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Forget perfection

by Deanna Larson

A long overdue anti-perfectionist trend is overtaking the fitness world. Being overweight isn't always unhealthy. You can think yourself thin—and you don't need to spend hours in the gym. Feel like crying with relief over your stack of New Year's resolutions? Read on.

Count calories, sure, but keep weight off with different thinking. Dr. Judith S. Beck uses the power of the mind to push dieters to lose once and for all in The Complete Beck Diet for Life: The Five-Stage Program for Permanent Weight Loss. Daughter of pioneering cognitive therapy founder Aaron Beck and director of the Beck Institute of Cognitive Therapy, Beck (The Beck Diet Solution) is a diet coach who helps dieters feel in control and remain motivated while losing at a steady rate and still eating favorite foods. The "getting ready to lose" section is a mental and emotional workout, followed by beginner and maintenance phases of her "Think Thin Program." Each section includes "In Session with Dr. Beck" counseling scenarios, food plans and sidebars like "Reality Check" and "Success Skills." Beck knows you'll make mistakes, or even decide that enjoying a few more calories is a fair exchange for a few extra pounds. But her mantra is: you will turn mistakes into opportunity, you will maintain your weight loss. Sample daily menus, recipes for healthy meals and snacks, a bibliography and plenty of charts and graphs for amateur scientists and left-brainers round out this authoritative guide to getting off the diet-go-round.

Fitness through the years
Weight creep as we age isn't a given. Orthopedic surgeon Vonda Wright, director of PRIMA (the Performance and Research Initiative for Masters Athletes), believes that a sedentary lifestyle rather than biology accelerates the "aging" process. Fitness After 40: How to Stay Strong at Any Age is an approach to post-midlife fitness through the F.A.C.E. system of flexibility, aerobic exercise, "carrying" load-bearing exercise and achieving equilibrium and balance. Illustrated exercises, chapters on healing and avoiding injury when exercising as well as hydration and good nutrition are about as dry as a physical therapy pamphlet, but reiterating the basics will doubtless ensure you don't become "merely a bad sequel to your 20-year-old self."

It's not you, it's your genes
If you want to be a size zero, "choose your parents well," says Dr. Linda Bacon in Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight . Bacon—a therapist and recovering "weight obsessive" with an ironic name who holds a doctorate in physiology and specializes in eating disorders and body image—looks at the disconnect between modern food processing, diet culture and the actual science behind the "moral imperative" to lose weight. She disproves the assumption that being fat equals being unhealthy and deconstructs food and fat politics. There are plenty of thin people among McDonald's regular customers, according to Bacon, who explores why diet and exercise programs often don't work, and offers practical advice on how to recast the "weight problem" by helping the vulnerable respect their bodies and souls, taking care of real hungers and changing taste in the process. The best way to lose is to give up the fight and turn control over to your body, according to the book. "You will find that biology is much more powerful than willpower," Bacon writes. "Body weight might be a marker for an imprudent lifestyle in some people but its role in determining health . . . is grossly exaggerated."

Motivation in pictures
That's a "fattitude" heartily endorsed by comic-strip creator Carol Lay in her intriguing graphic memoir, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude. The L.A. based writer and creator of the WayLay comic strip that has appeared in The San Francisco Examiner, L.A. Weekly and Salon.com, is a "born eater." After learning unhealthy eating—and dieting—habits from her parents, Lay spent her college years in denim maxi dresses, gorging on home-baked bread and fake cookie dough, followed by addiction to amphetamine-based weight-loss pills. She starts the action with a comic strip featuring a hostess greeting her recent self with "You've lost so much weight! You look great! How did you do it?" "I count calories and exercise every day," she answers, followed by a trio of wordless panels showing the hostess dumbfounded for seconds on end. Her seriocomic weighty adventures have a fresh Californian vibe while communicating slightly self-righteous weight-loss tips, but before you hate this cool chick for her steely self-control, she draws a panel about the dangers of emotional binging after a breakup. On a holiday. Or imagines how the Devil would tempt her in the so-Hollywood "Day in the Diet" fantasy strip, which features George Clooney arriving unannounced with hot sausage biscuits, hash browns and a double chocolate chip "crappicino" from Mickey D's. Handwritten calorie charts (her recommended plan only provides about 1,350 calories, a bit low for healthy weight loss), eating plans and recipes and lists of "dodgy foods" round out this quirky but useful motivational tool for achieving thinner peace.

No time? No problem!
Weak-willed? Time-strapped? Get The 90-Second Fitness Solution: The Most Time-Efficient Workout Ever for a Healthier, Stronger, Younger You. New York trainer Pete Cerqua probably got sick of clients moaning about their desire for defined tank-top arms without having a minute to do a thing about it. His brilliant 15-minute-per-week workout promises to beat cardio at shedding pounds and reduce bodies by a half-dress size without changing food choices. His simple illustrated exercises, which only require resolve, a wall and a floor, are done in 90-second reps using pauses and holding weights in key positions rather than slow movements. Busting myths up and down the fitness spectrum, Cerqua advocates four simple secrets to success: short workouts, simplified eating, fewer supplements and a stress-proof life to eliminate time-consuming symptoms, not to mention life-altering illness. Bright, clean and breezy with its "Ask Pete" sidebars, real-life 90-Second Success Stories, speed reader's synopses, lightning-fast gourmet recipes and oversized exercise scorecards, this is the trend-setting fitness guide for the rest of us.

Count calories, sure,…

Business & Finance, Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Crafts, Hobbies & Home Business & Finance

Less can be more, in the world of work

Feature by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

Now's the time to usher in the new year—and perhaps a new approach to your career. If you've resolved in 2009 to work smarter, be more productive, follow your dreams or find more fun in the daily 9-to-5, this quartet of books will come in handy.

Back to basics
Is your life overscheduled and overrun by clutter, whether piles of paper on your desk or way too many commitments on your calendar? Leo Babauta has the solution. In The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential. . . in Business and in Life he has created "a how-to manual on how to simplify and focus on the essential. How to do less while accomplishing more." Babauta isn't just paying lip service to the importance of learning to focus on what's important. Over the last few years, he's accomplished quite a list of goals (running two marathons, doubling his income, eliminating his debt, writing this book) while parenting six children. His secret lies in his ability to focus on one thing at a time rather than trying to juggle too many things at once. In the book, Babauta offers targeted suggestions for slowly but surely finding focus (and thus, greater efficiency). A 30-day challenge provides a kick-start, and simplification strategies and tips abound.

Control is key
David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, published in 2001, sold a million copies and significantly increased demand for Allen's Getting Things Done, or GTD, seminars, delivered at companies and government agencies worldwide. Not surprisingly, he found time to write another book: Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life. This time around, he offers "new and deeper perspectives about why [the GTD] information works as well as it does and how universally it can be applied." The first few chapters explain the GTD concept and set up Allen's plan for Making It All Work. Perspective is important to this process, and the author skillfully frames the various levels of perspective as distances, which range from 50,000 feet (career, purpose, lifestyle) to 10,000 feet (current projects) to "runway" (daily actions, like managing email). The author says adhering to his principles will enable you to "quickly gain coherence and reorient yourself for the next round when you're faced with disruption"—a useful skill to have in a recession, for sure.

Entrepreneurial excitement
Donny Deutsch's CNBC television show "The Big Idea" profiled entrepreneurs who've achieved the American Dream of having, well, a big idea, and working hard to make it a reality. In the show's companion book, The Big Idea: How to Make Your Entrepreneurial Dreams Come True, from the "Aha Moment" to Your First Million, written with Catherine Whitney, Deutsch's energy and enthusiasm are infectious. The Big Idea is a fine mix of advice gleaned from his own experiences running an ad agency, plus stories of successful idea-implementers who have appeared on his TV show. Those profiled include the founders of Subway, Spanx and Sam Adams, plus proprietors of lesser-known companies like the Ugly Talent Agency, which fills the need for regular-looking folks on movie sets and in magazines. This book will serve as a useful how-to manual for would-be entrepreneurs, and provide "If they can do it, so can I!" inspiration.

Cubicle-bound creativity
Unlike most career-related books, Who Took All the Paperclips? Fun Things to Do with Office Supplies When the Boss Isn't Looking supports—nay, encourages—pilfering office supplies. Author Rachel Rifat advocates using those Post-its and paperclips to make crafts that will perk up a boring cubicle. Rifat opens her compendium of crafts with "Matchstick Incense: When nature calls and the whole office doesn't need to know!" and includes step-by-step instructions for a beaded privacy curtain and a pillow made from bubble-wrap, among other projects. Quirky illustrations and funny captions add to the book's appeal, as does the author's explanation of why she left her own corporate job: "she decided she could not stand to see another manager wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts at a beer bust." It's hard to argue with that.

Linda M. Castellitto makes Post-it origami in North Carolina.

Fiction

Fiction

Take a journey around the world in stories

Feature by Harvey Freedenberg

by Harvey Freedenberg

From Mexico, to the former Soviet Union, to England, Japan and the United States, the reach of the short story spans the globe. These five collections, some by established authors and others by writers just beginning to make their mark, offer a generous introduction to the richness of modern short fiction.

Chilly slices of modern life
Ali Smith, author of the critically praised novel The Accidental, has observed, "Stories can change lives if we're not careful." In The First Person and Other Stories, her fourth collection, she offers her unsettling take on contemporary life.

Smith's book is most notable for its air of experimentation. The story that opens the collection, "True Short Story," begins with a writer in a café, observing two men and imagining the story of their relationship before halting the exercise. ("I stopped making them up. It felt a bit wrong to.") It concludes with a series of pithy observations on the nature of the short form from writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and Alice Munro.

Smith's style is terse and edgy, almost daring the reader to settle in. In most of these stories, the characters are nameless, and it's only possible to know their setting because of a passing allusion to London or some feature of British life.

One of the more startling tales is "The Child," in which a woman discovers a baby abandoned in her grocery store shopping cart. When she takes the child with her, it begins spouting conservative political dogma, soon laced with racist and sexist jokes. The First Person and Other Stories won't appeal to everyone's taste, but those who like their stories provocative and enigmatic are likely to find it a satisfying work.

Weird, wonderful and wild
Although he's unknown to the American audience, Yasutaka Tsutsui has captured awards in his native Japan for his science fiction. His collection, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno, translated by Andrew Driver, contains several examples in that genre, but it also sparkles with biting pieces of social and political satire that reveal a formidable talent.

Tsutsui excels at creating protagonists living in worlds uncomfortably recognizable as our own and yet decidedly dystopian. In "Rumours of Me," a young man suddenly begins to hear and read news stories about the most mundane aspects of his daily life. "Anything can become big news if the media report it," a newspaper editor tells him, bringing to mind the short-lived obsession with "Joe the Plumber" in last fall's presidential campaign. "Commuter Army" is a brilliant satire on the insanity of war, imagining platoons of soldiers who board the train each morning like office workers, the fortunate survivors returning home the same evening. "Hello, Hello, Hello" features a meddlesome "Household Economy Consultant" whose bizarre counsel sheds a revealing light on modern capitalism and our consumer culture.

The title story, the longest in the collection, is a complex exploration of human sexuality and evolutionary biology that plays out in the context of a space adventure. Throughout this wildly varied assortment of tales, Tsutsui's voice is witty and quirky, seducing us to suspend our disbelief for even the most fanciful narrative.

Riding the waves
Whether as a force for life or one of destruction, water in all its forms is the unifying theme in writer and artist Peter Selgin's powerful collection, Drowning Lessons. Selgin is never heavy-handed in his use of metaphor, and it's rewarding to trace the skill with which he employs it in many of these 13 stories.

In the opening tale, "Swimming," an elderly man disgruntled with the state of his marriage offers swimming lessons to an attractive younger woman. "Our Cups Are Bottomless" features a man in a coffee shop in a dying mill town, contemplating the suicide notes he's written as the town's two rivers rise in a raging downpour.

The most dramatic story in Drowning Lessons is "The Sea Cure." In it, two brothers take a trip to Mexico. Lewis becomes ill after drinking the local water, and Clarke meets a mysterious woman he believes will help secure medical treatment for Lewis, whose condition becomes more desperate with each page, until the story reaches its haunting climax. The collection concludes with the alternately hilarious and touching "My Search for Red and Gray Wide-Striped Pajamas." Its narrator suffers from mysterious fainting spells while wandering New York City seeking a pair of pajamas like the ones worn by his late father, his search a metaphor for the attempt to find his way in the world.

Coming to America
When a young writer's first two stories are published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic, it's a safe bet she's on the fast track to recognition in the world of literary fiction. In One More Year, Sana Krasikov, born in Ukraine and now living in New York, demonstrates why the early notice she's achieved is well-deserved.

Krasikov's fiction focuses on her fellow immigrants. Unlike the affluent Bengalis depicted in the stories of another young star of contemporary short fiction, Jhumpa Lahiri, however, her characters are struggling to plant their feet firmly on the first rung of the ladder of success in America. Most of the stories are set in Westchester County, New York, but it's hardly the country club and cocktail party world of John Cheever.

In stories like "Companion," "Asal" and "Maia in Yonkers," women from the former Soviet Union find themselves in low-end personal care jobs. Maia's son sums up her plight when he berates her, "Every year you say 'It's one more year, one more year!' " and his blunt indictment sums up the predicament of most of Krasikov's characters. Representative is Anya, the protagonist of "Better Half," 22 years old, married for a few months and working as a waitress, who observes that "trying to escape your tedious fate only led you back to it."

Their task won't be easy, but at the end of this consistently strong collection we're left with a feeling that the determination by Krasikov's characters to establish themselves in a new land will be rewarded.

Living and loving in Mexico
Carlos Fuentes, perhaps Mexico's most distinguished living writer, offers a rich collection of stories in Happy Families. Taking his ironic title from Tolstoy's legendary observation, Fuentes exposes the dark corners of his characters' emotional lives with a piercing light.

Fuentes' prose is lush, almost poetic, as presented in this translation by the distinguished translator Edith Grossman. Indeed, after each story there is a free verse "chorus," many of them illuminating some troubling aspect of modern Mexican life.

In its 16 stories, Happy Families covers the subject of love in all its complexity. We meet a long-married couple raking over the dying coals of their relationship ("Conjugal Ties (1)"), a priest who's fathered an illegitimate daughter and lives with her in an isolated mountain village at the base of a volcano ("The Father's Servant") and a mother desperate to rescue her son from a life of street crime ("The Mariachi's Mother"). Fuentes is a keen student of human behavior, and if his Mexican historic and cultural references occasionally may be puzzling to non-Mexican readers, the emotions on display are universal. In "The Discomfiting Brother," the story of an impoverished man who returns to the home of his prosperous brother after more than 30 years, the former notes, "Life consists in our getting used to the fact that everything will be badly for us." That solemn observation serves as a fitting benediction to this collection by an acknowledged literary master.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Business & Finance

Business & Finance

Bouncing back

Feature by Susan Rucci

by Susan Rucci

What a difference a year can make, especially if you have a 401k or other investments in the stock market. Now that the Wall Street bubble has burst, what's an individual investor to do? A new batch of books sets out to prove that even in bad economic times, you can turn your stock portfolio, bank account or retirement fund around and rebound financially.

Taming the Bear
Two of the best books are part of Wiley's Little Book, Big Profits series that focuses on all things financial, from investment strategies to long-term economic trends. My favorite is The Little Book That Saves Your Assets: What the Rich Do to Stay Wealthy in Up and Down Markets by David M. Darst, a managing director at Morgan Stanley. Darst says to thrive financially today you must practice asset allocation, compiling a financial portfolio with assets that make money when the economy is doing well, but also including assets that make money when the economy slows down. He says it's the approach the wealthy use to maintain their lifestyle even in tough economic times. Darst writes in a reader-friendly manner, often using football analogies to make a point. One of his strongest chapters is called "Building Your House," which compares a financial portfolio to a person's home. He writes that much like a house, a portfolio should reflect an investor's personality and should be "built" to have a mixture of assets that are functioning (steady and reliable, like bonds) and fun (riskier, but with a potentially bigger payoff, like stocks). In another compelling chapter called "The Road Less Traveled That You Should Take," Darst rightly argues that most people no longer have any choice but to be actively engaged in managing their financial portfolio because the days of a guaranteed pension are gone forever. Now all the responsibility rests on the individual.

Another recent book in the series is also well edited and on point. The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets: How to Keep Your Portfolio Up When the Market Is Down, by investment advisor Peter Schiff, is a playbook on how to preserve wealth even as the economy falters. After a brief history lesson on the U.S. stock market, Schiff outlines an investment plan that taps into the larger and financially stronger global economy. He particularly likes the money-making opportunities in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). All have seen their economies boom thanks to manufacturing; Schiff is particularly fond of China. Besides the BRIC bloc, Schiff likes Canada, Australia and New Zealand as good wealth-building opportunities through investments in raw materials, oil and minerals. He also recommends investing in precious metals such as gold (either in physical gold or in mining stocks). He closes out his book with a provocative look at the 2008 presidential election and argues that the American investor would be wise to wait until at least 2012 before re-investing in the market. Schiff wrote the bestseller Crash Proof, which accurately predicted the current Wall Street turmoil, so his words are particularly valuable now.

Think globally
Another book that urges a more global approach to your financial portfolio is Game Over: How You Can Prosper in a Shattered Economy by Stephen Leeb. The book went to print just as the Dow began its tumble last fall. Leeb's premise is fairly depressing; he argues that the economy will take years to recover from inflation, the weakening dollar and, most importantly, runaway national debt. He spends more than half the book discussing resource shortages like oil and water (the latter being the more interesting read of the two) and emerging alternative energies. Leeb urges investors to create portfolios that are inflation-proof and to invest in industries that produce high rates of return in spite of high inflation. Like other authors featured here, he urges investment in gold through exchange-traded funds or individual gold companies. Another interesting nugget from Leeb: he says the last thing any investor should do is turn investments into cash. He contends that money in a checking or savings account will not earn nearly the amount of interest needed to compensate for the decline in its value because of inflation.

The Jubak Picks: 50 Stocks That Will Rebuild Your Wealth and Safeguard Your Future sums up the latest strategies of Jim Jubak, senior markets editor for the website MSN Money, where more than a million investors click on his monthly "Jubak Journal" for financial advice. Jubak asserts that investing in the right macro trends will make you money, and he includes specific, detailed stock picks for each of his suggestions. He says the best investments right now can be found outside the U.S., particularly in China and India; in food (which he calls the new oil), through agriculture and food-commodity stocks; and in technology. Jubak ends his book with a chapter titled "50 best stocks in the world." Exxon, precious metals companies and search engine Google are among those that make the list.

The Ten Roads to Riches: The Way the Wealthy Got There (And How You Can Too!) by Forbes columnist Ken Fischer might be the most fun-to-read book in this group because it delves into one of Americans' favorite topics: how the rich get rich. Fischer knows that road well; he's a self-made billionaire who's on the Forbes 400 list and owns a firm that manages $45 billion in assets. Fischer says there are 10 ways to acquire wealth a lot faster than the idealized "work hard, save your money" mantra. The richest road is also the most obvious and the one most people take—starting your own business. But there are other ways, including managing other people's money, owning real estate and even turning celebrity into wealth. Fischer points out that boxer George Foreman retired from the sport completely broke. An indoor grill bearing his name changed his financial status and now Foreman is not only a household name (at least in the kitchen) but also worth millions. Single women, and maybe some single men as well, will be amused and perhaps inspired by the chapter which outlines marriage as another way to acquire wealth. My, how times have changed. Fischer says you should forget about marrying a millionaire—now you need to marry a billionaire to acquire true wealth.

Most of these books rely on the premise that the reader has money to invest and time to wait out the investment payoffs. What they don't address are the day-to-day financial struggles so many people are facing as jobs vanish and the economy spirals downward. The need for help in those areas should create a bull market in financial advice books as the new year progresses.

This will be another tough year in the housing market, with foreclosures expected to remain at their highest numbers in more than a decade. Two recent books offer timely advice for those facing difficult choices about their homes.

Putting your house in order
How to Sell a House Fast in a Slow Real Estate Market by William Bronchick and Ray Cooper is a smart, fairly fast read on what to do to get your house sold quickly. Some suggestions are obvious: invest in paint, new rugs and curb appeal. Other advice is simply interesting, like knowing the supply quotient for your neighborhood (divide the number of homes for sale by the number of closings in the last 30 days). If you have the time and/or live in the home, the authors recommend you do the selling yourself—you'll get to pocket a real estate agent's three to six percent commission. And there are good ideas about what to do if several months have passed and your home still hasn't sold (try the round-robin strategy, which involves holding an open house over a two-day period and then taking bids from all prospective buyers).

If you're facing foreclosure, pick up a copy of Stop Foreclosure Now, by attorney and mortgage expert Lloyd Segal. Lloyd self-published Stop Foreclosure Now in 2007 with considerable success; AMACOM recently issued a paperback edition. For less than $20, the book is a wealth of information on the foreclosure process, walking the reader through every detail. Early on, Segal advises the reader not to panic because foreclosure is a lengthy process that can take anywhere from three months (in nonjudicial foreclosures) to two years to complete. He urges homeowners to use that time to figure out whether it's better to try to keep the property or lose it. There's a lengthy section on refinancing as well as a chapter devoted to members of the military on active duty who are legally protected from foreclosure and may actually be entitled to a lower interest rate. Foreclosure is complicated and while Segal argues that a homeowner can handle the process, the wiser move still seems to be hiring an attorney to help you navigate the system.

Susan Rucci is a TV news producer who writes from Washington, D.C.

Fiction

Fiction

A rollicking adventure ride through life

Feature by Stephenie Harrison

by Stephenie Harrison

Ricky Rice is a down-on-his-luck former heroin addict who works as a janitor at a bus depot and focuses on just getting by. But this quickly changes when he receives a one-way bus ticket to Vermont from an unknown source in the mail, along with a note that enigmatically tells him the time has come to honor a secret promise he once made. Summoning all of his courage and going along for the ride, Ricky finds himself part of a rag-tag band of investigators, tasked with finding and following a divine Voice in modern-day America. Soon, Ricky embarks on a journey that will forever change his life, as he faces the demons from his past and even battles a few new ones along the way—all the while grappling with the big questions of faith, doubt, race, class, sex and all the little ones in between.

To say any more would do a disservice to Big Machine, since half the fun for the reader is being sucked into the whirlpool of Ricky’s awe-inspiring adventure. Hysterical yet heartbreaking, playful yet pensive, bleak yet hopeful, Victor LaValle’s novel masterfully blends these contrasting elements to produce a rich and rewarding literary experience. LaValle shines a light onto the shadowed fringes of society, tackling the gritty and grimy aspects of life with just the right mix of brash wit and tender compassion. A motley amalgam of sci-fi, mystery, and crime noir, Big Machine transcends the boundaries of standard literary fiction and defies readers’ expectations at every turn. Fantasy and reality constantly mingle, but the core issues—though messy and complicated—are undeniably human.

Wildly creative but always believable, it’s little wonder LaValle has developed a diverse following, ranging from Pulitzer-winning author Michael Cunningham to rap artist Mos Def. With Big Machine, LaValle has created a novel that makes you feel as much as it makes you think, proving that he is not just a writer to watch, but a writer to read.

Stephenie Harrison lives and writes in Nashville.

Pop Culture

Pop Culture

Woodstock turns 40

Feature by Ron Wynn

by Ron Wynn

1969, when the Woodstock Music & Art Festival began. An event that brought more than half a million people to Max Yasgur’s farm in the Catskill Mountains of New York for three days of music and celebration, Woodstock signaled the popularity and potency of modern rock ’n’ roll in American society, and ultimately led to the creation of today’s popular music empire and celebrity culture. Three books, two new volumes and an updated reissue, provide exhaustive and often spirited accounts from insiders, historians and participants in the epic festival that paved the way for the convergence of commerce and culture that constitutes such contemporary spectacles as Bonnaroo.

Behind the scenes
The Road to Woodstock: From The Man Behind The Legendary Festival is famed promoter and artist manager Michael Lang’s account of the maneuvering, deal-making and deft planning that resulted in Woodstock. Only in his 20s, he’d already organized the Miami Pop Festival in 1968 and enjoyed producing other shows and concerts. He deemed himself part of a new generation rejecting the old social order and embracing fresh ideas about such issues as civil rights, sexuality and drugs. Lang envisioned Woodstock as much more than a series of concerts: it would also be a forum for alternative political and social philosophies, and a chance to debunk myths about long-haired kids, their music and their heroes.

The book documents the daily improvising on details like staging, security and contracts. Lang recruited the help of everyone from The Hog Farm, a commune whose assistance ranged from aiding victims of drug overdoses to providing food for hungry kids, to off-duty cops who took security gigs against the wishes of their superiors, and apprentice carpenters who helped design and build sets with minimal or no specifications.

It also contains several rare photographs and many great stories. These include Lang recruiting Peter Townshend of The Who by keeping him awake and plying him with alcohol, and getting a terrified Richie Havens to open the concert, then having him do so many encores he forgets the words to a number and starts wailing “Freedom.”

History of a phenom
If Lang’s book takes an ultra-personal approach, Brad Littleproud and Joanne Hague’s Woodstock: Peace, Music & Memories is the prototypical historical chronicle. Littleproud and Hague were too young to attend the festival, but they interviewed its co-creator and promoter Artie Kornfield, along with numerous Woodstock survivors. Their colorful chronicles add spice to what would otherwise be a dry factual summary of the concert and related episodes.

Kornfield’s anecdotes dovetail almost exactly with Lang’s, while the spicy rhetoric of such figures as peace activist Wavy Gravy shows that not everyone at Yasgur’s farm was in a joyous and giving mood. There are also 350 color and black-and-white pictures, many of them great candid shots of folks enjoying the music, being overcome by the spectacle and reveling in the atmosphere.

Picturing legends
Like Lang and Kornfield, photographer Elliott Landy considered himself part of the new order Woodstock was created to serve. But his involvement and connections came from the journalistic rather than musical end. He took pictures for various underground and alternative newspapers and magazines, and became friends with Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin before the festival. Landy was also a prolific contributor to record labels, providing spectacular shots that would become legendary album covers.

While Woodstock Vision: The Spirit of A Generation was first released in 1994, this latest version includes a special 90-page photo commemorative of the Woodstock festival personally selected by Landy from his archive. Because of his relationships with artists, his photos were never posed or staged. Whether it’s classic album covers like Dylan’s Nashville Skyline or Janis Joplin and Richie Havens before and after gut-wrenching Woodstock performances, Landy’s Woodstock Vision gives incredible entry into the personalities of icons.

There will be many other Woodstock retrospective items coming in the days leading up to the anniversary date. Still, these books are a fine addition to the legacy of sources that evaluate the three-day journey that helped change a nation’s culture.

Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville CityPaper and other publications.

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction & Fantasy

An epic quest

Feature by Sean Melican

by Sean Melican

When the Barenaked Ladies sang “Everything old is new again,” they probably weren’t referring to science fiction and fantasy. But if this month’s offerings are any indication, they certainly could have been. For August we have a new vision of elves, a Dyson sphere populated by historians, pirates and fools, and an anthology of vampires inhabiting a multitude of ecological niches.

The title of Elfland leads one to expect a traditional fantasy story—the orphaned hero, the last surviving remnant of the monarchy, a motley and moral fellowship, a great quest—but readers will be pleasantly surprised by the directions in which the story branches. Yes, the narrative engine is driven by the threat of a world-ending ice giant, Brawth, and the efforts of one man, Lawrence Wilder, the Gatekeeper between Earth and the Otherworld, to contain Brawth.But Freda Warrington’s novel rises above other fantasies by focusing on the lives of the densely interwoven Wilder and Fox families who are concerned with the threat, but not consumed by it. Though it’s branded as a fantasy, Elfland shares as much with mainstream fiction as it does genre. The novel begins when the oldest child is not yet an adolescent and ends well after he’s spent time in prison for murder and has (borrowing from the romance genre) stolen the heart of a woman who once despised him. The novel generates greater emotional responses from the warp and weft of the families’ twisted skein, including adultery, betrayal, incest, love, lust, murder and brutal secrets brought to light. It is a strong beginning for a series that has the potential to attract a diverse group of readers.

A fantastic new world
Even though three books in the Virga series come before it, The Sunless Countries doesn’t require any outside knowledge—an odd discovery in light of the novel’s philosophical stance. Virga is a mini-Dyson sphere with a nuclear fusion engine as its sun, and various wheeled cities rotating around even smaller fusion engines. Leal Maspeth is a tutor hoping to be promoted to faculty, but what is a historian to do when the ahistorical Eternists (straw-men stand-ins for Creationists and Wikipedia-ists) have taken control of her city? And what is she to do when she falls in with Hayden Griffin, the hero and sunlighter, just as a voice resounds through the world warning of impending doom for all Virga? As in many otherwise excellent hard science fiction novels, the characters here suffer from a certain flatness. Virga is a superb example of world-building, with complex visual wonders deftly handled by Karl Schroeder’s writing. Curiously, Leal’s historical view is oddly old-fashioned, seeing history as a collection of static, objective facts, which she sticks to despite the evidence that her own historical role will be read one of two ways—heroine or quisling—depending on whether she is alive or dead when the Eternists eventually fall. A fifth novel is demanded.

The vampire authority
Popularly, vampires have ranged from bogeymen to darkly sensual to angst-ridden, but John Joseph Adams’ hefty anthology, By Blood We Live, resurrects 37 incarnations. There are familiar names with familiar stories, most notably Armstrong, King, Lumley and Rice, who is represented by her only published piece of short fiction. Vampires appear in historical and mythological contexts, from the sinking of the Titanic to James Wentworth’s South Pole excursion, the American West to 1930s China, Roanoke to Fallujah. Often the setting is merely a place to locate the vampire, but some authors venture much further. In “Snow, Glass, Apples,” Neil Gaiman brilliantly re-examines the underlying assumptions of the Snow White mythology, and with Lilith Saintcrow’s pitch-perfect “A Standup Dame,” we are treated to a consideration of gender roles in noir genre. We learn what happened to Elvis and Gatsby, Jesus and the devil’s own son, among others. There is also lust, parasitism, violence and narrow escapes. More than anything, this anthology demonstrates that the vampire is not only undead but mutable, and in the best writers’ hands, a tool for analyzing our mortal frailty and resilience in the teeth of unadulterated evil and unimaginable love.

Sean Melican is the new science fiction and fantasy columnist for BookPage. In alphabetical order, he is a chemist, father, husband and writer.

Parenting

Parenting

New releases share the truth about parenting

Feature by Joanna Brichetto

by Joanna Brichetto

Meet some of the best parenting books of the year so far, culled from the gravid shelves at BookPage. Selected on individual merit, this disparate grouping nonetheless suggests a pattern: truth. These new books seem to concern themselves with rooting out truth no matter how entrenched the myth, how muddled the syndrome, how white the lie, and all entirely to our favor. Truth can be shocking. For example, what we thought was OK for kid’s health is bad, and what we thought was bad is actually OK. Or, we learn our ideals of the “good” mother and the “good” girl must be radically redefined. Or, we find the real nitty-gritty coming home with a newborn is not quite what we expected. Still, these books are just what the doctor should order: a frank, fearless and sometimes very funny heads-up. Of course, the ultimate parenting truth is that we all want to succeed, and with selections like these, we have a pretty good chance.

Myth-busters
How often have you heard these health facts: burns are best treated with ice, wounds should “air out” at night, spinach is a good source of iron, and teething can cause high fever? Guess what? These facts are fiction: baby myths, if you will. Pediatrician Andrew Adesman heard these and hundreds of other baby myths so often, he felt duty-bound to write a book: Babyfacts: the Truth About Your Child’s Health From Newborn Through Preschool. How about: raw carrots improve vision, green mucous always indicates a bacterial infection and cupcakes make kids hyper? Again, not true. If you are surprised, you aren’t alone: a pilot study showed a shocking number of pediatricians are just as credulous about these pervasive myths as the rest of us. Adesman deftly debunks the most common nuggets of misinformation in an easy-to-use, absorbing reference.

Open in case of emergency
The next book debunks myths too, but it specializes in how to distinguish a real emergency from a routine situation or a false alarm. Emergency room pediatrician Lara Zibners has the street cred to teach parents when a trip to the ER is a must, a maybe or a wait-and-see, and ditto for a regular acute office visit. In If Your Kid Eats This Book, Everything Will Still Be Okay, Dr. Zibners covers every category likely to be a concern at some point: newborn issues, skin, guts, “plumbing,” allergies, wounds, fever, head injuries and so on. The range is immense (and realistic): swallowed fish-tank gravel, super-glued body parts, high fevers or major trauma, she’s been there. A nice touch is the author’s overriding assertion that parents should always trust intuition: we know our own children best. Keep a copy in the medicine cabinet for quick, straightforward advice when you need it most.

In the trenches
Former war photojournalist Deborah Copaken Kogan is back with more stories from the family front. Picking up where her best-selling memoir Shutterbabe left off, Kogan weaves past and present into a wry portrait of real life at home. In Hell Is Other Parents: and Other Tales of Maternal Combustion the author confronts family challenges that make covering carnage in Afghanistan (which she has done) seem easy by comparison. Her frank take on Mommy & Me classes, life as a reluctant stage mother and encounters with parents who espouse decidedly different childrearing philosophies (i.e. helicopter parents) is delightful. So too are her flashbacks to younger and wilder days: days before she and her family of five must squeeze into a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment and get by on a freelancer’s pittance. Above all, do not miss the chapter about sharing a room in the maternity ward with the world’s rudest postpartum teenager.

Instruction manual
New moms and moms-to-be, meet your new best friend. Claudine Wolk, author of It Gets Easier! And Other Lies We Tell New Mothers, tells it (and all of it) like it really is: pregnancy, childbirth and those first, foggy baby months. Never mind all the other advice that will inevitably bombard the pregnant and postpartum: listen to her. Wolk, a mother of three, interviewed hundreds of women to find the real deal: the most helpful tips, most urgent issues and most practical solutions for the transition to motherhood. The three big common concerns—sleep, schedule and guilt—are covered in great detail, but each chapter is packed with invaluable, uncensored advice on absolutely everything. This book is precisely what the subtitle claims: “a fun, practical guide to becoming a mom.” Where, oh where was it when my two kids were new? A must for baby shower and new mom gifts.

The confident parent
Parents who have made it past the baby stage are ready for Jen Singer, award-winning mommy blogger and author of You’re a Good Mom. Singer’s new series began this spring with the publication of Stop Second-Guessing Yourself: The Toddler Years, and continues with the September release of Stop Second-Guessing Yourself: The Preschool Years. Singer’s cheery, no-nonsense style helps parents navigate the challenges unique to the three- to five-year-old set (or, as she calls them, “tiny teens in light-up sneakers”). Combining her own experiences with those of veteran moms from her website, MommaSaid.net, she gives the support, advice and insights most of us desperately need. Note the reassuring reader-contributed “It Worked for Me” and “Okay, I Admit It” boxes sprinkled throughout.

Giving girls voice
Rachel Simmons broke new ground with Odd Girl Out, the best-selling exploration of bullying among girls. With The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls With Courage and Confidence she turns her lens to the insidious myth of the Good Girl: a narrow and unrealistic model of female perfection. Far too many girls equate self-esteem with being “good”: thinking and acting only in modest, polite, conscientious and selfless ways. Such a limited repertoire of acceptable feelings limits the healthy development of real self esteem, body image and overall confidence, and prevents girls from cultivating potential. The pattern can start in early childhood and expand throughout life, affecting choices in education, career, relationships and family life, as well as a sense of purpose and worth. Simmons presents case studies and research to illustrate the complexities of the Good Girl syndrome, as well as numerous strategies we can all undertake to encourage the authentic inner—and ultimately outer—voice of girls.

Joanna Brichetto objects to the word “parent” used as a verb, but she parents a teen and a toddler, anyway.

Children's & YA, Picture Book

Children's & YA Picture Book

Back to school, with a smile

Feature by Robin Smith

by Robin Smith

With year-round school schedules and earlier and earlier starting dates, it’s sometimes hard to say when the back-to-school season for American kids begins. Those of us of a certain age know that school should start after Labor Day, but that, like cassette players and phones with cords, is just a quaint old-timey idea in many parts of the country.
No matter the start date in your area, it won’t be long before kindergartners and elementary school kids are looking for books to explain the world of school to them. Whenever your new school year begins, you can be ready with these new offerings and know that they will help pave the way to a successful school year.

It’s not just kids who go to school—buses make the daily trek, too. Poet Marilyn Singer explores in exuberant rhyme the trip to school in I’m Your Bus, illustrated by Evan Polenghi. Every page bustles with brightness and sparkle, and even the traffic lights on the dedication page have big smiling faces, ready for school! Short, easy-to-read rhymes keep this story moving. “Sweepers sweeping, bakers baking. / Dawn is barely even breaking. / Time for buses to be waking!” All the vehicles, from street sweepers and trucks to taxis and limos, are painted with wide, welcoming smiles—just the encouragement youngsters need to face a new school year. This would be a wonderful book to read on one of the first days of kindergarten, even if your kids walk or drive; the rhythm is infectious and the words are easy to memorize, which makes this a perfect choice for children who are excited about learning to read.

French lessons
Once parents have gotten their children over their concerns about school buses, the real issue will have to be faced: school itself. No matter the happy faces that parents put on, some kids do not want to go to school, ever. A newcomer to America, Stephanie Blake, has just the antidote for this reluctance with I Don’t Want to Go to School! Originally published in France, this is the humorous tale of Simon, a mischievous little rabbit who does not want to go to school. Each time one of his parents tells him all the great things that happen at school, he answers with just two words, “No way!” Despite his firm statements, the time for the first day keeps drawing nearer and nearer. Using a mixture of half-page illustrations, saturated primary colored backgrounds and amusing graphic elements, the story will have new readers delightfully unsure whether Simon will even go to school, let alone like it. American children will enjoy some of the details that mark this book as a little bit Continental—the children have chocolate mousse in the cafeteria, nap under a communal blanket and the blackboards and posters are written in cursive with the numbers one and seven jauntily crossed. Simon’s many facial expressions are a marvel as well. The endpapers alone will make the most worried kindergartner laugh! Simon might be the perfect friend to carry to school on the first day.

New beginnings
A much more serious offering about school adjustment is My Name is Sangoel by Karen Lynn Williams and Khadra Mohammed, illustrated by Catherine Stock. This is the gentle story of one refugee boy from Sudan and his adjustment to life in his new country, the United States. Young readers will quickly empathize with Sangoel as he, his mother and sister enter the bustling airport, filled with English signs and people speaking English. Because his father was killed in Sudan and he carries his Dinka name, Sangoel is the man of the family and the only one who speaks any English. The biggest adjustment for Sangoel is school. Everywhere he turns, people mispronounce his name, and he fears he will lose even that connection to his father. But his ingenuity pays off when he figures out a way to let everyone know just how his name is pronounced. Through soft watercolors and the occasional torn photo or fabric collage, Stock’s illustrations let the reader understand exactly how Sangoel is feeling and what a tremendous challenge it is to move to a new country and continent. Books like this tend to be preachy, but the writers keep the focus here on young Sangoel and his adjustment without veering into the political. Most schools in America have refugee children or children who are adjusting to a new culture and language; this is a book, along with Aliki’s excellent Marianthe’s Story, that should help build compassion in many classrooms.

Robin Smith teaches second grade in Nashville.

Education, Nonfiction, Parenting

Nonfiction Parenting Education

That old college try

Feature by Angela Leeper

by Angela Leeper

For many students across the nation, back to school means more than shopping for new pencils, backpacks and clothes. It’s time to start searching for the right college or preparing for the first year away from home. While either experience can be daunting for teens and parents alike, several new books guide readers through the college selection process, the transition to college and even adventurous alternatives to the traditional university route.

“No future decision will carry as much social visibility as the college choice,” contends college advisor and author Joyce Slayton Mitchell. In her accessible 8 First Choices: An Expert’s Strategies for Getting into College, she eases high school students’ pressure by walking them step by step through the college admissions process—from testing, researching universities and selecting eight first choices to how financial aid works and how to nail the college essay, application and interview. In an age where college applications are at an all-time high and still on the rise, she shows the specifics deans are looking for, with tips from some of the most selective universities. Mitchell also describes how to demonstrate diversity, personalize the college selection process and stand out among thousands of applications, even if you’re an overrepresented applicant. Above all, she encourages high school students to take ownership of the decisions that will direct their future. In a concluding chapter to parents, she addresses their concerns while gently reminding them to foster their children’s independence in this character-building experience.

Temptation Island
For young women who’ve earned a spot in college (hopefully, one of their eight first choices), U Chic: The College Girl’s Guide to Everything offers hip yet down-to-earth suggestions on all areas of campus life. More than 30 women who’ve recently graduated from universities across the country give an insider’s scoop on getting along with roommates, dorm decorating, sororities, college perks and thriving when in the minority. While they touch upon studying and other ways to succeed in class, deciding on a major, campus safety, budgets, exercise and nutrition, the majority of this guide is dedicated to topics that parents tend to avoid. As one contributor writes, “College is the ultimate Temptation Island.” Whether it’s ditching the dorm and getting more involved on campus, “tech etiquette for a Facebook Age,” the dating scene, sex ed, “dormcest,” partying responsibly, depression or eating disorders, the authors dish it out with frank advice on surviving the newfound freedoms and temptations.

Letting go
Teenagers may think they know everything, but they can always use some help making the switch from high school to college. So can parents. Marie Pinak Carr’s Sending Your Child to College: The Prepared Parent’s Operational Manual provides myriad tips for parents’ new role and for preparing their children for the next big step in their lives. Kicking off with the mountains of required paperwork and making sure they aren’t billed twice for insurance, this chatty guide also reminds parents about checking accounts, budgets, laundry, campus safety, alcohol and drug use and other important topics they need to discuss with their fledgling collegiates. While some chapters focus on more serious matters, such as navigating campus, travel arrangements, health care and car emergencies, other chapters on furnishing a dorm room and thematic care packages remember the fun side of college. For parents who really want to stay connected, there’s even a quick chapter on volunteer possibilities, whether near or far from campus. But it’s the extensive checklists and forms throughout that are reasons enough to purchase this useful manual.

While the book above touches on the practical side of college, Marjorie Savage’s You’re On Your Own (But I’m Here if You Need Me): Mentoring Your Child Through the College Years focuses on the emotional transition—for students and parents—and makes an excellent companion guide. For parents who want to give their children space but also want to know how soon they can call after settling them into their dorms, this comprehensive book explains the change from primary caregiver to proud mentor and supporter. It addresses how college affects the entire family, from students’ range of emotions, especially in their first six weeks away from home, to ways parents can avoid empty nest feelings. Always encouraging parents to help and not “helicopter,” the author does let them know when their insights are important to share in such matters as finances, health, safety and the social scene. Each chapter concludes with a list of “Quick Tips for Students” for parents to pass along to their children. And just when parents are starting to grasp their new relationships with their children, they come home again. Luckily, there’s a section that covers this adjustment, too!

Going global
If all the talk of standardized tests, college applications and high tuition rates are causing extreme dizziness and heart palpitations, then the “anti-college prep handbook” The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education may be the best guide yet. In the summer of 2005, author Maya Frost, her husband and four teenage daughters left their suburban life in Oregon to live around the world. Whether parents are considering sending their high school- or college-age children to study abroad or the “full-family deal,” a short stay or total immersion, Frost describes how all of these options focus on children’s total development rather than just on their education and help prepare them for a global workplace. While packing up the family and moving to a foreign country may seem scary or like a glamorous never-ending vacation, the author also explains how to let go of fear, numerous expat misconceptions and key qualities for making the experience a success. A plethora of first-hand statements from experienced travelers reveals invaluable insight and the inspiration to get up and go—abroad.

Angela Leeper is the Director of the Curriculum Materials Center at the University of Richmond.

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

You can do it

Feature by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

DIY has never been hotter. Thanks to the rise of hipster culture and the fall of the economy, crafting is uber-cool. Really, why pay for a pricey photo album, lamp or tote bag when a handmade one is personalized—and priceless? This sextet of new books offers inspiration, instructions and ideas aplenty. Craft on!

A new perspective on paper
In her introduction to Home, Paper, Scissors: Decorative Paper Accessories for the Home, Patricia Zapata confesses to a strong affinity for paper. So strong, in fact, that she collects all manner of colors, textures and types, but can’t bring herself to write on any of the precious pages. She can, however, create with them, and her book offers projects suitable for a wide range of tastes and skill-levels. How-tos (including photos, materials lists, patterns, and time-estimates) cover Decorating, Entertaining and Gifting, from a Fluttering Mobile to Mosaic Place Mats to a Pocket Photo Album. This lovely book is perfect for crafters looking to explore an inexpensive new medium.

A bevy of bags
By now, thanks to increased eco-awareness, most of us have purchased a few canvas totes—and maybe even remember to use them at the grocery store. With Sew What! Bags: 18 Pattern-Free Projects You Can Customize to Fit Your Needs, crafting veterans and amateurs alike can go a step further by designing and making their own totes, plus 17 other bag-esque projects. Author Lexie Barnes puts her experience as a handbags and accessories designer to work in this great guide, which includes detailed instructions, inspiring photos and plenty of you-can-do-it encouragement. Spot-on tips for hemming, choosing fabric and breaking out of the pattern mold help ensure this book is a crafter’s delight.

Dress up your dorm room
If Theresa Gonzalez and Nicole Smith have anything to say about it, dorm rooms will no longer be drab. Rather than view a 200-square-foot space as a bland box, they urge, “Think of it as a creative challenge.” And instead of fighting the arrival of the inevitable concrete block, view it as a bed-booster and a “cute bookend that you adapt into a cinderblock cozy.” While Dorm Decor: Remake Your Space with More Than 35 Projects mainly uses the feminine pronoun when addressing readers, guys would do well to check out the book as well; the sleek, Jonathan Adler-esque Stone’s Throw Pillow; the witty Oh Dear, Deer Head; and the ever-useful Laundry Day Backpack are just a few examples of projects that will appear to dorm-dwellers of either sex. The book (spiral-bound, with full-color photos) is organized by function, such as sleep, dress and hang out. This is one book enterprising crafters won’t mind studying.

Making the past present, through linens
EllynAnne Geisel knows her vintage linens. In The Kitchen Linens Book: Using, Sharing, and Cherishing the Fabric of Our Daily Lives she writes and rhapsodizes about tablecloths, hot pads, towels and more. A devoted fabric collector, she writes, “My vintage kitchen linens, like my aprons, speak of past generations, but they also inspire me to think of future gatherings.” To that end, Geisel provides instructions for fabric care, embellishing linens, packing a picnic and making a proper pot of tea. She also shares other linen aficionados’ touching stories and remembrances. There are recipes, too, and a vintage Butterick transfer pattern is tucked in the back. The author’s knowledge of and love for fabric artifacts is evident—and infectious—in this enjoyable read, which surely will inspire readers to look at linens from bygone days with renewed respect and appreciation.

Delicious creativity
From biscotti to fudge to preserves to spiced olives, Christmas Gifts from the Kitchen is just the book for creative types who like to bestow delicious homemade presents on family and friends. Traditional recipes—kugelhopf (a fruit-and-nut cake), gingerbread and macaroons—mingle with more unusual ones, including Pine Nut Brittle, Candied Grapefruit Peel and Lemon Spice Olives. Foodwriter and farmer Georgeann Brennan provides gift-packaging ideas as well, such as glittery cones to hold candy, a teacup-as-cookie-holder and a bread board as the foundation for packaging a cake. Readers likely will want to dive into these recipes—and begin taste-testing—right away.

T-shirt transformation redux
When it comes to t-shirts, Megan Nicolay is a seemingly tireless innovator. In her follow-up to the popular Generation T: 108 Ways to Transform a T-shirt, the author has come up with ideas for scarves, oven mitts, dresses, baby booties—and of course, a selection of t-shirts with a twist. In Generation T: Beyond Fashion: 120 New Ways to Transform a T-shirt, witty titles (Pom-Pom Circumstance for a toddler’s hat, Love it or Weave It for a crisscross tank top) share space with step-by-step instructions, line drawings, variations and photos of people and pets wearing the creations. Projects such as a wine cozy, pet bed, plant hanger and car floor mats up the DIY ante, but tutorials on tying, stitching and laundering—plus no-sew options—will boost beginners’ confidence. Thanks to the projects’ low-cost raw materials (t-shirts the crafter is already hoarding, scissors and a needle and thread) they offer crafters a recession-proof way to perk up a wardrobe, add some oomph to household décor or give thoughtful and personalized gifts. Generation T: Beyond Fashion is a t-shirt-transformation sourcebook that crafters will refer to again and again.

Linda M. Castellitto has plans for her stack of concert t-shirts.

Animals

Animals

A walk on the wild side

Feature by Deanna Larson

by Deanna Larson

The animal kingdom is full of insights into human nature. These new books give readers a fascinating glimpse of some of the connections.

Near and deer
Nature as nemesis is a foreign concept to anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (The Secret Life of Dogs), who embraces and even encourages the scourge of modern suburban gardeners in The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World (Harper, $24.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9780061792106). One fall, Thomas noticed that acorns were thin on the ground around her New Hampshire farmhouse, so she sprinkled corn on the ground for the wild turkeys.

Then came the hungry deer. Thomas, who grew up with her scientist parents among the Kalahari people of Africa, started scattering pounds of corn each day, the better to attract, track and observe usually hidden deer behaviors. “I could do no more than the bears and whitetails do—keep looking and listening for more information,” Thomas writes of her curiosity about the deer. “You find questions you cannot answer, and mysteries you cannot solve.”

As she begins to identify each doe, buck and fawn and follows the herds from season to season, Thomas draws readers into her compassionate, insightful accounts of everyday courage on behalf of wildlife, including standing up to an armed neighbor to make sure an injured bear wasn’t shot dead (he later bends her backyard birdfeeder pole like a paper clip and casually empties the seed into his mouth, proof of his vitality). Her accounts of the treatment of whitetail deer that survive impacts with cars are heartbreaking, but this “tree-hugging grandmother” passes a hunting license course with a near perfect score at the age of 68 and then goes hunting with her neighbor in the name of conservation and research. “I didn’t learn how to hunt but I did learn how it feels to hunt,” she writes, “which is all I really wanted.” Anyone with an interest in wildlife will adore spending time with Thomas and her sensitive, inquisitive mind.

Amazing animal rescues
World-renowned ethologist and anthropologist Dr. Jane Goodall made her name studying and living among the chimpanzees of Tanzania. She later founded the Jane Goodall Institute, a nonprofit that encourages individuals to take “informed and compassionate action to improve the environment of all living things.” Horrified by the destruction of primate habitats, she left the field in the mid-1980s to raise awareness about conservation. Her new book, Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink, co-written with Cincinnati Zoo director Thane Maynard, host of the NPR’s The 90-Second Naturalist, is a report on species once on the verge of extinction whose populations are now being revived.

Gathered firsthand by Goodall and colleagues in the field, and from scientific and historical record, these accounts detail the heartening yet life-threatening challenges of conservation work. From the graduate student who dyed the tufts on the heads of cotton-top tamarin monkeys to tell them apart while observing this endangered primate, to the 19th-century lighthouse cat that killed the last remaining wrens on Stephen’s Island, New Zealand, to the California condor chick reintroduced into the wild and then rushed into surgery after its young parents fed it trash instead of bone fragments, these stories could galvanize even the most cosseted animal lover to action. “It comes down to a conflict between concern for the individual and concern for the future of a species,” Goodall writes. “[But] I found that people got really excited about the idea of sharing the good news, shining a light on all the projects, large and small, that together are gradually healing some of the harm we have inflicted.”

Finding the wolf within
Did the dog and human evolve together, and did canines become so successful because they had access to the even bigger human brain? Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Jon Franklin (Molecules of the Mind) uses research in brain science and anthropology, plus interviews with experts and primary experience with his own dog, to explore the relationship between ancient wolves, canines and humans in The Wolf in the Parlor: The Eternal Connection Between Humans and Dogs. “With respect to dogs,” Franklin writes, “the picture science had painted for us was woefully inadequate.” So he sets out on a long, smart and sometimes meandering research trip into the evolution of the wolf brain and its possible relationship to human and canine development.

Franklin tracks down the sexy and non-sexy research into canine evolution, and therefore, human evolution— from current research into what transformed humans 12,000 years ago, canine fossil material found in China, 150,000-year-old wolf skulls in an ancient cave and the lack of grant money to research dogs. (“I can’t get money for work on dogs,” one scientist laments. “I’m tired of struggling with it. Nobody cares about dogs.”) The story really gets interesting when Franklin gets a poodle puppy, Charlie, as a “marriage price” from his wife, then reluctantly observes the lengths to which humans go to “train” their companions, and how their efforts often say more about the humans than the dogs. He watches his wife prepare Charlie for competitive obedience trials (“Could dogs be a tool of one’s ambition?”) and goes to the nursing home where Charlie performs “songs” and realizes he can’t laugh with him, only at him, and that the dog knows the difference. As he muses on his dog as an “amplifier of nature,” Franklin leads dog lovers to ponder the critical role their own pets may play in shaping their daily lives.

Cat fancier
Millions of viewers fell in love with the story of Christian the lion on YouTube, wishing they were the ones getting that big cat hug. Kevin Richardson has lived that fantasy as a self-taught behaviorist and animal custodian at Kingdom of the White Lion in South Africa. He teams with writer Tony Park for a fascinating glimpse into the dangers and joys of working with lions, hyenas and other predators in Part of the Pride: My Life Among the Big Cats of Africa. Working as an exercise physiologist after college, Richardson met a rich man who had just bought a local lion park and encouraged him to visit with two little lion cubs, Tau and Napoleon. “Before I knew it,” Richardson writes, “I was responsible for an entire family of extreme creatures.” Without aspirations to become an animal wrangler or leeu boer (Afrikaans for lion farmer), the former zoology major instead developed relationships with these dangerous animals without a stick—the usual way of handling lions at the time—feeding them from his hand and following his own observations and instincts. Richardson still gets his fair share of lion “slap arounds” and tooclose encounters, which make for hair-raising reading. His respect for the big cats as he continues to learn and risk all makes his story endlessly fascinating.

The animal kingdom is full of insights into human nature. These new books give readers a fascinating glimpse of some of the connections.

Near and deer
Nature as nemesis is a foreign concept to anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (The Secret Life of Dogs), who…

Becoming a writer

Feature by Tom Robinson

by Tom Robinson

In this feature exclusive to BookPage.com, each month, four authors are asked a question about the craft of writing to give readers an insight into how their favorite writers think and work. For September's author forum, BookPage brought together Jeff Abbott, Heather Graham, Alex Kava and J.D. Rhoades to ask: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

JEFF ABBOTT

I rocked Show and Tell in first grade. When other kids brought in lizards and paintings, I announced I’d spent the weekend in Montana fighting aliens alongside cowboys. After the third week of hearing my extraordinary adventures, my teacher called my parents and suggested they get me a Big Chief tablet and a Husky pencil. I started writing down my big fat lies. And wow, on paper I could say so much more than I could in the three minutes allotted for Show and Tell. I was six; my mother still has all those stories. And my grandmother told me the people who wrote the books that I loved, and that she shared with me, had started off spinning oversized yarns, just like me. I knew then I wanted to write books.
Jeff Abbott writes suspense from his home in Austin.

HEATHER GRAHAM

Like most people, I went through wanting to do many things for a living. I have wanted to be a veterinarian, royalty (knew that was a lost cause early on!) marine biologist, dolphin trainer, salvage diver . . . when I reached high school and college, it was becoming anything in the theater, preferably an actress in award winning musicals. I made it as far as a traveling company associated with USF, dinner theater in Florida (almost an oxymoron at the time!) a stint as a singing tap dancing waitress who sold ribs, and a "pointer" for a number of training tapes. Oh, yes, and there were the "Trim-Twist" commercials. Anyway, by the time I had three of the five children, it cost me far too much to go to work, and I stayed home with the children, but we had been accustomed to two incomes, and I was (and still am) an absolutely horrible housekeeper. I had always loved books. Reading. Something I still find to be the catalyst for most people, whether they're writing hardcore horror, inspirational romance, technical thrillers, occult, historical, and so on. I never thought I could write better books than what I was reading—I wanted to write books that could do to others the wonderful things so many book did for me. Entrance, scare, fascinate—and long to know more or see more. I didn't know a soul who wrote, and so I bought a book called Writer's Digest, and blindly began sending off manuscripts and short stories. The short stories were usually horror, and went out to Black Cat, Twilight Zone and other such venues, and the books were going off to Dell, Bantam and other houses. I was very lucky when I had a book picked up by Dell, though my first sale was a short horror story. I quickly ascertained that books could provide an income, and I was again, blessed, to get in at a time when houses were buying short romances with a rabid hunger.
Heather Graham writes romantic suspense, as well as historical romance under the name Shannon Drake.

ALEX KAVA

In sixth grade Mrs. Powers read to us after lunch, books like Charlie the Lonesome Cougar and Harriet the Spy. I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, yet, but I loved how words could trigger the imagination and evoke such incredible emotion. By thirteen I was writing “stories” on the backs of outdated Co-op Grain calendars. They were spiral-bound and 52 pages and because they had been discarded no one cared what I did with them, as they might with a brand new notebook. But no one I knew made a living making up stories and writing them down. So it wasn't until 25 years later that I decided to sit down and give it a try. My first attempt received 116 rejections. That manuscript has never been published but it taught me something very important—I really did want to be a writer.
Alex Kava writes a series starring FBI profiler Maggie O'Dell.

JD RHOADES

Unlike a lot of writers, writing novels wasn’t my childhood dream. I’d always been a voracious reader, but most of my writing had been short satirical pieces, with a few stories thrown in. A snarky letter to the editor led to a gig writing a weekly humorous political column for my local paper. After a couple of years, my editor said “you know, you’re a pretty good writer, why don’t you try a novel?” I looked at some of the dreck that was on the market and thought, “Hey, how hard can it be?” Isn’t naïveté a wonderful thing? I discovered that the answer is “very hard indeed.” But once you do it, once you’ve laid a story down on paper all the way to writing “The END” for the first time, it’s even harder to stop.
J.D. Rhoades practices law and writes suspense novels from his home in North Carolina.

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Tom Robinson is an author publicist and media consultant working with authors across the country. Visit his website.

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