bookpagedev

YA FictionYA

Negotiating the boundaries between two worlds

Review by bookpagedev

Arnold Spirit Jr. has water on the brain. Born hydrocephalic, the Spokane Indian underwent surgery at six months. Because of his brain damage, he has 10 more teeth than most people, is nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other and suffers from migraines and seizures. He also stutters, lisps and has huge hands and feet. In fact, Junior has many physical irregularities, but there's nothing he struggles with more than sorting out the connection to his heritage.

Sherman Alexie's first novel for young adults is funny, self-deprecating and serious all at once. Closely based on Alexie's own experiences on the reservation, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian follows the 14-year-old narrator as he evades peer persecution and his family's poverty by transferring to an all-white school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

Junior is scorned by those he leaves behind on the reservation, and his best friend Rowdy wants nothing to do with him. The only time they meet during their first year of high school is on the basketball court.

Junior escapes his troubles by drawing quirky cartoons (depicted in illustrations by graphic artist Ellen Forney), but he has more going for him than he knows. He becomes a star on his new school's varsity basketball team, many of his fellow classmates come to respect him, the hottest girl in school befriends him and even nerdy Gordy can admit that Junior is smarter than 99 percent of the high school. Junior's lack of confidence in his choices, however, causes him to berate himself during his 22-mile walk home from school. He feels displaced: Does he belong in the snobby, wealthy white culture or among the inebriated, impoverished Indians of the reservation? With his perceptive narrator, Alexie deftly taps into the human desire to stand out while fitting in.

 

Arnold Spirit Jr. has water on the brain. Born hydrocephalic, the Spokane Indian underwent surgery at six months. Because of his brain damage, he has 10 more teeth than most people, is nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other and suffers from…

Children's & YA

An unlikely pair saddles up

Review by bookpagedev

Cowboy and Octopus are two brand spanking-new characters in children’s literature, and my, what clever little cutouts they are. Cowboy is a paper doll, while Octopus has been snipped from the comic pages. They are the latest concoctions from the fun-loving, award-winning pair of Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, well known for such books as Math Curse and The Stinky Cheese Man. (And in case you’re wondering how to pronounce the writer’s last name, it’s Shess-ka, rhyming with Fresca.) Cowboy and Octopus are friends, somewhat in the vein of Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad. And while this is a picture book, it consists of seven little mini-episodes, or chapters, all bearing the trademark quirky humor of Scieszka and Smith. For instance, when our two heroes meet, Cowboy asks Octopus: You wanna be friends? When Octopus says yes, the two shake hands . . . and shake hands, and shake hands and so on. The two friends amuse each other (and their readers) with such things as knock-knock jokes, Halloween costumes and a surprise dinner (cowboy beans, of course). Scieszka confesses that they had to ditch a chapter called The Boy Who Cried Cow Patty. This is, after all, good, clean (and sometimes strange) fun.

Smith’s collages are zany and wonderful throughout, with comic book touches and all sorts of background patterns, as well as scraps of photography, fabric and newspaper articles thrown into the illustrative mix. There’s even a red plastic barn with a few animal figures.

This is truly a wacky and original book for all ages, one with the potential to make teenagers and toddlers snicker equally hard at its jokes. Here’s one of those bedtime favorites that parents can easily enjoy reading over and over again it sure beats the more traditional little sheep frolicking through a meadow.

As in all good Westerns, our two heroes eventually disappear into a brilliant sunset together, with the words Adios Amigos etched into the skyline. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, to see these two funny guys back together again in a sequel.

Alice Cary rides the range in Groton, Massachusetts.

Cowboy and Octopus are two brand spanking-new characters in children's literature, and my, what clever little cutouts they are. Cowboy is a paper doll, while Octopus has been snipped from the comic pages. They are the latest concoctions from the fun-loving, award-winning pair of Jon…
Technology

Think small

Review by bookpagedev

Mark J. Penn’s Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes looks at the economy from the perspective of a cultural and political analyst. Besides being CEO of Burson-Marsteller, Penn served as a pollster to Bill Clinton; he is currently an advisor to such powerful types as Sen. Hillary Clinton and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. Thus, he is in a position to anticipate not only major shifts in social and fiscal policy, but also smaller cultural changes.

The many trends that Penn and co-author E. Kinney Zalesne identify as having significant future impact range from the potentially divisive (a sizable increase in the number of ex-convicts in the general population; a rise in the ranks of highly educated, connected and well-financed domestic terrorists and terrorist sympathizers) to the quirky (more left-handers, more office romances and more people eschewing the practice of sun-bathing). They encompass the curious (a surge in the number of 20-year-olds who knit; the increased popularity of archery) and the intriguing (growing numbers of Latino Protestants; second-home buyers).

Some readers might question some of Penn’s other contentions, particularly that less-educated voters are becoming more issue-oriented and sophisticated than their supposedly smarter comrades or that anti-Semitism is declining. But as the person who identified soccer moms as a key constituency long before his rivals, Penn is not given to shallow analysis or premature conclusions. Microtrends is a book you’ll return to often over the next few years to track the accuracy and validity of its predictions.

Mark J. Penn's Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes looks at the economy from the perspective of a cultural and political analyst. Besides being CEO of Burson-Marsteller, Penn served as a pollster to Bill Clinton; he is currently an advisor to such…
Sports

Stand up and yell

Review by bookpagedev

Since 2006, Whitman Publishing of Atlanta has been issuing football vault books, a series of richly produced, slipcase-bound memorabilia volumes focusing on the major college football factories. To date, coverage has been exclusively on Southeastern Conference schools, but forthcoming editions are promised for Texas and Notre Dame (and presumably others). The latest, Auburn University Football Vault: The Story of the Auburn Tigers, 1892-2007, follows true to form, with fascinating archival and gorgeous color photos wedded to gung-ho text, the entire package studded with nostalgic reproductions of game-day tickets, programs, mini-pennants and similar ephemera. Former Auburn publicist and athletic director David Housel provides the copy, which charts the early years of the Alabama school’s longstanding football program, then moves through the decades with fan-like fervor, recounting the tenures of great coaches (Shug Jordan, Pat Dye, etc.), the contributions of great athletes (Bo Jackson, Pat Sullivan et al.) and the team’s high-water marks and disappointments. It’s a veritable treasure-trove for impassioned Auburn fans (of which there are many) and a terrific example of the high-quality work in Whitman’s uniquely attractive ongoing efforts.

Since 2006, Whitman Publishing of Atlanta has been issuing football vault books, a series of richly produced, slipcase-bound memorabilia volumes focusing on the major college football factories. To date, coverage has been exclusively on Southeastern Conference schools, but forthcoming editions are promised for Texas…
Sports

Get your game on

Review by bookpagedev

Finally, we come to a book that may prove vital to football fans no matter which game (college or pro) is their main obsession. Stephen Linn’s Fox Sports Tailgating Handbook: The Gear, the Food, the Stadiums is a handy, sturdily bound paperback catering to the needs of those who love football, but maybe love the cult of football even more. Tailgating isn’t just about the game; it’s about socializing, eating, drinking and joining in fanatical revelry. This omnibus tells you how to do it right at every NFL and major college venue nationwide. Linn, who has a franchise on this subject through his other books and TV appearances, provides coverage on the best tailgating equipment (grills, coolers, furniture, etc.), safety tips, recipes (some supplied by real-life tailgaters), fan gear and profiles of a few of the most tricked-out vehicles (buses, RVs, etc.) you’ll ever see in a crowded game-day parking lot. The heart of the book is the listing of specific tailgating information for university campuses and pro facilities. Here we get history on teams and venues, pertinent contact information, radio affiliations, shuttle-bus schedules and, most importantly, the details on when and how tailgaters can do their thing and any restrictions they need to be aware of to pull it off with minimal interruption. Many of us simply are not tailgaters (too much hassle, too many logistics). But for those who are immersed in the art form, Linn’s volume is a practical necessity.

Finally, we come to a book that may prove vital to football fans no matter which game (college or pro) is their main obsession. Stephen Linn's Fox Sports Tailgating Handbook: The Gear, the Food, the Stadiums is a handy, sturdily bound paperback catering to…
Sports

Hot and not

Review by bookpagedev

The Paolantonio Report: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players, Teams, Coaches, and Moments in NFL History, by Sal Paolantonio with Reuben Frank, is yet another fan item, but one designed to spur controversy and armchair debate. Paolantonio, a sportswriter and ESPN fixture for years, compiles subjective lists of the NFL’s big on-the-field moments and movers and shakers, categorizing his coverage by underrated and overrated. Chapters are divided into player positions, coaches, teams, Super Bowl performances and Hall of Famers. For example, quarterbacks Joe Namath, Brett Favre and Terry Bradshaw are dubbed overrated, while QBs Len Dawson and Ken Anderson achieve an underrated grade, with Paolantonio running through career stats and accomplishments and putting them into contemporary perspective. The idea here is to start the discussion, of course, and this book will be handy to have around on Sunday afternoons for reference, or for simple diversion during those lengthy TV timeouts.

The Paolantonio Report: The Most Overrated and Underrated Players, Teams, Coaches, and Moments in NFL History, by Sal Paolantonio with Reuben Frank, is yet another fan item, but one designed to spur controversy and armchair debate. Paolantonio, a sportswriter and ESPN fixture for years,…
Sports

What the pros know

Review by bookpagedev

Former star NFL running back Jerome Bettis won a Super Bowl ring following the 2005 season, then bowed out of the game after 13 years of consistent excellence with the Rams and Steelers. Bettis is probably headed for the Hall of Fame, and since retirement has tried to make a go of it in broadcasting. The Bus: My Life In and Out of a Helmet is Bettis’ life story, co-authored by Gene Wojciechowski, one of ESPN.com’s better contributors. Essentially, this is a straightforward pro forma treatment, typical of the as-told-to sports genre. The prose isn’t scintillating with Wojciechowski striving to keep his subject’s conversational voice front and center but Bettis’ tale of youthful behavioral struggles in Detroit (gangs, drugs) followed by college greatness at Notre Dame and his subsequently eventful pro career will doubtlessly rope in committed football fans.

Former star NFL running back Jerome Bettis won a Super Bowl ring following the 2005 season, then bowed out of the game after 13 years of consistent excellence with the Rams and Steelers. Bettis is probably headed for the Hall of Fame, and since…
Sports

What the pros know

Review by bookpagedev

Tom Callahan, author of last season’s excellent Johnny U, returns with The GM: The Inside Story of a Dream Job and the Nightmares That Go with It, in which he chronicles the final year in the working life of recently retired NFL executive Ernie Accorsi. Callahan’s narrative is equally split between biography and the specific events of the 2006 football season, as Accorsi winds up his impressive career as general manager of the New York Giants. Readers get a strong sense of Accorsi’s humble Hershey, Pennsylvania, roots; the friendships and professional loyalties he developed over the years; and his stints doing media relations, player evaluations and head honcho decision-making for his various college and pro employers, which have also included Penn State, the Baltimore Colts and the Cleveland Browns. Callahan’s fly-on-the-wall presence takes us into the inner workings of the Giants’ front office, and Accorsi frankly relates the pitfalls and politics that go into the process of hiring and firing coaches, drafting college talent, dealing with player contracts in the age of the salary cap and negotiating the myriad unexpected personal challenges involving ownership and the NFL as an organization. In many ways, this volume will have special attraction for today’s Giants fans, but Accorsi’s status as a definite survivor of the NFL wars, and his keen historical viewpoint will engender broader general interest as well.

Tom Callahan, author of last season's excellent Johnny U, returns with The GM: The Inside Story of a Dream Job and the Nightmares That Go with It, in which he chronicles the final year in the working life of recently retired NFL executive Ernie Accorsi.…
Sports

Big fan on campus

Review by bookpagedev

Austin Murphy’s Saturday Rules: A Season with Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines) finds the veteran Sports Illustrated writer traipsing across the country throughout last year’s college football season. He offers a lively you are there diary-like account of his journeys to all the big Division I programs, featuring in-depth analysis of the various teams’ fortunes, including important wins and critical losses, all leading up to the post-season bowl games. Interview focus with a distinctly human-interest slant is on the young athletes (the stars and the lesser-known), but is more so on the high-profile coaches such as Pete Carroll at USC, Charlie Weis at Notre Dame and Urban Meyer at Florida. Murphy’s essentially chronological reportage eventually zeroes in on the Bowl Championship Series and Florida’s title-winner over Ohio State, yet he saves the very best for last via a sit-down visit with the key players responsible for underdog Boise State’s stirring and jarringly spectacular victory over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, without doubt one of the greatest games in the annals of the college gridiron.

Austin Murphy's Saturday Rules: A Season with Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines) finds the veteran Sports Illustrated writer traipsing across the country throughout last year's college football season. He offers a lively you are there diary-like account of his journeys to…
Biography

At home with the Alcotts: Louisa May and Bronson

Review by bookpagedev

Louisa May Alcott and her father, A. Bronson Alcott, died within three days of each other in March, 1888. For most of their lives, it was Bronson, a self-educated philosopher and controversial education reformer, who was known to the public for both good and ill. One of the earliest Transcendentalists, he was a close friend of Emerson and Thoreau. He was also regarded by many as an impractical idealist who could not provide for his family. It was late in Louisa’s life with the publication of Little Women, followed by Little Men and Jo’s Boys that she far exceeded her father in renown, receiving much critical acclaim, best-selling success and substantial financial rewards.

Their father-daughter relationship was not always easy, as John Matteson vividly demonstrates in his engrossing Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. For Louisa as well as for Bronson, Matteson writes, life was a persistent but failed quest for perfection. Both had ambitions of altering the world through literature. In ways that neither anticipated and in widely varying degrees, they succeeded. Yet it was in the lives they lived, rather than in the words they wrote or spoke, that they fought hardest for redemption: both to redeem themselves from their perceived failures and to redeem the world at large from the wickedness that both father and daughter sought earnestly to reform. Matteson calls Louisa the most intensely practical of [her father’s] children and says Bronson took pride in her many admirable qualities. However, he says her instinctive pursuit of pleasure was to lead Bronson for many years to view Louisa as the most selfish of his children. He was especially concerned about her strong will and temper, in which she resembled her exemplary mother, Abigail, known as Abba. In many ways this is a family biography with Abba as the central figure. A social activist and humanitarian in her own right, Abba nurtured her daughters and supported her husband through thick and much more often thin. Matteson follows the Alcotts through Bronson’s two most notable but short-lived educational and social experiments: the Temple School and the utopian community of Fruitlands. The family moved often. Louisa’s most enjoyable times were spent in Concord, where Emerson encouraged her to read books from his personal library and she learned about the natural world from Thoreau.

Louisa’s volunteer service as a nurse during the Civil War was life-changing in several ways. She comforted a dying soldier in a hospital in Washington, D.C., and Matteson believes this moment exemplified what she came to see as the greatest good in life: the sharing of another’s adversity. In much of her best fiction, emotional climaxes occur when central female characters offer to share the burdens of those they love. Alcott’s heroines tend to interpret times of challenge as opportunities to transcend selfishness. It was a publisher who suggested she write a book about girls. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, she wrote. But when she did write about life within a family much like her own, she found great success. Matteson writes insightfully about both her well-known works and others virtually forgotten. His study of the Alcotts is a sensitive and very readable exploration of prominent figures in 19th-century America.

Roger Bishop is a retired Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Louisa May Alcott and her father, A. Bronson Alcott, died within three days of each other in March, 1888. For most of their lives, it was Bronson, a self-educated philosopher and controversial education reformer, who was known to the public for both good and…

Pop CultureArts & Culture

Oops, I did it again!

Review by bookpagedev

It happens about every 10 words the ums, uhs, you knows the verbal placeholders we use while our minds race ahead of our tongues, the verbal gaffes like substituting interweb for Internet or replacing loofah with falafel (as commentator Bill O’Reilly is rather famously alleged to have done in a telephone call). Armed with a master’s degree in linguistics and a doctorate in English, author Michael Erard lumps a variety of faux pas under the heading of disfluencies in Um. . . Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, which makes them sound more remarkable than most of them really are. Our verbal miscues are plentiful and inevitable, but only occasionally riotous or ruinous. If we’re really lucky, like the notorious Rev. William Spooner, not only will actual blunders (such as exalting God as a shoving leopard ) bring us fame, but invented ones such as a camel passing through the knee of an idol will be ascribed to us, enhancing our renown.

Viennese professor Rudolf Meringer’s famed battles with Sigmund Freud over the cause of Fehlleistung (literally faulty performance, now widely known as Freudian slips ) are documented in detail here, as is the cross-cultural nature of the vocal glitch. In the Wichita tongue, for instance, the word kaakiri, or something, takes the place of uh, and similar verbal tics can be detected even in sign language. From Mrs. Malaprop, whose penchant for garbled speech in the 1775 play The Rivals has given us the catchall word for verbal blunders, to President George W. Bush, whose so-called dubyaspeak has given rise to such howlers as 2004’s This is a historic moment in history, as far as I’m concerned, Erard deftly picks his way through a junkyard of spoken debris to inform, enlighten and entertain in equal measure.

Verbal blunderologists swarm among us like birdwatchers in spring, and we are all unwitting targets for their nets. So be forewarned: Um is a mystery you won’t want to hiss, and if you do, may sod rest your goal.

It happens about every 10 words the ums, uhs, you knows the verbal placeholders we use while our minds race ahead of our tongues, the verbal gaffes like substituting interweb for Internet or replacing loofah with falafel (as commentator Bill O'Reilly is rather famously alleged…
Memoir

Gray matters

Review by bookpagedev

To dye or not to dye? That is the question posed by Anne Kreamer’s Going Gray. In a bold move, Kreamer, at 49 (but feeling 35), decided to leave the corporate environment, begin writing full time and let her gray-haired self come out. When I made my decision to go gray, she writes, I had no idea that the choice would elicit such emotionally laden responses. In Going Gray, she interviews women in various careers who have chosen to live confidently with their natural hair color. Emmylou Harris, the sixty-year-old country singer, is the great American icon for gray-haired female sexiness, she notes. On the subject of exposing one’s true self, Harris tells her, Who wants to put on an act twenty-four hours a day? Despite our culture’s obvious obsession with looking as young as possible for as long as possible, Kreamer cites the recent frenzy of media stories concerning Helen Mirren’s beauty, and Meryl Streep’s dynamic portrayal of an absolutely ungrandmotherly white-haired magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada as evidence of a shifting consciousness.

But there are plenty of dissenting voices, too. Kreamer admits her friend, famed writer/director/producer Nora Ephron, whose latest book, I Feel Bad About My Neck, is a collection of wise and witty essays about aging, has no plans to stop coloring her hair. She’s 66. How we choose to grow older is deeply idiosyncratic, Kreamer says, and is a matter of individual taste and circumstance depending on one’s age, romantic status, professional situation, class, race, ethnicity, geography, all of it. Whether ’tis nobler to wear the inevitable signs of aging proudly or to take arms against them Going Gray explores this contemporary conundrum in the most, well, colorful terms. Linda Stankard is dyeing to be seen as a successful Realtor in Piermont, New York.

To dye or not to dye? That is the question posed by Anne Kreamer's Going Gray. In a bold move, Kreamer, at 49 (but feeling 35), decided to leave the corporate environment, begin writing full time and let her gray-haired self come out. When I…
NonfictionEducation

A+ for laughter

Review by bookpagedev

New from the hilarious author of Daddy Needs a Drink comes Tales from the Teachers’ Lounge, in which Robert Wilder again masterfully turns his first hand experience into a narrative that’s at once both humorous and moving. This time Wilder takes us into the wacky world of the classroom where a daily conflict takes place between lesson plans and the lessons of real life. There’s nothing in the policy manual… [about] what to do when you see your student sprawled over the hood of a Camero making out, he explains. Competing with television, movies and cell phones isn’t easy, and guiding today’s students through a maze of books, bullies and bomb threats is tricky business. Teachers should be more like midwives and less like drill sergeants, Wilder advises. From painful to poignant, these laughter-inducing classroom chronicles are sure to chalk up good grades with educators, parents and even students sneaking a peak into the teachers’ lounge. (Hey, if gets them to read, it can’t be bad.)

New from the hilarious author of Daddy Needs a Drink comes Tales from the Teachers' Lounge, in which Robert Wilder again masterfully turns his first hand experience into a narrative that's at once both humorous and moving. This time Wilder takes us into the wacky…

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