapter, the size of the fraud is described in this eye-opening book. Perhaps the most valuable instrument in the regulator’s toolbox is something called The Precautionary Principle which happens to be the title of Indur M. Goklany’s new book, subtitled “A critical appraisal of environmental risk assessment” ($17.95, Cato Institute). I grant you that this does not make one’s heart leap with anticipation, but it is surely worth reading if you want to understand why environmentalists and self-appointed consumer protection groups are forever seeking to ban everything critical to human health and other needs. The banning of DDT by the Environmental Protection Agency and subsequently by African nations led to the needless deaths of millions in Africa from Malaria and is credited for the plague of bed bugs that has occurred nationwide in the U.S..
In a world where the Middle East and the Maghreb (North African) nations are in a state of turmoil and the U.S. is engaged in two lengthy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a stealthy participant in the effort to remove Libya’s despot from office, peace seems as elusive as ever. Douglas E. Noll has written Elusive Peace: How Modern Diplomatic Strategies Could Better Resolve World Conflicts ($25.00, Prometheus Books). Since the dawn of civilization some five thousand years ago, I doubt that there has ever been a day when war and conflict has not existed somewhere, shaping history for good or ill. Noll brings his extensive experience as a professional mediator to the question of why peace talks and other issue-related negotiations fail. He posits that the international community is using a model of European diplomacy dating back to the 18th century to solve the problems of the 21st century. This strategy is based on the belief that nations will act rationally to resolve problems, but it is clear with a glance back on the last century that this is not true. Noll cites studies that demonstrate that emotional and irrational factors play a great role in the success or failure of a mediated solution. He has written an important book that should be read by diplomats, politicians, and all others engaged in the struggle for peace.
When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse ($26.95, Verso Books). From metal detectors to drug tests, increased policing to electronic surveillance, schools have been transformed in ways that have detrimental affects on students who must submit to this system of unprecedented restrictions on their rights, dignity, and educational environment. The author, Annette Fuentes, cites a CNN report that found that in New York City there are nearly 5,000 employees in its school safety division in contrast to about 3,000 counselors. This book is a real eye-opener. As For Me and My House: A GPS for Parents of School-Age Children ($14.95, Amazon.com, softcover) by Rose Marie Whiteside addresses the need for accountability by parents whose children are matriculating through what many regard as a seriously flawed public school system nationwide. You can learn more about the book and her views at www.as-for-me-and-my-house.com. All manner of problems faced by Americans and ethnic groups such as Latinos, Afro-Americans, and Asian Americans are noted, along with the responsibilities that come with the rights Americans assume are associated with government schooling. It is commonly said by teachers that parents are as much of the challenge of teaching children as any other and this book prepares parents to get the most out of their local education system.
With the growing population of single people, I have often wondered why cookbooks do not cater to this trend. Now one does. Cooking for One by Chefs Mark and Lisa Erickson of the Culinary Institute of America ($24.95, Lebhar-Friedman Books, softcover) addresses the many ways a single person can, season to season, prepare delicious meals for themselves. The book is enhanced with gorgeous full color photos by Ben Fink, but it is the recipes for everything from Cornish hen with chutney glaze to spiced halibut or roasted duck with orange sauce that will make your mouth water. While the recipes are scaled to the single diner, they can easily be adapted for a dinner for two.
I am a pushover for a book that approaches an interesting topic, especially if the author does a great job of describing it. This description fits Poison, an Illustrated History by Joel Levy ($16.95, Lyons Press, softcover), a short, very entertaining look at poison from Cleopatra to Mary Ann Cotton, from cone snails to cocaine. It is filled with fascinating facts such as ergot mold which grows on rye and other grains may have played a role in the 1691 witchcraft panic because it causes hallucinations. Nicotine, the addictive ingredient in cigarettes, is also a highly potent alkaloid neurotoxin used widely as an insecticide. Botulinum toxin is the most potent poison known to science. Little more than a cup of it would be enough to kill every human on Earth. I recommend a strong dose of this book for the sheer pleasure (and terror) of its contents. I am also fond of books that offer a look at the world in which we live in an entertaining fashion. The Indispensable Book of Useless Information by Don Voorhees ($12.95, Perigee, softcover) has lots of information and while much is trivia, there’s plenty of actually useful information as well. Voorhees delights in gathering bits of information and organizing to entertain the reader. He has three previous such books and they are a great way to pass the time. Having grown up watching the great western movies of the 40’s up to more recent times, I only later came to realize how the values expressed in those films influenced my own and always for the better. If you’re a fan, you will enjoy The Greatest Western Movies of All Time by the editors of American Cowboy magazine ($16.95, Two Dot, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press). It’s a compendium of short essays about films that any fan will instantly recall, appealing to a wide variety of ages and preferences, from Shane to The Wild Bunch, High Noon to Unforgiven. The best of them—and they’re all here—were in fact real dramas despite the general formulas we came to understand and expect. It was, indeed, good versus evil. It was about taking responsibility and showing courage. This is just a dandy little book that is also filled with photos of many of my favorites. And, yes, I have seen most of those in the book.
To Your Health
Every so often a book on some aspect of health comes along that makes such good sense that you just want to shout “hurrah!” The Breakthrough Depression Solution by Dr. James Greenblatt, MD, is one such book ($16.95, Sunrise River Press, North Branch, MN, softcover). Dr. Greenblatt is a psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of children and adults experiencing depression and, with twenty years of experience, he says that “There are many factors involved in depression, ranging from diet and lifestyle to genetics. The good news is that patients can, indeed, escape the roller-coaster ride of frustration and cynicism caused by ineffective antidepressant regimens and their attendant side affects.” An assistant clinical professor at Tufts Medical School, Dr. Greenblatt has laid out a method for identifying and treating the physical contributors to depression and he does so in a way that a layman such as myself can easily understand. Bearing in mind that each depression is unique depending on the individual; their biochemistry, including physical factors such as nutrition, genetics, hormones, and stress, all of which can contribute to the severity of the condition. The bad news is that depression is strongly associated with heart disease, puts people at risk for alcohol and drug abuse, and is a major factor in suicide. There are, however, simple, effective strategies for sustained recovery and you can learn about them in this book.
Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life by Dr. Claudia Welch, Master of Science, Oriental Medicine, ($18.00, Da Capo Press, softcover) takes a very different approach and is directed at women and, in particular, those in the workforce who must juggle work and family life. She explores the counterbalancing effects of sex and stress hormones, and outlines strategies for self-care to help combat stress-induced medical problems from painful periods, mood swings, fatigue, insomnia, infertility, and other common health problems women encounter. The author lectures and teaches on Asian and Ayurvedic medicines that involve a complete lifestyle that is, in many ways, different from the one to which most American women are accustomed. A lot of it will raise questions such as advice to avoid storing food in plastic containers or plant and lawn care choices that are deemed “endocrine disruptors”, the all-purpose villain used widely to disparage beneficial chemicals that actually protect one’s health. So, proceed with caution if you choose to read this book.
Given events in Japan with its horrendous earthquake and tsunami what, in fact, would you do in a true life-threatening situation? Scott B. Williams has written an interesting guide, Getting Out Alive, ($14.95, Ulysses Press, softcover) that describes thirteen deadly scenarios and how others actually survived them. He lays out the three vital ways to cheat death when all seems lost by avoiding panic, knowing survival skills, and maintaining a relentless determination to survive. The book is filled with tactics such as building shelters, finding water, signaling for help, and much more. You never know when such knowledge will come in handy.
People, People, People
There is no question that Napoleon Bonaparte is one of the great figures in history and so famous that his first name is the title of Napoleon: A Biography by Frank McLynn ($19.95, Skyhorse Publishing, softcover). From cover to cover it runs 739 pages, but the subject of the biography more than lives up to them. McLynn tells the story of a man who was an existential hero, plaything of fate, an intellectual giant, and a deeply morally flawed man. The book is enhanced by the author’s analysis of the personalities around Napoleon that include his sprawling family and two wives. What emerges is a figure more closely resembling a Mafia godfather than visionary European leader. His life is a reflection of 18th century European history and I guarantee any lover of history a thoroughly gripping and enjoyable biography.
Iran, after the 1979 Islamic revolution that forced out the Shah and installed a vicious coterie of ayatollahs and mullahs, the nation descended into a hell that few can comprehend. During the summer of 1988, the Islamic Republic began to systematically kill its political prisoners, hanging thousands, estimated to be between 4,500 and 10,000, many of whom were in Evin Prison in Tehran. They did everything they could for two decades to hide this crime and the mass gravesites. Dr. Jafar Yaghoobi, a prisoner between 1984 and 1989, somehow survived and, in Let Us Water the Flowers ($19.00, Prometheus Books, softcover) shares his memoir with readers, describing the courage, resistance, camaraderie, and solidarity of the prisoners who did not give up hope. Others broke under the pressure and collaborated with their jailers. The book provides a powerful insight to the mindset of those ruling Iran and to the events of that early terrible period of time. Released from prison in 1989, he escaped to Turkey, joining his family in Germany and eventually, in 1990, moving to the United States. Since his retirement from the University of California-Davis, he has been active in bringing attention to human rights abuses in Iran. Today, Iran’s leaders are moving inexorably toward acquiring nuclear weapons and the failure to stop this could have catastrophic consequences for the region and the world.
A colleague of mine, member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Jerome Tuccille, has just had his latest book published, Hemingway and Gellhorn: The Untold Story of Two Writers, Espionage, War, and the Great Depression ($15.99, on sale for $11.51, Amazon.com, softcover). Hemingway had the good fortune to be born and to live through one of the world’s most exciting, challenging, and dangerous periods, including the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War that preceded World War Two and, of course, the war itself. Ernest Hemingway emerged from this era of turmoil as one of America’s greatest novelists, but his life reads like a novel as well. Turcille’s latest of more than twenty books deals with his tumultuous marriage to his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, along with their activities as spies for the U.S. government. Between Gellhorn’s political passions, her affairs, as well as Hemingway’s extramarital affairs that doomed the marriage, they were dramatic enough to merit an upcoming HBO special, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, based on the book!
Boneheads: My Search for T. Rex ($25.00, Council Oak Books, Tulsa, OK) is Richard Polsky’s story of putting his career as a private art dealer on hold in order at age 50 to pursue his childhood obsession with paleontology and embark on a quest to fine the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex, a rare find even by those who devote a lifetime to it. In this entertaining account, Polsky sets out for the South Dakota badlands and discovers what he calls a lost tribe, the Boneheads, and becomes one of them, an oddball group of dinosaur hunters intent on finding the holy grail of those searching for this elusive skeleton. Fewer than fifty have been found, but one fetched $8.3 million at Sotheby’s. An offbeat tale, it says a lot about how, for fun and profit, some pursue this dream and why. In a similar fashion, Jake MacDonald tells of his own obsession with grizzly and other bears, In Bear Country ($18.95, Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press, softcover). If you’re expecting a dry story about the life cycles of bears, this is not the book to read. If you’re in the mood for a collection of stories about bears, it surely is. Ironically, the more MacDonald studied bears, the less he felt he knew. To the question, what do you do if you meet a bear in the woods, he relates the advice of an old-timers who told him, “You can’t outrun a bear, so forget it. Just outrun the person you’re with.” For anyone who finds these creatures of interest, this is a great read.
We live in a culture that drowns us in useless entertainment, mostly provided by the now ubiquitous television set in every room of the house. Jan Lancaster has penned My Fair Lazy ($15.00, NAL, New American Library, softcover) that is subtitled “One reality television addict’s attempt to discover if not being a dumb ass is the new black or, a culture-up manifesto.” Lancaster relates how content she was to wrap herself in a blanket, eat grilled cheese sandwiches, and watch an endless stream of mind-numbing nonsense such as American Idol, Survivor, Wife Swap, The Biggest Loser, and the endless other “reality” shows. She admits it gave her a feeling of intellectual and moral superiority without requiring any effort other than moving the dogs to find the remote. If this is you or someone you know, I recommend reading it. Theatre Geek: The Real Life Drama of a Summer at Stagedoor Manor by Mickey Rapkin ($15.00, Free Press, softcover) takes the reader on a backstage tour of the lives of young drama queens. Before there was “Glee” or “American Idol” there was Stagedoor Manor, a theatre camp in the Catskills where Hollywood casting directors came to find the next generation of stars. It’s where Natalie Portman, Robert Downey, Jr., Zach Braff and others got their start in a breeding ground for Broadway and Hollywood. It is an interesting look at the world of young performers hoping to become stars. Long ago I did public relations for Actors Equity, learning what a difficult life it was for those who longed for the spotlight and how few ever achieved any success. Movie aficionados will enjoy Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley by Jeffrey Spivak ($39.95, The University Press of Kentucky), but it will help if you are particularly fond of films from his era of musicals, transforming the way dances were staged and filmed during the Great Depression. Surprisingly there is no star on Hollywood Boulevard, nor was there any Academy Award recognition despite his innovations. This book is devoted to his life and it was messy. He was married six times and his addiction—liquor—and behavior would derail his career as a choreographer and ultimately ruin his life, despite the fact that the techniques he developed are still in use today. Oddly, he had little training in dance. Indeed, most everything about Berkeley was odd and Spivak has done a first rate job of capturing his life. From the world of entertainment, a large format book, Queen: The Ultimate Illustrated History of the Crown Kings of Rock by Phil Sutcliffe ($24.99, Voyageur Press, an imprint of Quayside Publishing Group) will prove a joy to all who are fans of this fabled band. It is hard to believe it is now forty years after their debut. More than 500 photos and artifacts illustrate the book.
There is a deluge of memoirs these days. People, for whatever reason, feel compelled to tell their stories. Reading Lips: A Memoir of Kisses by Claudia Sternbach ($14.95, Unbridled Books, softcover) has a previous 1999 memoir and her new one tells of the kisses that shaped her life and uses them to tell of her search to get life right in a sharp, funny memoir, ideal for other women seeking the same thing. Into My Father’s Wake by Eric Best (www.intomyfatherswake.com) is one of many self-published memoirs. This one tells of the author’s solo, 5,000 mile Pacific journey aboard the 47-foot ketch as he sought to understand the way his father’s life shaped his own. There are some for whom the tossing waves and long hours on the ocean are a lure that must be explored and, for those, this book will prove of interest. A very different story is told in The House on Crash Corner…And Other Unavoidable Calamities by Mindy Greenstein, PhD ($20.00, Greenpoint Press, softcover) is the author’s entertaining memoir of a woman who leaves the world of a Yiddish-speaking, orthodox Jewish upbringing to become an expert gunslinger and prison psychologist, an Upper West Side mom, a therapist for cancer patients, and, ironically, a cancer survivor herself. This is about growing up in a home of Holocaust survivors, a mother who loves to gamble at the off-track betting parlor, a poker-playing father, a rebellious brother, and what it was like to be an over-achieving daughter.
Roy Rowen, a career correspondent and author, has written Never Too Late: A 90-Year-Old’s Pursuit of a Whirlwind Life ($19.95, Globe Pequot Press) shares the pleasures and potentials of old age based on a long life of adventure spend covering wars and revolutions around the world that took him into his eighties. For seniors, this is his advice to those who still enjoy good health and a career that keeps them young. He offers his views on the value of optimism, the fight to maintain independence as the years go by, and the necessity for seniors to start a second career or activity. For the many people who likewise are in their later years, this book will prove an inspiration and a reason to examine what it means to be old.
Marriage, Parenting, Etc
Let us begin with marriage and Gerald Fierst’s latest book on the subject, The Heart of the Wedding ($19.95, Parkhurst Brothers Publishers, softcover). Fierst notes that, while traditions like the tiered white cake, the Wedding March, and formal dress are still honored, there are all manner of new choices for the ceremony, the reception, music, and other elements. The book is filled with true love stories of real life wedding ceremonies, along with lots of common sense recommendations for making the day meaningful, memorable, and practical. The author is a Civil Celebrant who has officiated at more than 250 weddings over the past seven years.
After the marriage comes the fighting—just kidding! In The Good Enough Spouse: Resolve or Dissolve Conflicted Marriages ($14.95, New Horizon Press, softcover) Dr. William E. Ward addresses unhappy spouses and explains why their marriages are unsatisfying, dysfunctional, and deteriorating. Know a couple this describes? If so, this book might prove helpful to both as it explores the true, deeper causes that each partner must address. Then he outlines a proven strategy for partners to mend and revitalize their unions. Everyone brings a certain amount of personal “baggage” to a marriage and it is important to examine it and grow beyond it. Relations do evolve and change. The aim is to make it change for the better. One problem few couples will discuss is examined in Intimacy Anorexia: Healing the Hidden Addiction in Your Marriage by Dr. Douglas Weiss, Ph.D. ($22.95, Discovery Press, Colorado Springs, CO, softcover). The author is the president of the American Association for Sex Addiction Therapy and the clinical director of the Heart to Heart Counseling Center. A licensed psychologist, he has authored twenty books on addiction and relationships. The book grew out of a recognition by himself and his colleagues that they were seeing male sex addicts, usually engaging in masturbation or having sex outside of their marriage. What was notable was that they were often not having sex with their wife. They called this intimacy anorexia and the book addresses this behavior. The book will prove helpful to both the addict and his spouse.
There are many books on parenting, but while this is a priority for mothers, most men do not get much advice or help beyond having observed their own fathers. Perfect Dad: The Complete Do-It-Yourself Guide for Becoming a Great Father by Todd Cartmell ($12.99, Revell, softcover) is written in the language of dads, especially new ones, using short, entertaining chapters, humor, while providing a comprehensive look at what it takes to be a great dad. It offers advice on how to look at your children, how to talk to them, connect with them, act toward them, and provide the leadership they want. For the new father in particular, this is the perfect gift, but it will also work for the father feeling a bit overwhelmed. Though it “belongs” in the Bookviews section on novels, Parents Behaving Badly by Scott Gummer ($23.00, Touchstone) fits in here as well for its hilarious look at what occurs at the start of Little League season with all of its joy, passion, stress, and anxiety. It is a wonderful satire on the insanity of youth sports today and roasts the lunatic parents and overzealous coaches who all too often ruin it for the kids! Anyone who has a kid in Little League will recognize the truths exposed and way the game can bring out the worst in zealous parents. Check it out.
Getting Down to Business Books
In an alarmingly bad economy, it is perhaps not surprising that there aren’t that many new books being published to tell you how to succeed. Still, there’s always some author who wants to take a shot at it and Robert Mayer, with Peter Weisz, has done so in Without Risk There’s No Reward ($23.95, Seven Locks Press). After serving in the U.S. Air Force in World War II, Mayer began as a day laborer and from there became a builder, banker, businessman, hotel and casino operator, and world class entrepreneur. The book is essentially a memoir, the story of how he achieved his success; it took a lot of work on his part and that is perhaps the greatest lesson the book imports.
Leadership is Dead: How Influence is Reviving It by Jeremie Kubicek ($24.00, Howard Books, division of Simon and Schuster) acknowledges that “leadership” has been studied and redefined for decades. He concluded that too many people who claim to be leaders have abused their positions and lost their moral compass. He decided to free himself from the old self-centered view of leadership and embrace a broader, more positive view; that of the opportunity to influence people, have a positive affect on them, and bring them together for more than just displaying personal status, wealth, power or success. Essentially, he writes about values that are as much spiritual as managerial. For anyone who wants to reconcile success with service, this book will prove most satisfying. For those entrepreneurs wondering that the next big trend will be, Patrick J. Howie has written The Evolution of Revolutions: How We Create, Shape, and React to Change ($25.00, Prometheus Books). It is a blend of historical analysis and how-to knowledge that Howie, an economist, has come up with to help spot “the next big thing.” He holds a patent for analyzing the effectiveness of marketing strategies, so he has been studying this for a long time. Now he shares what he has learned with the reader.
Conflict 101: A Manager’s Guide to Resolving Problems So Everyone Can Get Back to Work is one of those titles that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the book ($17.95, Amacom, softcover). Susan H. Shearouse is about to save managers who read her excellent book hours and hours of trouble and the costs of conflict in the workplace which affects productivity and can lead to a world of related problems such as decreasing motivation, destroying morale, aggravating absenteeism, and worse. The author has more than 20 years as a conflict resolution professional so she knows what she’s writing about. Anyone in a management position will benefit greatly from this excellent book.
Children’s & Younger Readers Books
The marriage of Britain’s Prince William to Kate Middleton got lots of little girls thinking about what it must be like to be a princess. Goosebottom Books has a series devoted to six female leaders who are not well-known to American girls, but are part of the history of Egypt, Iran, Mongolia, Spain, and other places. For those aged 9 through 13, it is a great series called “The Thinking Girl’s Treasury of Real Princesses". Among the titles are Hatshepsuit of Egypt, the first female Pharaoh, Artemisia of Caria, a queen and admiral who earned the Persian Xerxes’ respect, Sorghaghtani of Mongolia, the daughter-in-law of Genghis Khan who consolidated her family’s control of a vast empire. Others include Qutlugh Terkan Khatun of Kirman, Isabella of Castile, and Nur Jahan of India. They are priced at $18.95 and, in addition to excellent texts, are all beautifully illustrated.
The story of a very different princess is told in Pretty Princess Pig ($9.99. Little Simon, a division of Simon & Schuster) by Jane Yolen and Heidi E.Y. Stemple, and illustrated by Sam Williams. Ideal for kids ages 4-6, it will have them laughing on every page as Princess Pig gets ready for a big party, redecorating the dining room, baking a cake, digging up flowers, and unknowingly making a big mess on every page, all while wearing her flowered party dress. Kristi Yamaguchi, the famed skating star, has written Dream Big Little Pig! ($15.99, Sourcebooks Jabberwocky). Illustrated by Tim Bowers, the mother of two children of her own, she based the theme of the book on her lifelong motto, “always dream.” Poppy the Pig provides a lot of fun and inspiration as she dreams of becoming a skating star, despite some early setbacks trying out other dreams. This is a great book for readers aged 5-10.
A spate of books about our feathered friends, birds, offers a variety of wonderful reading.
Ten Birds by Cybele Young ($16.95, Kids Can Books) is a numbers book for the very young, teaching them numbers, but doing so with some of the most extraordinary artwork I have seen in a while. Remarkable images will entrance the very young reader fortunate enough to receive this book. A nine-book series, “The Lima Bear Stories”, by Thomas Weck and Peter Weck, kicks off with The Megasaurus, with illustrations by Len DisSalvo ($15.95, Lima Bear Press) and a cover featuring three very nervous owls. Great for kids aged 4-8, this and the others in the series will teach the values of courage, tolerance, honesty, and other traits worth acquiring. This book, however, also entertains with its story of a monster in Beandom whose favorite food was beans! All manner of efforts to rid the kingdom are tried before they find one that works. For a taste of poetry there’s Birds of a Feather ($17.95, Wordsong/Boyds Mill Press, Honesdale, PA) with poems by Jane Yolen and some extraordinary color photos of various bird species by Jason Stemple. This will appear to kids ages 9-11 and may turn one of them into a future ornithologist with pages that feature kingbirds, waxwings, terns, and others.
A Norwegian folktale is retold by Ashley Ramsden and illustrated by Caldecott Medalist, Ed Young. Seven Fathers ($16.99, Roaring Brook Press) tells of a traveler seeking shelter in a snowstorm who stumbles upon a house and when he asks the old man on the porch if there’s a room where he can spend the night, he is directed to an older man who, in turn, directs him to one yet older. This is a mystical tale that is sure to enter into the memory of any youngster, ages 8 to 11, fortunate to read it.
Novels, Novels, Novels
Someone, I’m told, once said there are only seven plots in the whole of literature and, if you have read novels for fifty years or so, it’s easy to see why. There are, of course, the various genres such as suspense, mystery, romance, fantasy, and science fiction. In all novels, it seems, there must be a hero and a villain. In the end, it comes down to how well the story is told.
I recently received a review copy of a novel by Jonathan Bloomfield. It combines all the elements described and one more. It is so timely it will scare the pants off of you. It is Palestine ($17.97, http://www.silverlanepublishing.com/) and is about an attack on Israel that involves Iranian nuclear bombs and the coordination with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Why not call it “Israel” instead? Because Israel was called Israel before a Roman emperor tried to expunge that already ancient name by calling it Palestine. With the exile of the Jews to Babylon and their subsequent life in the Diaspora, two thousand years passed before they could reclaim it as their historic, national homeland. Barely the size of New Jersey, it became the focus of hatred for all Muslims, but especially for the Iranian ayatollahs who, in 1979, took control of Iran. To bring about the return of the Twelfth Imam, a Shiite legend, they intend to bring about Armageddon and that is where the novel begins in earnest as Israeli military and intelligence officers gather to confront the fact that they are 24 hours away from annihilation. The nation’s political leaders refuse to take action though. What follows is a coup orchestrated to save Israel from destruction. The story is actually told from the point of view of both Israelis and members of Hamas. Moreover, the details of the actions of all the characters suggest that only someone totally familiar with Israel’s capabilities could have written the book. This is heart-pounding suspense that could become a reality. Another novel has Judaism at its core and takes a page of largely unknown history as its theme. The Messiah of Septimania by Lee Levin ($16.95, Royal Heritage Press, softcover) tells of the medieval Jewish Kingdom of Septimania and its first king; one with three different names, a man hailed as the Messiah. During the reign of Caesar Augustus, veterans of the Roman Seventh Legion (Septimanii) settled in a land just north of the Pyrenees. There was, indeed, such a region, but it is not known as a Jewish kingdom and the author has “borrowed” it for his own purposes, noting that in 70 A.D., the Romans had conquered Jerusalem and allegedly took the Holy Menorah back to Rome. In 410, the city was sacked by Visigoths who were said to have taken it back to their capital, Rhedae, in Septimania. It vanished. Or did it? The novel is written with a strict adherence to historical accuracy and introduces us to a Jewish King, said to have been an uncle to Charlemagne and whose bloodline intermingled with the Carolingian kings of France. His army protected the southern flank of Charlemagne’s Frankish kingdom. The novel that Levin has woven from these strands of history will keep the reader entranced.
Kal Wagenheim has been writing books since before I met him many, many years ago. We were both born in Newark, NJ and have both pursued the writer’s trade in one fashion or another. From a biography of Babe Ruth to teaching creative writing at Columbia University and The State Prison in Trenton, Kal’s own creative juices keep percolating and that is evident in a very “grown up” novel, The Secret Life of Walter Mott ($16.99, http://allthingsthatmatterpress.com). And, yes, it’s a bit of a play on the famed “Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber. The year is 1959 and Kal’s Walter has a dreary job in an insurance company. A bachelor, he secretly lives in his office to save money, retire early, and travel the world. Then he falls in love with a co-worker and all his plans go to hell. It is a ribald tale of misadventures spinning out of control. Laura Dave returns with a new novel, The First Husband, ($25.95, Viking) that more seriously explores the question, how do you know you’ve made the right choice? Annie Adams appears to have the good life with a career, a circle of friends, and live-in boyfriend, Nick. When Nick decides he needs to take a break from the relationship, Annie is shattered. While recuperating from the shock she visits a local restaurant where she meets the chef, Griffin, and falls for him big time! Three months later she marries him and finds herself living in Griffin’s hometown in Massachusetts. Life is full of surprises and questions.
For romantics, there’s Santa Montefiere’s new novel, The Mermaid Garden ($24.99, Touchstone, a division of Simon and Schuster), following the international success of “The French Gardener.” It is a complex and irresistibly compelling story set in both Tuscany and the coast of Devon, England. Spanning four decades, the novel threads together two separate stories. The garden is part of a palazzo in Herba, Italy. The year in 1968 and ten-year-old Floriana, a child of poverty, is befriended by the son of the villa’s wealthy owner. They become friends despite the odds She dreams that her destiny is in that garden, with him. Fast forward to 2009 and a charming old hotel by the sea. When its owner, Marina, hires a handsome Argentine artist to run it, sparks fly for her step-daughter Clamentine. Happy endings? You will have to read it to find out. Location often plays as great a role in a novel as the characters. In Philip Cioffari’s novel, Jesusville, ($18.95, Livingston Press, softcover) the two meld together when despair meets greed in a Southwestern desert. As Cioffari explains, “All the characters have in one form or another lost faith—in God or the Church or the social order or themselves.” Possessing empty lives, they are seeking some meaning to their existence. They are in great need of redemption.
For those who like their suspense straight, two novels amply provide it. In The Gods of Greenwich ($24.99, Minotaur Books, a Thomas Dunne Book) Norb Vonnegut (no relationship to Kurt Vonnegut) follows up on his initial success with “Top Producer”, a novel of Wall Street. He continues that theme with a new story of frighteningly plausible manipulations in the world of high finance to deliver a recession-era nail-biter about a super-powered hedge fun and a new employee who suspects a deadly secret behind its spectacular quarterly gains. Jimmy Cusack is trying to deal with investors who want out ‘now’ while Cy Lesser, a high-powered financial dynamo is in Iceland planning a shorting-scheme to bring down one its largest banks. Add in Rachel Whittier, a sexy nurse who has killed an aging millionaire in his Fifth Avenue apartment. Cusack jumps at the chance to work for Lesser in the Greenwich, Connecticut office of his hedge fund. Only a Wall Street insider like Vonnegut could have written this fast-paced thriller. It could not be more timely. In A Conflict of Interest ($25.00, Gallery Books) we enter the world of criminal defense attorney Alex Miller, the youngest partner in a powerful New York firm. He’s got everything; a loving wife, a beautiful daughter, and the dream job. At his father’s funeral he is approached by Michael Ohlig, a mysterious and nearly mythic figure in Miller family history. He asks Alex to represent him in a high-profile criminal investigation of an alleged brokerage scam that has lost hundreds of millions of dollars for its investors. As the novel unfolds, Alex discovers shocking secrets that threaten everything in which he believes. This is a strong debut for Adam Mitzner, its author. Fans of legal thrillers will have found a new author to read and follow.
Most of us could not find Serbia on the map if we had to, but David Albahari has put it on the literary map with Leeches ($24.00, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a darkly funny, complex murder mystery that reflects the uncertainty of life in the late 1990s Serbia. It begins when a single, pot-smoking columnist for a Belgrade newspaper sees a man slap a beautiful woman on the banks of the Danube. Intrigued, he tries unsuccessfully to follow her though the city’s tangled streets. Soon after, he received a mysterious manuscript comprising fragments on the Kabbalah and the history of Jews in Zemun and Belgrade. Wierdly, the manuscript’s contents seem to mutate each time he opens it up. Not your average thriller to be sure, but very interesting in its own way. Born in Serbia, the author emigrated to Canada in 1994. His reputation is growing. Finally, for those who love short stories, there’s Roddy Doyle’s Bullfighting ($25.95, Viking), a series of bittersweet tales about men and middle age, revealing a panorama of Ireland today. Doyle has a knack for capturing human moments, bravado and helplessness, as, in one story, four men take a vacation in Spain to drink and watch bullfights. The stories move from classrooms to crematoriums, local pubs to bullrings. It’s all about life and it’s all marvelously well told.
My Picks of the Month; To Your Health; People (biographies and memoirs); Marriage and Parenting; Business books; Children’s and Younger Reader’s books; and new Novels
My Picks of the Month
For the best book on why the U.S. is in severe financial trouble. I recommend you read Dice Have No Memory: Bad Bets & Bad Economics from Paris to the Pampas by Bill Bonner (29.95, Wiley, hardcopy and e-Book). For more than thirty years, Bonner has analyzed and commented upon the challenges facing the U.S. economy as the president/CEO of Agora Publishing, one of the world’s largest financial newsletter companies. His newsletter, The Daily Reckoning, has six global daily editions and he has coauthored three previous bestsellers. This book is a collection of his columns since the new millennium, all just dead-on regarding the way the Federal Reserve and other central bankers have historically and currently created financial havoc for nations and individuals. Bonner writes with such a light touch, with humor, that the reader has to remind themselves how serious things are. This book will make it much easier to grasp that is happening and to make smarter personal financial decisions.
Regular readers of Bookviews know that I come from the “boost, don’t knock” school of reviewing. If I receive a book that I find wanting in some respect, it simply does not show up among the notice taken of those which I think will be of interest to readers.
I am going to make an exception for two books because they represent a genre I have seen now for decades. They are books that tell readers that everything around them is lethal or hazardous in some respect. They arrived about the same time that the Centers for Disease Control announced that life expectancy in the United States is an astounding 78 years of age on the average, the highest ever! You wouldn’t know that from reading The Healthy Home: Simple Truths to Protect Your Family from Hidden Household Dangers by Dr. Myron Wentz and Dave Wentz ($21.99, Vanguard Press, imprint of Perseus Book Group) that is just page after page of generally idiotic warnings against non-stick pots and pans, wrinkle-free sheets, and electrical appliances of all kinds. Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in the Age of Environmental Crisis by Sandra Steingraber ($26.00, Da Capo Press) is equally idiotic in its own paranoid way. To begin with, there is no “environmental crisis.” The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and doing what it has always done, sustaining life. To read this book is to be advised to forego all the advances of modern life, including bug spray, on the grounds that children are threatened by them. Take away the bug spray and all that’s left is the bugs, Nature’s most effective means of spreading disease. Avoid these books. Read poetry instead.
While on the subject of toxic books, another to avoid is Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future by Steve Hallett with John Wright ($26.00, Prometheus Books) that is surely one of the greatest collections of lies about energy to come along in a while. Having made enormous leaps forward over the past two centuries or so using coal and oil, the authors would have you believe that the Earth is running out of both these energy sources when is most certainly is not. The United States by itself is a huge storehouse of coal and oil, but access to it has been systematically denied, thus making the nation dependent on expensive imported oil and thwarting access to hundreds of years’ worth of coal reserves. The book claims that “global warming” exists when this hoax was exposed in 2009, advances the debunked “peak oil” myth, and throws in “wealth inequality” for good measure. The latter could have come right out of the Communist Manifesto. Avoid this book like the plague.
Since the 1980s we have been hearing about “global warming”, but in late 2009, the leak of emails between the small group of “climate scientists” whose data fed the fraud, based on reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore’s propaganda machine, drove a stake into the heart of it. The problem is that this bad science has been wired into our society from health to education, law, defense, international development, trade, and academic publishing. A clear-eyed look at this is found in Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and our Lives, edited by Patrick J. Michaels ($24.95, Cato Institute). We continue to be flooded with apocalyptic scenarios when the real threats, earthquakes, tsunamis, and others are equated with the false ones. In chapter after chapter, the size of the fraud is described in this eye-opening book. Perhaps the most valuable instrument in the regulator’s toolbox is something called The Precautionary Principle which happens to be the title of Indur M. Goklany’s new book, subtitled “A critical appraisal of environmental risk assessment” ($17.95, Cato Institute). I grant you that this does not make one’s heart leap with anticipation, but it is surely worth reading if you want to understand why environmentalists and self-appointed consumer protection groups are forever seeking to ban everything critical to human health and other needs. The banning of DDT by the Environmental Protection Agency and subsequently by African nations led to the needless deaths of millions in Africa from Malaria and is credited for the plague of bed bugs that has occurred nationwide in the U.S..
In a world where the Middle East and the Maghreb (North African) nations are in a state of turmoil and the U.S. is engaged in two lengthy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a stealthy participant in the effort to remove Libya’s despot from office, peace seems as elusive as ever. Douglas E. Noll has written Elusive Peace: How Modern Diplomatic Strategies Could Better Resolve World Conflicts ($25.00, Prometheus Books). Since the dawn of civilization some five thousand years ago, I doubt that there has ever been a day when war and conflict has not existed somewhere, shaping history for good or ill. Noll brings his extensive experience as a professional mediator to the question of why peace talks and other issue-related negotiations fail. He posits that the international community is using a model of European diplomacy dating back to the 18th century to solve the problems of the 21st century. This strategy is based on the belief that nations will act rationally to resolve problems, but it is clear with a glance back on the last century that this is not true. Noll cites studies that demonstrate that emotional and irrational factors play a great role in the success or failure of a mediated solution. He has written an important book that should be read by diplomats, politicians, and all others engaged in the struggle for peace.
When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse ($26.95, Verso Books). From metal detectors to drug tests, increased policing to electronic surveillance, schools have been transformed in ways that have detrimental affects on students who must submit to this system of unprecedented restrictions on their rights, dignity, and educational environment. The author, Annette Fuentes, cites a CNN report that found that in New York City there are nearly 5,000 employees in its school safety division in contrast to about 3,000 counselors. This book is a real eye-opener. As For Me and My House: A GPS for Parents of School-Age Children ($14.95, Amazon.com, softcover) by Rose Marie Whiteside addresses the need for accountability by parents whose children are matriculating through what many regard as a seriously flawed public school system nationwide. You can learn more about the book and her views at www.as-for-me-and-my-house.com. All manner of problems faced by Americans and ethnic groups such as Latinos, Afro-Americans, and Asian Americans are noted, along with the responsibilities that come with the rights Americans assume are associated with government schooling. It is commonly said by teachers that parents are as much of the challenge of teaching children as any other and this book prepares parents to get the most out of their local education system.
With the growing population of single people, I have often wondered why cookbooks do not cater to this trend. Now one does. Cooking for One by Chefs Mark and Lisa Erickson of the Culinary Institute of America ($24.95, Lebhar-Friedman Books, softcover) addresses the many ways a single person can, season to season, prepare delicious meals for themselves. The book is enhanced with gorgeous full color photos by Ben Fink, but it is the recipes for everything from Cornish hen with chutney glaze to spiced halibut or roasted duck with orange sauce that will make your mouth water. While the recipes are scaled to the single diner, they can easily be adapted for a dinner for two.
I am a pushover for a book that approaches an interesting topic, especially if the author does a great job of describing it. This description fits Poison, an Illustrated History by Joel Levy ($16.95, Lyons Press, softcover), a short, very entertaining look at poison from Cleopatra to Mary Ann Cotton, from cone snails to cocaine. It is filled with fascinating facts such as ergot mold which grows on rye and other grains may have played a role in the 1691 witchcraft panic because it causes hallucinations. Nicotine, the addictive ingredient in cigarettes, is also a highly potent alkaloid neurotoxin used widely as an insecticide. Botulinum toxin is the most potent poison known to science. Little more than a cup of it would be enough to kill every human on Earth. I recommend a strong dose of this book for the sheer pleasure (and terror) of its contents. I am also fond of books that offer a look at the world in which we live in an entertaining fashion. The Indispensable Book of Useless Information by Don Voorhees ($12.95, Perigee, softcover) has lots of information and while much is trivia, there’s plenty of actually useful information as well. Voorhees delights in gathering bits of information and organizing to entertain the reader. He has three previous such books and they are a great way to pass the time. Having grown up watching the great western movies of the 40’s up to more recent times, I only later came to realize how the values expressed in those films influenced my own and always for the better. If you’re a fan, you will enjoy The Greatest Western Movies of All Time by the editors of American Cowboy magazine ($16.95, Two Dot, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press). It’s a compendium of short essays about films that any fan will instantly recall, appealing to a wide variety of ages and preferences, from Shane to The Wild Bunch, High Noon to Unforgiven. The best of them—and they’re all here—were in fact real dramas despite the general formulas we came to understand and expect. It was, indeed, good versus evil. It was about taking responsibility and showing courage. This is just a dandy little book that is also filled with photos of many of my favorites. And, yes, I have seen most of those in the book.
To Your Health
Every so often a book on some aspect of health comes along that makes such good sense that you just want to shout “hurrah!” The Breakthrough Depression Solution by Dr. James Greenblatt, MD, is one such book ($16.95, Sunrise River Press, North Branch, MN, softcover). Dr. Greenblatt is a psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of children and adults experiencing depression and, with twenty years of experience, he says that “There are many factors involved in depression, ranging from diet and lifestyle to genetics. The good news is that patients can, indeed, escape the roller-coaster ride of frustration and cynicism caused by ineffective antidepressant regimens and their attendant side affects.” An assistant clinical professor at Tufts Medical School, Dr. Greenblatt has laid out a method for identifying and treating the physical contributors to depression and he does so in a way that a layman such as myself can easily understand. Bearing in mind that each depression is unique depending on the individual; their biochemistry, including physical factors such as nutrition, genetics, hormones, and stress, all of which can contribute to the severity of the condition. The bad news is that depression is strongly associated with heart disease, puts people at risk for alcohol and drug abuse, and is a major factor in suicide. There are, however, simple, effective strategies for sustained recovery and you can learn about them in this book.
Balance Your Hormones, Balance Your Life by Dr. Claudia Welch, Master of Science, Oriental Medicine, ($18.00, Da Capo Press, softcover) takes a very different approach and is directed at women and, in particular, those in the workforce who must juggle work and family life. She explores the counterbalancing effects of sex and stress hormones, and outlines strategies for self-care to help combat stress-induced medical problems from painful periods, mood swings, fatigue, insomnia, infertility, and other common health problems women encounter. The author lectures and teaches on Asian and Ayurvedic medicines that involve a complete lifestyle that is, in many ways, different from the one to which most American women are accustomed. A lot of it will raise questions such as advice to avoid storing food in plastic containers or plant and lawn care choices that are deemed “endocrine disruptors”, the all-purpose villain used widely to disparage beneficial chemicals that actually protect one’s health. So, proceed with caution if you choose to read this book.
Given events in Japan with its horrendous earthquake and tsunami what, in fact, would you do in a true life-threatening situation? Scott B. Williams has written an interesting guide, Getting Out Alive, ($14.95, Ulysses Press, softcover) that describes thirteen deadly scenarios and how others actually survived them. He lays out the three vital ways to cheat death when all seems lost by avoiding panic, knowing survival skills, and maintaining a relentless determination to survive. The book is filled with tactics such as building shelters, finding water, signaling for help, and much more. You never know when such knowledge will come in handy.
People, People, People
There is no question that Napoleon Bonaparte is one of the great figures in history and so famous that his first name is the title of Napoleon: A Biography by Frank McLynn ($19.95, Skyhorse Publishing, softcover). From cover to cover it runs 739 pages, but the subject of the biography more than lives up to them. McLynn tells the story of a man who was an existential hero, plaything of fate, an intellectual giant, and a deeply morally flawed man. The book is enhanced by the author’s analysis of the personalities around Napoleon that include his sprawling family and two wives. What emerges is a figure more closely resembling a Mafia godfather than visionary European leader. His life is a reflection of 18th century European history and I guarantee any lover of history a thoroughly gripping and enjoyable biography.
Iran, after the 1979 Islamic revolution that forced out the Shah and installed a vicious coterie of ayatollahs and mullahs, the nation descended into a hell that few can comprehend. During the summer of 1988, the Islamic Republic began to systematically kill its political prisoners, hanging thousands, estimated to be between 4,500 and 10,000, many of whom were in Evin Prison in Tehran. They did everything they could for two decades to hide this crime and the mass gravesites. Dr. Jafar Yaghoobi, a prisoner between 1984 and 1989, somehow survived and, in Let Us Water the Flowers ($19.00, Prometheus Books, softcover) shares his memoir with readers, describing the courage, resistance, camaraderie, and solidarity of the prisoners who did not give up hope. Others broke under the pressure and collaborated with their jailers. The book provides a powerful insight to the mindset of those ruling Iran and to the events of that early terrible period of time. Released from prison in 1989, he escaped to Turkey, joining his family in Germany and eventually, in 1990, moving to the United States. Since his retirement from the University of California-Davis, he has been active in bringing attention to human rights abuses in Iran. Today, Iran’s leaders are moving inexorably toward acquiring nuclear weapons and the failure to stop this could have catastrophic consequences for the region and the world.
A colleague of mine, member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Jerome Tuccille, has just had his latest book published, Hemingway and Gellhorn: The Untold Story of Two Writers, Espionage, War, and the Great Depression ($15.99, on sale for $11.51, Amazon.com, softcover). Hemingway had the good fortune to be born and to live through one of the world’s most exciting, challenging, and dangerous periods, including the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War that preceded World War Two and, of course, the war itself. Ernest Hemingway emerged from this era of turmoil as one of America’s greatest novelists, but his life reads like a novel as well. Turcille’s latest of more than twenty books deals with his tumultuous marriage to his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, along with their activities as spies for the U.S. government. Between Gellhorn’s political passions, her affairs, as well as Hemingway’s extramarital affairs that doomed the marriage, they were dramatic enough to merit an upcoming HBO special, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, based on the book!
Boneheads: My Search for T. Rex ($25.00, Council Oak Books, Tulsa, OK) is Richard Polsky’s story of putting his career as a private art dealer on hold in order at age 50 to pursue his childhood obsession with paleontology and embark on a quest to fine the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex, a rare find even by those who devote a lifetime to it. In this entertaining account, Polsky sets out for the South Dakota badlands and discovers what he calls a lost tribe, the Boneheads, and becomes one of them, an oddball group of dinosaur hunters intent on finding the holy grail of those searching for this elusive skeleton. Fewer than fifty have been found, but one fetched $8.3 million at Sotheby’s. An offbeat tale, it says a lot about how, for fun and profit, some pursue this dream and why. In a similar fashion, Jake MacDonald tells of his own obsession with grizzly and other bears, In Bear Country ($18.95, Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press, softcover). If you’re expecting a dry story about the life cycles of bears, this is not the book to read. If you’re in the mood for a collection of stories about bears, it surely is. Ironically, the more MacDonald studied bears, the less he felt he knew. To the question, what do you do if you meet a bear in the woods, he relates the advice of an old-timers who told him, “You can’t outrun a bear, so forget it. Just outrun the person you’re with.” For anyone who finds these creatures of interest, this is a great read.
We live in a culture that drowns us in useless entertainment, mostly provided by the now ubiquitous television set in every room of the house. Jan Lancaster has penned My Fair Lazy ($15.00, NAL, New American Library, softcover) that is subtitled “One reality television addict’s attempt to discover if not being a dumb ass is the new black or, a culture-up manifesto.” Lancaster relates how content she was to wrap herself in a blanket, eat grilled cheese sandwiches, and watch an endless stream of mind-numbing nonsense such as American Idol, Survivor, Wife Swap, The Biggest Loser, and the endless other “reality” shows. She admits it gave her a feeling of intellectual and moral superiority without requiring any effort other than moving the dogs to find the remote. If this is you or someone you know, I recommend reading it. Theatre Geek: The Real Life Drama of a Summer at Stagedoor Manor by Mickey Rapkin ($15.00, Free Press, softcover) takes the reader on a backstage tour of the lives of young drama queens. Before there was “Glee” or “American Idol” there was Stagedoor Manor, a theatre camp in the Catskills where Hollywood casting directors came to find the next generation of stars. It’s where Natalie Portman, Robert Downey, Jr., Zach Braff and others got their start in a breeding ground for Broadway and Hollywood. It is an interesting look at the world of young performers hoping to become stars. Long ago I did public relations for Actors Equity, learning what a difficult life it was for those who longed for the spotlight and how few ever achieved any success. Movie aficionados will enjoy Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley by Jeffrey Spivak ($39.95, The University Press of Kentucky), but it will help if you are particularly fond of films from his era of musicals, transforming the way dances were staged and filmed during the Great Depression. Surprisingly there is no star on Hollywood Boulevard, nor was there any Academy Award recognition despite his innovations. This book is devoted to his life and it was messy. He was married six times and his addiction—liquor—and behavior would derail his career as a choreographer and ultimately ruin his life, despite the fact that the techniques he developed are still in use today. Oddly, he had little training in dance. Indeed, most everything about Berkeley was odd and Spivak has done a first rate job of capturing his life. From the world of entertainment, a large format book, Queen: The Ultimate Illustrated History of the Crown Kings of Rock by Phil Sutcliffe ($24.99, Voyageur Press, an imprint of Quayside Publishing Group) will prove a joy to all who are fans of this fabled band. It is hard to believe it is now forty years after their debut. More than 500 photos and artifacts illustrate the book.
There is a deluge of memoirs these days. People, for whatever reason, feel compelled to tell their stories. Reading Lips: A Memoir of Kisses by Claudia Sternbach ($14.95, Unbridled Books, softcover) has a previous 1999 memoir and her new one tells of the kisses that shaped her life and uses them to tell of her search to get life right in a sharp, funny memoir, ideal for other women seeking the same thing. Into My Father’s Wake by Eric Best (www.intomyfatherswake.com) is one of many self-published memoirs. This one tells of the author’s solo, 5,000 mile Pacific journey aboard the 47-foot ketch as he sought to understand the way his father’s life shaped his own. There are some for whom the tossing waves and long hours on the ocean are a lure that must be explored and, for those, this book will prove of interest. A very different story is told in The House on Crash Corner…And Other Unavoidable Calamities by Mindy Greenstein, PhD ($20.00, Greenpoint Press, softcover) is the author’s entertaining memoir of a woman who leaves the world of a Yiddish-speaking, orthodox Jewish upbringing to become an expert gunslinger and prison psychologist, an Upper West Side mom, a therapist for cancer patients, and, ironically, a cancer survivor herself. This is about growing up in a home of Holocaust survivors, a mother who loves to gamble at the off-track betting parlor, a poker-playing father, a rebellious brother, and what it was like to be an over-achieving daughter.
Roy Rowen, a career correspondent and author, has written Never Too Late: A 90-Year-Old’s Pursuit of a Whirlwind Life ($19.95, Globe Pequot Press) shares the pleasures and potentials of old age based on a long life of adventure spend covering wars and revolutions around the world that took him into his eighties. For seniors, this is his advice to those who still enjoy good health and a career that keeps them young. He offers his views on the value of optimism, the fight to maintain independence as the years go by, and the necessity for seniors to start a second career or activity. For the many people who likewise are in their later years, this book will prove an inspiration and a reason to examine what it means to be old.
Marriage, Parenting, Etc
Let us begin with marriage and Gerald Fierst’s latest book on the subject, The Heart of the Wedding ($19.95, Parkhurst Brothers Publishers, softcover). Fierst notes that, while traditions like the tiered white cake, the Wedding March, and formal dress are still honored, there are all manner of new choices for the ceremony, the reception, music, and other elements. The book is filled with true love stories of real life wedding ceremonies, along with lots of common sense recommendations for making the day meaningful, memorable, and practical. The author is a Civil Celebrant who has officiated at more than 250 weddings over the past seven years.
After the marriage comes the fighting—just kidding! In The Good Enough Spouse: Resolve or Dissolve Conflicted Marriages ($14.95, New Horizon Press, softcover) Dr. William E. Ward addresses unhappy spouses and explains why their marriages are unsatisfying, dysfunctional, and deteriorating. Know a couple this describes? If so, this book might prove helpful to both as it explores the true, deeper causes that each partner must address. Then he outlines a proven strategy for partners to mend and revitalize their unions. Everyone brings a certain amount of personal “baggage” to a marriage and it is important to examine it and grow beyond it. Relations do evolve and change. The aim is to make it change for the better. One problem few couples will discuss is examined in Intimacy Anorexia: Healing the Hidden Addiction in Your Marriage by Dr. Douglas Weiss, Ph.D. ($22.95, Discovery Press, Colorado Springs, CO, softcover). The author is the president of the American Association for Sex Addiction Therapy and the clinical director of the Heart to Heart Counseling Center. A licensed psychologist, he has authored twenty books on addiction and relationships. The book grew out of a recognition by himself and his colleagues that they were seeing male sex addicts, usually engaging in masturbation or having sex outside of their marriage. What was notable was that they were often not having sex with their wife. They called this intimacy anorexia and the book addresses this behavior. The book will prove helpful to both the addict and his spouse.
There are many books on parenting, but while this is a priority for mothers, most men do not get much advice or help beyond having observed their own fathers. Perfect Dad: The Complete Do-It-Yourself Guide for Becoming a Great Father by Todd Cartmell ($12.99, Revell, softcover) is written in the language of dads, especially new ones, using short, entertaining chapters, humor, while providing a comprehensive look at what it takes to be a great dad. It offers advice on how to look at your children, how to talk to them, connect with them, act toward them, and provide the leadership they want. For the new father in particular, this is the perfect gift, but it will also work for the father feeling a bit overwhelmed. Though it “belongs” in the Bookviews section on novels, Parents Behaving Badly by Scott Gummer ($23.00, Touchstone) fits in here as well for its hilarious look at what occurs at the start of Little League season with all of its joy, passion, stress, and anxiety. It is a wonderful satire on the insanity of youth sports today and roasts the lunatic parents and overzealous coaches who all too often ruin it for the kids! Anyone who has a kid in Little League will recognize the truths exposed and way the game can bring out the worst in zealous parents. Check it out.
Getting Down to Business Books
In an alarmingly bad economy, it is perhaps not surprising that there aren’t that many new books being published to tell you how to succeed. Still, there’s always some author who wants to take a shot at it and Robert Mayer, with Peter Weisz, has done so in Without Risk There’s No Reward ($23.95, Seven Locks Press). After serving in the U.S. Air Force in World War II, Mayer began as a day laborer and from there became a builder, banker, businessman, hotel and casino operator, and world class entrepreneur. The book is essentially a memoir, the story of how he achieved his success; it took a lot of work on his part and that is perhaps the greatest lesson the book imports.
Leadership is Dead: How Influence is Reviving It by Jeremie Kubicek ($24.00, Howard Books, division of Simon and Schuster) acknowledges that “leadership” has been studied and redefined for decades. He concluded that too many people who claim to be leaders have abused their positions and lost their moral compass. He decided to free himself from the old self-centered view of leadership and embrace a broader, more positive view; that of the opportunity to influence people, have a positive affect on them, and bring them together for more than just displaying personal status, wealth, power or success. Essentially, he writes about values that are as much spiritual as managerial. For anyone who wants to reconcile success with service, this book will prove most satisfying. For those entrepreneurs wondering that the next big trend will be, Patrick J. Howie has written The Evolution of Revolutions: How We Create, Shape, and React to Change ($25.00, Prometheus Books). It is a blend of historical analysis and how-to knowledge that Howie, an economist, has come up with to help spot “the next big thing.” He holds a patent for analyzing the effectiveness of marketing strategies, so he has been studying this for a long time. Now he shares what he has learned with the reader.
Conflict 101: A Manager’s Guide to Resolving Problems So Everyone Can Get Back to Work is one of those titles that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the book ($17.95, Amacom, softcover). Susan H. Shearouse is about to save managers who read her excellent book hours and hours of trouble and the costs of conflict in the workplace which affects productivity and can lead to a world of related problems such as decreasing motivation, destroying morale, aggravating absenteeism, and worse. The author has more than 20 years as a conflict resolution professional so she knows what she’s writing about. Anyone in a management position will benefit greatly from this excellent book.
Children’s & Younger Readers Books
The marriage of Britain’s Prince William to Kate Middleton got lots of little girls thinking about what it must be like to be a princess. Goosebottom Books has a series devoted to six female leaders who are not well-known to American girls, but are part of the history of Egypt, Iran, Mongolia, Spain, and other places. For those aged 9 through 13, it is a great series called “The Thinking Girl’s Treasury of Real Princesses". Among the titles are Hatshepsuit of Egypt, the first female Pharaoh, Artemisia of Caria, a queen and admiral who earned the Persian Xerxes’ respect, Sorghaghtani of Mongolia, the daughter-in-law of Genghis Khan who consolidated her family’s control of a vast empire. Others include Qutlugh Terkan Khatun of Kirman, Isabella of Castile, and Nur Jahan of India. They are priced at $18.95 and, in addition to excellent texts, are all beautifully illustrated.
The story of a very different princess is told in Pretty Princess Pig ($9.99. Little Simon, a division of Simon & Schuster) by Jane Yolen and Heidi E.Y. Stemple, and illustrated by Sam Williams. Ideal for kids ages 4-6, it will have them laughing on every page as Princess Pig gets ready for a big party, redecorating the dining room, baking a cake, digging up flowers, and unknowingly making a big mess on every page, all while wearing her flowered party dress. Kristi Yamaguchi, the famed skating star, has written Dream Big Little Pig! ($15.99, Sourcebooks Jabberwocky). Illustrated by Tim Bowers, the mother of two children of her own, she based the theme of the book on her lifelong motto, “always dream.” Poppy the Pig provides a lot of fun and inspiration as she dreams of becoming a skating star, despite some early setbacks trying out other dreams. This is a great book for readers aged 5-10.
A spate of books about our feathered friends, birds, offers a variety of wonderful reading.
Ten Birds by Cybele Young ($16.95, Kids Can Books) is a numbers book for the very young, teaching them numbers, but doing so with some of the most extraordinary artwork I have seen in a while. Remarkable images will entrance the very young reader fortunate enough to receive this book. A nine-book series, “The Lima Bear Stories”, by Thomas Weck and Peter Weck, kicks off with The Megasaurus, with illustrations by Len DisSalvo ($15.95, Lima Bear Press) and a cover featuring three very nervous owls. Great for kids aged 4-8, this and the others in the series will teach the values of courage, tolerance, honesty, and other traits worth acquiring. This book, however, also entertains with its story of a monster in Beandom whose favorite food was beans! All manner of efforts to rid the kingdom are tried before they find one that works. For a taste of poetry there’s Birds of a Feather ($17.95, Wordsong/Boyds Mill Press, Honesdale, PA) with poems by Jane Yolen and some extraordinary color photos of various bird species by Jason Stemple. This will appear to kids ages 9-11 and may turn one of them into a future ornithologist with pages that feature kingbirds, waxwings, terns, and others.
A Norwegian folktale is retold by Ashley Ramsden and illustrated by Caldecott Medalist, Ed Young. Seven Fathers ($16.99, Roaring Brook Press) tells of a traveler seeking shelter in a snowstorm who stumbles upon a house and when he asks the old man on the porch if there’s a room where he can spend the night, he is directed to an older man who, in turn, directs him to one yet older. This is a mystical tale that is sure to enter into the memory of any youngster, ages 8 to 11, fortunate to read it.
Novels, Novels, Novels
Someone, I’m told, once said there are only seven plots in the whole of literature and, if you have read novels for fifty years or so, it’s easy to see why. There are, of course, the various genres such as suspense, mystery, romance, fantasy, and science fiction. In all novels, it seems, there must be a hero and a villain. In the end, it comes down to how well the story is told.
I recently received a review copy of a novel by Jonathan Bloomfield. It combines all the elements described and one more. It is so timely it will scare the pants off of you. It is Palestine ($17.97, http://www.silverlanepublishing.com/) and is about an attack on Israel that involves Iranian nuclear bombs and the coordination with Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Why not call it “Israel” instead? Because Israel was called Israel before a Roman emperor tried to expunge that already ancient name by calling it Palestine. With the exile of the Jews to Babylon and their subsequent life in the Diaspora, two thousand years passed before they could reclaim it as their historic, national homeland. Barely the size of New Jersey, it became the focus of hatred for all Muslims, but especially for the Iranian ayatollahs who, in 1979, took control of Iran. To bring about the return of the Twelfth Imam, a Shiite legend, they intend to bring about Armageddon and that is where the novel begins in earnest as Israeli military and intelligence officers gather to confront the fact that they are 24 hours away from annihilation. The nation’s political leaders refuse to take action though. What follows is a coup orchestrated to save Israel from destruction. The story is actually told from the point of view of both Israelis and members of Hamas. Moreover, the details of the actions of all the characters suggest that only someone totally familiar with Israel’s capabilities could have written the book. This is heart-pounding suspense that could become a reality. Another novel has Judaism at its core and takes a page of largely unknown history as its theme. The Messiah of Septimania by Lee Levin ($16.95, Royal Heritage Press, softcover) tells of the medieval Jewish Kingdom of Septimania and its first king; one with three different names, a man hailed as the Messiah. During the reign of Caesar Augustus, veterans of the Roman Seventh Legion (Septimanii) settled in a land just north of the Pyrenees. There was, indeed, such a region, but it is not known as a Jewish kingdom and the author has “borrowed” it for his own purposes, noting that in 70 A.D., the Romans had conquered Jerusalem and allegedly took the Holy Menorah back to Rome. In 410, the city was sacked by Visigoths who were said to have taken it back to their capital, Rhedae, in Septimania. It vanished. Or did it? The novel is written with a strict adherence to historical accuracy and introduces us to a Jewish King, said to have been an uncle to Charlemagne and whose bloodline intermingled with the Carolingian kings of France. His army protected the southern flank of Charlemagne’s Frankish kingdom. The novel that Levin has woven from these strands of history will keep the reader entranced.
Kal Wagenheim has been writing books since before I met him many, many years ago. We were both born in Newark, NJ and have both pursued the writer’s trade in one fashion or another. From a biography of Babe Ruth to teaching creative writing at Columbia University and The State Prison in Trenton, Kal’s own creative juices keep percolating and that is evident in a very “grown up” novel, The Secret Life of Walter Mott ($16.99, http://allthingsthatmatterpress.com). And, yes, it’s a bit of a play on the famed “Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber. The year is 1959 and Kal’s Walter has a dreary job in an insurance company. A bachelor, he secretly lives in his office to save money, retire early, and travel the world. Then he falls in love with a co-worker and all his plans go to hell. It is a ribald tale of misadventures spinning out of control. Laura Dave returns with a new novel, The First Husband, ($25.95, Viking) that more seriously explores the question, how do you know you’ve made the right choice? Annie Adams appears to have the good life with a career, a circle of friends, and live-in boyfriend, Nick. When Nick decides he needs to take a break from the relationship, Annie is shattered. While recuperating from the shock she visits a local restaurant where she meets the chef, Griffin, and falls for him big time! Three months later she marries him and finds herself living in Griffin’s hometown in Massachusetts. Life is full of surprises and questions.
For romantics, there’s Santa Montefiere’s new novel, The Mermaid Garden ($24.99, Touchstone, a division of Simon and Schuster), following the international success of “The French Gardener.” It is a complex and irresistibly compelling story set in both Tuscany and the coast of Devon, England. Spanning four decades, the novel threads together two separate stories. The garden is part of a palazzo in Herba, Italy. The year in 1968 and ten-year-old Floriana, a child of poverty, is befriended by the son of the villa’s wealthy owner. They become friends despite the odds She dreams that her destiny is in that garden, with him. Fast forward to 2009 and a charming old hotel by the sea. When its owner, Marina, hires a handsome Argentine artist to run it, sparks fly for her step-daughter Clamentine. Happy endings? You will have to read it to find out. Location often plays as great a role in a novel as the characters. In Philip Cioffari’s novel, Jesusville, ($18.95, Livingston Press, softcover) the two meld together when despair meets greed in a Southwestern desert. As Cioffari explains, “All the characters have in one form or another lost faith—in God or the Church or the social order or themselves.” Possessing empty lives, they are seeking some meaning to their existence. They are in great need of redemption.
For those who like their suspense straight, two novels amply provide it. In The Gods of Greenwich ($24.99, Minotaur Books, a Thomas Dunne Book) Norb Vonnegut (no relationship to Kurt Vonnegut) follows up on his initial success with “Top Producer”, a novel of Wall Street. He continues that theme with a new story of frighteningly plausible manipulations in the world of high finance to deliver a recession-era nail-biter about a super-powered hedge fun and a new employee who suspects a deadly secret behind its spectacular quarterly gains. Jimmy Cusack is trying to deal with investors who want out ‘now’ while Cy Lesser, a high-powered financial dynamo is in Iceland planning a shorting-scheme to bring down one its largest banks. Add in Rachel Whittier, a sexy nurse who has killed an aging millionaire in his Fifth Avenue apartment. Cusack jumps at the chance to work for Lesser in the Greenwich, Connecticut office of his hedge fund. Only a Wall Street insider like Vonnegut could have written this fast-paced thriller. It could not be more timely. In A Conflict of Interest ($25.00, Gallery Books) we enter the world of criminal defense attorney Alex Miller, the youngest partner in a powerful New York firm. He’s got everything; a loving wife, a beautiful daughter, and the dream job. At his father’s funeral he is approached by Michael Ohlig, a mysterious and nearly mythic figure in Miller family history. He asks Alex to represent him in a high-profile criminal investigation of an alleged brokerage scam that has lost hundreds of millions of dollars for its investors. As the novel unfolds, Alex discovers shocking secrets that threaten everything in which he believes. This is a strong debut for Adam Mitzner, its author. Fans of legal thrillers will have found a new author to read and follow.
Most of us could not find Serbia on the map if we had to, but David Albahari has put it on the literary map with Leeches ($24.00, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a darkly funny, complex murder mystery that reflects the uncertainty of life in the late 1990s Serbia. It begins when a single, pot-smoking columnist for a Belgrade newspaper sees a man slap a beautiful woman on the banks of the Danube. Intrigued, he tries unsuccessfully to follow her though the city’s tangled streets. Soon after, he received a mysterious manuscript comprising fragments on the Kabbalah and the history of Jews in Zemun and Belgrade. Wierdly, the manuscript’s contents seem to mutate each time he opens it up. Not your average thriller to be sure, but very interesting in its own way. Born in Serbia, the author emigrated to Canada in 1994. His reputation is growing. Finally, for those who love short stories, there’s Roddy Doyle’s Bullfighting ($25.95, Viking), a series of bittersweet tales about men and middle age, revealing a panorama of Ireland today. Doyle has a knack for capturing human moments, bravado and helplessness, as, in one story, four men take a vacation in Spain to drink and watch bullfights. The stories move from classrooms to crematoriums, local pubs to bullrings. It’s all about life and it’s all marvelously well told.
That’s it for May! Come back next month for more news of the latest in fiction and on-fiction. Tell all your book-loving friends and family about Bookviews so they too can get the inside track.
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