New Today: The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

The is a brand new and greatly improved edition of a modern classic: the National Book Award-winning The Great War and Modern Memory (Sterling). Originally published in 1975, it was named one of the most important non-fiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library. In his preface, author Paul Fussell explains his book succinctly:

This book is about the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 and some of the literary means by which it has been remembered, conventionalized and mythologized. It is also about the literary dimensions of the trench experience itself.

The new Sterling edition is greatly enhanced. Photographs, illustrations, maps and other ephemera from the period illuminate what was already a good and celebrated work. This new edition takes on a very good work and makes it better and, ultimately, more useful.

New in Paperback: The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

It’s not that Warren Buffett gave Alice Schroeder permission to write his biography, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bantam). He hand-picked her, a move typical of the man many consider to be one of the most successful business people in the world. And typical of Buffett’s style, he chose right.

Former Morgan Stanley analyst Schroeder’s in-depth portrait of Buffett is better, even, than one might imagine. Buffett gave Schroeder full access: spending many hours with her and talking candidly about his personal life and his business. Nor is The Snowball simply sunshine. The Oracle of Obama comes across as extremely human: strong, assured, deeply intelligent, but flawed, of course, and sometimes even frail. More importantly, The Snowball delivers on the promise every biography makes but few can dish up: careful readers leave feeling as though a secret has been shared -- several, really -- and that the answer to an important question is within reach.

When the book was released early in 2008, The Los Angeles Times said, “The Snowball is likely to remain the most authoritative portrait of one of the most important American investors of our time.” We agree.

Biography: Stitches: A Memoir by David Small

David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir (McLelland & Stewart/W.W. Norton) is fantastic. As good or better than the most celebrated graphic novels that it will inevitably be compared to. Stitches is all the more compelling because it is not a novel at all. Rather, it is a graphic telling of author and illustrator David Small’s early life.

This is David through the Looking Glass as seen by David Lynch or perhaps Tim Burton, a dark and often disturbing graphic glimpse at a childhood that many of us might have thought was best left alone. Small takes us through the dark corridors of his childhood in Detroit in the 1950s, the son of a radiologist father whose constant x-raying ultimately gives the boy cancer. And things go downhill from there.

Stitches is a huge distance from the work Small is best known for. He has illustrated over 40 children’s books and won the most prestigious awards available to him in the process. It’s not hard to see why: Small is hugely talented and his understanding of visual storytelling is complete. Stitches is undoubtedly one of the best books of 2009.

New This Month: The Last Founding Father by Harlow Giles Unger

Harlow Giles Unger is one of those authors with the talent and skill -- not to mention passion -- to breathe life into history. You don’t have to read very far in his 16th book, The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness (Da Capo) to understand this:

The world was awash with war when James Monroe was born in the spring of 1758. A dozen nations were spilling the blood of millions across four continents, and the seas between them, in what was then called the “Great War for Empire.”

In The Last Founding Father, Unger builds a case for the importance of a vastly overlooked and underrated figure, America’s fifth President, James Monroe.

Monroe’s presidency made poor men rich, turned political allies into friends, and united a divided people as no president had done since Washington. The most beloved president after Washington, Monroe was the only president other than Washington to win reelection unopposed.

There’s more, of course. A lot more. Unger delivers his material on a wave of adventure and a compelling sense of importance. You won’t ever see the early history of America in quite the same way.

Non-fiction: Good Night & God Bless by Trish Clark

Despite the weird title and the seemingly off-the-wall premise, Good Night & God Bless (Hidden Spring) is a cool little book whose time has come.

As you will not have guessed from the aforementioned weird title, Good Night & God Bless is a guide to convent and monastery accommodation in Europe. While in some cases this also means spiritual retreat, it can also just mean inexpensive and interesting accommodation in some very unexpected places.

Produced in classic contemporary guidebook form, the entries are organized by country and city. Each entry offers some history of the property, amenities, cost, local sights and travel highlights. If budget travel is on your agenda, Good Night & God Bless will make a good addition to your travel planning package.

Volume one, available now, covers travel to Austria, the Czech republic and Italy. Volume two will cover the convents and monasteries of France, Ireland and the UK and will be available early in 2010.

Biography: Imagine: A Vagabond Story by Grant Lingel

In 2005, not many credits shy of a college degree, Western New York student Grant Lingel knew he wanted something else.

“Nothing made me different than most people at twenty-two,” Lingel writes in Imagine: A Vagabond Story (Langdon Street Press). “I was broke, scared, clueless, and annoyed. College debt was up to my ears, and there was no clear direction down any particular path.” When a path didn’t present itself, he bought a one-way ticket to Mexico and, with $300 in his pocket, he left his life behind, trading in the safety of the life his middle class white American upbringing had assured him for a sea of question marks in parts unknown.

Lingel is no Kerouac and Imagine is certainly no On the Road but Lingel’s earnest ramblings have a certain youthful appeal. It’s good to know, too, that the more things change, the more they stay the same and even children of the high tech age (Lingel was born in 1983) can be called beyond the safety of their laptops, PDAs and entertainment consoles.

Non-Fiction: The PETA Practical Guide to Animal Rights by Ingrid Newkirk

The PETA Practical Guide to Animal Rights (St. Martin’s Griffin) is a smart and compassionate new book from PETA founder and president Ingrid Newkirk. Despite the organization’s reputation for zero compromise, here at least Newkirk comes across as lucid and helpful, truly delivering on the title’s promise of a “Practical Guide” with tips, points and even instructions on how to make kind choices in a complicated world. From the book:

The beautiful thing is that activism is easy and takes as many forms as there are drops of water in a river. It can be quiet, practical, and incorporate seamlessly into our lives. Or it can be exciting, avant-garde, and even raucous. It takes all kinds of people and all kinds of actions to get the job done. All that matters is that if enough of us do something, then all the bits and pieces will come together to make one glorious success story.

On the road to that success, Newkirk delivers a road map to help would be activists find their own way to bringing change into their own lives as well as those of the animals with which we share the world. Newkirk’s book is a compelling blend of touching stories and rock solid how-to advice. Considering the miles this author has put into the trenches, her passion and expertise, it’s difficult to imagine anyone better placed to write this book. It’s an interesting and useful book on this difficult topic.

Art & Culture: Page Fright by Harry Bruce

Readers are more interested in process than product we’re told be author Harry Bruce in his vastly entertaining new work, Page Fright: Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers (Douglas Gibson Books). Says Bruce:

But process, which is what this book is all about, includes not only tools but the rooms in which writers work; the number of hours, in each day or night, that they imprison themselves in those rooms; and the number of words, in each day or night, that they’ve sworn to write…. Indeed, process is everything that creative writers do to make themselves as receptive as they possibly can to what so many of them see as dictation from a forever-unknowable source.

Bruce’s strong interest in the process of making books has led to him collecting the anecdotes that contribute to Page Fright throughout his 50 year career as an author and journalist. Burce tells us that Susan Sontag wrote in longhand on yellow legal pads as do Nelson DeMille, Jim Harrison, Beverly Cleary, Toni Morrison and Wendell Barry.

Yellow legal pads had not been invented when Alexandre Dumas did his writing, but the poet and author still used yellow, though only for his poetry. Dumas wrote his non-fiction on rose-colored paper and his novels on blue. And as silly as that sounds from this distance, it probably made it easier to find what you were looking for in his office.

“Nabokov and Saul Bellow liked to soak themselves in bathtubs,” writes Bruce. (Though probably not at the same time.) Nor were they the only water babies in this crowd. Bruce includes a quote from Diane Ackerman, who does it up right:

I have a pine plank that I lay across the sides of the tub so that I can stay in a bubble bath for hours and write. In the bath, water displaces much of your weight and you feel light. When the water temperature and the body temperature converge, my mind lifts free and travels by itself.

Since Ackerman is best known as the author of 1990’s A Natural History of the Senses, all of this sort of makes sense.

Page Fright is fantastic. Writers and would-be authors will find inspiration here. And anyone who loves books will find facts worth collecting and smiles that can’t be resisted. It’s a great book.

Non-Fiction: Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada by Stephen Schneider

On the world stage, Canada has a certain reputation. In general, Canadians are known to be quiet, self-effacing and the country itself is often seen as a vast, pastoral wasteland, but for the six months in winter when the country is covered in snow.

The reality, of course, is different. But just how different is it? Maybe we’ve never come closer to knowing than we can with Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada (Wiley).

Well-researched and skillfully put together, Iced is an even better book than one might at first think. Author Stephen Schneider is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Because of these deep and real creds, I anticipated that Iced would be dry and textbookish, an idea helped by the fact that publisher John Wiley & Sons does have a textbook division. But while I imagine Iced may well function in that capacity at some point, lay people with an interest in this topic will find much here to enjoy. It’s easy to feel confident that Schneider has done his homework, but he never leaves his reader feeling as though they’d just like their six hours back. This is no doubt due Schneider’s skill, but the material here is just terrific.

Though some aspects are well worn and widely known -- the role Canada played during the United States’ Prohibition in the 1920s and early 1930s, for instance -- much, much more of this material will be unfamiliar to most Canadians. From pirates operating off Canada’s east coast in the 17th century, to the contemporary gang violence that over the last two decades has accelerated to its highest point in history.

All the way through there are interestingly told anecdotes and careful documentation and, especially in the case of contemporary incidents, well considered ideas on what should be done and what isn’t being done and what needs to be done if only certain politicians would rise off their hineys.

Iced is a very good book. Readers with an interest in these topics will find a great deal to enjoy here.

Biography: Marcus Aurelius: A Life by Frank McLynn

Frank McLynn is a historian of some note. The author of biographies on as historically diverse a cast as Robert Louis Stevenson, Napoleon Bonaparte, Carl Jung, Charles Stuart and Lord Stanley, McLynn was awarded the 1985 Cheltenham Prize for Literature (for The Jacobite Army in England) and is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Literature at Strathclyde University. All of this is not shorthand for saying that McLynn brings substantial credits and busloads of credibility with him to the writing desk. Which is a good thing because, despite the sparkling nature of his topic here, Marcus Aurelius: A Life (Da Capo) is a bit of a slog.

Don’t get me wrong: one gets the feeling that everything one reads in the book is correct. Everything. But -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- McLynn writes like an academic. Marcus Aurelius: A Life is dense and distant and -- perhaps as a result -- seems very, very, very long. Actually, at nearly 700 pages, it is very, very, very long. Not that I mind long books but there’s very little here that is joyous.

There is a self-contradiction right at the heart of the Stoic’s version of goodness or virtue, which is compounded when we come to discuss their conception of evil. We are constantly told that the only good is moral good and that what defines moral good is that it should conform with the law of reason and be located within the domain of humanity…

And so on. Not necessarily what one signs up for when wanting to learn about one of the original philosopher kings.

That said, one never gets the feeling that Marcus Aurelius: A Life is not perfectly researched and accurately put down -- or, at least, as much as history will allow. That is to say that, if the ride is not joyous, it is at least correct. If you want to discover all that is known about Marcus Aurelius and you only want to look in one place, this, then, is certainly it.

Biography: Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life by Michael Greenberg

Today in January Magazine’s biography section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life by Michael Greenberg. Says Leach:

By the time he wrote Hurry Down Sunshine, a memoir of his daughter’s descent into mental illness, Michael Greenberg had been plying his trade, with intermittent success, for over two decades. Sunshine changed all that, catapulting Greenberg to enormous fame. Literature, it seems, is no longer sufficient diversion: we have become a society in love in other people’s suffering. We want the real, the screams and rants, the pills and pains, the hospitalizations and ensuing insurance battles. And Greenberg, who has spent his adult writing life searching out such stories, suddenly had an awful tale crash into his family like a bomb. Voilá.

The full review is here.

New This Week: The Masonic Myth and Occult America

During this time of economic turmoil, next week Da Vinci Code author, Dan Brown, is expected to pull a J.K. Rowling by single-handedly hauling the publishing industry out of the toilet. And, speaking of toilets, even though lots of reviewers will inevitably heap scorn on Brown’s latest offering, The Lost Symbol (Doubleday), a lot of bookstores are hoping history will repeat itself and that sometimes lazy book buyers will come thundering into their stores ready to buy the newest Brown... and perhaps something else.

It is this “something else” hope that fuels the onslaught of related and kinda-related books every time a new entry by a megaselling author hits the market. Obviously, The Lost Symbol, with its five million (five million!) hardcover first edition printing and massive promotional push will be no exception. A lot of more-or-less-removed-by-one type books are hitting the market even now. For this particular release, the top of these is The Masonic Myth (HarperOne), by inside man Jay Kinney. It’s important to note that Kinney didn’t conceive of The Masonic Myth as an also-ran. As Mokoto Rich pointed out in The New York Times a few days ago, Harper purchased the book two years ago and held it for publication this week, when interest in all things Masonic will reach an all-time high: if everything goes according to plan, that is. It’s kind of a shame, really, because The Masonic Myth ends up coming off looking like one of those cheesy books thrown together to take advantage of a fad and, really, nothing could be further from the truth.

Former Gnosis editor-in-chief Kinney knows his esoteric traditions. In The Masonic Myth he does a great job of sharing a whole lot of never-before-seen inside stuff in an easily understood way. There is a lightness to Kinney’s writing here, despite a topic that seems often to move towards the dark. He keeps things in perspective, even while he helps us do the same.

“Secretive brotherhoods can be excellent devices in suspense thrillers,” Kinney writes near the beginning of The Masonic Myth, “but novels are, by their very nature, fiction …. They say that truth is stranger than fiction. Let’s see if that’s true.”

Along the same lines but with a broader reach and more solid appeal (and -- perhaps not so mysteriously -- the same release date) is Occult America (Bantam) by Tarcher/Penguin editor-in-chief Mitch Horowitz.

As the title implies, Horowitz’ book looks at how the occult has impacted the development of the United States. (Hint: More than a little.) In fact, the book is subtitled The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation.

“Mysteries can be found wherever you look,” Horowitz tells us early on, “especially when you’re not sure what you’re looking for.” There is much in Occult America that is more grounded, less esoteric, but what could be more filled with poetic truth?

Occult America is fantastic: interesting, entertaining, enlightening, sometimes even moving. It’s Horowitz’ first book. I’m guessing it won’t be his last.

Art & Culture: Canada by Shelagh Rogers & Mike Grandmaison

Canada (Key Porter) takes my breath away. This is the book so many others have tried to make without this kind of success. A book that includes all of a vast and beautiful country and attempts to showcase it in a way that will have meaning for those who live in the country and those who admire it from afar.

Canada is a gorgeous book. Mike Grandmaison’s photos are -- without exception -- breathtaking as well as brilliantly reproduced. It’s so sad when the reproduction of a book is not as good as the material being printed. That is not the case here: Canada is a first class production from end to end. CBC personality Shelagh Rogers does justice to Grandmaison’s work:

I am having an affair with Canada. Every place I visit intoxicates in its own way. I form relationships with these places, even if they are not long term. They follow the usual pattern: a casual, if cautious, approach. Then a date for further exploration. Next, I get physical: climb its mountains, walk its paths, swim in its waters, depending on the geography, and at nigh, drink in its bars …. When I fall, I fall hard…until the next place comes along.

A coffee table book in format, for a gift, for sharing with your own family, or just to fill your senses with serene beauty, Canada is spectacular.

Art & Culture: Going Green edited by Laura Pritchett

Laura Pritchett’s bio tells us that, when she isn’t writing, “she’s Dumpster-diving to save what other people throw away.” So right away you know that Going Green: Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers and Dumpster Divers (University of Oklahoma Press) is not going to be an Eco Chic view of environmentalism.

In the preface, Pritchett explains the concept:

Gleaning junk from a beach leads to a discussion of the enormous amount of plastic waste in our oceans. Picking up a pair of pants from a gutter leads to a discussion of this country’s cotton industry. Finding a dead animal from the side of the road to eat leads to, well, raised eyebrows and a chuckle of admiration. Here are essays that not only explore the reusing but explore our culture at large.

I have no trouble admitting that my own ideas about environmentalism are probably closer to Eco Chic than Pritchett’s gleaning and I can’t imagine the set of circumstances that would have me diving into a Dumpster. Still, Pritchett’s collection manages to be thought-provoking. It’s yet another view of the green movement and the 24 voices here often seem raw and even primal: something remembered from wilder times (The 1970s, maybe?) when the world was less ordered and change wasn’t an option, it was a matter of course.

In the wonderful “Bin Diver” Christopher Buckley sums it all up:

Correct or incorrect as that might be, we have nonetheless, it seems clear, at least a responsibility to ourselves if not to those who follow us -- if not some perhaps spiritual obligation -- to recycle what little we can, to avoid wasting even the least bit given to us, in wealth or in relative poverty, to be resourceful stewards of the planet.

Runaway Devil: How Forbidden Love Drove a 12-Year-Old to Murder Her Family by Robert Remington and Sherri Zickefoose

The only thing that prevents Runaway Devil (McClelland & Stewart) from becoming the sort of true crime schlock no one ever admits to reading is the expert journalistic handling of the material by Calgary journalists Remington and Zickefoose. But the subject matter itself? It’s awful.

In 2006, middleclass Alberta tween JR -- screen name Runaway Devil -- convinced her much older boyfriend to murder her parents and eight-year-old brother. Runaway Devil has it all: goth music, trailer parks, Internet subculture and good girls gone very, very bad.

Remington and Zickefoose professional distance works well here. Considering the subject matter and the major players, the novelistic approach favored by some true crime writers would have done nothing but soften the horror. As it is, Runaway Devil will have you checking the contents of your daughters’ iPod and watching how much time she spends on social networking.

Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman

Tears in the Darkness (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) is horrible, brave, compelling. In some ways it’s an awful book. And a brilliant one. You want to stop reading. You can’t look away.

The topic has been covered before. Of course it has. And it’s been covered well. But Tears in the Darkness is an expertly wrought passion play. One part history, one part journalistic retelling, one part literary non-fiction, Tears in the Darkness is likely the best account of the Bataan Death March of 1942 when more than 76,000 troops under American control laid down their arms.

“The single largest defeat in American military history,” the authors tell us. “The sick, starving, and bedraggled prisoners of war were rounded up by their Japanese captors and made to walk sixty-six miles to a railhead for the trip to prison camp, a baneful walk under a broiling sun that turned into one of the most notorious treks in the annals of war, the Bataan Death March.”

I’m quite confident that Tears in the Darkness will be among my selections for best non-fiction works of 2009.

Review: Eiffel’s Tower by Jill Jonnes

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, senior editor J. Kingston Pierce reviews Eiffel’s Tower by Jill Jonnes. Says Pierce:

In her entertaining new history, Eiffel’s Tower: And the World’s Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count, Baltimore author Jill Jonnes (Conquering Gotham, Empires of Light) recounts the myriad indignities leveled against Eiffel and his Tour en Fer. That criticism obviously didn’t doom the engineer’s campaign to make a bold and, at the time, very modern statement on Paris’ skyline. However, it did create obstacles that delayed work and made it difficult to complete the project in time for the fair’s opening.

The full review is here.

Biography: Rich Brother, Rich Sister by Emi & Robert Kiyosaki

Money can’t buy happiness, that’s what everyone always says. And there are certainly things more important than gold and the path demanded to line your pockets with the stuff. Of course, the other part of the message is this: money can’t buy everything... but it really does not hurt.

All of this is severely underlined in Rich Brother, Rich Sister (Vanguard Press), a self-helpishly toned memoir from big bucks guru Robert Kiyosaki and his sister, Emi who, on her way to becoming the Venerable Tenzin Kacho, ordained by the Dalai Lama, clearly took a different path.

Kiyosaki is the author of 14 “Rich Dad” books, with titles like Rich Dad, Poor Dad; Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant; Rich Dad’s Prophecy and Rich Dad’s Escape From the the Rat Race. In all, nearly 26 million copies of Kiyosaki’s motivational books are in print.

Though the title is similar and the tone not overwhelmingly different form his previous books, the content of Rich Brother, Rich Sister is not the same in that it introduces a new co-author: Robert’s sister Emi, a Buddhist nun. At one point in Rich Brother, Rich Sister, Emi writes: “Robert and I share our adventure with you because it is not just a physical journey, but a spiritual one, too. Our lives have been ones of searching for an outward life that would reflect and mesh with our inner journeys, our quests of the heart.”

In some ways, that statement sums the book perfectly. A brace of siblings, two very different journeys and yet the smiles the peer out at us from the cover image are similar as, in the end, is the message that comes through. And what is that? Well, you knew all along, didn’t you? Wealth can be quantified in many ways. And what ways matter? Why, the ones that are important to you.

Non-Fiction: Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition by Alan J. Stein, Paula Becker and the HistoryLink Staff

Although even many Seattleites seem oblivious to the fact, this summer marks the 100th anniversary of their city’s first world’s fair. It was on June 1, 1909, that the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (A-Y-P) opened its gates and concessions on what is now the campus of the University of Washington, north of downtown. Around 80,000 people trooped through the fair on opening day, and by the time it finally shut down in mid-October of that year, more than 3.7 million tourists had passed through its turnstiles. Although the exposition wasn’t the immediate boon to local development and statewide population growth that its organizers had envisioned, it did showcase Washington’s resources and reinforced close connections between Seattle, the aborning business markets of Asia and what was then known as the District of Alaska. As the city’s present-day mayor, Greg Nickels, maintains in his foreword to the new Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Washington’s First World’s Fair: A Timeline History, the A-Y-P “put Seattle on the national map when most of the country still considered the Pacific Northwest frontier country.”

It was inevitable that a book commemorating this centennial should be published. What’s fortunate is that this project was undertaken by the folks at HistoryLink, an ever-growing, 11-year-old Internet database of stories from Seattle’s and Washington state’s past. Alan J. Stein and Paula Becker are both historians associated with that site. They had at their fingertips a wealth of research already accumulated about events, characters and esoterica associated with the fair and the Emerald City as it existed in the early 20th century. Drawing as well from the photographic resources at the UW Libraries Special Collections, the Washington State Historical Society, and other such organizations, they have put together an image-rich and graphically elegant work that offers the reader a sense of how the A-Y-P came into being, a taste of what visitors to that extravaganza would have seen and perspective on how the 1909 exposition led Seattle to host its better-known second world’s fair in 1962.

The text recounts some of Seattle’s history before the A-Y-P, including the financial bust provoked by the Panic of 1893 and the boom that resulted from the city’s involvement in the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-1899. It tells about the various sites considered for the expo (including what’s now Woodland Park, on Green Lake, where the city’s zoo currently stands) and the compromise that organizers had to make in order to situate the A-Y-P on the then-underdeveloped UW grounds. “One potential financial issue with the selected site,” the authors explain, “was that the sale of liquor, a big money-maker at other exhibitions, was forbidden by law within two miles of the University of Washington campus. Thus, the A-Y-P Exposition would become the only dry world’s fair in history.” And of course this book talks about all of the promotions, fund-raising, and planning that went into creating the fair, which its supporters promised would outshine Portland, Oregon’s Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905.

One thing I had forgotten was that the Olmsted Brothers, the famous Massachusetts landscapers charged with beautifying the north Seattle exhibition grounds, had originally proposed filling them with “fair buildings modeled after traditional Russian architecture, a nod to Alaska’s settlement by Russians.” Fortunately, San Francisco architect John Galen Howard, who was hired to supervise the construction of pavilions and exhibit halls on the property, favored the more classical, “City Beautiful” look popularized by Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. So there was no proliferation of onion domes, but there were plenty of elaborate friezes, cascading waterfalls and grand colonnades--including that on the Forestry Building, which promoted the Northwest’s timber industry and was fronted dramatically by 124 unpeeled fir-log columns four-and-a-half feet in diameter and 37 feet high. Less ostentatious and more brazenly bizarre edifices decorated the Pay Streak midway, where could be found “re-enactments of real events (the Monitor and the Merrimac, the Battle of Gettysburg), representatives of seemingly exotic primitive people who were actively marketed as uncivilized (the Inuit/Eskimos, the Philippine Igorrote Tribe), premature babies who passively demonstrated the efficacy of as yet unconventional technology (the Baby Incubator Exhibit), entertainers with various degrees of subtlety, amusement rides, games of skill and chance, and all manner of carnival flimflam.”

Chock-a-block with intriguing sidebars (about woman suffrage of the time and the growing use of hand-held cameras, for instance), souvenir artwork (admission tickets, buttons commemorating special days during the fair’s run, etc.), and a wonderful section devoted to profiles of every exhibition building, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, is as much a banquet for the eyes as it is satisfying to those of us hungry for substantive history-telling.

You can take a “cybertour” of the old A-Y-P fairgrounds, and see what has become of the site, by clicking here.

Biography: Black Tooth Grin: The High Life, Good Times, and Tragic End of “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott by Zac Crain

Unsurprisingly, Black Tooth Grin (Da Capo) begins at the end. December 8, 2004, 24 years to the day that John Lennon died. “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott killed onstage, mid-song. The founder of the metal cover band Pantera, Abbott was not well known outside of his own metal community. However according to author Zac Crain, no one who knew the musician ever wondered why so many people called the act “the 9/11 of heavy metal.”

Of course, Black Tooth Grin doesn’t just tell the story of Abbott’s death. Much more time and detail is spent on the doomed musician’s life. Does D Magazine senior editor and music scribe heavyweight Crain sometimes move Black Tooth Grin towards the maudlin? Maybe only slightly. For the most part, though, Crain seems to hit all the right notes, skillfully blending fact with educated fancy, filling in the blanks and also imagining the what-might have beens and the nearly-weres.

Metal fans will, of course, find Black Tooth Grin to be a must-read but even those who had only barely heard of Abbott will find Crain’s book compelling. It’s a portrait of the music industry exactly as you always suspected it was… and yet entirely different. Fascinating.

Biography: So Long As Men Can Breathe by Clinton Heylin

A little over 400 years after the publication of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets, biographer and Elizabethan and Jacobian scholar Clinton Heylin offers up the story of Shakespeare’s Sonnet’s unauthorized and unorthodox path to publication.

It is a testament to Heylin’s art and skill that not only do we sense the presence of the living, breathing Bard in So Long As Men Can Breathe (DaCapo), we also feel the connections between a beleaguered 17th century publishing industry and the one we’re saddled with today.

Heylin’s vision is both eye-opening and entertaining. You’ve never seen the publishing industry in this light. You’ve never seen Shakespeare in quite this light. But in the same book? This is one that can’t be missed.

Carter’s “Malaise” Speech 30 Years On

Today marks the 30th anniversary of President Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise” speech, in which author Kevin Mattson points out, the word “malaise” never actually appears.

Mattson’s new book, What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President (Bloomsbury) is bright and upbeat, but also a bit disturbing sad. From an excerpt in today’s New York Times:

It was the kind of secular sermon -- introspective, searching, occasionally soaring -- that can be a tear-jerker when delivered to swelling music on a TV show like “The West Wing” but works less well for real-world presidents. Mr. Carter’s speechwriters Hendrik Hertzberg and Gordon Stewart were brilliant, but they weren’t Aaron Sorkin.

Mr. Carter’s speech was a Hail Mary pass by a president in trouble. And like so many Hail Mary passes, it was picked off. Republicans clubbed Mr. Carter with its downer themes for the next year and a half. Ronald Reagan handily won the 1980 presidential election, denying Mr. Carter a second term. There wouldn’t be another Democrat in the White House for a long 12 years.

The excerpt can be found here.

Reading to Write

At a writers festival last weekend, I taught a workshop called “Writing Killer Fiction.” During the workshop -- and throughout the weekend, for that matter -- I found myself repeatedly recommending the same three books to aspiring writers. To my way of thinking, this trio of books would be a fantastic addition to any writer’s reading list, not just those who aspire to writing crime fiction. I thought I’d share my chosen three with you here. There are other books on writing but, for my money, this slender trio covers all the bases perfectly.

This Year You Write Your Novel (Little, Brown & Company) by Walter Mosley
“I don’t promise a masterpiece,” Mosley warns in his introduction, “just a durable first novel of a certain length,” and later in the introduction he underlines this point. “I can't promise you worldly success, but I can say that if you follow the path I lay out here, you will experience the personal satisfaction of having written a novel. And from that point, anything is possible.” January published a review when the book first came out in 2007. That’s here.

The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile (Fireside) by Noah Lukeman
The first five pages are the most important in your manuscript. If they’re not sharp and ready, who will want to read beyond? But literary agent Lukeman really goes much, much deeper than readers might expect. Those who are currently iffy about self-editing will do very well heeding Lukeman’s advice. And as much as anything, The First Five Pages is a book about editing. Though not just, as the title implies, the beginning of the book. Lukeman’s work seems to bring the currently much maligned Elements of Style to life.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Pocket Books) by Stephen King
Part memoir, part writing primer, King’s fans will be delighted to discover more about the master’s background, but there are few writers who won’t benefit from the straight-forward advice King’s hard-won experience helps him offer up. “This is a short book,” King says in On Writing, “because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers ... don’t understand very much about what they do -- not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.” ‘Nuff said.

New in Paperback: The Islamist by Ed Husain

More than two years after its initial publication, Ed Husain’s The Islamist comes to us in a sleek new paperback from Penguin.

The Islamist is riveting. This is partly due the extraordinary subject matter and partly to Husain’s calm and stately voice.

Though this is a topic that can invite strident voices to either side, Husain is all the more compelling for never really going there. Instead, he tells his tale simply: born in a Muslim but largely non-political London suburb, recruited to fundamentalism at 16 and swimming with extremists for five years. When he was in his early 20s, Husain rejected what was on offer, did his own research and found his way back to a more traditional form of the faith in which he had been raised. Much of The Islamist consists of this spiritual and physical journey and the view from inside is both frightening and enlightening, as is Husain’s personal journey back.

Since The Islamist was first published in 2007, it was nominated for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the PEN/Ackerly Prize for Literary Autobiography as well as several other prizes.

If you’ve ever wondered about Islam and how it fits into the modern world, you’ll find The Islamist to be a worthwhile starting point as well as a deeply interesting read. Highly recommended.

New in Paperback: A Pocketful of History: Four Hundred Years of America -- One State Quarter at A Time by Jim Noles

In 1997, the 50 States Commemorative Coin Program Act was passed into law. It meant that, beginning in 1999 and over the course of the next decade, the U.S. Mint would issue five new quarters each year. It was determined that the quarters would be issued in the order that the states joined the Union. As author Jim Noles writes in A Pocketful of History (Da Capo):

… Delaware, admitted to the Union on December 7, 1787, would lead the charge, followed at ten-week intervals for the remainder of 1999 by quarters for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut, respectively. After ten years, the program would end, forty-five quarters later, in 2008, with the issuance of quarters of Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, and Hawaii.

Each quarter gets its own chapter in Noles’ book, where history is shared in gentle doses. We learn a little about the history of each state, as well as the cultural and historical significance of the images the coins display.

For Noles’, history is lively and each journey is entertaining and informative. A Pocketful of History is a very good book.

Non-Fiction: The Pursuit of Perfect by Tal Ben-Shahar

If, in the course of reading a towering stack of books intended to make you perform better, faster and stronger you discover you have pushed yourself too close to perfection, then The Pursuit of Perfect (McGraw Hill) may well be the book for you.

After a decade of teaching Happiness classes at Harvard (one gets the idea of a class of grad students sitting around blowing bubbles, but I don’t think that’s it) author, philosopher and psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar came to understand that most people aspire to more than mere happiness. Whether or not they realized it, people wanted perfection in their lives.

The result should be obvious (but does not seem to be until it is pointed out). If you crave and search for perfection, you will inevitably be disappointed -- both in yourself and the world around you. If you need perfection in your life, you’ve failed before you get out of the gate. The Pursuit of Perfect is the answer to that discovery, with Ben-Shahar guiding you through the idea of looking for attainable self-fulfillment rather than setting unrealistic goals that can’t fail to do anything but disappoint.

In addition to teaching the topic at Harvard, Ben Shahar is the author of the bestselling Happiness, so he knows this topic from many angles. He writes engagingly and is an accomplished thinker who says much that is worthy of attention. The Pursuit of Perfect is a must-read for the overachiever in your life.

New This Month: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton is, first and foremost, a philosopher. Just a few months shy of his 40th birthday, de Botton is perhaps one of the most important philosophers alive today. Arguably, of course. But then, that’s part of the point of philosophy, is it not? Everything we see isn’t always what it seems and where we look is not necessarily where what is searched for will be found. Things like that. Philosophy is intended to help us not only answer questions, but -- perhaps more importantly -- to help us work up the right answers. It’s a field that is too often ignored or overlooked in our busy world.

Case in point: the word “philosophy” comes up not once in de Botton’s bio for his new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. He’s called “a bestselling author.” This is, of course, not inaccurate: de Botton’s books sell very, very well. But it is interesting that the word at the core of his work -- the word that drives it, if you will -- has been, as much as possible, struck from conversations about his writing. This can’t be unintentional. For some reason I still can’t comprehend, the word “philosophy” strikes terror into the hearts of many people. And it should not, which is why I belabor it here. Once again. (The first time I did so in this space was in a review of an earlier de Botton work, The Consolations of Philosophy, way back in 2000.)

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is another enjoyable foray into serious thought with a witty, knowledgeable and considerate guide. As much as anything, de Botton is a keen and practiced observer and through his eyes we see what is delightful and horrible and defeating and satisfying about how we put bread on our tables.

More than any of his previous books, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is as much art project as powerful social statement. In many ways, it is a deeply personal book, one that I suspect will be interpreted differently -- personally -- by each reader. As he journeys, de Botton asks and leads us to answer: why do we work? What makes work joyous? Is it meaningful? In the larger picture for our planet, is work worth it?

Excerpt: Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton

Horse Soldiers (Scribner) is the dramatic account of a small band of Special Forces soldiers who secretly entered Afghanistan following 9/11 and rode to war on horses against the Taliban:

Trouble came in the night, riding out of the dust and the darkness. Trouble rolled past the refugee camp, past the tattered tents shuddering in the moonlight, the lone cry of a baby driving high into the sky, like a nail. Sunrise was no better; at sunrise, trouble was still there, bristling with AKs and RPGs, engines idling, waiting to roll into the city. Waiting.

These were the baddest of the bad, the real masters of mayhem, the death dealers with God stamped firmly in their minds. The city groaned and shook to life. Soon everyone knew trouble had arrived at the gates of the city.

Read the full excerpt here.

Art & Culture: The Artist’s Mother, introduction by Judith Thurman

Like exhibitions loosely grouped around a theme, books with a themed core seem to come in one of two categories. They’re either lame excuses to connect that which probably shouldn’t have been connected in the first place, or wonderful triumphs that have us looking at the topic in a new way.

In almost every regard, The Artist’s Mother (Overlook) falls into the latter camp. “Maternal love takes many forms,” author and journalist Judith Thurman writes in her introduction, “not all of them benign, but one of the most essential is to provide an experience of attunement.”

We don’t experience that attunement in all of the work collected here, but one does get a glimmer of what Thurman means as well, in some cases, the connections some painters maintain with where they’ve been as well as how they’re getting where they’re going.

The book opens on a fantastic portrait of Albrecht Dürer’s mother, Barbara. Painted when the artist was just 19, it is a masterwork that clearly lays the groundwork for the genius still being developed. For a later glimpse of that genius, a charcoal sketch of Dürer’s mother done just months before her death captures the woman as she was, not idealized as was dictated by the fashions of the time. Both works are remarkable, but it’s terrific to see them almost side-by-side.

Delivered chronologically, the book ends on Andy Warhol’s 1974 portrait of his mother, Julia Warhola. In between is a history of art in maternal form: John Constable, Rossetti, Paul Cézanne, Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo and that most famous mother-painter of all James Abbott MacNeill Whistler whose “Portrait in Gray and Black” has come to be known as “Whistler’s Mother.”

The Artist’s Mother is a wonderful short course in art history as well a terrific tribute to one of humankind’s most lasting bond.

Non-Fiction: Squirrels of North America by Tamara Eder

At first blush, Squirrels of North America (Lone Pine) sounds almost ridiculously esoteric. Squirrels. In North America. Super specific and about a topic that -- let’s face it -- most of us give little thought. (ie: squirrels.) However, not long after my initial scoff, I spent an enchanted hour or so lost in the pages of what is essentially a field guide. That fascination is understandable and to be encouraged, especially in the young. As author Tamara Eder points out, for most of us, there is not a lot of nature that can be observed right in your own backyard:

In this time when most wildlife in North America is confined to national parks and protected areas, we often overlook the wildness in our own backyards. Few animals have adapted to human urbanization, and of those that have, almost none are mammals.

And then there are squirrels.

The squirrels’ ability to thrive in our urban domain might be the reason that many people disregard and even disdain squirrels. If you look more closely at these fellow mammals, however, you will discover extremely sociable and familiar creatures.

And look closely Eder does. Sixty-six species are grouped and color-coded, regions indicated, weight and general appearance noted. Illustrations include points to look for when making identifications. (Especially important with some of the chipmunk types, which seem very alike until the details are pointed out.

A charming and well-executed book, Squirrels of North America is sure to please the amateur naturalist in your life.

Now in Paperback: Keep Going: The Art of Perseverance by Joseph Marshall III

Since it was first published in hardcover in 2006, Keep Going: The Art of Perseverance (Sterling Ethos) by Joseph Marshall III has touched many people and, if the stories are to be believed, altered many lives. That being the case, it’s good to see it turn up now in a tiny and elegant paperback volume.

Marshall is the whole package: a historian, educator, motivational speaker and Lakota storyteller. All of these things come into play in Keep Going, a book so slender it could fit into the inside breast pocket of a good suit jacket, yet is so packed with storytelling punch, aspects of this message might stay with you forever.

On first reading, I was put in mind of that 1970s sensation, Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It offers the same winning combination of wisdom and innocence, a sort of knowing unknowing that compels the reader on. Nor does the reader need to be compelled far: just 130 pages in a small format paperback, it’s not beyond thought that Keep Going could be finished in a single sitting. I’m not totally sure why you’d want to do that, though. This is a book that’s about enlightenment, knowledge and strength, all concepts best savored, not inhaled.

Marshall is the author of The Lakota Way and The Journey of Crazy Horse, among other books. His written voice has a soothing quality. I anticipate revisiting Keep Going many times in the future.

New Today: A Day in the Life by Robert Greenfield

Through much of A Day in the Life (Da Capo) I kept getting the same uncomfortable feeling I got while watching Requiem for A Dream (2000), but not in a good way. There was a similar feeling of inevitable sinking and incoming tragedy. A similar feeling of wanting to shake someone and make them see.

Robert Greenfield (STP, Exile on Main Street) relates the tragic story of Tommy Weber and Susan “Puss” Coriat. Beautiful, aristocratic Londoners when they wed in the early 1960s, they are sucked into the vortex that the 60s became for many people and, by story’s end, both have been basically ruined by sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. Puss dies by her own hand in 1971 and Tommy in 2006 after decades of self-abuse.

In between the golden beginning and the ignominious end, the couple have two children -- one of whom would grow to become the actor Jake Weber -- fall in with various nefarious rock n’ rollers and just rip their golden life to shreds.

A Day in the Life reads, at times, like a novel, but like one of those torrid little romances you’d rather no one see you with. And after you finish reading? Well, I just wanted to have a shower.

A Day in the Life is not a bad book, but it’s a sad book. I’m not sorry I read it, but I’d certainly never read it again. Fans of music history and 1960s culture will feel differently, I’m sure. This book is just stuffed full of the kind of juicy tidbits that lot likes best.

New This Week: Either You’re In or You’re In the Way by Logan and Noah Miller

Filmmaking twin brothers Logan and Noah Miller have a single car, mobile phone and computer between them. It’s not that they wouldn’t each like their own but, as they tell us in the opening paragraphs of Either You’re In or You’re In the Way (Collins) “right now money is tight. So, for now, we share. And are blessed to have someone to share it with.”

That’s pretty much the sentiment that floats us through the book. It’s a charming, witty and in some ways fascinating story that’s part memoir and partly the story of how -- against all odds -- the brothers wrote, produced, acted in and directed a feature film -- starring no less than Ed Harris -- in less than a year with little between them besides 17 credit cards.

That would be sufficient story for the book, but then the resulting film, Touching Home, was nominated for 26 Academy Awards and took home 11 of them.

Either You’re In or You’re In the Way is, in some ways, a Cinderella story in perfect Hollywood style with all the bittersweet details and plot twists such a story demand. And, all things considered, it’s no surprise that they can write, too. Those who love movies and/or a touching family story will enjoy this book. It’s a very worthwhile read on so many levels.

New Today: The Whatchmacallit by Danny Danziger and Mark McKrum

You know, you could probably go through your whole life and never know what a tittle is. Or a toorie. Or a caruncula. But with the publication of The Whatchamacallit (Hyperion), you can discover what they are. Those, and a few dozen other common objects with uncommon names you couldn't care less about.

But should you care? Or, more to the point, shouldn't you? That's why authors Danny Danziger and Mark McKrum collected the stories behind a whole mess of things you might never bother to consider. But I think readers of January Magazine’s brother-in-crime, The Rap Sheet, want to to know that a scarpetta is the hunk of bread you use to wipe gravy or sauce from your plate. And I think, as one who eats breakfast, you want to know that fines are the crumbs at the bottom of a cereal box.

And speaking of breakfast, did you know that those little stringy bits between a banana and its peel have their own name?! Yep. They’re phloem bundles. And that bit of punctuation in which a question mark is immediately followed by an exclamation point? It's called an interrobang.

In The Whatchamacallit, you’ll find dozens of treasures such as these, each described with certain degrees of gravitas, albeit with the authors’ tongues shoved deeply into their cheeks. Some of the essays are short and sweet, others venture further, becoming mini-treatises on topics that somehow connect to the word in question. It’s essential reading for anyone who loves words ... and if you're reading this, that means you.

Non-Fiction: An American Trilogy by Steven M. Wise

I think it’s possible that the publication date of Steve M. Wise’s latest book was unfortunate. The best laid plans. An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery & Dominion on the Banks of the Cape Fear River (Da Capo) was published about a week before the strain of influenza most popularly known as swine flu started getting a lot of ballyhoo from CNN and other experts in the art of the sensational. That is to say that the book was published at a time when even staunch animal activists aren’t feeling especially compassionate about the fate of pigs. And, really? That’s a shame because, once again, Wise has written a trenchant and important book.

Wise is a lawyer who has taught at Harvard, Lewis and Clark and other places. He is president of the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights. And he cares very deeply about both human and animal rights, as he demonstrated in several previous books, including Though the Heavens May Fall and Rattling the Cage.

In An American Trilogy Wise trains his sharp eye on Tar Heel, North Carolina, home of the largest slaughterhouse in the world, once the site of atrocities to African American slaves and before that home to indigenous Americans.

At times, An American Trilogy is a difficult book to read. There are some things here a lot of people don’t really want to know. In the book’s prologue, Wise explains that he was deeply affected by the material that moved him to write the book and that passion shows up on every page though, as he tells us, “In this book, I do not recite the atrocities we perpetuate on pigs. Instead, I discuss why we think it’s okay to inflict them. And that discussion will bring us to the study of history.”

In that study, Wise examines why American accept the type of cruelty he shows us in Bladen County, North Carolina. More: he connects it with cruelty to native Americans as well as African American slaves. He does all of this with the style and grace that always marks his work. An American Trilogy is a remarkable book.

Non-Fiction: Blue Heaven by Bill Terry

Editor’s Note: Running this review just a few days after C.J. Box’s Blue Heaven won the Edgar Award seems pleasingly ironic. And it goes to show that everyone’s idea of heaven is just a little different.

Picture this: it’s late spring 1922. A British expedition is traversing the East Rongbuk Valley in Tibet when they come across the most extraordinary thing: a beautiful and mysterious hyacinth blue poppy. In the end, though, as author Bill Terry tells us in Blue Heaven (Touchwood Editions) the poppy wasn’t a poppy at all. “It was a meconopsis, a name derived from the Greek mekon (poppy) and opsis (like). The climbers had found Meconopsis grandis, commonly known as the Tibetan Poppy or the Himalayan Blue Poppy.”

That explanation, on the very first page of Blue Heaven, is about as technical as Terry lets things get, though it is clearly understood throughout that he has his material well under control.

Part adventure travel, part gardener’s memoir and guide and all parts love letter to a flower that has captured men’s imagination since time out of mind. What comes through on every page, though, is Terry’s clear passion for his subject. The resulting book rings with both authority and echoes of that passion. It’s a wonderful little book. One need not be a gardener or amateur botanist to appreciate Bill Terry’s very special Blue Heaven.

New this Month: Clara’s Story by Clara Kramer

You know this story. Even so, it does not get easier to hear. Sometimes you want to look away. But you can’t. You must not. It’s an important story to remember, beautifully preserved here, but still difficult to look at straight on.

In 1939, Clara Kramer was a teenager in Poland. When the Germans invaded her small town, she and her family were given shelter by the family of their former housekeeper. With two other families, they created an underground bunker of sorts, where 18 people settled in to try to simply live through the nightmare that had fallen over their world.

In many regards, Kramer’s story echoes that of the doomed Anne Frank but, of course, for the happier ending. That alone is a miracle: of the 5000 Jews in Zolkiew, Poland before the War, Kramer is one of only 50 to have survived. In reading her story, though, there’s more than survival here. There is perseverance, desperation and grace, in equal measure. That grace is present in every word. From the author’s note of Clara’s Story:

Writing this book was like walking out my kitchen door in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and straight into my home in Zolkiew. Although the events in this book happened sixty years ago, they have never left me. As with many survivors, I relive them in the present.

Now 81, Kramer was one of the founders of the Holocaust Resource Center at Kean University. It’s an organization she has been president of for the last 20 years.

New This Month: The Secret Lives of Litterbugs by M.A.C. Farrant

Fans of west coast Canadian writer M.A.C. Farrant can be forgiven if they feel there’s a shadow of the familiar in her latest book, The Secret Lives of Litterbugs (Key Porter). That’s because she partly mines territory already covered in 2004’s My Turquoise Years, a memoir that takes place in 1960, Farrant’s 14th summer. But don’t let possible redundancy scare you away: it doesn’t happen here.

The Secret Lives of Litterbugs is a collection of personal essays about Farrant’s own youth in the 1960s, as well as some that reflect her own experiences as a mother: the coin, then, is viewed from both sides.

Where My Turquoise Years is bathed in a certain nostalgic light -- 14 in 1960, somehow those numbers seem to just want to add up to nostalgia -- Litterbugs deals with a broader spectrum in terms of both timeline and emotion. It seems to me there’s a sharpness here that was lacking in the earlier book. But, whatever it is, The Secret Lives of Litterbugs is bright and fresh and real, a deeply enjoyable slice of family life, then and now.

New this Month: The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz

Considering how the last year or so has gone, Jacqueline Novogratz left her job in the financial sector just in the nick of time. That wasn’t what it was about. From the front flap of The Blue Sweater (Rodale): “Jacqueline Novogratz left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it.”

The result was a journey that would have far-reaching results. For Novogratz herself, obviously, but also for the people whose lives she touched and who touched her and now, with The Blue Sweater, she touches ours, as well because, as empowered as she is and as powerful she has, in a way, become, Novogratz can also write. In The Blue Sweater she brings us along on her personal journey of transformation.

Part of the power in The Blue Sweater comes from Novogratz’s own urgency. “Today, I believe more strongly than I did as a young woman that we can end poverty,” she writes at one point. “Never before in history have we had the skills, resources, technologies, and imagination to solve poverty that we do now.”

Novogratz is the piper. The stories she tells here are her music. And it’s difficult to even want to do anything other than follow along.

Less Equal Than You’d Think

Are women writers underrepresented in our literary landscape? Elaine Showalter, Princeton University Professor Emerita and author of A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (Knopf) certainly thinks so. On a recent On Public Radio International broadcast, Showalter explained her thoughts:

Women write a lot of fiction, and are massively read, and if you look at the best-seller list at any point… they will be represented in great numbers, and women are also reading fiction by men; but the opposite is not the case. I mean, men don’t read as much fiction by women; but more important than that, in our schools and in our histories of American literature, and in our sense of a national literary tradition, women don't play the role that they’ve earned.

A partial transcript of the broadcast is here, as is a link to listen to the interview in full.

New in Paperback: Farewell, My Subaru by Doug Fine

One of the things that’s struck me about the green movement: it can be a little dour. And, actually, I get it. Really, I do. There’s a lot of serious stuff going on, after all. Climates changing. Polar icecaps melting. Food supplies dwindling. It’s all enough to put you in a really bad mood. As a result, a lot of Earth save-related stuff is strident. Unsmiling. You get the feeling you better put up or shut up: the planet is not going to save itself. If you’re not going to do something about it, you’d better stand aside or get trampled in the angry green parade.

Farewell, My Subaru (Villard) isn’t like that. The first hint, of course, is that title. A perfect title, when you think about it. A little bit romantic. A little bit evocative (the whole fossil fuel thing). Certainly a little bit fun. The title hints at all the things this book is and means and accomplishes. But it’s not an idle reference either. In fact, you meet the late, lamented Subaru at the very beginning of the book. The car is dying. And it’s not dying well. And author Fine watches it happen while wondering how much he actually cares. The opening lines of Farewell, My Subaru:

As I watched my Subaru Legacy slide backward toward my new ranch’s studio outbuilding, the thought crossed my mind that if it kept going -- and I didn’t see why it wouldn’t -- at least I would be using less gasoline.

NPR contributor Fine’s print work has appeared in The Washington Post, Wired and Salon. His voice is gentle, his humor sharp, his message clear. Farewell, My Subaru is an easy, enjoyable read. And that’s a good thing, because this is a book that everyone needs to read.

Non-Fiction: Twitter Power by Joel Comm

I’ve been successfully avoiding Twitter since I first heard about it a couple of years ago. I’ve been busy with my blog and my Facebook and my life, I really didn’t think I needed to add yet another thing. My single encounter with Twitter confirmed this early assessment. I’m a journalist and a novelist: I have a track record for going long. Being scintillating in 140 characters or less just didn’t appeal. I mean, it’s one thing to be concise: I’m all for that. But then there’s silly. And that’s where in my mind I stuffed Twitter.

And then 2009 happened and it seemed that suddenly even old men who shouldn’t know how to program their mobile phones are using their crackberries to tweet. So I start telling myself: OK. I’ll play with this. Get it working for me. But, you know the drill, life just keeps getting in the way.

After a couple of very productive weeks of procrastinating in the Twitter department, I caught a break: not one but two review copies of Twitter Power (Wiley) showed up in the January offices. And multiple review copies from various sources is a sign: it’s one of the ways we can tell if a book is getting some push. And, clearly, Twitter Power was one of those.

To be honest, most often, a book like this? I would have assigned it. But considering my Twitterless state and the fact that it was something I’d been thinking about, I started on the book myself and, within 24 hours of beginning to read, I’d set up two Twitter accounts -- one for myself and one for January -- and had additionally and quite easily done some fairly complicated footwork.

I love it when life conspires. Had Twitter Power been published a year ago, it would have been a useful book and probably held its own in sales, but that’s about it. But because this is the Twitter moment and Joel Comm chose this one to show up with this blazingly lucid book, he’s a star. The book is a bestseller and Comm is leaving a path of new tweeters in his wake.

Luckily, there’s more than timing at play here: Twitter Power is a good book. Comm (can that possibly be his real name?) is a social networking master, but he also has the depth of knowledge and the spiritual calm to explain all this stuff in a rational, logical way. And, of course, the book is published by Wiley, who have been producing excellent geek books for just about as long as there have been geek books to produce.

Now, honestly? I personally still do not love Twitter. I had an instant affinity for Facebook when I joined a couple of years ago, but Twitter still strikes me as a bit empty. The “micro” part of “microblogging” still leaves me a little cold. And “thumbtyping” is never going to be any fun for me. Maybe these are conditions I’ll grow out of. Meanwhile, I’m there and doing it and Twitter Power brought me there effortlessly. It’s a well thought out, friendly and entirely easy to follow book and it sounds considerably more sensible than the upcoming Twitter Wit, “a book of Twitter’s wittiest messages, edited by Nick Douglas and coming out Fall 2009 from HarperCollins.” As John McCain surely knows by now, you don’t have to be witty to tweet.

Review: Will Marry for Food, Sex, and Laundry by Simon Oaks

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Will Marry for Food, Sex, and Laundry by Simon Oaks. Says Leach:

I have no idea what possessed Mr. Oaks to pen his self-help ode to marital bliss. He is not a psychologist, MSW, or therapist of any sort. He is an ex-race car driver, and though he alludes to work many times in his deeply silly book, he never specifies precisely what he does. Perhaps he feels his nine -- nearly ten -- years of marriage qualify him to pen such a manual. Perhaps I feel my 16 years of marriage qualify me to say unkind things. Never mind. Down to specifics.

The full review is here.

Non-Fiction: Life in Color: Visual Therapy’s Guide to the Perfect Palette by Jesse Garza and Joe Lupo

Maybe it’s just me, but something about Oprah stylists Jesse Garza and Joe Lupo’s second book just struck me as perfectly 2007. It’s not that the book is dated, exactly. It’s just something about the enthusiastic and unapologetic hedonism in Life in Color: Visual Therapy’s Guide to the Perfect Palette (Chronicle Books) that puts one in mind of a time -- not that long ago in months and years, but perhaps long ago in spirit -- when the most important thing on all of our minds might reasonably have been to discover if our styletype was classic or whimsical or if your colortype was earth, sun, moon or star.

One of the first lines in the introduction sums my feelings up pretty well:

As you make your grand entrance, you can bet people notice the way that drop-dead red dress brings out the rosins in your cheeks -- or, conversely, the way that dreary mustard yellow sweater makes you look drawn and worn.

Here’s what else can make you look drawn and worn: losing your job. Losing your house. Politically losing your way.

I’m not saying Life in Color is a bad book. It probably isn’t. It’s me, really it is. Or it’s the world. I think I would have liked this book a lot a year ago. But times have changed. So many banks have failed. Heads of state have shifted. 401ks have gotten smaller, the endangered list has gotten longer. And those granite countertops I thought I wouldn’t be able to live without? I’m sort of thinking that I can. Realistically, I’m just not in the mood for a “two-man style SWAT team” right now. I’m wondering if anyone really is.

New This Month: Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief

Raising Freethinkers (AMACOM) by Dale McGowan, Amanda Metskas, Molleen Matsumara and Jan Devor is a newly revised edition of a popular 2007 book. It was published in a hailstorm of controversy. The very premise of the book invites it. As the authors say in the preface to the new edition:

The sound you heard upon opening this book was the other shoe dropping. Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief is just that -- a practical guide. You’ll find ideas and ponderings in these pages, but also specific answers to common questions and hundreds of activities and resources to make those ideas come alive.

Now, clearly, Raising Freethinkers is not a book for everyone. At all. However, those faced with raising children outside of organized religion and looking for answers on how to proceed will find them here. McGowan writes:

Even though we can and often do end up pursuing the same ends, religious and nonreligious parenting really aren’t the same. There is a profound difference in the context, the space in which religious parenting and nonreligious parenting happen.

A really active and simple example of this comes from one brief line in the book: “Skepticism -- the simple request for reasoning or evidence before accepting a proposition -- is a virtue to treasure and cultivate in our kids.”

Questions of community, ethics, religious literacy “without indoctrination” and other important matters are considered and discussed. Raising Freethinkers is dynamic, thought-provoking reading for anyone, but non-religious parents will discover they no longer need to feel quite so alone.

Non-Fiction: Love in 90 Days by Diana Kirschner

This time of year, the pressure to be paired is almost palpable. And whether or not society is supportive of singles seems to be a cyclic thing. Sometimes the pendulum swings one way and everyone is looking for a reason to justify both unpairing or even just celebrating your single state. But that’s not the cycle that we’re currently in. In Love in 90 Days (Center Street) author Diana Kirschner makes this abundantly clear:

Love is life’s golden ticket. It brings in the brightest of colors and the rich high and low notes. There is no mistaking it; you know when you have love. And you definitely know when you don’t. The big question is, What are you doing about not having love in your life? Are you going to risk being alone and lonely, missing out on all that love can give?

So, okay: no pressure, right? But wait, it gets worse. It turns out there are health benefits to being in a relationship, too:

Study after study has shown that love relationships have a huge impact on our psychological, economic, and physical well-being. Having a life partner can create a higher sense of self-worth, provide intimacy and emotional support, which fulfills the deepest need for human connection, and lead to greater wealth and economic stability.

So much for accepting your single self as you are. If you thought you were happy alone, think again. Doctor Diana makes it clear: single sucks. But here’s the problem: what’s a guy to do.

In Love in 90 Days, Kirschner offers up all the answers. And that’s not tongue-in-cheek, either. After all, the subtitle is The Essential Guide to Finding Your Own True Love. That’s a tall order, so Kirschner doesn’t spend too much time on making potential readers feel bad about their partnerless state: she snaps us right to work.

Unfortunately, I was well into Love in 90 Days before I realized that the book is completely not aimed at me. What was my first clue? Try this chapter heading: “Field Report of DUDs and STUDs.” And though some of this advice could work for either gender, Love in 90 Days is most obviously (obvious to anyone but me, I guess) a book aimed at helping women find their ideal man. So I can not tell you if the book works. I can tell you this, though: it’s a 13 week program that takes a sensible and pro-active approach to helping women zero in on their “own true love” in less time than the average sitcom season. Works for me.

From everything I can see, the book is doing very, very well and getting Kirschner a lot of attention. And that’s good, because here is what I hope: she’ll do so well with Love in 90 Days that she’ll write a follow-up, and that follow-up will get me going on finding my “own true love.” There are worse things to hope for.

New in Paperback: The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley

The Book of Dead Philosophers (Vintage) is shockingly lucid, surprisingly good, unexpectedly funny. It’s a book that meets its initial mandate, then passes it by a country mile. Clearly, I liked it a lot. I find it difficult to imagine anyone with even a passing interest in philosophy who would not enjoy it.

Author Simon Critchley looks chronologically at those who dedicated their lives to thinking about intellectual matters of life and death and how they themselves exited the material world. “Very simply stated,” writes the author, “this is a book about how philosophers have died and what we can learn from philosophy about death and dying.”

But it’s more than that, too. Critchley points out that we, as a society, are almost ridiculously frightened of death. And what can we do about that? Critchley has the answer: philosophy.

It was a commonplace in antiquity that philosophy provides the wisdom necessary to confront death. That is, the philosopher looks death in the face and has the strength to say that it is nothing.

That’s in theory. In practice... well, Critchley gives us short profiles of close to 200 philosophers, a little about how they lived and -- more importantly in the context of this book -- how they died. On that journey, we encounter all that life has to offer: wit and wisdom, tragedy and comedy. There are bizarre ends and others that are pathetically unexceptional. In short, he gives us the tools we need to begin to “learn to have death in your mouth, in the words you speak, the food you eat and the drink that you imbibe.”

It’s a remarkable book.

New Yesterday: What Obama Means by Jabari Asim

If timing is everything, Jabari Asim, formerly an editor at The Washington Post and currently editor-in-chief of The Crisis -- the magazine of the NAACP -- has it all figured out.

The author of 2007’s The N Word: Who Say It, Who Shouldn’t and Why approaches Barack Obama’s new presidency from a cultural perspective in What Obama Means: For Our Culture, Our Politics, and Our Future (William Morrow). Asim uses his talent, his training and his observations about his own culture to help understand how we came to this point and where we might expect to go from here. It’s a thoughtful and enjoyable ride. You might not agree with everything that Asim posits, but he states his various cases eloquently and he writes so well, it’s enjoyable to follow him on this journey of thought:

With the heyday of Parisian exile long gone and journeys back to Africa exposed as mostly implausible, race men and women have nowhere else to go. There are too many bodies in the earth, and you can’t, as Toni Morrison once wrote, just up and leave a body. Those bones belong to the land, the land belongs to us, and we don’t need to wear lapel pins to prove it.

Asim is a wonderful writer, sure. But he’s also something of a philosopher and, on moving with him through his thoughts on how this moment in history became possible, it’s enjoyable to follow his mental calisthenics.

Did Michael Jordan’s success in the NBA contribute to Obama’s successful run at the White House? How about Sidney Poitier’s Academy Award and Michael Jackson’s Thriller? Now me, I would not have made those connections and, having read What Obama Means, I’m still not sure I’m convinced. But these are engaging mental exercises for this moment in time. Asim has written an entertaining, enlightening and thought-provoking book. Students of contemporary culture will want to put it near the top of their lists.

New This Week: The Complete Beck Diet for Life by Judith S. Beck

Though diet books are popular throughout the year, late December to early January remains a popular time to debut them. And why? Because a lot of us tend to overindulge in something over the holidays -- and often more than one something! By the time it’s nearly over, we start to realize that something’s gotta give... and it hopefully won’t be our favorite jeans.

In The Complete beck Diet for Life: The Five Step Program to Permanent Weight Loss (Oxmoor House), Dr. Judith S. Beck (The Beck Diet Solution) offers up another tome that uses cognitive therapy to help your battle the bulge. The idea is to “gain control of your eating and your weight, and once you do, you’ll be more in control of your life.”

And while I continue to love comedian Craig Ferguson’s diet advice -- eat less, move around more -- on reading Beck’s book, one can see how training your mind might help you to control what you intake. And why. Much of Beck’s advice seems so sensible, it’s no wonder the book has been screaming up the charts since release.

“This book,” writes Beck, “is your instruction manual for motivating yourself for life.”

Review: Little Pink House by Jeff Benedict

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, contributing editor Stephen Miller reviews Little Pink House by Jeff Benedict. Says Miller:

It is often said that bad cases make for bad law, and the United States Supreme Court case of Kelo v. New London certainly contained a bad set of facts.

Anxious to reverse the decay in New London, Connecticut, as well as neutralize political opponents, Governor John Rowland and his staff dsevised a massive urban renewal project along the New London waterfront. However, a Republican Governor’s involvement in a project in heavily Democratic New London was a non-starter, so the New London Development Corporation was reinvigorated to champion development and manage the resources that would flow from the state.

The full review is here.

Best Books of 2008: Non-Fiction

American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum (Crown) 352 pages
So many 20th-century misdeeds have been labeled “the crime of the century,” that it’s hard to keep track. Wasn’t the 1932 Lindbergh baby kidnapping supposed to be the crime of the century? Or was it Leopold and Loeb’s murder from 1924? Perhaps it was the Great Brink’s Robbery of 1950, or the shocking Jonestown Massacre of 1978? And what about the slaying of libidinous architect Stanford White in 1906? For his latest book, New York Times reporter-turned-Vanity Fair writer Howard Blum casts the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing as the foremost crime of the 1900s. It certainly had drama, as the leaf copy of American Lightning makes clear: “On the morning of October 1, 1910, the walls of the Los Angeles Times building buckled as a thunderous detonation sent men, machinery, and mortar rocketing into the night air. When at last the wreckage had been sifted and the hospital triage units consulted, twenty-one people were declared dead and dozens more injured.” That devastation came in the midst of heightened animosities between labor organizers and industrialists in the United States. Much in contrast with pro-union San Francisco, the City of Angels had sought to curb (or kill) labor’s influence. One of the loudest voices in that campaign came from Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis, so it was not unexpected that his business should be among the dozens targeted for damage by aggravated unionists who believed employers could only be brought to the bargaining table under threats of violence. Apparently, though, the timing mechanism on the suitcase bomb deposited in an alley behind the Times headquarters was faulty, and its dynamite went off later than planned, when people were working inside the structure. In the aftermath, the man considered at the time to be “America’s greatest detective,” William J. Burns, was called to investigate. Blum carefully tracks the efforts by Burns and his subordinates to identify and apprehend the men responsible for that explosion, brothers John J. and James B. McNamara. However, he extends his focus further, telling the parallel stories of eminent attorney Clarence Darrow, who was persuaded by labor leaders to defend the McNamaras, and moviemaking pioneer D.W. Griffith, who helped Burns to resolve the case and was inspired by it to create his epic 1915 film, Birth of a Nation. Blum does a remarkable job here of blending the tales of his principals together, and peppering in such other peripheral players as movie star Mary Pickford, muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, and union leader Samuel Gompers. -- J. Kingston Pierce

Full-Court Quest by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith (University of Oklahoma Press) 479 pages
Full-Court Quest is a delightful surprise. The story of a woman’s basketball team that started in an Indian boarding school and rose to take their place as Montana’s first basketball champions, playing at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Full-Court Quest has everything. A story you’re not likely to have heard before, authors Peavy and Smith did heavy detective work uncovering layer upon layer to reveal an important piece of women’s history; of native American history and even of the type of spirit for which the West became known. Peavy and Smith tell their chosen tale well, sprinkling us lightly across a narrative that, nonetheless, never loses any of its real life grit. And this was just the duo of authors to bring us this unforgettable story. Peavy and Smith have been collaborating on works of women’s history for three decades. They are the authors of ten books together, including Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement, Pioneer Women and Frontier House. A wonderful story splendidly told. It deserves the widest following imaginable. -- Sienna Powers

He Is…I Say by David Wild (DaCapo) 203 pages
Rolling Stone contributing editor David Wild offers up an intimate look at Neil Diamond, “our own King of Kings, our Jewish American Elvis” in He Is…I Say, a skillful biography that manages to be both affectionate and informative. In his introduction, Wild sets the tone: “Neil Diamond, as I can personally attest, was big in Jersey well before Bruce Springsteen became The Boss. In our home in particular, his music was always near the very top of our pops.” Part personal memoir, part revealing peek at an enduring icon, and part fan letter from a life-long Diamond aficionado, one thing is clear throughout: David Wild is a stylist second to none and it’s a pleasure to take this journey with him. “In the wonderfully emotional and occasionally manic-depressive world of Neil Diamond, agony and ecstasy have long gone hand in hand, making no shortage of beautiful music together.” -- Aaron Blanton

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant by Alexandra Fuller (Penguin) 224 pages
This year one of the best books about the Iraq War was set entirely in Wyoming. Alexandra Fuller obliquely connects the dots between the United States’ motives in the Mideast with the questionable practices of big-oil companies in The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, an account of a Wyoming roughneck’s short, happy life. Just as she did in her own memoirs of growing up in Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat, Fuller tells young Colton’s story in a parade of impressionistic scenes that are as much about the landscape as they are the wide-eyed oil rigger who walks through it. Colton, the unlikely hero at the center of the book, is no John Wayne, no Gary Cooper. He loves hunting and fishing, idolizes his father (also an oil rigger), swigs Mountain Dew by the gallon, marries young, drives a Ford pickup, and works hard to provide for his family. His is an ordinary life headed for an extraordinary fate. More than anything, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant is a story about the crushing realities facing blue-collar Westerners, the once-proud pioneers who now find themselves the disposable commodities of industry and corporate greed. -- David Abrams

Lost: A Memoir by Cathy Ostlere (Key Porter Books) 256 pages
I had a bad feeling most of the time I spent reading Cathy Ostlere’s skillfully wrought memoir of a family’s grief, Lost. The award-winning writer has a wonderful way with language and, despite the personal nature of the material she covers here, she approaches it with a journalist’s eye and heart. Even so, almost from the very first moment, you get the feeling that this is a story that can’t have a happy ending. From the beginning, there’s something in Ostlere’s tone; something in the slow, stately march of the words she chooses to relate this deeply personal tale. Lost breaks the heart, again and again. Sometimes, it breaks the heart too much. -- Linda L. Richards

Marie-Anne: The Extraordinary Life of Louis Riel’s Grandmother by Maggie Siggins (McLelland & Stewart) 307 pages
I love the genesis of Marie-Anne: The Extraordinary Life of Louis Riel’s Grandmother. Author Siggins reports that, more than a decade ago, while she was doing research on Riel: A Life of Revolution, Siggins’ superlative biography of Canadian hero of history, Louis Riel. “As my research progressed,” writes Siggins, “I came to regard her as the most exceptional Canadian woman of the nineteenth century. The achievements of Laura Secord, Susanna Moodie, and Frances Ann Hopkins pale in comparison.” While in certain historical circles, those would be fighting words, they also convey the spirit of the biography of Marie-Anne that Siggins would come to write. If Siggins was ever an impartial historical observer, her impartiality got lost in the research someplace. Siggins tells her educated idea of Marie-Anne’s life with spirit, passion and conviction. The result is a significant work of non-fiction that breathes with the life of a well-told thriller. The book is just everything is ever could or even should be. -- Monica Stark

Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea (Perigee Trade) 240 pages
Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED is the book for word lovers. Thanks to Ammon Shea, though I do not know the word for word lovers, I know what my trouble is: onomonomatia: vexation at having difficulty in finding the right word. If you or somebody you know suffers from onomonomatia, consider Reading the OED as a remedy, for Shea read the entirety Oxford English Dictionary, and lived to tell the tale. Reading the OED is a blast. Divided into 26 wordacious chapters -- that’s A-Z -- the book is both an examination of words and a meta-examination of reading dictionaries. It’s hysterically funny: David Sedaris, laugh-out-loud-on-the bus funny. I myself finished the book at home, where Shea’s definition of Xenium reduced me to hysteria. For the record: “Xenium: (n.) A gift given to a guest. ‘It is a very delicate balance to strike, this business of giving a gift to someone you do not want to offend and yet whom you also do not want to stick around too long. Unless you are one of those unbalanced individuals who actually enjoys having company, I would recommend giving a xenium (italics the author’s) such as a pair of used socks, something that says ‘Here is a gift -- please go away.’” Perhaps you feel this way yourself. This, along with several words for vomit (Keck is a good one) makes Reading the OED the perfect gift. Where else will you learn that gound is: (n.) the gunk that collects in the corners of the eyes? I bought three copies of Reading the OED as Christmas gifts. And I hardly expect to be accused of giving a Toe Cover: (n.) A present that is both useless and inexpensive. -- Diane Leach

The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman (Basic Books) 384 pages
It’s tempting to think that people of the 21st century are too worldly, too skeptical to be taken in by the sort of hoaxes that were perpetrated on our forebears 100 or 200 years ago. But then you remember stories about voters being convinced (against all the evidence) that President-elect Barack Obama is Muslim or that the Apollo 11 astronauts didn’t really walk on Earth’s moon, but simply kicked up dust on a Hollywood stage set. And suddenly the capacity for men and women to be buffaloed doesn’t look so related to an earlier day. Still, the rich deception pulled off by editor Richard Adams Locke and his New York Sun “penny paper” in 1835 depended on their era’s being less knowledgeable about science and more easily wowed by pseudo-scientific discoveries. To drum up attention, the Sun published a series of articles supposedly proving the existence of life on the moon. And not just any life, but such exotica as walking beavers, unicorns, peculiar bearlike creatures, and 4-foot-tall “man-bats” (perhaps the predecessors of those bizarre “bat boys” the Weekly World News always used to feature on its cover). For several weeks, the “Great Moon Hoax” -- supposedly employing information supplied by an associate of noted astronomer Sir John Herschel -- captured international attention and brought acclaim (and income) to the young, struggling Sun. Renowned showman P.T. Barnum later claimed that the paper peddled $25,000 worth of moon-hoax paraphernalia to gullible readers. Marshaling ample (and then some) trivia and stories related to this fraud, New York in the 1830s, and people who were affected in some way by Locke’s bunkum (including Edgar Allan Poe, who claimed that the Sun had plagiarized his fiction), author Goodman delivers a remarkable story of a more innocent America and the sort of journalism that turned its residents into newspaper followers. -- J. Kingston Pierce

True Crime: An American Anthology edited by Harold Schechter (Library of America) 788 pages
The serial-killer porn and Mafiosi tell-alls that swamp today’s non-fiction crime shelves rarely light my fire, but I’m a sucker for more ambitious fare such as True Crime, edited by Harold Schechter. And for once the generic title is appropriate. The tell, though, is in the subtitle. Because in this ambitious collection, Schechter presents a very convincing argument that crime is about as American as apple pie, with a boffo selection of red, white and blue mayhem from a star-studded list of contributors, both contemporary and historical -- everyone from Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin to Dominick Dunne and Ann Rule. The book also contains narratives of murder and violence that stretch from homicidal pilgrims at Plymouth to the Menendez brothers of Southern California. There’s an excerpt from Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, Mark Twain takes a few swipes at the myths of the “Wild West” and James Ellroy, in his unsettling “My Mother’s Killer,” lets slip his well-worn Mad Dog of Crime persona just enough to reveal a surprising glimpse of Sick Puppy. Cotton Mather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Damon Runyon, Jim Thompson and Ambrose Bierce also chip in, and the newspaper and magazine articles, journal excerpts and public documents they and others are responsible for make this almost 800-page tome an unforgettable reading experience. It’s one hell of a reference source and a bruising and bloody social history of the United States. Hell, there’s even a collection of lyrics here from several murder ballads, so you can hum along. Nervously, perhaps, while you wonder if you remembered to lock the side door. -- Kevin Burton Smith

Holiday Gift Guide: Birdscapes: A Pop-Up Celebration of Bird Songs in Stereo Sound by Miyoko Chu with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

There’s something deliciously crazy about Birdscapes (Chronicle Books). Cunningly engineered and beautifully designed and executed, to open the book is to initiate a wildlife symphony so convincing, the whole time I played with the book, my dog thought something illicit was happening on my desk. (And, from her perspective, what could be more illicit than colonies of birds taking root in the studio?)

The sounds would be impressive enough, but they’re not alone. Open, for instance, to the two-page spread showing a Pacific Seabird Colony. A rocky seascape rises right out of the book. A paragraph of text explains that “Common Murres court and fight on rocky outcrops, trumpeting to one another. Red-legged Kittiwakes exchange rapid nasal calls from the cliffs,” and so on, but you almost don’t need to be told: so strong are the visuals -- right there in 3-D! -- and so convincing are the sounds, not a snippet of imagination is required in order to partake.

A section at the back of the book explains all seven of the dioramas included in some detail. Birdscapes is breathtaking: flawlessly put together, no bird lover will fail to feel their jaw drop.

Holiday Gift Guide: Solitude by Robert Kull

“In many cultures, solitude is recognized as an opportunity to journey inward; in our culture, spending time alone is often considered to be unhealthy because we tend to believe that meaning in life is found only through relationship with other people … one of the challenges of solitude is that you have to face yourself.”

Robert Kull is an extraordinary man. In 2001, he put together sufficient supplies to last one year, then he traveled to a remote island in the Patagonian wilderness with the idea of exploring the effects that deep solitude might have on body and mind.

Years before, a motorcycle accident had left him with only one leg, so, right away, one knows that the physical challenge would be greater than might otherwise have been the case. But does that physical challenge even come close to the mental one?

In Solitude (New World Library) Kull’s prose is journal spare: a deep thinker’s notes to himself. “Rock-sitting in the evening rain,” he writes on December 4, 2001, “and then a shift. Light, that seems to come from beyond, floods my soul and brings love, peace, beauty and the gift of Life.”

And the answers he found?

“Some of those answers cannot be put into words,” writes Kull, “but I hope they have come drifting up between the lines of my journal.”

Some of them have.

Holiday Gift Guide: Jetpack Dreams by Mac Montandon

According to author Mac Montandon, the desire for flight without the aid of a fuselage is probably as old as mankind itself. “Adam and Eve, after all, didn’t bicycle from grace or swim from grace, they fell, and had they had jet engines strapped to their backs everything might have been different.”

It’s this sort of tongue-in-cheek but inarguable logic that makes Jetpack Dreams (Da Capo) such a delight and which sustains us through 261 hardcover pages of Montandon’s quest to strap said jet engine to his own back.

In the course of his quest, Montandon takes us along as he explores the history and even the development of this astonishing -- and oddly tough to nail down -- piece of technology. It’s a great ride and since you’re unlikely to find an actual jetpack under your tree, Jetpack Dreams may well be the next best thing.

Holiday Gift Guide: Oz Clarke’s Pocket Wine Guide 2009

Oz Clarke is one of the top wine writers in the world and his annual Pocket Wine Guide (Harcourt) has come to be a must-have for certain segments of the wine-drinking community.

Though at least certain aspects of the coming year might be lean, wine lovers can easily rationalize the purchase of Clarke’s reasonably priced little book as he goes out of his way to find not only the best wines, but also the best “World Class Wines That Don’t Cost the Earth” as well as “Top value Wines.” As well, he reports on producers and regions to watch.

Especially interesting this year is a section on the effect that climate change might have on wines and wine producers. He makes some interesting points, but concludes that the type of temperature change associated with global warming might well have us entering a “post-classic” era of wine production.

And as astute a wine writer as former actor Clarke has proven to be when it comes to international wines, potential readers with an interest in Canadian wines and wine production will want to give this one a wide berth: Canada doesn’t even rate its own section, but rather gets lumped in with “Other Wine Countries” between -- get this -- Bulgaria and China, both of which get a more intimate look than does Canada. In fact, of all the “Other Wine Countries” the one that gets the closest and most detailed look is England (Did I mention Clarke is a Brit?) which is just stupid: the United Kingdom produces more wine than only six countries: Syria, Malta, Panama, Lichtenstein, India and La Réunion. And don’t tell me it’s about quality: no one is running around claiming that Sussex wines beat the pants off… well… anyone.

Now all of that said, for many people, Clarke’s annual guide is an absolute must. For those people, Oz Clarke’s Pocket Wine Guide 2009 is a terrific gift.

Holiday Gift Guide: Owls of North America by Frances Backhouse

Readers with an interest in owls will simply not find a better book than respected science and environmental writer Frances Backhouse’s Owls of North America (Firefly Books).

The book is large and handsome, suitable for coffee table adornment, but don’t let it spend too much time there. Backhouse hits just everything you’d want to see covered in a book of this nature: owls in history and mythology, their mating and flight habits, how they communicate, see rest.

A large chunk of the book is given over to profiles of 23 species of owls, intended to help owl buffs identify and observe their own neighborhood owls.

“From ancient myth to Harry Potter, owls hold an enduring place in the human imagination,” Backhouse writes. “In some cultures they are revered, in others, feared. And for every superstition that associates owls with good fortune, a dozen more link them to mortality, sickness or evil. A small sample of the hundreds of legends, beliefs and customs that invoke owls gives a sense of the prominent and diverse roles in which these birds have been cast.”

Owls of North America will be a fabulous gift for the naturalist of curious child on your list.

A Grand... and a Grand Life

On occasion, I love to read a beefy business book. Tom Peters. Seth Godin. They’re the guys who seem to have their fingers on the pulse of what works -- and more, why it works. Every time I read one of their books, I find nuggets of gold.

So imagine my curiosity when I spotted a book called 1,000 Dollars and an Idea (Newmarket) by a guy called Sam Wyly. It reached out to me, I think, because it didn’t look like a Peters book or a Godin book or any number of those slickly designed business memoirs by any number of quasi-famous people who might appear in Vanity Fair’s annual establishment issue. It looked... real. And you know what? It is.

1,000 Dollars and an Idea doesn’t reads less like a business memoir and more like a thriller. I mean, there’s never any doubt that 007 kills the villain, destroys the lair, beds the girl. And here, there’s no doubt that Wyly becomes a billionaire; it says so, right on the cover. So the big question is: how does it happen? What’s the path? What’s the story?

For Sam Wyly, the story began in a tiny Louisiana town, from being dirt poor to becoming one of the nation’s most visionary businessmen. Back when everyone was looking at computer hardware, Wyly was looking at software. Back when everyone was shying away from doing business with AT&T and its monopoly, Wyly took them on and was instrumental in the company’s break-up. Along the way he also rescued the Bonanza restaurant chain and grew Michaels craft stores into one of the nation’s megabrands. Today, he’s involved in wind energy. Will he change our lives again? Bet on it.

As thriller-like as it is, 1,000 Dollars and an Idea is, at heart, a nostalgic look back at a man’s life. Wyly has an intense respect for his past, his own history. In these pages, his childhood home comes to life. He describes early business meetings and infuses them first with real suspense, then the exhilaration of success. It’s almost childlike, wide-eyed -- and suddenly this billionaire seems like a real guy. Not a god of business, but a guy with good ideas who found himself more successful than he ever dreamed he would or could be. But he knows it could have gone the other way.

“That’s been the experience,” Wyly told me in a recent interview. “You sort of learn by doing. Some things work, some things don’t work. We learn by failing as well as by succeeding at things.”

One of the most arresting details of Wyly’s life has nothing to do with business. In Dallas on the morning of November 22, 1963, he saw the president’s motorcade. “I had just watched the president and Jackie go by, watching from the third floor of the Neiman Marcus building, and by the time I got in my car in the parking garage, it was coming on the radio that he’d been shot. I just couldn’t get over it, it was just disbelief and denial that it couldn’t have happened. And gradually I realized, yeah, it happened, and it’s just... I spent several days just glued to the TV.”

And two days later, he saw Ruby shoot Oswald -- then recognized Ruby as an old neighbor of his. “That was a double stunner.”

This kind of thing happens throughout 1,000 Dollars and an Idea. Though Wyly is always in the middle of something exciting, his focus isn’t on himself as much as it is on the people who helped him and contributed so much to his success and his life.

“I’ve been lucky to have had some really able people come into my life at points along the way,” he told me. “Different people with different skills and different knowledge that contributed to what we’re doing together.”

There’s something about writing a memoir about your own life, then giving so much of the credit away to other people. You don’t see that lot. It impressed me.

Early on, Sam Wyly was in the oil business. Now he’s in the clean energy business -- and there have been a lot of ventures (and adventures) in between. I wondered if there’s one thing that stands out, a legacy.

“I don’t know if I could just pick one thing. I’m a guy who likes a chocolate milkshake one month,” he told me, “and a strawberry milkshake the next.”

We talked a little about John Adams, the HBO miniseries, and the nation’s founding fathers. I mentioned the episodes about writing the Declaration of Independence and said that these were simply men of their times, businessmen and farmers with a vision for something new, even revolutionary.

“That’s what I’ve seen myself doing,” Wyly said after a moment. “To look at something as it is and think about how could it be. And then to set about to make it happen.”

1,000 Dollars and an Idea isn’t hard-edged or prescriptive like Tom Peters’ and Seth Godin’s books. Instead, it’s got a gentle style that feels like you and Wyly are sitting in his living room, and he’s telling you stories... whispering, so you lean in. And when he’s done and you’re driving back home, you suddenly get the one real message, the powerful suggestion that in business and in life, if you have courage, if you stoke your own determination, and if you surround yourself with talented people you, too, can make it happen.

Holiday Gift Guide: The 2009 Old Farmer’s Almanac

Obviously, you’d don’t have to be an old farmer -- or even any kind of farmer -- to enjoy The Old Farmer’s Almanac (Yankee Publishing), which has been published annually since 1792. The contemporary editions retain all the down-homey advice that made the annual publication an absolute must for those who made their living from the land, but gears itself these days to answering questions and bringing smiles to readers wherever they live. The 2009 edition includes articles on fashion trends, growing tomatoes and even one on global cooling. But the heart of the whole thing is in the calendar pages. “They present sky sightings and astronomical data for the entire year and are what make this book a true almanac.”

Who needs an almanac? Brides, gardeners, event planners: basically anyone who wants a shot at seeing into the future. In any case, the book is slender, inexpensive and will slide easily into a stocking and should, theoretically, provide a whole year of fun.

Holiday Gift Guide: I Live Here

I Live Here (Pantheon) is stunning, heartbreaking, riveting. True.

Actually four books held together in an artful portfolio, each documents the stories of some of the displaced women and children in four locations: survivors of ethnic cleansing in Burma, war in Chechnya, globalization in Mexico and AIDS in Malawi.

Some of the voices we encounter belong to those very women and children, other stories come to us through noted artists and writers -- Ann-Marie MacDonald, Joe Sacco and Karen Connelly among them.

The book is part of a project put in motion by actor Mia Kirshner, who was initially looking to fill a hole in a seemingly rich and comfortable life and possibly ended up with more than she bargained for, but certainly not more than she could chew. In a recent interview, Kirshner said that, on her travels, she “mostly met people who weren’t that different from you and me. Sure, they were desperately poor, but they were even more desperate to be heard. This project is about making that happen.”

The I Live Here Foundation can be reached online.

New in Paperback: Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore

I kept coming back to his face. Earnest. Hair swept back rakishly. Eyes straight ahead to a glorious future. This is the face of evil, wreathed still in youthful innocence. It’s difficult to imagine.

And I kept coming back to the question: nature or nurture? Who wouldn’t want to know that? The product of the original dysfunctional family -- a violently alcoholic father, a sexually ambitious mother -- a youthful Josef Stalin goes off to study for the priesthood, a turn of events perhaps not expected from the man who will grow to become one of history’s bloodiest dictators.

In Young Stalin (Vintage) Simon Sebag Montefiore takes us there elegantly. His research is exhaustive, yet seamless. That is, we’re so swept away by the story he tells, that we can’t see it or feel the work it took to get us there. That’s as it should be. Nor is there any doubt that the author knows his way around this material. And know it he does. In its publication year, Young Stalin won the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Political Literature, the Costa Biography Prize and the LA Times Book Prize in Biography.

And if you love this author and just can’t get enough, in November look for Sashenka: A Novel (Simon & Schuster). The byline is different but similar -- Simon Montefiore – as is the time we spend. Sashenka begins in Russia in 1916 in an odd calm before the storm.

New Last Week: The 12-Step Bush Recovery Program by Gene Stone

Sometimes you just have to laugh in order to avoid crying. Alternately, one could say: it would be funny, if it weren’t also true.

From Step 3. Deal With Embarrassment:

Maybe these last few years have been tough, but they could have been worse. After all, my lawn is still green, I can drink my tap water, and the enormous oil derrick spewing vile crap outside my ocean-view window has become very attractive to me. Do I really have a problem?

Each person’s definition of a problem is different. Some people grasp their problem quickly, others don’t. Also, what is a problem to some is not a problem to others. Maintaining objectivity is difficult in this area. Skilled parishioners must always be careful not to judge. However, you have a problem.

The reality is this: no matter the outcome of next week’s election, this part of the problem will be removed. The 12-Step Bush Recovery Program: A Lifesaving Guide to Shaking Off the Horrors of the Last Eight Years, with Practical Advice on Relapse, Remission and Recounts (Villard) is clearly satire. It tweaks the classic 12-step recovery program into a direction never quite before seen. Trenchant essays by talented contributors (Nathan Richardson, John Hartmann, Tony Hendra, others) fill the book out beyond the merely spoofy. This is hard-hitting political satire done up in a way we hope we won’t need to see again for a long, long time. It’s paperback original. It’s slender and it’s cheap. Get it while it’s hot. Because -- may the force be willing -- we won’t need to be laughing at this stuff much longer. And Gene Stone, also the author of The Bush Survival Bible and Duck! The Dick Cheney Survival Bible, will be looking for a new job. Thank God, yes? We’ve been in limbo long enough.

Excerpt: The Muslim Next Door by Sumbul Ali-Karamali

In a review earlier this month, I said that I felt that The Muslim Next Door: The Qur’an, the Media, and that Veil Thing by Sumbul Ali-Karamali was an important book. From that review:

The Muslim Next Door should be required reading in the West at this time. Ali-Karamali clearly knows her subject both on a personal and professional level. Raised a Muslim in a country that didn’t at that time have a lot of Muslims in it, the author has a graduate degree in Islamic law from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and has served as a teaching assistant and research associate in Islamic law.

Now January offers up an excerpt from The Muslim Next Door, so that readers can experience Ali-Karamali’s lucid style first-hand:

My father tells a story of tea etiquette. In India, he says, if your host offers you tea, you must decline, because to immediately accept a cup of tea would show greed. If your host offers you tea again -- as he must, if he is at all hospitable -- you must decline a second time, showing your host consideration and a disinclination to be troublesome. But the third time your host offers you tea, as he will, because no host would willingly allow a guest to depart his house bereft of refreshment, then you may gratefully accept.

The full excerpt is here.

Art & Culture: We Will Be Heard by Bud and Ruth Schultz

For more than a quarter century, Bud and Ruth Schultz have been collecting American stories, taking people’s pictures, all on a single theme: repression in America. In We Will Be Heard: Voices in the Struggle for Constitutional Rights Past and Present (Merrell) the couple present us with 90 stories -- each one accompanied by a photographic study of the subject.

In the Preface, the work is explained:

It has been more than twenty-five years, now, since we first began to interview and photograph those for whom the promise of American democracy – freedom of expression, freedom of association – has been denied. Seeking people targeted by government for their political beliefs and activities, we, of necessity, focused on those advocating the right to unionize, an end to racial segregation, and an end to war, movements that helped define and transform the twentieth century.

For the most part, you won’t recognize their faces. You won’t know their names. (Ring Lardner Jr. is an obvious -- and deeply interesting -- exception.)

We Will Be Heard will make you wonder; make you think; perhaps even make you cry. It will not, however, leave you untouched.

Non-Fiction: The Muslim Next Door by Sumbul Ali-Karamali

When she was growing up in Los Angeles, Sumbul Ali-Karamali would often be the only Muslim child in a classroom, at a birthday party, or the house of a friend. She found herself constantly dealing with questions and sometimes even shocked disbelief from people who didn’t even know where to begin to understand her religion. And that was before 9/11. Since that time, of course, North American’s misunderstandings around Islam have grown far worse. As Ali-Karamali tells us in The Muslim Next Door (White Cloud Press):

… the common Western perception of Islam has become a contorted, evil caricature of the real thing, like some reversed portrait of Dorian Gray, where the normal reality hides in the attic and the visible portrait becomes increasingly repulsive. Especially since the end of the Cold War, we in the United States have been bombarded with daily, unchecked, untrue, public denigration of Islam to an irresponsibly defamatory degree.

The Muslim Next Door should be required reading in the West at this time. Ali-Karamali clearly knows her subject both on a personal and professional level. Raised a Muslim in a country that didn’t at that time have a lot of Muslims in it, the author has a graduate degree in Islamic law from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and has served as a teaching assistant and research associate in Islamic law.

Just as important, Ali-Karamali writes lucidly on every imaginable aspect of her topic. The subtitle’s The Qur’an, the Media, and that Veil Thing is a terrific starting point, sure: but she goes so much deeper than that. The Muslim Next Door is an important book.

Review: Zen and Now by Mark Richardson

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, contributing editor Diane Leach reviews Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Mark Richardson. Says Leach:

The best possible way to read Richardson’s book is to first re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you are between 40 and 60, chances are you still have a battered paperback copy around -- perhaps the edition with the blue cover (the one my parents had), the orange cover (mine), or Richardson’s pink one. If you are like many of us, you read the book well over 20 years ago, with intermittent comprehension. If at all possible, go back and reread. You will be amazed at how relevant Pirsig’s book remains. You may even be pleased at how much more you understand about his inquiry into Quality. Broken into layman’s terms, Pirsig felt anything worth doing merited one’s full attention; that even the dullest tasks, when carefully attended to, might well elicit better methods. In Pirsig’s pre-computer, pre-Internet, pre-mobile phone world, technology was already demonized. Pirsig argued that technology itself was not to blame for degraded values. Rather, our use of it -- rather, misuse -- lay at the root of societal disintegration.

In other words, hang up and drive.

The full review is here.

Review: My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, contributing editor Mary Ward Menke reviews My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. Says Menke:

Imagine being a 37-year-old woman, an accomplished professional, well-respected among your peers. You’re healthy, your future is bright, and then suddenly, your whole world collapses. The very thing you’ve devoted your life to studying -- the brain -- has betrayed you. A blood vessel has burst inside your head and you’ve suffered a massive stroke.

That’s what happened to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist -- brain scientist -- on the morning of December 10, 1996. In My Stroke of Insight, Taylor describes the event and her subsequent lengthy recovery from a clinical and very personal point of view.

The full review is here.

New this Week: The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan Lopez

In one of those odd coincidences of collective unconscious, 2008 saw the publication of two important books on mid-20th century art forger Han van Meergeren. Back in June we got The Forger’s Spell (Harper) by Edward Dolnick, a beautifully researched and illustrated look at the man most often thought to be one of the most successful art forgers of all time. Nor is Dolnick a neophyte to the shores of art crime. A previous work, 2006’s brilliant The Rescue Artist, won the Edgar award for Best Non-Fiction while ArtNews said there had never been “a better book on art crime.”

One would think that, in a year that an author this good had produced a book this terrific, another on the topic would be overkill. But Jonathan Lopez’s newly published The Man Who Made Vermeers (Harcourt) stacks up very well to Dolnick’s book, in fact the New York Sun says Lopez bests Dolnick. Personally, I think it would take an expert on the topic to pick a winner -- both books are terrific and engaging. Perhaps Dolnick’s prose is a little warmer, while Lopez’s seems a bit more in-depth, but I could be clutching at differences here. The color plates in The Forger’s Spell are fantastic and add their own depth to the story, while the many historic black and white photos in The Man Who Made Vermeers enrich the already terrific text.

If you must pick one over the other, do it at your favorite booksellers. Hold the books side by side, read a snippet from here and perhaps from there and then choose the one that seems to speak directly to you. If you choose one and enjoy it, one won’t ever be enough. Fate has made a set of these books, that’s what I think. And what’s to stop you going back and getting the other once your appetite has been properly whet?

New This Month: Shimmering Images by Lisa Dale Norton

You’ve always wanted to write the story of your life, but didn’t know where to begin. Or, you’ve felt the tug to set things down on paper, but thought you were too busy. Or that no one would care. Or both. If any of these things ring true for you, author, teacher and founder of the Santa Fe Writing Institute, Lisa Dale Norton has written the book you didn’t even know you were looking for.

Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir (St. Martin’s Griffin) is spare, slender and entirely to the point. In her introduction, Norton writes that the book “gives you the steps without a lot of fancy mumbo jumbo about literature and books you haven’t read and never will.”

Despite this grassroots-ish sounding advice, Norton manages to chase through to the beauty and spirit of powerful storytelling. As Norton says:

Story, the essence of narrative, is art. Writing life stories borders on the mystical because you, the writer, become the master of reality. You make sense of chaos. You bring order to life events through narrative; you attach meaning to events. The act is more than reporting facts; it is an act of creation. Art is creation. Memoir is art.

Review: Bonk by Mary Roach

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, Caroline Cummins reviews Bonk by Mary Roach. Says Cummins:

Years ago, Mary Roach paid the bills as a freelance travel writer. Being Mary Roach, however, she tended to pick offbeat locations (Antarctica) or offer goofy takes on the familiar (poking gentle fun at taxi drivers for a three-days-in-London story). Roach is best known now, of course, as an irreverent science writer. But she’s still picking unusual destinations, or finding the funky hiding in the familiar.

Her three books -- Stiff, Spook and now Bonk -- boldly go where most other writers fear to tread, into the realms of cadaver research, scientific attempts at tracking the afterlife and the hush-hush history of sex studies. They’re beloved because, unlike most non-fiction books about science, they’re laugh-out-loud funny. But under the humor is a serious mission: to report on the valuable, if bizarre and/or embarrassing, work that science is doing on the nature of death and sex.

The full review is here.

Biography: Shopping for Porcupine by Seth Kantner

Darkness -- huge and boundless, with only my one scoop of light, which thins across snow to gray, grayer, blackness. No assurance out there of another human, not on this planet anyway. I shovel my cave by headlight. Pitch in twin sleeping bags, a caribou hide, food. It’s small inside; big out here, and silent, a few flakes coming down, and a few stars blurry up there and not sharing their hard-traveling light. The air is not cold, only sixteen below, but a north breeze sears my cheeks.

There are times in Seth Kantner’s memoir of growing up Arctic that we encounter this sort of cold, Northern poetry. A kind of love song to the harsh land that fed -- perhaps nurtured -- the talent in his young soul.

Through Kantner’s sharp eye we see not only his own coming-of-age, but the transformation of the land he so obviously loves. Not all of the transformations are good.

This carefully wrought memoir is his first book-length work of non-fiction. Kantner’s fiction debut, Ordinary Wolves, brought the author wide acclaim in 2004. Shopping for Porcupine (Milkweed Editions) will bring him still more.

Non-Fiction: Wake Up to Your Weight Loss by Alyson Mead

Though I’m not, at this point in my life, especially interested in dieting, this line on the back of Wake Up to Your Weight Loss: Using the Art of Personal Narrative to Achieve Your Best Body by Alyson Mead caught my eye:

“What if the Buddha dieted?”

How could that not pique someone’s interest? A whiff of blasphemy and a hint of fun leads potential readers to think endless quantities of both might be found between these covers. And the fact is… well…. not so much. At the same time, Wake Up to Your Weight Loss is anything but stodgy. It begs us to find and reinforce the things inside us that are good, while letting go of much that is bad, including extra pounds.

When we want to say that someone or something is serious or dignified, we say it has gravitas, meaning substance …. So when did weight become synonymous with fast, lazy and dissolute?

I suspect that, like all self-help books, how much you manage to pull out of Mead’s latest book will depend entirely on you. However, her message of empowered self-acceptance and self-love that can lead to physical change is a positive one. Change your mind, she seems to say. And, in order to change you body, change your heart.

Review: Dishing With the Kitchen Virgin by Susan Reinhardt

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, contributing editor Mary Ward Menke reviews Dishing With the Kitchen Virgin by Susan Reinhardt. Says Menke:

The writer who Booklist called the “modern-day, Southern-fried Erma Bombeck or Dave Barry” has done it again with Dishing with the Kitchen Virgin. Susan Reinhardt’s third book (Not Tonight, Honey: Wait Til I’m a Size 6 and Don’t Sleep With a Bubba Unless Your Eggs are in Wheelchairs were numbers one and two) is another hilarious endeavor for the syndicated humor columnist born and raised in the South, whose talents apparently don’t carry over into the kitchen.

In Reinhardt’s words, Dishing with the Kitchen Virgin:

“… is the book for all of us who have felt guilty because our pot holders don’t have the burn marks of a real kitchen queen, whose pans aren’t scratched and half-scorched from overuse, whose Cuisinart has never been taken from the box and even still sports the old, yellowing bows from the Land of Unwanted & Unopened Wedding Gifts including Salad Shooters and Chop Wizards.”

The true audience is much wider, though. The book will appeal to kitchen virgins and trollops alike, as well as those who enjoy (or not) the results of their efforts and those who just want a good laugh.

The full review is here.

Non-Fiction: House Calls by Dogsled by Keith Billington

At first blush, it is the very opposite of a summer read, which quite often seem to be books whose covers feature iced drinks or miles of sand or seashells stretched on the seashore. House Calls by Dogsled: Six Years in an Arctic Medical Outpost (Lost Moose/Harbour Publishing) clearly does not meet that criteria for summer read. Yet it was the cover that finally forced the book into my hand on a hot day. And I’m glad.

So that cover. The arctic outpost of the subtitle. A line of dogs pulling a sled through the snow. And not recreationally, oh no: it’s clear that these dogs are doing serious snow business, keeping travelers alive by moving them through their arctic world. I felt 10 degrees cooler just touching the book.

Author Keith Billington’s story is warming, however. In 1963 and while still in their 20s, Billington, a nurse, and his wife Muriel, a midwife, arrived in Fort McPherson, 1700 miles north of Edmonton to work with the Gwich’in people. In the time the Billingtons spent in the Arctic, the Gwich’in taught them as much about life and the way the world works as the couple would help them. House Calls by Dogsled is that story.

Billington is no lyricist, nor does he even make an attempt. The material here is so rich, however, that it stands on its own: a fascinating glimpse into a culture foreign to many of us, with the narrating Billington most often the proverbial fish out of water. It’s a memorable book. And just the thing to lower the temperature on a hot day.

Review: France: Instructions for Use by Alison Culliford and Nan McElroy

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, Cherie Thiessen reviews France: Instructions for Use by Alison Culliford and Nan McElroy. Says Thiessen:

“When all else fails ... read the instructions,” is the tongue-in-cheek advice on the cover of this diminutive book, setting the lighthearted tone for this latest offering in the Instructions for Use travel series. (Earlier books were on Europe and Italy.)

Well, there’s only one way to test out a travel book, so obviously I had to pack my bags, tuck the small compendium into my backpack, and fly to Europe. France: Instructions for Use made for entertaining reading on the plane, although my sudden bouts of laughter may have woken my neighbor more than once.

The full review is here.

Lost: A Memoir by Cathy Ostlere

I had a bad feeling most of the time I spent reading Cathy Ostlere’s skillfully wrought memoir of a family’s grief, Lost (Key Porter). The award-winning writer has a wonderful way with language and, despite the personal nature of the material she covers here, she approaches it with a journalist’s eye and heart. Even so, almost from the very first moment, you get the feeling that this is a story that can’t have a happy ending. From the beginning, there’s something in Ostlere’s tone; something in the slow, stately march of the words she chooses to relate this deeply personal tale. Lost breaks the heart, again and again. Sometimes, it breaks the heart too much.

I am holding my brother’s life in the soft flesh of my throat. I dare not tell for fear I’ll drop the ball of thread and lose us. If I speak, will the sky fall in? I am sister, daughter, wife, and mother – there is no myth to guide me with this question.

And that’s just from page 11.

In the mid-1990s, Ostlere’s word traveling, adventure loving brother disappeared while sailing his 28-foot sailboat from Ireland to Madeira, alone but for his girlfriend, Sarah. On his birthday, months after he set off, his family realizes he’s missing. Then they try to find him.

And sometimes it breaks the heart. Too much.

21 Distinctions of Wealth by Peggy McColl

Don’t ask me how it happened, because I do not know but somewhere between the mortgage crisis and breaking the hundred dollar a barrel mark for oil, Issue # 1 emerged. And things changed.

While the environment is still important -- as are eating healthily and raising smart kids and making sure the correct tyrant gets that office this fall -- the reality of a future without marble countertops has entered a lot of people’s minds in the last few months. Never mind taking marble for granted: we’re suddenly not even sure that, in five years time, we’ll be able to afford countertops at all.

Enter Peggy McColl and 21 Distinctions of Wealth: Attract the Abundance You Deserve (Hay House). McColl’s advice is pretty easy to digest. Stop sweating the small stuff, the author of Your Destiny Switch seems to be telling us. Stop looking at minutiae and instead, live the way you were born to be:

Wealth is your birthright. It’s everyone’s birthright! The silver spoon was in your mouth on the day you were born. You may not realize it because you think that to have riches you need lots of cash or financial holdings – or a genuine silver spoon – but this is a very limited and distorted way of thinking about wealth …. What most people don’t realize is that wealth is an energy force.

There’s more to it than that, of course. It’s a whole book, after all. I’m still working my way through it, trying to put into practice some of the things McColl is trying to teach. What the hell, is what I’m thinking. There’s a pile of gold coins on the cover and I wouldn’t mind gettin’ me some of that. All I have to do, McColl says, “is let go of the negative thoughts and feelings that have been blocking you and open yourself up to the gifts you were born with.”

With oil now over $143. a barrel, I need to open myself up and attract me some abundant wealth pronto. I’ll let you know how it all turns out.

New this Week: Petite Anglaise by Catherine Sanderson

When agents and editors search the blogosphere looking for projects that will surprise and delight -- the overlooked gems that will wow the world -- Petite Anglaise is what they’re looking for. I’m sure of it. Not just a blog that is smart and jaded -- you can find those anywhere. Just throw a mouse in any direction and see where it lands. To make the successful transition from blog to book, though, it stands to reason that the blogger should not only have something to say, she should have the ability to say it well and in a way that will touch the heart.

Catherine Sanderson’s Petite Anglaise -- new in print in North America this week (it was published in the UK back in March) is just everything you’d want it to be. Perhaps more. There is a sweetness in Sanderson’s prose, but it doesn’t hurt the teeth. Sanderson manages smart and sharp and vulnerable all in quite manageable gulps. More: several Princess Diaries-for-grown-up-girls threads runs through Sanderson’s fledgling effort. This is an effect that is not lessened by the fact that it’s all true (or, at least, true-ish).

The set-up, then: as Sanderson’s story begins, she is living the dream. The young Brit is living in Paris, has a French lover (Mr. Frog), a charming tiny daughter (Tadpole) and everything should be perfect, but it is not. She starts her blog -- the place where Petite Anglaise is born -- as a place to muse over her life. “Petite Anglaise wasn’t really about me,” Sanderson writes early in the book, “at least not at first. For a month or two I filled the blog with what I hoped were witty arch observations about life in Paris,” but after a while -- and perhaps inevitably -- the blog became a sort of living diary, one that could, through comments from readers, talk back. Ultimately, the blog changed Sanderson’s life.

As compelling as all of that sounds, the blog is not the story here. Rather, it is the human tale wound up in fairy tale trappings and -- perhaps most importantly of all -- told with a true storyteller’s eye for the details that count.

Lord Black and Nixonland

There are a couple of reasons I found Conrad Black’s review of Nixonland for The New York Sun is both deliciously appropriate and kind of funny (though the giggle inducing was, no doubt, not intended).

In the first place, Black is the author of Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (PublicAffairs), a huge, toe-breaker of a book The New Yorker called an “exculpatory gloss for seemingly every grimy facet of Nixon’s career.”

In the second place, Black -- who is also Lord Black of Crossharbour -- is currently in jail for obstruction of justice and fraud. It’s not much of a surprise that Black doesn’t love the more recent book on Nixon:

There has been a good deal of comment on “Nixonland” by Rick Perlstein, a pastiche of journalistic highlights of the tumultuous years between Lyndon Johnson's immense landslide over Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Richard Nixon's comparable burial of George McGovern in 1972. The country effectively rejected the right for the center-left, and then the left for the center-right, similar responses, bracketing the heavy Vietnam involvement.

The book is unrigorously and almost unrelievedly opinionated. Its theses are that the United States is almost unprecedentedly divided; that its political discourse has been almost unprecedentedly coarsened; and that Richard Nixon is responsible for both. All of these propositions are demonstrably false. This is the last, and far from the most persuasive, stand of the Nixon demonstrators.

The book in question, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein was published by Scribner in mid-May and has been well-reviewed in other places. Black’s New York Sun review is here.

Tip of the hat to Quill & Quire.

Review: While They Slept by Kathryn Harrison

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, Diane Leach reviews While They Slept by Kathryn Harrison. Says Leach:

Kathryn Harrison has spent her writing life parsing her difficult childhood. Born to unmarried teenage parents in 1962, the infant Kathryn was “ransomed,” as her mother put it, to her maternal grandparents. Her father was banished. Her mother, openly relieved at recovering her youthful freedom, moved into an apartment and spent little time with her daughter. What time she did spend was fractious, critical and unkind. The appearance of Harrison’s father, when the author was 20, seemed a dream come true: the man adored her. In fact, he couldn’t keep his hands off her. The ensuing incestuous relationship shattered Harrison’s already fragile sense of self. Years later, she documented the episode in her infamous memoir, The Kiss.

The Kiss was followed by the essay collection Seeking Rapture and the wrenching The Mother Knot. In each, Harrison uses her elegant prose style like a scalpel, prising apart the layers of damage in an effort -- seemingly largely successful -- to heal herself. Now happily married to writer Colin Harrison and a devoted mother of three, Harrison has not outrun her demons as much as recognized their destructive capabilities, arming herself for their periodic onslaughts. Yet she retains a grim fascination with dysfunction, murder, trauma. How do people survive? Or not? It is this overarching interest that leads her to the Gilley family.

The full review is here.

Review: The Art of Column Writing by Suzette Martinez Standring

Today in January Magazine’s non-fiction section, Mary Ward Menke reviews The Art of Column Writing by Suzette Martinez Standring. Says Menke:

The Art of Column Writing by Suzette Martinez Standring sounds as though it were written for newspaper columnists. Don’t let the title fool you: this is a book for all writers of non-fiction, and there are likely a few fiction writers who could benefit, too.

A past president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, Standring is a syndicated columnist with GateHouse News Services. She has the chops to write a book on column writing based on her experiences alone, but she chose to pick the brains of the masters. Advice from greats like Art Buchwald, Arianna Huffington, Dave Barry and Pete Hamill fill the pages, making The Art of Column Writing a must-read for writers at all stages of their careers.

The full review is here.

New Today: The Healthy Skeptic by Robert J. Davis

If you are complacent about your health and feel good about the way health care is administered in your life, you probably don’t need The Healthy Skeptic: Cutitng Through the Hype About Your Health (University of California Press). But if, like a growing number of people, you suspect there’s more to a lot of what you’ve heard than… well… what you’ve heard, you might find this to be a journey worth taking.

Author Robert J. Davis is just the pen you want to find behind a book like this. As a medical journalist, he is award-winning and he holds a masters degree in public health from Emory, where he also teaches, and a PhD in health policy from Brandeis.

Long story short: he understands these issues fully. It is, in a sense, his business to know this stuff. In The Healthy Skeptic, he exposes several health-related myths, while scratching bare the infrastructure that not only made them possible in the first place, but -- in some cases -- created them. Cholesterol. Super foods. Dieting. Anti-aging drugs. Davis looks at all of these things, and many more, and cuts the myth from the reality. More importantly, he helps us sort through the information available so that, in future, we might be able to sort the wheat from the chaff on our own.

New This Month: How to be Useful by Megan Hustad

The trouble with saying that a book is “unerringly hip” is that the people you most want to attract with that phrase are likely to be put off by it. In a way, that’s the subtext of this “… handbook for a new -- and slightly cynical -- generation” in former editor Megan Hustad’s not very cynical debut, How to Be Useful: A Beginner’s Guide to Not Hating Work (Houghton Mifflin).

All of the things that make this book silly have nothing to do with the book itself. Stripped of all the marketing gewgaws, How to Be Useful is pretty terrific: a good idea well-executed.

Hustad has gone through all the self-help classics (“success literature”) with a fine-toothed 21st century comb. She looked at various versions of Emily Post through Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence People to less well known tomes like Napoleon Hill’s How to Raise Your Own Salary and even seemingly irrelevant, reasonably recent bestsellers like Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

She went through them and distilled them and essentially pulled out the stuff that made them great in the first place -- what truths they unveiled, what zeitgeists they touched upon -- and translated them for a generation that gets “spoon-fed cranked-up sardonic posturing every time you turn on the television.”

In her own words, Hustad took the most compelling American success books of the last 100 years “and turned them upside down and shaken out every last bit of wisdom that might be useful to those low on the office totem pole today.”

Excerpt: A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz takes us through America’s first contact:

Plymouth, it turned out, wasn’t even the first English colony in New England. That distinction belonged to Fort St. George, in Popham, Maine -- a place I’d never heard of. Nor were Pilgrims the first to settle Massachusetts. In 1602, a band of English built a fort on the island of Cuttyhunk. They came, not for religious freedom, but to get rich from digging sassafras, a commodity prized in Europe as a cure for the clap.

History isn’t sport, where coming first means everything. The outposts at Popham and Cuttyhunk were quickly abandoned, as were most of the early French and Spanish settlements. Plymouth endured, the English prevailed in the contest for the continent, and Anglo-American Protestants -- New Englanders, in particular -- molded the new nation's memory. And so a creation myth arose, of Pilgrim Fathers seeding a new land with their piety and work ethic. The winners wrote the history.

The full excerpt is here.

New in Paperback: NASA: The Complete Illustrated History by Michael Gorn

Every time there’s a presidential race, it brings NASA to my mind. Maybe it’s because of the “space race,” but it’s also at least partly due to wondering why we haven’t gotten farther, achieved more. Shouldn’t we be able to buy timeshares on Mars by now? Shouldn’t we have colonies on the Moon? I don’t think I’m alone in these connections. Every time an election draws near, it seems as though we get treated to a new spate of books about space stuff. And here we are.

NASA: The Complete Illustrated History (Merrell Books) is the first paperback edition of a striking hardcover first published in 2005. As the subtitle tells us, it is a complete history on NASA which -- perhaps not so coincidentally -- turns 50 in 2008.

You don’t need an anniversary to enjoy the book, though. Author Gorn is an award winning historian with several other related books to his credit and the foreword was written by former astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

NASA: The Complete Illustrated History is clearly a must for space geeks, but many will enjoy this book that would reach for the stars.

The Changing Face of History

When I was growing up in the 1960s, my father used to bring me all sorts of treasures of knowledge, from weekly magazines that built up into a multi-volume library (“Buy your binder today and get a free index!”) to gorgeous single-volume encyclopedias with paintings of planets and cavemen and dinosaurs striding through tropical jungles. Children have always liked true stories when interestingly presented, whether it’s books about dinosaurs or the Guinness Book of Records. That doesn’t change.

Opening History: The Definitive Visual Guide from the Dawn of Civilization to the Present Day (Dorling Kindersley Books) took me right back to my childhood, except that in those days there were far more paintings than photos. Unlike the books that excited me so much, this one is about human history; there’s no artist’s impression of the Big Bang, say, or of dinosaurs and mostly, cavemen are represented by photos of skulls, tools and fires, with the beautiful cave art of Lascaux to demonstrate communication.

The book is laid out in a combination of themes, including “Rulers and Hierarchies,” “Warriors, Travelers and Inventors” and “Population and Power.” There are timelines, both in the course of the book and at the end, which is a set of national histories, from North and Central America to Oceania.

History includes all the usual stuff: ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, mediaeval Europe, the Industrial Revolution, France and the World Wars. It also offers information about mediaeval Korea, Polynesian expansion, the ancient African states and 17th century Japan, among other things. It extends from the first creatures that might be considered human ancestors to the present problems of climate change and world health.

The world has changed since those books of my childhood were published; the contents of this book show that. History recognizes that the world is a much bigger place than Western publishers and teachers were admitting back then: an irony, in these days of globalization.

Business Books Get Doomsday Spin

The recent economic downturn is finding expression in business books. According to Bloomberg’s Susan Antilla, “doomsday books have become publishing's spring fashion.”

Pop a couple of Prozacs and sit back for a roundup of the scariest financial books on the market. It’s gloom-and-doom season for purveyors of financial books, so pull out a can of beans from your ammo case in the bomb shelter and warm it up. You’re going to need some nourishment.

Book titles are getting scarier than an auction-rate security, with titles such as “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism'” trumping Dale Carnegie and Suze Orman on the Amazon Top 100 list of business books.

Other cheerful titles to get you stuffing your money in the mattress: “The Great Bu$t Ahead: The Greatest Depression in American & UK History Is Just Several Short Years Away” and “The Second Great Depression: Starting 2007, Ending 2020.”

Yikes! The rest of Antilla’s piece is even scarier and it’s here.

I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

It cracks me up that the shiny new paperback edition of Nora Ephron’s screamingly funny 2006 book is being pitched towards Mother’s Day. There’s an irony there somewhere, even if I'm not quite sure what it is.

I Feel Bad About My Neck (Vintage) is Ephron’s song -- lament? -- for women of a certain age. It is also a memoir, because the view we see here, for better or worse, is all Ephron’s. And while it is funny, a central core of melancholia touches the essays included in the book. Though that shouldn’t be surprising either.

Best known for her film work -- When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail among them -- she is also the author of Crazy Salad, Scribble Scribble, Wallflower at the Orgy and Heartburn. In short, she has done much in her life to celebrate and, as much as I laughed while I real I Feel Bad About My Neck, there was a part of me that just wanted to cry.

“Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five,” Ephron tells us in “What I Wish I’d Known,” and later she writes that the “sad truth is that it’s sad to be over sixty.”

I’m imagining a different ending; one that is still to be written. I’m imagining “I Feel Bad About My Hip,” the joyous -- and funny -- rebuttal she will write in another 15 years.

New Last Week: Right Is Wrong by Arianna Huffington

Considering everything that’s been going on for the last eight years, we’re pretty confident in suggesting that Arianna Huffington is not the only card carrying Republican who has gone renegade. However, she’s certainly among the most visible.

In case there was ever any doubt, Huffington’s new book -- her 12th -- Right Is Wrong (Knopf), makes it clear what side of the party line she’s sitting on these days. It also has what I’m almost positive is the longest subtitle. Ever.

How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution and Made Us All Less Safe.

Ah, sorry, Arianna, could you possibly make your feelings a little more clear? There might be someone, somewhere who doesn’t get it.

If you can’t wait to get your hands on the book and you want a dose of Ms. Huffington right this second, her popular Web site, The Huffington Post, is here.

Excerpt: Lust in Translation by Pamela Druckerman

Today in January Magazine, an excerpt of Lust in Translation: Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee by former journalist Pamela Druckerman:

The morning after François Mitterrand's funeral, a photo showed the late president's mistress and illegitimate daughter standing by his grave alongside his wife and sons. That tableau has become famous internationally as proof that the French are uniquely tolerant of extramarital affairs.

In fact, although French presidents seem to have an infidelity record approaching 100 per cent, ordinary Frenchmen claim to be quite faithful. In a 2004 national survey, just 3.8 per cent of married men and 2 per cent of women said they had had more than one sex partner in the past year (the best approximation of infidelity) -- fewer than in similar surveys in the U.S. and the U.K.

If France isn't the world capital of adultery, which country is? I set off around the world to find out.

See the full excerpt of Pamela Druckerman’s Lust in Translation here.

Writing in Downward Dog

Many of us -- perhaps most -- wouldn’t think to lump yoga and creative writing together. For Jeff Davis, the connection came somewhat naturally when, as a writing teacher, he found himself pushed to his physical and emotional limits. According to Davis, he added a very basic yoga regime into his day to help him deal with the physical stresses of his work. To his surprise, regular yoga practice helped release his muse which led (more or less directly and perhaps not so startlingly, since this is a writing teacher) to him writing a book to help others get to the yoga writing special place in the same way he had.

Now revised and expanded, Davis’ The Journey from the Center to the Page: Yoga Philosophies and Practices as Muse for Authentic Writing (Monkfish Publishing) is intended to help writers “forge a deeper connection with their muse through the use of simple yoga practices,” and other cool stuff. From the publisher:

Through the processes Davis suggests, writers gain the authentic insights needed to deepen their concentration, increase their self-discipline and bring new life to their writing. At once inspirational and instructional, The Journey from the Center to the Page artfully illustrates how yoga philosophies and practices can be an invaluable ally to the writing life.

If you’re already stuck in downward dog, this might be one to check out.

Celebrating Earth Day: Go Green by Nancy H. Taylor

Before you even pick the book up, Nancy H. Taylor’s Go Green: How to Build an Earth-Friendly Community (Gibbs Smith) scores points for staying on target; on task. No glossy stock here, no nasty poison inks or sketchy varnishes. The slender paperback is all soft edges and recycled stock so, going in, it’s reassuring to see an author who encourages us to change the world by starting with “easy things like changing our lightbulbs, recycling and driving less” actually walking that walk in her own book.

Taylor’s book deals with all the issues central to recreating your life in a more conscious way. Remodeling your home with green as your guide; choosing greener vehicles, buying local and organic food; conserving water and getting to a place of awareness with your personal carbon footprint.

At its core, Go Green is a primer. If you’re already ankle-deep or more in the environmental movement, there’s probably not a great deal for you to learn here: most of this has been said before, albeit in more complicated ways. But if you, like millions of others, want to know where to begin and how you can start to help, you won’t go wrong with Go Green.

Further Adventures in Search of Perfection by Heston Blumenthal

In this gorgeously produced and surprisingly thick book, Blumenthal looks at the preparation of exactly eight dishes: hamburger; fish pie; chicken tikka masala; risotto; peking duck; chilli con carne; baked alaska and trifle. However, he looks at the them so closely, there are times that they probably want to squirm. Blumenthal’s risotto, for example, takes only about 35 minutes to prepare... once you’ve dealt with the 10 hours of prep time required to make it in his way. While it’s likely that very (very, very) few people will make risotto in exactly the way Blumenthal recommends, on the way to the recipes, you’ll learn an awful lot about rice and starch and many other things you’ve probably never considered deeply until now.

Picking off where he left off in 2006’s In Search of Perfection, Further Adventures in Search of Perfection (Bloomsbury), Blumenthal goes to excessive (some would be say crazy ass) lengths to deconstruct a handful of favorites. “Ultimately,” writes Blumenthal, “that’s what this book is about the excitement and enjoyment of discovering new routes to the cooking of old favorites.”

The routes are extreme, to say the very, very least. For example, in order to determine if marinades actually do tenderize meat, at one point Blumenthal sticks chicken breasts into an MRI (this on the road to finding the perfect chicken tikka masala). If you’ve seen him on television, you know that some of the effort he goes through in his endless search for the perfection is… well… a little silly. Same here. But, at the same time, it’s a deeply interesting tour through a surprising number of ingredients and techniques by a man whose internationally acclaimed restaurant -- Fat Duck -- and OBE attest to the passion he brings to his quest.

“Increasingly,” Blumenthal writes, “I’ve realised that culinary perfection means not only mastery of technique, but also consideration of the sensory and psychological aspects of a dish.” If that’s a line that hits you where you live, you will love Further Adventures in Search of Perfection.

New This Month: Landscape Planning by Judith Adam

Six years ago, a top landscape architect and designer reviewed the first edition of Judith Adam’s Landscape Planning: Practical Techniques for the Home Gardener (Firefly Books) for January Magazine and liked it.

Back in 2002, Laura-Jean Kelly said, “Landscape Planning is formulated to assist gardeners in the eastern part of North America in their tasks and this is reflected in materials and plants that are suggested in this book. With that said, Judith Adam approaches an often daunting task in a straightforward manner and provides the homeowner with a thorough primer on landscape management. If you are a beginner, this is one book that will cut through the maze of trends and styles to educate with practical advice.”

In 2008, Adam and Firefly offer up a new revised edition, mainly enhanced by still more tools to help the home landscaper find garden gold in their own little plot of land. Kelly’s 2002 review is here. It’s all still true of the new edition. Only more so.

The Dawkins Effect

If you were to sit down and try to dream up a book intended to annoy the largest number of people possible, it would look a lot like this. And I don’t just mean the shiny silver cover with the bright orange die-cut, either. Rather, a book not only based on material that, for many of us was one of the forbidden dinner table conversation topics when we were growing up, it occasionally touches on still more.

The book, of course, is Richard Dawkins’ sensational The God Delusion (Mariner Books), first published to a growing thundercloud of readership in 2006, it was recently released in paperback in time for a new edition to (ahem) lord it over a whole flock of imitators and also rans: some taking up Dawkins’ refrain, others trying to rake a little muck and -- astonishingly -- a few even used Dawkins’ name in the title of their own books. Honestly, put up your hand if you think a book called God is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins (Ignatius Press) can do anything but sell more of Dawkins book. And how about The Dawkins Delusion? (IVP Books and the question mark is part of the title.) Or the even stupider sounding The Ipod Tutor: The Argument Against Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. As the name sort of implies: you don’t even have to read that one. You can just listen along.

Let’s face it, though: Dawkins has here cooked up a powerful stew, one that sometimes reads as though it is meant to annoy the other side. For example, this snippet from Dawkins’ preface to the paperback edition seems like gasoline intended for the fire:

… I suspect that for many people the main reason they cling to religion is not that it is consoling, but that they have been let down by our educational system and don’t realize that non-belief is an option. This is certainly true for most people who think they are creationists. They have simply not been properly taught Darwin’s astounding alternative.

You can almost hear the flames jump at that one; hear people preparing to write still more books with “Dawkins” in the title. And it also helps you understand why The God Delusion has invited such a huge readership. The Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University as well as the author of many hugely popular and thought-provoking books, Dawkins delivers the scholarship necessary for us to even begin to take him seriously. But what really compels -- and makes some people mad enough that they even use the professor’s name in the title of their own books -- is that Dawkins doesn’t bother dancing the careful dance. “Darwin’s Rottweiler” is what Discovery called him. We get that -- really we do. But it just scratches the surface.

Spilling the Five Secrets

Suddenly, everything’s a bucket list. In fairness to him, author John Izzo might not merely be jumping on this bandwagon. As the author of Second Innocence and the co-author of Awakening Corporate Soul -- bestsellers both -- Izzo understands exactly the path you want to take. After all, as his bio tells us, he’s “spoken to over one million people on four continents about living more purposeful lives.” That’s a lot of speaking. A lot of souls.

If Izzo is trying to keep The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die (Berrett-Koehler) an actual secret, he’s doing a terrible job. The press material that arrived with January’s copy of the book had them all lined up, one through five. Plus you don’t even have to read the book to figure out what they are: chapters three through seven are secrets one through five.

In the interest of spilling our guts and helping you get the fast track to everlasting happiness (and who the hell doesn’t want that?) here they are:

• Secret One: Be true to yourself
• Secret Two: Leave no regrets
• Secret Three: Become love (clearly that’s a tricky one if you haven’t also read the accompanying chapter.)
• Secret Four: Live the moment
• Secret Five: Give more than you take

Obviously, this is one of those deals where you don’t benefit from just reading the secrets. Heck: I just typed them and I’m not feeling any better.

Despite the fact that I am, here, having a little bit of fun, in his prologue, Izzo warns us that the title of the book “was not chosen lightly. The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die has two key elements. The first is the idea that there are indeed ‘secrets’ to life .... The second element, ‘before you die,’ reminds us that there is urgency to discovering what really matters.”

New This Week: Green Chic by Christie Matheson

The shift was so subtle, for many of us, it happened right in front of our eyes while we weren’t looking.

It seems like, one day, saving the planet was like guerilla war-fare. Not only were people chaining themselves to trees, throwing paint on fur-wearers, and protesting all manner of protestable things, they were looking distinctly frumpy while doing it.

Then, almost overnight, green became the new black and a new breed of advocate picked up the banner. They were different because not only were they determined to save the world, they were convinced you could look good doing it.

Enter fashion writer Christie Matheson, author of Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style (Sourcebooks). Matheson wants us to “embrace the fabulousness of green living. And it is fabulous. Being green can help you look gorgeous, have a killer wardrobe, feel amazing, travel in style, create a home that’s an oasis, host fun parties, eat incredible food, and drink phenomenal wine, all while feeling more connected with your friends, family, and nature.”

Nor is any of this nearly as stupid as it sounds. I mean, it could have been. It really, really could. Matheson is, however, a talented and accomplished writer and it’s clear she really cares about her topic and has walked this particular walk. So it’s a good book. Despite the fact (or, perhaps, for some reason because of the fact) that she insists on saying things like “None of the designer cakes, martinis, or Italian sheets are even remotely as chic -- and I mean really, truly, deeply, timelessly, Jackie-O-and-Audrey-Hepburn chic -- as living green.”

Most of the book offers up fetchingly stated green living alternatives. (“Fetchingly stated” because, I assure you, this writer does not do things without style. Ev-ah. But you guessed that already.) She deals with all aspects of green living in the real world. Long story short: follow Matheson’s path, heed her advice and you will decrease your footprint. And, needless to say, you’ll look fabulous doing it.

Cosmetics Cop in Action

You don’t actually need a review of Don’t Go to the Cosmetic Counter Without Me (Beginning Press). You already know about this book. You just need to be told that the latest edition -- the seventh -- is available now. It’s been about 25 years since author Paula Begoun, a former make-up artist, put together the original version of the book that would lead to her being called “the Ralph Nader of Rouge” and “Cosmetics Cop” (a nickname she likes well enough to own the dot.com for).

This latest edition is right up to the minute and makes for some fascinating reading. Literally every product I’d heard some buzz about was listed and had been reviewed. (In fact, if I’d had the book a few weeks earlier, I would have saved some money: some of my most recent skincare purchases had earned Begoun’s frowns.)

The book is grouped into three major sections. Section one -- by far the largest – takes you through each product by company. You read that right: about 30,000 products in all. The second hits the highlights: summarizing the best in each category. And a third is a dictionary of cosmetic ingredients for those times when, say, you’re wondering exactly what that watercress extract in a moisturizer is actually going to do for (to?) your skin, or just what the hell Seamollient is, anyway. (Note: according to Begoun, “Seamollient” is a trade name for an algae extract. I would guess it costs more, though.)

I found it interesting that some of the technological changes I have sensed in the cosmetic industry over the past decade or so have been noted by the cosmetic cop herself. Changes in serums, for instance, have warranted a different kind of look than previously. And prefacing the “best powders” section, Begoun writes, “Quite honestly ... it is getting more and more difficult to find a bad loose or pressed powder.”

There is, for me, one huge mystery around Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me: as in previous editions, there’s a picture of Begoun right on the cover. How is it that, with every new edition, she appears even younger? Maybe testing 30,000 products will do that for you!

It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Green

Last week we told you about Christie Matheson’s engaging Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style (Sourcebooks). This week it’s Gillian Deacon talking about her new book Green for Life (Penguin).

“It’s so fulfilling and rewarding to take steps on your own and do something you know is making your family healthier or your home less toxic or your small personal footprint just a little smaller,” she said.

Is it just me, or is there lot of buzzing in the room? Ah well: it’s for a good cause, right? Canadian Press has more of the same here.

And while we’re on the topic of the environment, The Toronto Star reports that, when it comes to the publishing industry, Canada is winning the battle of the green:

U.S. publishers are gradually going green, but Canada remains the book industry leader when it comes to forest-friendly book production, a comparison of recent studies in each country indicates.

The Star story is here

Marley Story Optioned by Weinstein

Variety reports that the Weinstein Company has optioned rights to Rita Marley’s 2004 autobiography No Woman No Cry: My Life With Bob Marley (Hyperion), “with plans to develop and produce a biopic about the legendary Jamaican singer.”

The project is in early development, with a late 2009 release date anticipated.

Published by Hyperion in 2004, book chronicles the couple's tempestuous marriage, which began in 1966 and weathered numerous separations and affairs, the birth of four children together (Marley may have fathered as many as 22 in all, 10 legally recognized) and an assassination attempt in 1976.

The Variety piece is here. January ran an excerpt of the book when it was first published. You can see that excerpt here.

Author Snapshot: Kevin Bazzana

Music historian and biographer Kevin Bazzana holds a Ph.D. in music history from UC Berkeley, a degree he puts to careful use in creating beautiful and lucid biographies of musical characters you just don’t think about every day. Not for this author either Madonna or Chopin: the objects of his interest tend to the more esoteric, the less known.

Bazzana’s first two books focused on various aspects of the life and work of Glenn Gould. Glen Gould: The Performer in the Work (Oxford University Press) was published in 1998 to international acclaim. As Library Journal pointed out, the book was much more than a biography, “this is instead a detailed critical study of Gould the musical interpreter, complete with a CD of pertinent recordings.”

Bazzana followed that up with Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould (McLelland & Stewart) in 2003, arguably creating the author as the world’s leading expert on the brilliant and eccentric Canadian pianist.

Last year the publication of the biography of another eccentric and brilliant pianist brought Bazzana further acclaim. Lost Genius tells the story of the Hungarian-born Ervin Nyiregyházi, who spent his life struggling with his talent. New this month in paperback, Lost Genius is nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.

While it’s difficult not to be curious about what will come next for this writer, we must resist the urge. As will be seen, it’s not his favorite question.



A Snapshot of Kevin Bazzana...

Born: Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada
Resides: Near Victoria, Britsh Columbia (Brentwood Bay, actually.)
Birthday: July 27, 1963
Web site: I lack sufficient computer skills and self-esteem to create a personal Web site, and alas have no thoughts profound enough to justify one.

January Magazine: Please tell us about your most recent book.

Kevin Bazzana: Lost Genius is a biography of the Hungarian-American pianist and composer Ervin Nyiregyházi (1903-1987). He was a brilliant, highly original musician and eccentric character who led a bizarre life, though his story is almost unknown today. He was one of those gifted artists who was cursed psychologically in ways that sabotaged his career; his story is a tragedy about a great talent that cannot find its place in the world, and he left to posterity only tantalizing glimpses of his art in its prime.

He was one of the most remarkable prodigies in music history -- a psychologist wrote a book about his gifts when he was 13 -- and he had a sensational career in his childhood and youth. But in his early 20, though recognized as one of the greatest pianists of his day, he lost the momentum of his career, for complicated professional, artistic and personal reasons.

For the next half-century, he lived a restless and dissolute life, mostly anonymously in seedy neighborhoods of Los Angeles -- he lived in poverty, drank heavily, was sexually voracious (he married 10 times!). He occasionally performed in private or public, and even long after he was supposedly washed up he could amaze knowledgeable listeners with his playing, though efforts to revive his career always failed. (He spent most of his time composing -- more than 1000 works in a strange, old-fashioned, very personal style.) In the 1970s, he was rediscovered in old age, and enjoyed a brief, noisy, controversial renaissance -- he gave some concerts, made some recordings -- before slipping back into obscurity again.

In my opinion, Nyiregyházi’s is one of the most fascinating stories in music history, made all the more significant and interesting -- and ultimately tragic -- by his unquestionably great gifts.

What’s on your nightstand?

A few years ago, I realized that I was remarkably ignorant of all manner of literature, and since then have set about, more or less systematically, to remedy that defect -- reading Moby-Dick and Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina and Ulysses and all the other books I should have read in college but didn’t.

Recently, I’ve been having a bit of a Philip Roth fit. I just finished American Pastoral and am now cracking open I Married a Communist. But I should add that I divide my free time almost equally between books and movies -- I am a passionate film buff -- and so my nightstand is often piled with DVDs rather than books. My most recent weekful of rented DVDs ranged from Ichikawa, Bergman and Godard, to Laurel and Hardy and The Pajama Game.

What inspires you?

I usually feel presumptuous using the word “inspiration” about my work, since writing non-fiction consists so much of the prosaic donkey work of research. In my experience, writing non-fiction resembles Edison’s famous definition of genius: “one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.” (This is why I sometimes think that the phrase “literary non-fiction” is an oxymoron -- so much of the process involves routine detective work that hardly counts as literary.) But I suppose something like inspiration does give me the motivation to do the labor required to write a biography. In the case of Lost Genius, I can definitely say that I was inspired by genuine interest in and devotion to the subject, and by a desire to share his story and make a case for his significance with the public. I felt particularly passionate about the subject because he was so obviously brilliant and original and yet almost completely unknown; a kind of missionary zeal propelled me in this case.

My previous biography was about Glenn Gould, and though I was genuinely passionate about him, too, he was already famous enough when I came along that he didn’t really need my championship. But Nyiregyházi, it seemed, was going to remain a “lost genius” unless I roused myself and did something about it. That, I suppose, could be called inspiration.

What are you working on now?

For whatever reasons -- weariness? indecision? dread? -- my brain has been in stand-by mode in the year since Lost Genius was first published. I have kept up with the various freelance writing, editing and lecturing jobs that feed and clothe me, but I am not yet at work on a new book. I have been poking my nose into various subjects that interest me, and have been seriously considering moving away from my chosen field (classical music), but have not yet found a new topic. I suspect I may have to wait until a new topic finds me. Part of the problem may be that I am uncertain whether I want (or have the stamina) to write another biography. Writing a biography is a huge, engrossing, exhausting task, and at the end of the day it’s difficult to feel truly confident that you have successfully captured something as elusive as a human life and personality. Anyway, at the moment, when it comes to my “next book,” I can only say, “Stay tuned.”

Tell us about your process.

With a biography, I begin rather amorphously, simply musing about the subject, reading about his life, going through his work and so on, without (at first) any firm goal in mind. Once I have committed to undertaking a full biography, I begin to accumulate data and materials more systematically. Actual writing comes fairly late in the process. (My ten years of work on Lost Genius included less than two of actual writing and editing; the rest was sleuthing.)

When it finally becomes clear that I have enough material for a book, I start with a pen and a piece of paper. I first lay out the overall structure of the book, initially on just one or two pieces of paper, so I can see the whole book at a glance. I then expand on this skeleton, creating ever more detailed outlines, until I feel confident that I know the main divisions of the book -- how the story will unfold, how I will balance chronological narrative with essay-like passages, and so on. (I let the subject dictate the form: every life story suggests its own structure, balance of factors, style and tone.)

Detailed outline at hand, I go systematically through my groaning files and put each bit of information into its appropriate slot. Eventually, I come up with a somewhat orderly pile of information that I can begin sculpting into something that looks like prose. Of course, there are always surprises along the way -- last-minute discoveries and ideas that need to be incorporated, sometimes even major structural changes late in the day. But I find that if I begin with a detailed outline I can avoid getting lost in the mountains of data, and can handle whatever is thrown at me at the last minute.

Finally, when every word and comma is self-evidently perfect, I send the text to my editor, who points out all the self-evident imperfections -- and then a whole new round of fun begins...

Lift your head and look around. What do you see?

A small bedroom converted into an office. My computer sits on a desk that looks out over a half-acre of lawns, trees and gardens -- a view sometimes inspiring, sometimes distracting. Our cat, Sophie, occasionally perches on the desk to look out the window or sun herself while I work. Around me are filing cabinets, bookshelves, and CD cabinets -- all of them reaching satiation -- as well as stereo equipment, photos, diplomas, prizes and tchotchkes. On one of the few bits wall space, a poster of Samuel Beckett (one of my heroes) bearing a quotation that is, if not exactly inspirational, at least ... reassuring: “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I read voraciously as a kid and always had a lot of books around me. Early on, I dreamed that one day I might do the unimaginable and actually create one of these magic “book” things myself. But as an adult there was never an “Aha!” moment when I decided to be a writer. I studied first theatre and then music in university, and eventually got a Ph.D. in music, assuming that I would pursue an academic career. But my academic career effectively ended with my doctorate, as I realized that I preferred writing and lecturing about music to non-professional audiences, which I have done in a variety of forums.

The opportunity to write a trade biography of Glenn Gould came about, in 2000, in a rather roundabout way (old-boy network, friend-of-a-friend -- that sort of thing), and at that point it suddenly appeared that I was a real writer. Actually, I published my first article when I was 16, and have been writing for publication and profit off and on ever since; in fact, I can’t really do anything else. But for whatever reasons, I never thought of myself as a professional writer until quite recently. So I never decided to become a writer so much as realized, late in the day, that that is what I actually was.

If you couldn’t write books, what would you be doing?

I sometimes fantasize about pursuing one of my non-literary artistic interests -- music, theatre, film -- in a professional way. If a genie gave me one wish for a career and the chops to pull it off, I might choose film director, though the thought of being a pianist or conductor would also be tempting. (In real life, I can barely play a C-major scale on the piano without falling off the bench.) As it stands, I don’t have any apparent marketable skills besides writing, so I can’t imagine what I would be doing if I couldn’t write. Probably living, like one of Beckett’s characters, on “small charitable sums.”

To date, what moment in your career has made you happiest?

Certain specimens of recognition I have received have been particularly meaningful. High-profile reviews and prizes and such. Perhaps this is not surprising, given how long and difficult and lonely the process of writing a book can be, it’s nice to see signs that your work was not entirely in vain. I’m a long-standing New Yorker fan, and I experienced particularly rewarding feelings of having “arrived” when my books were reviewed (well, technically “Briefly Noted”) in The New Yorker. All of my reviews get filed, but those in The New Yorker are the only ones that I actually laminate.

For you, what is the easiest thing about being writer?

The hours, the working conditions and the wardrobe requirements. Admittedly, my wife has a good, secure government job and is very supportive of my work, so I’m quite aware that the circumstances in which I work are pleasant entirely because of her. If I lived alone, I would be working in much drearier conditions -- if at all.

What’s the most difficult?

Knowing that it is impossible to make a decent living writing books in Canada -- at least, books on the kinds of subjects that interest me. When I weigh the amount of work involved in writing a comprehensive biography against the likely audience for a serious book about a classical musician, I know that I will be working for something far south of minimum wage. That realization can make getting up in the morning to start writing a little difficult.

What question do you get asked about your writing most often? What’s the question you’d like to be asked? What question would like never to be asked again?

These questions are difficult to answer, since I have had relatively little public experience as a writer -- relatively few readings and interviews and such -- so I can’t claim a wearisome overexposure to questions. I have never had to deal with, say, the particular woes of a high-profile author on his tenth book tour, and so have never felt the urge to run amok after hearing Question X for the umpteenth time. Still, I sometimes feel that any question about one of my books is one too many. This may seem a little odd, but think about it: publication represents the beginning of the public’s interest in the book, but often the end of the writer’s. Even when you’re genuinely devoted to a subject, it can be a race to the finish-line to see whether you will complete the book before growing sick of it! I think that’s inevitable with a biography, when you spend so much time cooped up at close quarters with the same person. Once the book’s done, you think you want nothing more than to ignore the subject for a decade or so. But it’s precisely then that people start reading the book and wanting to talk to you about it. Of course, given that I’m currently uncertain about what project to take up next, I guess I could say that there is one question I would like never to be asked again: “So, what’s next for Kevin Bazzana?”

Tell us something about yourself that no one knows.

I memorized the Greek alphabet in Grade 7, to impress a girl who had one of those endless, unpronounceable Greek surnames -- 13 letters long, beginning with a silent “M.” Ever since then, whenever I want to write secret notes to myself I write them phonetically using Greek letters; this way, I can, for instance, write down things my wife wants for Christmas and keep the lists out in plain sight. (Thus, “Van Morrison’s new CD” becomes “ΥανΜωρρισονςνευΚΔ.”) I once read that Bertrand Russell hit upon this same encryption system as a teenager -- a case of great nerds thinking alike.