holiday gift guide 2010

Holiday Gift Guide: The Sugar Mother and Foxybaby both by Elizabeth Jolley

November 26, 2010 admin 0

Here’s a gift suggestion for the reader who thinks they’ve devoured everything: Elizabeth Jolley. Prior to her death in 2007, Jolley has risen to become one of Australia’s best known and most celebrated authors, known for her dark wit, biting characterizations and sophisticated view of relationships and the world. Jolley was unable to find a publisher for her work until she was in her early 50s, but she managed to publish 14 novels, four short […]

Holiday Gift Guide: The Columbo Collection
by William Link

November 24, 2010 admin 0

Lieutenant Columbo with a cell phone? Finding one of television’s most popular fictional sleuths still on the ball and on the job in the 21st century — 39 years after he first questioned suspects on The NBC Mystery Movie — can seem a bit disorienting. But nobody could do better at bringing Columbo out of mothballs than his co-creator, William Link, author of the book, The Columbo Collection (Crippen & Landru). Together with his lifelong […]

Holiday Gift Guide: Star Trek: The Original Series 365 by Paula M. Block and Terry J. Erdmann

November 22, 2010 admin 3

I am a Star Trek fan (I’ll wait while you finish mocking me). I have always been a fan of the original series, mostly because it wEas the one I grew up with. Captain Kirk, Mister Spock, Doctor McCoy, Mister Scott and the rest of the crew were the paragons on which I based a lot of who little me wanted to become. And while bombing around in a space ship and shooting ray guns […]

Holiday Gift Guide: Up We Grow: A Year in the Life of A Local Farm by Deborah Hodge and Brian Harris

November 20, 2010 admin 0

Almost like a trip to a farm, Up We Grow (Kids Can Press) takes kids on a photographic journey — through all four seasons — to a farm where food and animals grow in abundance. Even in the photos you can tell it’s all quite a lot of hard work: people hoeing and raking and collecting, but also talking to animals, eating fresh produce and laughing. Photographer Brian Harris is committed to several non-profit organizations […]

Holiday Gift Guide: Northern Kids by Linda Goyette

November 17, 2010 admin 0

The fourth entry in Brindle & Glass’ Courageous Kids series, Northern Kids follows the pattern set by the previous books in telling regional children’s stories in their own voices. Based on archival material and extensive interviews, author Linda Goyette here recreates the stories of children as authentically as her source material allows. A brief section after each chapter called “What Do We Know For Sure” explains just where the source material came from and how […]

Holiday Gift Guide: Following the Detectives edited by Maxim Jakubowski

November 16, 2010 admin 3

During the summer of 2009, British editor and former bookstore proprietor Maxim Jakubowski asked 11 authors, including me, to contribute to a volume of 21 essays about cities and other places in the world that are closely associated with famous fictional sleuths. Given that he wanted me to write about Dashiell Hammett and San Francisco, a city I have long adored (and about which I had penned two previous books), I was pleased to accept […]

Holiday Gift Guide: Game Day by Kevin Sylvester

November 15, 2010 admin 0

Budding athletes and sports fans will enjoy Game Day: Meet the People Who Make it Happen (Annick Press). Brightly illustrated and breezily written, Game Day shows young readers some of the myriad people who make sports go. Not the athletes, but the behind the scenes people who few give any thought to at all. Each of 21 chapters is a brief and punchy biography of someone you’ve probably never heard of but whose role in […]

Holiday Gift Guide: The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock

November 15, 2010 admin 0

If you were to dream up the perfect gift for the hardcore book lover, it would look a lot like The Paper Garden (McLelland & Stewart) by Molly Peacock. Peacock takes a very personal look at the life of Mary Granville Pendarves Delany, daughter of the aristocracy, married into wealth at 16 to improve her family’s fortune, widowed by 25. Delany danced, partied, stitched and painted for the next few decades, until she married again […]

Holiday Gift Guide: Go Nuts: Recipes that Really Shell Out by Debbie Harding

November 13, 2010 admin 4

Though there is a large bookshelf fairly groaning under the weight of cookbooks in my kitchen, until I started looking closely through Go Nuts: Recipes That Really Shell Out (Touchwood Editions), I didn’t realize I’d never seen a whole book dedicated to nuts before. When you think about it, that’s a bit of a surprise because nuts are so versatile. Go Nuts is testimony to that, including recipes suitable for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert. […]

Holiday Gift Guide: The Snuggie Sutra by Lex Friedman and Megan Morrison

November 12, 2010 admin 0

It’s difficult to imagine The Snuggie Sutra (St. Martin’s Press) as anything but a gift book. Seriously: it’s really not the sort of book one buys for themselves.As the title suggests, The Snuggie Sutra is about how to use the pop culture phenomenon Snuggie “blanket with sleeves” for uses quite beyond what the inventor probably originally intended. From the Preface: Of course, once we owned our Snuggies, and could cuddle up with a good book, […]