bookpagedev

Simply elegant experiments

Review by bookpagedev

Science writer George Johnson’s The 10 Most Beautiful Experiments includes Newton’s illuminating splitting of light into colors; Galileo’s experiment with gravity; Lavoisier’s work with oxygen; Faraday’s proof that magnetism, electricity and light are inextricably intertwined; and more. Johnson admits to selecting his top 10 arbitrarily, but they all share the common criterion of being comparatively simple in concept – the sort of experiment that could be set up in a laboratory (or even, in some cases, a home). They also share the distinction of opening fundamental areas of science, from the nature of energy to the inner workings of the mind.

Johnson’s book is as elegant as the experiments he features, which are drawn from physics, chemistry, biology and even psychiatry. Johnson acknowledges that the reader might have other experiments to add to the list, and why not? Science is about the fascination of exploring the universe and whatever fascinates the mind, is, like The 10 Most Beautiful Experiments, worth the exploring. The writing here is lively, mixing bits of biography with the experiments themselves, offering the human element that explains the scientists’ motivation as well as the science. Johnson shares personal anecdotes as well as theory in an engaging, compelling style. The result is a little gem of a book, enjoyable to read both as history and science.

Science writer George Johnson's The 10 Most Beautiful Experiments includes Newton's illuminating splitting of light into colors; Galileo's experiment with gravity; Lavoisier's work with oxygen; Faraday's proof that magnetism, electricity and light are inextricably intertwined; and more. Johnson admits to selecting his top 10…

It must be the shoes

Review by bookpagedev

Odds are you’ve never heard of the Dassler brothers, but almost assuredly you’ve heard of the brands they created, Adidas and Puma. In Sneaker Wars, journalist Barbara Smit gives a lively, detailed account of the brands’ fates and fortunes in the world of sports, history and business. After reading this book, you won’t look at your sneakers or any athletic apparel with a logo quite the same way again.

Adolf (Adi) and Rudolf (Rudi) Dassler established their shoe company in Germany in the 1920s. With their complementary skills – Adi the behind-the-scenes technician, Rudi the extroverted sales type – they made some of the best athletic shoes and enjoyed much success. They also benefited from Hitler’s keen interest in sports. Athletic accomplishment had high propaganda value and Hitler wanted to showcase German power and athletic prowess at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Many of the German athletes were wearing Dassler shoes. Adi, however, was determined to get their shoes on Jesse Owens, an extraordinary black American athlete who was expected to shine at the Olympics. And when Owens smashed records and collected numerous gold medals wearing the brothers’ shoes, the Dasslers secured a reputation with the world’s most prominent athletes.

But wartime quarrels about who was vying for control of the company caused a bitter rift between the brothers and the company was split in 1948. Everything from equipment to employees to patents was divided between them. Adi registered Adidas. Rudi registered Puma. And the sneaker wars began. Over generations, the rivalry led not only to Adidas and Puma making competing products, it resulted in increasingly clever and crafty ways of marketing and selling those products. Smit highlights the intriguing behind-the-scenes activity and historical backdrop that made sports business what it is today. What began with shoe brands courting Olympic athletes with hushed illegal “bonuses” under bathroom stalls evolved into multimillion-dollar celebrity and team endorsements, and the outsize sports personalities that are now commonplace. Sneaker Wars reveals how the game is really played.

Ellen R. Marsden writes from Mason, Ohio.

Odds are you've never heard of the Dassler brothers, but almost assuredly you've heard of the brands they created, Adidas and Puma. In Sneaker Wars, journalist Barbara Smit gives a lively, detailed account of the brands' fates and fortunes in the world of sports, history…
Biography

The Beats and the search for meaning

Review by bookpagedev

The spirit that animates – or at least haunts – Deborah Baker’s excellent account of the Beats in India, A Blue Hand, is not the spirit of its main protagonist, the troubled, sweet-natured poet-mystic Allen Ginsberg, but rather an elusive seeker, chanter of Swinburne and one-time girlfriend of poet Gregory Corso, Hope Savage.

Ginsberg left New York for India in the fall of 1961, after months of delay and indecision, propelled by a vision of God he had in a Harlem apartment years earlier. He was met eventually by his lover, Peter Orlovsky, and the pair joined poet Gary Snyder and his then-wife Joanne Kyger for some weeks in exploring India, while Corso (the one truly unlikable figure in this history), remained ambivalently, fearfully at home, and William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac followed other paths. Driven by unknown dreams or demons, Savage had long ago slipped the bonds of her eminent South Carolina family and of Corso and traveled by herself to Iran and Afghanistan. By the time Ginsberg arrived in India, she was already there.

Drawing with marvelous artistry from the papers and archives of Ginsberg and others, Baker presents readers with the manifold textures of the Beats’ inner quest – the dreams and nightmares, the drug use (which Ginsberg almost comically hoped would fast-track enlightenment), the personal and artistic rivalries, the poetry and the sometimes-numbing, sometimes-uplifting encounters with India itself. Baker, who was a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for a biography of poet Laura Riding, wields here a scalpel-like pen: "Allen Ginsberg lay in a sweat-drenched puddle of self-pity," she writes early in the book. "He had so wanted to be a saint, but what was he supposed to suffer for?"

In May of 1963, Ginsberg headed home. According to Baker, "despite his passion for the idea of India, there was something improbable about Allen Ginsberg’s pilgrimage there. Unlike many of those who came after him, he neglected to leave much of his past behind. Instead, he brought most of it with him."

Savage, on the other hand, had cut her ties with the past and, it seems, absorbed the Eastern spiritual ideal of self-abnegation. Baker writes that she searched assiduously for Savage but never found her, not even a trace.

 

The spirit that animates - or at least haunts - Deborah Baker's excellent account of the Beats in India, A Blue Hand, is not the spirit of its main protagonist, the troubled, sweet-natured poet-mystic Allen Ginsberg, but rather an elusive seeker, chanter of Swinburne…

Memoir

The House on First Street

Review by bookpagedev

Julia Reed’s The House on First Street is distinguished by its elegance and wittiness, as well as its poignancy and civic-mindedness. Told by a 40-something woman of privilege, one who could afford a TV-watching companion for her cat while Reed led a split existence between the Big Apple and the Big Easy, she is ultimately a woman without any true home until she moves permanently to New Orleans and finds, first, true love, and then, the city of her heart in ruins.

Reed, a contributing editor to both Newsweek and Vogue, was born in what was the wealthiest, most urbane city in the Mississippi Delta. Greenville, also the native ground of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, was, like its larger, more sophisticated sister to the south, nearly destroyed by the Mississippi River flood of 1927. Thus it’s in keeping that a beautiful but decaying New Orleans house owned by another Percy becomes home to Reed and her new husband just weeks before Katrina hits.

The house remains a wreck, though largely unscathed by Katrina, and the horrors of home renovation – and the devastation wreaked elsewhere in the city – are almost a match for Reed’s descriptions of the glorious, spiritual delights of food. She chronicles with obvious glee the progressively better meals she manages to offer an entire contingent of Oklahoma National Guardsmen stationed down the block to fend off looters at a time when almost no city stores are open and no city, state, local or federal officials are to be seen.

Despite Reed’s self-deprecating generosity, also seen in her loving commitment to both new and lifelong friends, to neighbors, to various people who have worked for her, and to an improbably sweet-natured crackhead she tries again and again to redeem, Reed ensures that we do not mistake her for Mother Teresa. The tantrums she throws at contractors attract neighbors and passing cars; she lapses into what she later concedes is a “Marie Antoinette moment” while she cleans out the rotted contents of her (predictably) stuffed refrigerator after 12 electricity-free days; and her scorn for then-Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco and Nagin practically curls the pages.

Some readers will be tempted to condemn The House on First Street as trivial or paternalistic in comparison to Montana-Leblanc’s book. But Reed marries, and finds her place in New Orleans, to earn what Montana-Leblanc possesses at the beginning and end of her tale: a family and roots too deep for any hurricane to destroy, despite the anger and tears and grievous loss wrought by our country’s greatest naturaldisaster.

Diann Blakely’s third poetry collection, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, to be published this fall by Elixir Press, takes its title from a work set in New Orleans.

Julia Reed's The House on First Street is distinguished by its elegance and wittiness, as well as its poignancy and civic-mindedness. Told by a 40-something woman of privilege, one who could afford a TV-watching companion for her cat while Reed led a split existence between…
Biography

A life worth reliving

Review by bookpagedev

From 1929 to 1934, Florence Wolfson faithfully recorded the details of her life in a diary she received on her 14th birthday – and what a life it was. A precocious, exquisitely attired Manhattanite with an artistic bent, Florence took advantage of every opportunity for adventure, sometimes flirting with scandal. She frequented the Metropolitan Museum of Art, newly opened in 1929; saw live performances by actresses Helen Hayes, Katherine Cornell, Lynn Fontaine and Eva La Gallienne. She had a copy of the banned Ulysses and read Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga novels as they were published. Among her classmates at Hunter College, where she edited the literary magazine, were Joy Davidman (whose marriage to C.S. Lewis was chronicled in Shadowlands) and Bel Kaufman, who recalled “a young woman who used to appear in class in fawn-colored riding breeches. . . . How I envied those riding breeches and the exotic life she lived.” That life is presented in cinematic scope in Lily Koppel’s The Red Leather Diary.

Koppel, a New York Times reporter, came across Florence’s diary in 2003, when she happened upon a Dumpster loaded with old trunks, vintage clothing and other unclaimed items from the recesses of her building, where Florence had once lived. Intrigued, Koppel tracked her down with the help of a 1930s-fascinated lawyer-turned-detective.

Florence’s life reads like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime in places, with all the famous paths crossed and situations experienced; while descriptions of city life recall Marjorie Hart’s Summer at Tiffany. Together, Koppel and Florence take readers through a world dizzy with new ideas, rhythms and inventions, but not immune to the effects of the Depression and later the coming of world war.

From 1929 to 1934, Florence Wolfson faithfully recorded the details of her life in a diary she received on her 14th birthday - and what a life it was. A precocious, exquisitely attired Manhattanite with an artistic bent, Florence took advantage of every opportunity for…
Memoir

Not Just the Levees Broke

Review by bookpagedev

The title of Phyllis Montana-Leblanc’s Not Just the Levees Broke is derived from Spike Lee’s documentary about Katrina. A poem Montana-Leblanc had written the night before Lee paid her a final visit in her FEMA trailer gave him the ending to his work; and he, in turn, was the impetus for her book. Though her language is, for the most part, plain and repertorial (and at times appropriately profane), we see Montana-Leblanc’s lyric gifts in the first pages’ description of Katrina’s clouds, “dark gray, light gray, white, and almost black. . . . They’re all separated, as if they know once they connect all hell will break loose.” Montana-Leblanc’s nightmarish tale fulfills the prophecy in those clouds.

The evacuation order comes too late from Mayor Ray Nagin. One by one, the floors of the apartment complex where Montana-Leblanc, her husband and other members of her family have taken shelter are torn off by the wind. Debris flies outside, projectiles of death. Her family is split up, first by the storm, then by officials. For eight days, Montana-Leblanc and her husband trudge, nearly sleepless, soaked in foul water and mostly without food, from dry spot to dry spot, waiting in line after line after line, until they are airlifted to San Antonio. The racism that was all too evident on big-screen TV – one of LeBlanc’s chapter headings recalls the prevention of the Red Cross from entering the state while military forces were marshaled, officials fearing rioting blacks more than being concerned with helping people – is microcosmically revealed when she realizes that Cheetos are being given only to white people in one feeding station.

Montana-Leblanc’s story may not be the best-written account of Hurricane Katrina, but it is surely among the most harrowing and enraging.

Diann Blakely’s third poetry collection, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, to be published this fall by Elixir Press, takes its title from a work set in New Orleans.

The title of Phyllis Montana-Leblanc's Not Just the Levees Broke is derived from Spike Lee's documentary about Katrina. A poem Montana-Leblanc had written the night before Lee paid her a final visit in her FEMA trailer gave him the ending to his work; and he,…
Fiction

Promise of the Wolves

Review by bookpagedev

The Promise of the Wolves is the first in a trilogy with an unusual premise: chronicling the life of an ancient wolf pack. Author Dorothy Hearst relates her spellbinding saga through the voice of Kaala, a mixed-blood pup born into the Swift River Pack of the Wide Valley, somewhere in southern Europe approximately 14,000 years ago. Legend says that a wolf whose blood is mixed with that of wolves outside the Valley will “stand forever between two worlds.” When Kaala’s mother is banished from the pack for mating with an outsider, Kaala, who may be the wolf named in the prophecy, is allowed to stay, though ridiculed by Ruuqo, the pack leader, and tormented by his pups.

Ruuqo repeatedly lectures the Swift River pups about the covenant the Wide Valley wolves made with the Ancients (the Sky, Sun, Moon and Earth) many millennia ago: to avoid humans, never to kill a human unprovoked and to mate only with wolves inside the Valley. Kaala hears his warnings, but her intuition and instinct mysteriously draw her to the humans nearby.

As the moons come and go in Kaala and the other pups’ first year, she gradually becomes their designated leader – admired for her willingness to stand up to Ruuqo’s harsh treatment and her tenacious loyalty to the weaker pups. Eventually her attraction to humans is tested when, straying afar from the pack, she saves a girl from drowning. Kaala befriends the girl, TaLi, and “her boy” Brelan; they even hunt together, sharing their prey. The pups allied with Kaala follow her lead, choosing humans of their own with whom to bond. Kaala experiences potent and conflicting emotions – she is drawn to the newfound humans, but at the same time deeply mournful, knowing her old world may soon be ending.

Hearst spent 10 years editing books from nonprofit organizations, while simultaneously “trying to be a writer.” Her fascination with wolves began in 2001, and once she started writing about them, she says she couldn’t stop. Extensive research with the International Wolf Center and lengthy observation of wolves in sanctuaries laid the groundwork for this debut novel, loosely based on the “controversial and contested” theory of the co-evolution of wolves and humans, which maintains that wolves taught the early humans to hunt cooperatively and form complex societies. This moving saga will appeal especially to animal lovers, but all readers will be intrigued by Hearst’s unique blend of myth and scientific research, and be left eagerly awaiting the next installment.

The Promise of the Wolves is the first in a trilogy with an unusual premise: chronicling the life of an ancient wolf pack. Author Dorothy Hearst relates her spellbinding saga through the voice of Kaala, a mixed-blood pup born into the Swift River Pack…
NonfictionEssays

Vonnegut, posthumously

Review by bookpagedev

Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany – the inspiration for his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five – still bear heavily on his mind in Armageddon in Retrospect, a posthumous collection of 12 short stories and observations assembled and introduced by his son, pediatrician and memoirist Mark Vonnegut.

As in most of his celebrated writings, Vonnegut strikes a fine balance here between the impersonal horrors of war and the mundane coping mechanisms of its victims, between past realities and future possibilities and, ultimately, between good and evil. In the title story, he conjures up an institute in Oklahoma which plumbs the theory that all the world’s ills may be caused by the Devil. In a more down-to-earth musing, “Guns Before Butter,” three captive American soldiers, starving in Dresden, find comfort in dreaming up recipes for fabulous dishes and inscribing them in cookbooks.

Vonnegut died at the age of 84 on April 11, 2007, two weeks before he was scheduled to give a speech at Butler University. Fortunately, he had provided his son an advance copy of his remarks, and this rambling, avuncular piece opens the book. Reading like an all-purpose graduation speech, it is shot through with quips, fond memories of home and family, sage observations and verbal mischief.

Seeded through the book are reproductions of Vonnegut’s sketches, as well as a letter he wrote to his family at the end of World War II explaining why and where he’d been missing in action. “On about February 14th,” he writes, “the Americans came over, followed by the [Royal Air Force]. Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in 24 hours and destroyed all of Dresden – possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.”

Kurt Vonnegut's experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany - the inspiration for his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five - still bear heavily on his mind in Armageddon in Retrospect, a posthumous collection of 12 short stories and observations assembled and introduced by his son, pediatrician…
Business & Finance

Reading up on the right investments

Review by bookpagedev

When the markets crash, your nest egg goes splash and you wish you had cash, that’s a bear market. Sadly, most investors spent the summer watching portfolios shrink and blue chips sink as money retreated from Wall Street. That, my friends, is the downside of investing.

If you’re in the market for the long term, here’s what to do seek the advice of people, like the authors below, who’ve weathered the storms. Most will recommend that you diversify, diversify, diversify. Then, hold tight, remembering that a diversified portfolio will share in the gains when the bulls return to Wall Street and in the meantime, your money will be far less likely to smash, crash or splash.

Common sense reigns I know these first guys well. From their days as the hip" investment advisors on AOL to their current monopoly on common sense in the financial world, the Gardner brothers preach a sensible, stable approach to personal finance and investing. So I wasn’t surprised to find that The Motley Fool’s What to Do With Your Money Now: Ten Steps to Staying Up in a Down Market by David and Tom Gardner (Simon ∧ Schuster, $23, 212 pages, ISBN 0743233786) mimics the no-nonsense advice they dispense daily on their Web site, on TV and radio and in their news column. What’s new in this book is the Gardners’ self-deprecating ability to use their own flops as examples of what’s wrong with investing" right now. They admit to financial and business-building mistakes, offering personal examples designed to keep you from taking the wrong turns in your own portfolios. This is sage advice from Fools.

Time to learn Safer Investing in Volatile Markets: Twelve Proven Strategies to Increase Your Income and Financial Security by Carolann Doherty-Brown (Dearborn, $18.95, 288 pages, ISBN 0793151481) is a straightforward guide to understanding the strategy and timing issues most financial advisors and stock brokers use to advise their clients. Knowing how long you will hold and then sell a stock is as important as understanding a company’s P/E ratio or its audit practices. Knowing what your broker knows, and how he should react to market trends, is insurance for you and your portfolio. In the long run, the smart investor survives by being educated about all the issues at work in the markets. As Brown says, my 12 strategies will not work all the time for all people, but history has shown they do work most of the time." Follow her lead for long-term growth and an escape from the roller coaster markets.

Is it a stock or a bond? Most people don’t know the difference between stocks and bonds. Over the years, I’ve encountered many investors who just think bonds pay less" than stocks. So I’m delighted to report there’s finally a book that shows how this integral part of a portfolio works. The Money-Making Guide to Bonds: Straightforward Strategies for Picking the Right Bonds and Bond Funds by Hildy and Stan Richelson (Bloomberg, $26.95, 304 pages, ISBN 1576601226) delivers a wealth of information on what bonds are, how to pick bonds and how to plan bond investing. Bonds should not be trendy additions to portfolios in bad times, the authors argue, but a well-thought out portion of any serious investment or retirement plan. Get off the bubble Bubbleology: The New Science of Stock Market Winners and Losers by Kevin Hassett offers an interesting and timely look at why stock market prices rise and fall and how group psychology intersects with finance. Recent market reactions would make any investor wonder are we all a group of untrained lemmings rushing toward the cliff? Hassett, an economist and frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, argues that traditional ways of assessing a stock’s inherent risk (equating it with volatility) are flawed. He offers a set of simple principles to explain why investors panic when they see a bubble" or steep rise in the markets and what you can do to profit from the market’s overreactions to bubblespotting." A timely book, yes, but one that teaches long-term approaches to investing and offers interesting insight into the mind of the market.

 

When the markets crash, your nest egg goes splash and you wish you had cash, that's a bear market. Sadly, most investors spent the summer watching portfolios shrink and blue chips sink as money retreated from Wall Street. That, my friends, is the downside…

Memoir

Giving voice to the tragedy in Darfur

Review by bookpagedev

How is it that despite an international outcry, the displacement of nearly two million people and the murder of upwards of half a million more continues to this day in Darfur? “[E]ven though some people think Darfur is simple genocide,” Daoud Hari writes in his remarkable memoir, The Translator, “it is important to know that it is not. It is a complicated genocide.” Readers will get some sense of the political and psychological complexity of this genocide in Hari’s vivid account of the harrowing 40 days during 2006 when he, American journalist Paul Salopek and their driver, Ali, were arrested, tortured and accused of being spies, first by rebel gunman of Hari’s own tribe, then by a mad regional commander inspired by the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, and finally by the military governor representing the government of Sudan.

But Hari’s stirring memoir is not meant to be a geopolitical analysis of the conflict raging through the western region of Sudan. Rather it is a personal, surprisingly engaging story of his own experiences growing up in Darfur as the youngest son in a family of herders and shepherds. Their centuries-old way of life was shattered in 2003 when members of his Zaghawa people rose up against repression by the Sudanese government, which used the occasion to launch a systematic effort to depopulate the Darfur region.

Hari, who developed a passion for English novels in high school, became a translator for a commission investigating genocide in Darfur and later for American reporters. Released, finally, from prison in Sudan, Hari continues to advocate for the people of Darfur with a sweetness and humanity that is vastly more compelling than the Sudan government’s argument of bullets and bombs.

How is it that despite an international outcry, the displacement of nearly two million people and the murder of upwards of half a million more continues to this day in Darfur? "[E]ven though some people think Darfur is simple genocide," Daoud Hari writes in…
Fiction

Undiscovered Country

Review by bookpagedev

It was not suicide. Of that, 17-year-old Jesse Matson is certain. He is positive his father wouldn’t have killed himself while on their hunting trip in the wintry woods of Minnesota. He remains convinced even when the town sheriff rules that the gunshot wound Harold Matson suffered was self-inflicted. A visit from his late father – a gruesome figure who emerges from the lake a few days after his death with a face “like a burned-out building, blackened at the windows and caved in on itself” – and the ghost’s declaration that “I didn’t want to leave, Jesse,” is, in many ways, the final nail in the coffin: Jesse vows to find his father’s killer and exact revenge.

“Who do you think you are, anyway? Hamlet?” Jesse’s friend asks him after hearing of the visit from beyond the grave. “Next thing, Jesse, you’ll be telling me your old man was murdered and your uncle’s the one that did it.” Exactly. The novel’s title, Undiscovered Country (taken from one of the Danish prince’s soliloquies), isn’t the only thing Lin Enger, brother of well-known novelist Leif Enger, borrows from Hamlet in his graceful rumination on the ties that bind. The likely culprit? Jesse’s uncle, Clay, who had courted Jesse’s mom back in high school before his older brother swooped in and made her his bride. Jesse’s love interest? An Ophelia-esque girl from the wrong side of the tracks.

The story is told a decade after the shooting by an adult Jesse wanting to explain his version of what happened to his little brother Magnus. Jesse, now a college English teacher, narrates carefully, with the stark, parsed cadences that come from trying to tell a story so painful it rails against words. “I inserted my finger into the nine hold, spun the dial clockwise and watched it spin back around. Then I dialed one, twice, quickly,” Jesse says of his 911 call after discovering his father dead. The telling is deliberate, so that the listener will make no mistake in the hearing. Though the ending – despite a last-minute twist – is hardly a surprise, Enger’s glistening prose, set so gently on the frozen lakes of Minnesota, will have readers shivering in their boots.

Iris Blasi is a writer and editor in New York City.

It was not suicide. Of that, 17-year-old Jesse Matson is certain. He is positive his father wouldn't have killed himself while on their hunting trip in the wintry woods of Minnesota. He remains convinced even when the town sheriff rules that the gunshot wound Harold…
FictionWorld Fiction

Finding Nouf

Review by bookpagedev

Romantic images of Lawrence of Arabia and sunbaked, hospitable Bedouins well up from Western books and movies about the desert. That evocative landscape plays a seminal role in Zo∧#235; Ferraris’ first novel as well, but in her masterful hands Saudi Arabia’s mysteries are free of overheated symbolism.

In Finding Nouf, we look into the minds of trackers who can tell a story from footprints in the sand, their etchings unique as fingerprints. We share the frustrations of Miss Katya Hijazi, a highly trained crime-scene investigator, who must dodge the religious police and her father’s worries whenever she leaves the house. But most of all we feel the pain and puzzlement, the idealism and yearnings of Nayir, a Palestinian who has grown up in Saudi Arabia and is put in charge of investigating a 16-year-old girl’s death, and finding her killer.

Young Nouf drowned in an onrush of water in a desert valley not long before her wedding. But did she run away, as her wealthy family chooses to believe? Or was she kidnapped and murdered? Nayir devotes himself to uncovering the facts even as the grieving family gives mixed signals about whether they want the truth.

Ferraris crafts her main character so skillfully that the reader roots for Nayir despite his judgmental attitudes toward women who show too much skin, even an ankle or a forthright gaze. Miss Hijazi’s forwardness grates on him, her behavior as unsettling as the hushed-up evidence of Nouf’s bloody injuries. Nayir and Miss Hijazi become unlikely partners as they attempt to find justice for a girl who in death gained the ultimate release from an oppressive society.

The story proceeds at a flawless pace, with landscape and characters deftly drawn. The reader enters places few Americans ever see, including the inner sanctum of a Saudi family, which Ferraris knows first-hand: she lived in Jeddah with her then-husband and his Saudi-Palestinian family following the Gulf War. Her remarkable debut is a tale of manners, romance and intrigue with a literary feel that will make readers hope she follows her first novel with a second.

Andrea Brunais writes from Tampa, Florida, and Bluefield, West Virginia.

Romantic images of Lawrence of Arabia and sunbaked, hospitable Bedouins well up from Western books and movies about the desert. That evocative landscape plays a seminal role in Zo∧#235; Ferraris' first novel as well, but in her masterful hands Saudi Arabia's mysteries are free of…
Business & Finance

Reading up on the right investments

Review by bookpagedev

When the markets crash, your nest egg goes splash and you wish you had cash, that’s a bear market. Sadly, most investors spent the summer watching portfolios shrink and blue chips sink as money retreated from Wall Street. That, my friends, is the downside of investing.

If you’re in the market for the long term, here’s what to do seek the advice of people, like the authors below, who’ve weathered the storms. Most will recommend that you diversify, diversify, diversify. Then, hold tight, remembering that a diversified portfolio will share in the gains when the bulls return to Wall Street and in the meantime, your money will be far less likely to smash, crash or splash.

Common sense reigns I know these first guys well. From their days as the hip” investment advisors on AOL to their current monopoly on common sense in the financial world, the Gardner brothers preach a sensible, stable approach to personal finance and investing. So I wasn’t surprised to find that The Motley Fool’s What to Do With Your Money Now: Ten Steps to Staying Up in a Down Market by David and Tom Gardner (Simon ∧ Schuster, $23, 212 pages, ISBN 0743233786) mimics the no-nonsense advice they dispense daily on their Web site, on TV and radio and in their news column. What’s new in this book is the Gardners’ self-deprecating ability to use their own flops as examples of what’s wrong with investing” right now. They admit to financial and business-building mistakes, offering personal examples designed to keep you from taking the wrong turns in your own portfolios. This is sage advice from Fools.

Time to learn Safer Investing in Volatile Markets: Twelve Proven Strategies to Increase Your Income and Financial Security by Carolann Doherty-Brown is a straightforward guide to understanding the strategy and timing issues most financial advisors and stock brokers use to advise their clients. Knowing how long you will hold and then sell a stock is as important as understanding a company’s P/E ratio or its audit practices. Knowing what your broker knows, and how he should react to market trends, is insurance for you and your portfolio. In the long run, the smart investor survives by being educated about all the issues at work in the markets. As Brown says, my 12 strategies will not work all the time for all people, but history has shown they do work most of the time.” Follow her lead for long-term growth and an escape from the roller coaster markets.

Is it a stock or a bond? Most people don’t know the difference between stocks and bonds. Over the years, I’ve encountered many investors who just think bonds pay less” than stocks. So I’m delighted to report there’s finally a book that shows how this integral part of a portfolio works. The Money-Making Guide to Bonds: Straightforward Strategies for Picking the Right Bonds and Bond Funds by Hildy and Stan Richelson (Bloomberg, $26.95, 304 pages, ISBN 1576601226) delivers a wealth of information on what bonds are, how to pick bonds and how to plan bond investing. Bonds should not be trendy additions to portfolios in bad times, the authors argue, but a well-thought out portion of any serious investment or retirement plan. Get off the bubble Bubbleology: The New Science of Stock Market Winners and Losers by Kevin Hassett (Crown Business, $18.95, 128 pages, ISBN 0609609297) offers an interesting and timely look at why stock market prices rise and fall and how group psychology intersects with finance. Recent market reactions would make any investor wonder are we all a group of untrained lemmings rushing toward the cliff? Hassett, an economist and frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, argues that traditional ways of assessing a stock’s inherent risk (equating it with volatility) are flawed. He offers a set of simple principles to explain why investors panic when they see a bubble” or steep rise in the markets and what you can do to profit from the market’s overreactions to bubblespotting.” A timely book, yes, but one that teaches long-term approaches to investing and offers interesting insight into the mind of the market.

When the markets crash, your nest egg goes splash and you wish you had cash, that's a bear market. Sadly, most investors spent the summer watching portfolios shrink and blue chips sink as money retreated from Wall Street. That, my friends, is the downside of…

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