bookpagedev

Business & Finance

Real emotion: connecting the head to the heart in decision making

Review by bookpagedev

Think back to the last time you made a decision based solely on cold, hard logic. Having trouble? Much as we’d like to be rational, the truth is we’re often ruled by our emotions. We go back to the store that feels comfortable, we buy the dress that makes us feel sexy, we eat at the restaurant that makes us feel at home. Here’s the lesson all marketers and managers should heed: It’s time to get in touch with your emotions, and three new business books can show you how to achieve this elusive goal.

Going out of your mind Jack Zufelt is a top professional speaker, a successful trainer and a highly acclaimed consultant and entrepreneur. Not exactly the guy you’d expect to dismiss goal-setting, self-help books and even motivational speakers in his new book The DNA of Success: Know What You Want to Get What You Want (HarperCollins, $26.00, 224 pages, ISBN 0060006587). Success is “an inside job,” says Zufelt, one that defies the rational baggage of “shoulds” and “ought-tos.” Instead, he says it’s time to get out of your head and tap into your emotions to find out what your heart truly yearns for. Those “core desires” in turn ignite the powerful “conquering forces” that motivate you to overcome all obstacles.

To be honest, it is work digging down to those core desires, but the process can be revelatory and even fun when done with a partner. The reward is in finally figuring out what you truly desire and discovering the passion to go out and achieve it.

Zufelt simplifies the complex ideas with his positive, can-do approach and includes plenty of personal stories. He moves beyond business applications to show how your core desires relate to creating family relationships, growing spiritually and improving self-image. The road to riches The team that created the blockbuster First, Break All the Rules is back with new revelations in Follow This Path (Warner, $26.95, 256 pages, ISBN 0446530506). Most companies are hoping to find the road to riches by tweaking price or by slapping “new ∧ improved!” everywhere, but that’s a dead end, say Curt Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina. Customers base their loyalty on the way your company makes them feel, and it’s your employees that make or break that connection.

The commonsense ideas are based on a study by the Gallup Organization that questioned more than 10 million customers, three million employees and 200,000 managers. The findings concluded that what customers buy and keep buying is based on how they feel, and the best way to connect with a customer’s emotion is not through brands, slogans or jingles, but another human being. It’s a wake-up call for companies who are ignoring the untapped resources of their work force. The ideas seem simple develop employees’ strengths instead of fixing weaknesses; don’t treat everyone the same way but finding a company that recognizes the emotion-driven economy is rare.

Follow This Path creates an easy-to-follow road map for managers who want to engage and inspire their employees. The authors outline 34 different talent areas, describe the kind of work environment employees want and show managers how to achieve it. The 12 conditions of a great workplace (“There is someone at work who encourages my development” and “I have a best friend at work”) might sound like utopia for workers, but today’s great companies are finding a way to make it a reality.

The pursuit of pleasure Melinda Davis’ The New Culture of Desire is a challenging look at what motivates us in today’s hyper-connected world (Free Press, $26, 288 pages, ISBN 074320459X). The goal of Davis’ company, The Next Group, is to get inside the minds of today’s consumers, and during the past six years they have probed the shift in human desires. According to Davis, the old motivators sex, money and power have taken a back seat to the new driving force in human behavior: the pursuit of pleasure.

Davis begins by laying out the complicated assertion that the physical world is dead, and we’ve moved into what she calls “imaginational reality.” With pervasive technology and media coming at us from every direction, we have abandoned concrete reality and now live our lives in our heads. It’s a thought-provoking idea that has the scary ring of truth.

Now that we’ve transitioned into a new reality, we’ve developed a new survival instinct, says Davis. Instead of worrying about physical attacks, we’re now protecting our brains from assault. We’ve all become “imaginational age mental patients” looking for a product or service to be our healer.

If Davis still sounds like the crazy one, think about the $15 billion we spend each year on antidepressants. And that doesn’t include the tab on bubble baths, chocolate, alcohol and all the other guilty pleasures we use to self-medicate. Whether you agree with Davis’ ideas or not, The New Culture of Desire is fascinating reading that leaves you thinking about the changed reality in which we live.

Busting the Boom-Boom Room Nick Cuneo was the ultimate macho boss. The Smith Barney branch manager was notoriously creative with the F-word, kept a gun in his desk and instituted an infamous basement party room dubbed the Boom-Boom Room where happy hour started as early as 10 a.m. The Garden City, New York, branch and its boss were consistently top performers for the financial services firm, but the good times didn’t make up for the consistent abuse and intimidation directed toward female employees. Fed up with the groping and discrimination, women Cuneo had labeled with such nicknames as the Stepford Wife and the Playboy Bunny fought back with a class action lawsuit.

Journalist Susan Antilla tells the riveting story in Tales from the Boom-Boom Room: Women vs. Wall Street. Antilla followed the case from its beginnings, and the result is an intriguing cross between Liar’s Poker and A Civil Action. Readers get a fascinating look at the appalling behavior Wall Street chose to ignore and a guide through the machinations of a landmark case.

Led by outspoken broker Pamela Martens, women from Smith Barney branches across the country came together to expose the sexual hazing and unequal pay practices that damaged their careers. Most of the women involved in the suit are now forbidden to talk about the case because of settlement agreements, but Antilla vividly re-creates the characters and events. This story doesn’t come with a happy ending; many of the women quit their jobs or left the industry altogether and some dropped their complaints rather than face the daunting legal process with no sure reward. But Wall Street fears bad publicity even more than litigation, and this riveting human and legal drama will ensure that the stories told by these courageous women won’t be forgotten.

Think back to the last time you made a decision based solely on cold, hard logic. Having trouble? Much as we'd like to be rational, the truth is we're often ruled by our emotions. We go back to the store that feels comfortable, we buy…
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

In the desert with Rommel

Review by bookpagedev

Author Steven Pressfield has forged a considerable reputation as a historical novelist, focusing on the more ancient civilizations. His 1998 novel Gates of Fire, about the 300 Spartans who defended Thermopylae against an overwhelming number of Xerxes’ troops in 480 B.C., helped inspire a whole new wave of interest in that heroic encounter. Now he turns his sights on the desert war of World War II and the formidable talents of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the so-called “Desert Fox.” Told as a written memoir from a young British lieutenant, R. Lawrence Chapman (aka Chap), Killing Rommel chronicles the deadly mission of a commando unit, the Long Range Desert Group, as it tries to outmaneuver Rommel and assassinate him. It’s a daring, even reckless endeavor that takes a special group of men.

Pressfield has never been shy about sharing his vast knowledge of ancient weaponry and now, moving to the era of World War II, he hasn’t lost a step or a spear. And yet he’s smart enough not to allow didactics to get in the way of good drama. While the weapons have changed greatly, the men in the trenches haven’t, and few writers handle the intense camaraderie of fighting men better than Pressfield. The desert itself emerges as a character, as in this passage where Chap muses on its timelessness and his relationship to it. “I am an ordinary Englishman, barely out of my university years. Yet here I sit, in the vastness of the African night, surrounded by mates who could have stepped from Caesar’s legions or Alexander’s phalanx.” As you ride in the tanks with the men toward the conclusion of the novel, you come to realize that what happens to Rommel doesn’t really matter. The German commander is respected on both sides for his gentlemanly behavior toward troops. He refuses to execute POWS or Jews, earning the wrath of Hitler and sealing his own fate. No, it’s what happens to the men we’ve come to know through Pressfield’s masterly characterizations that has become so vital.

Michael Lee is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Author Steven Pressfield has forged a considerable reputation as a historical novelist, focusing on the more ancient civilizations. His 1998 novel Gates of Fire, about the 300 Spartans who defended Thermopylae against an overwhelming number of Xerxes' troops in 480 B.C., helped inspire a whole…
Fiction

What fools these mortals be

Review by bookpagedev

From across the pond and across the centuries, the words of Stratford-upon-Avon’s most famous resident have never rung with such screwball truthiness as in Jess Winfield’s My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare.

Winfield, who as co-founder of the hilariously funny Reduced Shakespeare Company holds the world record for the shortest-ever production of Hamlet (43 seconds), stretches out in his first novel, contrasting the travails of UC Santa Cruz graduate student William Shakespeare Greenberg with those of the Bard himself.

Each enmeshed in comparative backwaters of academia – Greenberg writing his master’s thesis, Shakespeare teaching Latin to recalcitrant youth – our two scholars find their lives transformed in strange and mysterious (and oddly parallel) ways by sacred talismans entrusted to them for delivery to a third party. In Shakespeare’s case, it’s a Catholic relic; in Greenberg’s, it’s a giant mushroom of the species Psilocybe cubensis. Both objects are on their respective government’s to-don’t list, and place their bearers in some peril.

Each alternating chapter opens with either a Shakespeare quote (the Greenberg chronicles) or a paragraph of lit crit (when the Bard takes the stage). But throughout, My Name Is Will deftly avoids the musty bouquet of the library stacks as Winfield’s twin heroes vault off the page in 3-D, Technicolor, surround-sound exuberance. With Winfield, as with his muse, the wordplay’s the thing, and both of his Shakespeares live by their wit – sharp-thinking, sharp-tongued observers in a world that seems alternately obliging and oppressive.

And, without giving anything away, even Winfield’s old troupe makes a cameo at the story’s end, albeit in disguise. To borrow a line from guess who, “That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” One cautionary note: mindest thou this fair novel’s subtitle! and were by bawdy tales thy temper e’er distress’d, then from this work thy fancy best should fly; but those of sterner stuff shall see themselves impress’d, and to their great delight to it should hie.

From across the pond and across the centuries, the words of Stratford-upon-Avon's most famous resident have never rung with such screwball truthiness as in Jess Winfield's My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare.

Winfield, who as co-founder of the…
Business & Finance

Real emotion: connecting the head to the heart in decision making

Review by bookpagedev

Think back to the last time you made a decision based solely on cold, hard logic. Having trouble? Much as we’d like to be rational, the truth is we’re often ruled by our emotions. We go back to the store that feels comfortable, we buy the dress that makes us feel sexy, we eat at the restaurant that makes us feel at home. Here’s the lesson all marketers and managers should heed: It’s time to get in touch with your emotions, and three new business books can show you how to achieve this elusive goal.

Going out of your mind Jack Zufelt is a top professional speaker, a successful trainer and a highly acclaimed consultant and entrepreneur. Not exactly the guy you’d expect to dismiss goal-setting, self-help books and even motivational speakers in his new book The DNA of Success: Know What You Want to Get What You Want (HarperCollins, $26.00, 224 pages, ISBN 0060006587). Success is "an inside job," says Zufelt, one that defies the rational baggage of "shoulds" and "ought-tos." Instead, he says it’s time to get out of your head and tap into your emotions to find out what your heart truly yearns for. Those "core desires" in turn ignite the powerful "conquering forces" that motivate you to overcome all obstacles.

To be honest, it is work digging down to those core desires, but the process can be revelatory and even fun when done with a partner. The reward is in finally figuring out what you truly desire and discovering the passion to go out and achieve it.

Zufelt simplifies the complex ideas with his positive, can-do approach and includes plenty of personal stories. He moves beyond business applications to show how your core desires relate to creating family relationships, growing spiritually and improving self-image. The road to riches The team that created the blockbuster First, Break All the Rules is back with new revelations in Follow This Path. Most companies are hoping to find the road to riches by tweaking price or by slapping "new ∧ improved!" everywhere, but that’s a dead end, say Curt Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina. Customers base their loyalty on the way your company makes them feel, and it’s your employees that make or break that connection.

The commonsense ideas are based on a study by the Gallup Organization that questioned more than 10 million customers, three million employees and 200,000 managers. The findings concluded that what customers buy and keep buying is based on how they feel, and the best way to connect with a customer’s emotion is not through brands, slogans or jingles, but another human being. It’s a wake-up call for companies who are ignoring the untapped resources of their work force. The ideas seem simple develop employees’ strengths instead of fixing weaknesses; don’t treat everyone the same way but finding a company that recognizes the emotion-driven economy is rare.

Follow This Path creates an easy-to-follow road map for managers who want to engage and inspire their employees. The authors outline 34 different talent areas, describe the kind of work environment employees want and show managers how to achieve it. The 12 conditions of a great workplace ("There is someone at work who encourages my development" and "I have a best friend at work") might sound like utopia for workers, but today’s great companies are finding a way to make it a reality.

The pursuit of pleasure Melinda Davis’ The New Culture of Desire is a challenging look at what motivates us in today’s hyper-connected world (Free Press, $26, 288 pages, ISBN 074320459X). The goal of Davis’ company, The Next Group, is to get inside the minds of today’s consumers, and during the past six years they have probed the shift in human desires. According to Davis, the old motivators sex, money and power have taken a back seat to the new driving force in human behavior: the pursuit of pleasure.

Davis begins by laying out the complicated assertion that the physical world is dead, and we’ve moved into what she calls "imaginational reality." With pervasive technology and media coming at us from every direction, we have abandoned concrete reality and now live our lives in our heads. It’s a thought-provoking idea that has the scary ring of truth.

Now that we’ve transitioned into a new reality, we’ve developed a new survival instinct, says Davis. Instead of worrying about physical attacks, we’re now protecting our brains from assault. We’ve all become "imaginational age mental patients" looking for a product or service to be our healer.

If Davis still sounds like the crazy one, think about the $15 billion we spend each year on antidepressants. And that doesn’t include the tab on bubble baths, chocolate, alcohol and all the other guilty pleasures we use to self-medicate. Whether you agree with Davis’ ideas or not, The New Culture of Desire is fascinating reading that leaves you thinking about the changed reality in which we live.

Busting the Boom-Boom Room Nick Cuneo was the ultimate macho boss. The Smith Barney branch manager was notoriously creative with the F-word, kept a gun in his desk and instituted an infamous basement party room dubbed the Boom-Boom Room where happy hour started as early as 10 a.m. The Garden City, New York, branch and its boss were consistently top performers for the financial services firm, but the good times didn’t make up for the consistent abuse and intimidation directed toward female employees. Fed up with the groping and discrimination, women Cuneo had labeled with such nicknames as the Stepford Wife and the Playboy Bunny fought back with a class action lawsuit.

Journalist Susan Antilla tells the riveting story in Tales from the Boom-Boom Room: Women vs. Wall Street (Bloomberg, $26.95, 384 pages, ISBN 1576600785). Antilla followed the case from its beginnings, and the result is an intriguing cross between Liar’s Poker and A Civil Action. Readers get a fascinating look at the appalling behavior Wall Street chose to ignore and a guide through the machinations of a landmark case.

Led by outspoken broker Pamela Martens, women from Smith Barney branches across the country came together to expose the sexual hazing and unequal pay practices that damaged their careers. Most of the women involved in the suit are now forbidden to talk about the case because of settlement agreements, but Antilla vividly re-creates the characters and events. This story doesn’t come with a happy ending; many of the women quit their jobs or left the industry altogether and some dropped their complaints rather than face the daunting legal process with no sure reward. But Wall Street fears bad publicity even more than litigation, and this riveting human and legal drama will ensure that the stories told by these courageous women won’t be forgotten.

 

Think back to the last time you made a decision based solely on cold, hard logic. Having trouble? Much as we'd like to be rational, the truth is we're often ruled by our emotions. We go back to the store that feels comfortable, we…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Kansas girl with Hollywood dreams

Review by bookpagedev

Erin McGraw has made her mark with short stories peopled by quirky yet thoroughly believable characters caught up in the vagaries of familial relationships. In The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, her second novel, McGraw has taken the skeleton of her own grandmother’s story and turned it into a frank and engaging depiction of one young woman’s attempt to reinvent herself.

At 17, Nell Plat is immersed on a Kansas farm, married to Jack, a dull, thoughtless mama’s boy who is disdainful of Nell’s lack of culinary skills and unappreciative of her increasing renown as a seamstress. Nell is completely unprepared for motherhood, and her first child, Lucille, leaves her mired in depression. As Nell sews fashionable dresses for the town’s upper crust, she begins to imagine another life – “where no baby cried and no wind blew.” After the birth of her second daughter, Amelia, Jack becomes scornful of her mothering; when he sells her sewing machine out from under her, Nell is gone. She takes the dollars she has painstakingly socked away, leaves Jack and the girls to his mother’s care, and heads to Los Angeles, her vision of paradise.

Nell works as a “shoppie” in a succession of clothing stores, and spends her nights as Madame Annelle, sewing dresses for the fashion-conscious matrons of Pasadena. Eventually she quits her day job and becomes self-employed, pushing thoughts of her daughters into the background.

McGraw’s research into Hollywood in the ’20s and its burgeoning movie business blends seamlessly with Nell’s saga, as she first sews, then designs, costumes for the stars. She marries George, an oil man, and gives birth to Mary, her first truly wanted daughter. But George is resentful of her career, sarcastically referring to her as “the seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard.” The inevitable reckoning with Nell’s past arrives unexpectedly when Lucille and Amelia suddenly appear. The ways in which Nell copes with the revelation of her past brings McGraw’s enlightening novel full circle, and brings her tribute to her grandmother’s gumption to a hopeful, if bittersweet, conclusion.

Deborah Donovan writes from La Veta, Colorado.

Erin McGraw has made her mark with short stories peopled by quirky yet thoroughly believable characters caught up in the vagaries of familial relationships. In The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, her second novel, McGraw has taken the skeleton of her own grandmother's story and turned…
Business & Finance

Real emotion: connecting the head to the heart in decision making

Review by bookpagedev

Think back to the last time you made a decision based solely on cold, hard logic. Having trouble? Much as we’d like to be rational, the truth is we’re often ruled by our emotions. We go back to the store that feels comfortable, we buy the dress that makes us feel sexy, we eat at the restaurant that makes us feel at home. Here’s the lesson all marketers and managers should heed: It’s time to get in touch with your emotions, and three new business books can show you how to achieve this elusive goal.

Going out of your mind

Jack Zufelt is a top professional speaker, a successful trainer and a highly acclaimed consultant and entrepreneur. Not exactly the guy you’d expect to dismiss goal-setting, self-help books and even motivational speakers in his new book The DNA of Success: Know What You Want to Get What You Want . Success is "an inside job," says Zufelt, one that defies the rational baggage of "shoulds" and "ought-tos." Instead, he says it’s time to get out of your head and tap into your emotions to find out what your heart truly yearns for. Those "core desires" in turn ignite the powerful "conquering forces" that motivate you to overcome all obstacles.

To be honest, it is work digging down to those core desires, but the process can be revelatory and even fun when done with a partner. The reward is in finally figuring out what you truly desire and discovering the passion to go out and achieve it.

Zufelt simplifies the complex ideas with his positive, can-do approach and includes plenty of personal stories. He moves beyond business applications to show how your core desires relate to creating family relationships, growing spiritually and improving self-image.

The road to riches

The team that created the blockbuster First, Break All the Rules is back with new revelations in Follow This Path (Warner, $26.95, 256 pages, ISBN 0446530506). Most companies are hoping to find the road to riches by tweaking price or by slapping "new & improved!" everywhere, but that’s a dead end, say Curt Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina. Customers base their loyalty on the way your company makes them feel, and it’s your employees that make or break that connection.

The commonsense ideas are based on a study by the Gallup Organization that questioned more than 10 million customers, three million employees and 200,000 managers. The findings concluded that what customers buy and keep buying is based on how they feel, and the best way to connect with a customer’s emotion is not through brands, slogans or jingles, but another human being. It’s a wake-up call for companies who are ignoring the untapped resources of their work force. The ideas seem simple develop employees’ strengths instead of fixing weaknesses; don’t treat everyone the same way but finding a company that recognizes the emotion-driven economy is rare.

Follow This Path creates an easy-to-follow road map for managers who want to engage and inspire their employees. The authors outline 34 different talent areas, describe the kind of work environment employees want and show managers how to achieve it. The 12 conditions of a great workplace ("There is someone at work who encourages my development" and "I have a best friend at work") might sound like utopia for workers, but today’s great companies are finding a way to make it a reality.

The pursuit of pleasure

Melinda Davis’ The New Culture of Desire is a challenging look at what motivates us in today’s hyper-connected world (Free Press, $26, 288 pages, ISBN 074320459X). The goal of Davis’ company, The Next Group, is to get inside the minds of today’s consumers, and during the past six years they have probed the shift in human desires. According to Davis, the old motivators sex, money and power have taken a back seat to the new driving force in human behavior: the pursuit of pleasure.

Davis begins by laying out the complicated assertion that the physical world is dead, and we’ve moved into what she calls "imaginational reality." With pervasive technology and media coming at us from every direction, we have abandoned concrete reality and now live our lives in our heads. It’s a thought-provoking idea that has the scary ring of truth.

Now that we’ve transitioned into a new reality, we’ve developed a new survival instinct, says Davis. Instead of worrying about physical attacks, we’re now protecting our brains from assault. We’ve all become "imaginational age mental patients" looking for a product or service to be our healer.

If Davis still sounds like the crazy one, think about the $15 billion we spend each year on antidepressants. And that doesn’t include the tab on bubble baths, chocolate, alcohol and all the other guilty pleasures we use to self-medicate. Whether you agree with Davis’ ideas or not, The New Culture of Desire is fascinating reading that leaves you thinking about the changed reality in which we live.

Busting the Boom-Boom Room

Nick Cuneo was the ultimate macho boss. The Smith Barney branch manager was notoriously creative with the F-word, kept a gun in his desk and instituted an infamous basement party room dubbed the Boom-Boom Room where happy hour started as early as 10 a.m. The Garden City, New York, branch and its boss were consistently top performers for the financial services firm, but the good times didn’t make up for the consistent abuse and intimidation directed toward female employees. Fed up with the groping and discrimination, women Cuneo had labeled with such nicknames as the Stepford Wife and the Playboy Bunny fought back with a class action lawsuit.

Journalist Susan Antilla tells the riveting story in Tales from the Boom-Boom Room: Women vs. Wall Street (Bloomberg, $26.95, 384 pages, ISBN 1576600785). Antilla followed the case from its beginnings, and the result is an intriguing cross between Liar’s Poker and A Civil Action. Readers get a fascinating look at the appalling behavior Wall Street chose to ignore and a guide through the machinations of a landmark case.

Led by outspoken broker Pamela Martens, women from Smith Barney branches across the country came together to expose the sexual hazing and unequal pay practices that damaged their careers. Most of the women involved in the suit are now forbidden to talk about the case because of settlement agreements, but Antilla vividly re-creates the characters and events. This story doesn’t come with a happy ending; many of the women quit their jobs or left the industry altogether and some dropped their complaints rather than face the daunting legal process with no sure reward. But Wall Street fears bad publicity even more than litigation, and this riveting human and legal drama will ensure that the stories told by these courageous women won’t be forgotten.

 

Think back to the last time you made a decision based solely on cold, hard logic. Having trouble? Much as we'd like to be rational, the truth is we're often ruled by our emotions. We go back to the store that feels comfortable, we…

Fiction

Solving a Mormon murder mystery

Review by bookpagedev

At the end of the 19th century, Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, embarked on a one-woman crusade to end polygamy in America. She published two memoirs about her experience as a plural wife and became one of the leading public speakers of her day. Her much-publicized divorce and outspoken apostasy helped bring about a reform of polygamy laws in the 1890s. David Ebershoff’s timely new novel, The 19th Wife, mixes fictionalized excerpts from Young’s memoir with a contemporary murder mystery that takes place in a Mormon sect very similar to the Yearning for Zion ranch that was in the news so much this spring.

Jordan is 20 years old, gay and living in Pasadena, with a decent job and a dog. He is completely estranged from the polygamous community where he grew up, and no wonder. At age 14, he was taken to the side of the road and literally dumped there. His wryly funny, rarely bitter voice is one of the rich rewards of the novel. When Jordan hears that his mother, the 19th of 20-something wives, has been arrested for her husband’s murder, he knows instinctively that she is innocent. He returns to Utah to solve the mystery, which means facing his family, the community and the faith that abandoned him.

Although Ann Eliza Young’s memoir exists (and can be read online via Google Books), Ebershoff has chosen to fictionalize sections, as well as create period documents such as articles, letters and interviews. These round out Ann Eliza’s story and offer "eyewitness" accounts of early Mormon life from her parents and son, as well as from Brigham Young himself. Similarly, Jordan’s personal story is enriched by characters he meets along his journey: a young runaway, a hotel clerk and most significantly, a Mormon scholar whose research subject is Ann Eliza Young and who has much to offer about the ways intellectual freedom enriches faith.

Ebershoff has clearly done his research, as the extensive bibliography shows, but the book never bogs down in dry, factual detail. The 19th Wife subtly relates the way Mormon history continues to affect present-day policies and realities with a surprising amount of insight and sensitivity, creating an entertaining, sympathetic and sometimes very funny novel.

Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.

 

At the end of the 19th century, Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, embarked on a one-woman crusade to end polygamy in America. She published two memoirs about her experience as a plural wife and became one of the…

FictionWorld Fiction

Bravery in Beijing

Review by bookpagedev

Writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo – whose A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction last year – has brought us another novel full of beauty and soul in Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth.

Twenty-one-year-old Fenfang Wang has escaped her parents’ sweet potato farm for the bright lights of Beijing, desperate to make it in TV and film. Scoring credits like “scared girl in police chase” and generally trying to stay afloat in the big city, she becomes involved with two men, wanders down several vocational dead ends and sharply observes the world around her. One day she decides to start writing, and that simple act of pen to paper leads her to self-realization in unexpected ways.

Although Fenfang is a young female in the city, she isn’t really Carrie Bradshaw. Neither is she, necessarily, a voice of youthful angst. Instead, she is something rare and precious: a fresh voice. She’s sardonic and detached, yet full of dreams, desires and wisdom.

East meets West in Fenfang’s relationship with Bostonian Ben, and generations clash in her communal apartment building. And as Fenfang relocates throughout the city, we continue to gain insight into her China. In 20 brief snatches, lyrical and rich even in their leanness – with accompanying photos by the author – Guo creates something poetic and gritty that feels very true.

With China so firmly in the global spotlight, it’s tempting to make Twenty Fragments into merely a window through which we might see and understand the world’s most populous nation. And the novel does function that way: Fenfang is coming of age as China is coming of age. In some ways, she is Beijing.

But she is also universal in her growing up. Her story puts us in touch with the part of us that’s starving and striving, desperate for something to break and overjoyed when it finally does. In that way, she guides us, not just through a culture, but through life itself.

Jessica Inman writes from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo - whose A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction last year - has brought us another novel full of beauty and soul in Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth.

Twenty-one-year-old Fenfang…
Nonfiction

Fussell follows fashion

Review by bookpagedev

Paul Fussell is back, and he’s as feisty as ever. After categorizing the nation’s social strata in Class: A Guide Through the American Status System and setting the record straight in The Great War and Modern Memory, the National Book Award winner and former U.S. Army officer turns his biting wit to another social phenomenon.

In Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear, Fussell describes, discusses, speculates and pontificates about the customs and vanities that drive people of all nationalities to suit up, each in their own fashion. “This is unashamedly a book about appearances,” he writes. “This is also a book about the comfort and vanity of belonging, which everyone has experienced.” The former Ivy League professor of literature sparks his history lesson with colorful opinions and offbeat facts. Ever wonder why a priest’s cassock has 33 buttons? Why police uniforms are blue? Why the first Salvation Army workers wore padded headgear? Fussell answers these questions and more. Through research and interviews, he pieces together an overview of uniforms throughout the 20th century, peppered with his own curmudgeonly brand of commentary.

Examining military uniforms in detail, Fussell describes the looks of American, Russian, German and Italian troops. He explains why the U.S. Army changed its dirt-colored uniforms, or “Brown Jobs,” to green, and how the Air Force came up with its own outfits around 1950. He describes the theories behind the uniforms of bus drivers, postal workers, nuns, chefs, cheerleaders and baseball players. Entertaining stories round out the mix, including that of Elmo Zumwalt an admiral who tried to change the U.S. Navy’s traditional uniform and Gen. George S. Patton, who believed that a smart-looking uniform commanded respect and boosted bravado.

Full of pugnacious observations and intellectual insights, Uniforms notes that most people attempt a delicate balance when it comes to fashion conforming to the norm while asserting their individuality. Hence the uniforms we all wear, from Birkenstocks and bell-bottoms to khaki pants and Polo shirts. Rebecca Denton is an editor and writer in Nashville.

Paul Fussell is back, and he's as feisty as ever. After categorizing the nation's social strata in Class: A Guide Through the American Status System and setting the record straight in The Great War and Modern Memory, the National Book Award winner and former U.S.…
Children's & YA

A princess discovers the keys to her kingdom

Review by bookpagedev

Catherine Gilbert Murdock considers herself a failed screenwriter—but she’s quite happy with the course of her career. If it weren’t for screenwriting, she wouldn’t have developed her storytelling and dialogue-writing skills. And if a screenwriting career had worked out, she probably wouldn’t have written two acclaimed novels for young adults, Dairy Queen and its sequel, The Off Season.
“Screenwriting is so structured; it doesn’t allow you to be lazy,” Murdock says from her home near Philadelphia. “You have to have tight dialogue, a plot that works, a lot of conflict, and it has to escalate and have a really good resolution at the end.”
She managed to incorporate all those elements into her award-winning debut novel, Dairy Queen, which features D.J. Schwenk, a feisty Wisconsin farm girl who tries out for her high school football team. Morgan’s latest novel, Princess Ben, takes readers in a different direction, though the heroines of the two books share some similarities.
“It’s a huge departure for me,” Murdock says of Princess Ben. “My other books are contemporary coming-of-age novels, but this one is pure fantasy. It’s much closer to my heart. I love my other books, but these are my people—dragons, princesses, magic brooms.”
Like D.J., Princess Benevolence isn’t just a young woman with the courage and smarts to save the day—she can be impetuous and snippy sometimes, too. “With both of these characters, I wanted to make them heroic but also very humanly flawed,” the author tells BookPage. “It was important to me as a writer to do that, to make the characters balanced.”
Murdock says she filled Princess Ben with the things she loved as a child—and still does. But the specifics of the novel arrived via her subsconscious: “I had an amazingly vivid dream about a girl plunging out the window on a broom, and I thought, wow! I spent the next day creating the story in my head.”
In that story, we meet Princess Ben, a young lady whose parents are assassinated, thus making her the heir to the kingdom of Montagne. Queen Sophia, Ben’s aunt, takes her in, and promptly begins to strategize about finding Ben a husband. She banishes Ben to a room in a locked tower, and it is there that Ben discovers there’s something strange about the wall: She is able to move through it. On the other side, she finds a staircase that leads her to all sorts of adventures that are decidedly unbecoming to a princess.
Murdock’s descriptions of Ben’s escapades are vivid and thrilling, and her detailed descriptions of the castle and its remarkable passages will give readers reason to look more closely the next time they’re in an architecturally dramatic structure.
In college, Murdock says, “I studied architectural history, not the craft itself, but I love buildings and spaces and the vocabulary for discussing them. I actually had another dream, many years ago, about castles. I love castles, and when I had the dream about the girl [and the broomstick] all these jigsaw puzzles clicked.”
Murdock was careful not to get too caught up in the architectural details, though. Her two children, a 12-year-old son and a nine-year-old daughter, helped her strike the right balance. She read Princess Ben aloud to them and, if a monologue went on too long, “their eyes would just roll back in their heads. When they get antsy, I know it’s too boring.”
The author also shares her manuscripts with her younger sister, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the memoir Eat, Pray, Love: “We read each other’s work, absolutely, every time. We go back and forth on the phone saying, ‘My job is harder; no, yours is.’ We do agree that revising is much harder than writing.”
The importance of sharing, civil conversation and other forms of politesse have a strong presence in Princess Ben, and intentionally so. “A lot of this book grew out of my efforts to get my kids to really think about table manners,” Murdock says.
In addition, Ben learns that “whatever you radiate comes right back at you”—something that’s central to the positive changes in her relationship with Queen Sophia, and her ultimate ability to solve problems for herself and the kingdom.
The princess also discovers that intellectual strength is a powerful weapon, a message that’s important to Murdock. She says, “I wanted Ben to save the country in a female way, instead of being the girl who takes the sword and does the guy thing.” She adds, “The most important scene to me is when Ben is at the ball talking to the king [of a neighboring land] and they have a war of words with all of this subtext. It’s a really female way to express power, by talking. That’s one of Ben’s big realizations, that knowing how to speak is very, very important.” And a good lesson for teenagers to learn.

Catherine Gilbert Murdock considers herself a failed screenwriter—but she's quite happy with the course of her career. If it weren't for screenwriting, she wouldn't have developed her storytelling and dialogue-writing skills. And if a screenwriting career had worked out, she probably wouldn't have written two…
Children's & YA

In this fantasy, the eyes have it

Review by bookpagedev

Peculiar magic, royal adventures and Bohemian intrigue dominate the pages of The Cabinet of Wonders, Marie Rutkoski’s debut children’s novel and the first installment of her new series, The Kronos Chronicles. Rutkoski offers an imaginative look at the Early Modern era with a cast that features the inquisitive Kronos family and their army of tin pets, gypsy friends with curiously magical talents and one chillingly ambitious Hapsburg prince.

Magic is a luxury reserved for the elite in Bohemia, but a few artisans such as Mikal Kronos have managed to develop their abilities without schooling. Petra Kronos envies the magical abilities of her father, a local metalworker who uses invisible tools, builds objects with his mind and gives life to an amusing menagerie of metal animals. But after the ruthless Prince Rodolfo commissions Mikal to build the grandest astronomical clock in history, he returns to his daughter without reimbursement and without a pair of eyes. After learning of the clock’s destructive powers, Petra escapes to Prague with the goal of recapturing her father’s eyes and destroying his creation.

Slaving for weeks on end in the bowels of the castle as a dye worker, Petra uses patience and some plucky exploits to lead her into the acquaintance of Rodolfo. In his inner chambers she discovers the Cabinet of Wonders, a curious collection of magical artifacts, as well as the holding cell for her father’s eyes, which the prince wears to harness Kronos’ powers. Petra’s success is greatly owed to clever characters like Neel, a gypsy boy with invisible finger extensions perfect for lock picking, and friend Tomik, who can trap floods and lightning into tiny glass marbles. In this adventure, however, the sidekick steals the show. Hiding in Petra’s gnarled hair is her pet tin spider Astrophil, an amusing travel companion whose appetite for books and distaste for brazen heroics make him the best fictional spider since E.B. White’s Charlotte.

Though Rutkoski wraps up her magical tale beautifully, her lovable cast and intriguing scenarios are certain to bring readers back for a second round in The Kronos Chronicles. How else will readers retrieve the contents in that curious Cabinet of Wonders?

Peculiar magic, royal adventures and Bohemian intrigue dominate the pages of The Cabinet of Wonders, Marie Rutkoski's debut children's novel and the first installment of her new series, The Kronos Chronicles. Rutkoski offers an imaginative look at the Early Modern era with a cast…
Children's & YAPicture Book

One boy finds his own special ‘it’

Review by bookpagedev

Linden is having an awful day. He’s trying to pay attention to his teacher, Mrs. Lee, but he’s suffering from a terrible toothache. His friends laugh when he makes a funny duck sound – Linden likes making people smile – but Mrs. Lee is not amused. As he walks home from school with his brother Tony, a star athlete, Linden wonders if he’ll ever have any special talents. Tony offers encouragement, “Whatever it is that you want to do, you can do it. Trust God and dream big!” With You Can Do It!, Tony Dungy, former NFL player and current head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, has fashioned a warm and wise tale, complemented by the joyous watercolor illustrations of Amy June Bates. Dungy is clearly inspired by his own family’s unwavering faith and support of each other’s ambitions. Now a father and respected mentor, Dungy fondly recalls his brother’s search for a dream of his own.

As the boys return home, Mom and Dad are ready to help Linden find his “it.” Dad explains, “Your it is what you love to do. And it’s something God has given you the talent to do. That’s what makes it so special.” A trip to the dentist proves to be fateful for young Linden. “I love to make people smile,” Dr. Clarke shares, and Linden lights up with revelation. Only a few weeks later, he finds himself standing before his class, in full dental regalia, enthusiastically explaining what he’d learned from Dr. Clarke.

Dungy’s book is a lighthearted but effective lesson in perseverance, conviction and the importance of finding sustenance in a family’s belief system. His gentle storytelling will remind readers that dreams are often fulfilled in unexpected ways. Indeed, a postscript reveals that Linden did grow up to become a dentist!

Ellen Trachtenberg is a freelance writer who is helping her young sons find their “it.”

Linden is having an awful day. He's trying to pay attention to his teacher, Mrs. Lee, but he's suffering from a terrible toothache. His friends laugh when he makes a funny duck sound - Linden likes making people smile - but Mrs. Lee is not…
Religion & Spirituality

Exploring the traditions of Passover

Review by bookpagedev

At the customary Seder dinner celebrating the Jewish festival of Passover, the evening’s youngest participant, usually a child, recites the Ma Nishtana, the Four Questions, which begin with, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” In her lovely and thoughtful new gift book, Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights? The Four Questions Around the World, Ilana Kurshan uses these traditional Four Questions to explore the astonishing variety and diversity of Jewish settlements throughout the world and throughout history.

This slim but informative volume focuses, in turn, on nearly two dozen languages used by Jews throughout history, from Afrikaans to Yiddish. Each section poses the Four Questions of Passover in a different language (with transliterations as necessary), and follows these translations with a two- to three-page history of the Jewish people who use (or used) this language. Accompanying photographs, prints and other artwork provide either contemporary or historical glimpses into Jewish life around the world.

Given the worldwide history of Jews’ suppression and persecution, it’s not surprising that many of the included anecdotes are somber ones, particularly as the text outlines the numbers of European Jews before and after the Holocaust. Kurshan balances these sobering accounts, however, with discussions of how Jewish people – both singly and collectively – have affected culture, economy and civilization in virtually every corner of the world. Many stories also find comfort and hope in Zionism, as many historically persecuted Jewish minorities have found safety by immigrating to Israel.

Anyone interested in the rich and fascinating history of Jewish culture will find something to treasure here. Perhaps the best audience for Kurshan’s book, though, are those young people who are ready to ask more than just the traditional Four Questions of Passover, ready to explore their people’s abundant and diverse, troubling and rewarding history.

At the customary Seder dinner celebrating the Jewish festival of Passover, the evening's youngest participant, usually a child, recites the Ma Nishtana, the Four Questions, which begin with, "Why is this night different from all other nights?" In her lovely and thoughtful new gift book,…

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