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by Julie Hale

Set in 1941, The Greatest Skating Race: A World War II Story from the Netherlands by Louise Borden has all the makings of a classic. A Dutch boy named Piet takes on the mission of a lifetime when he is asked to skate across the canals of the Netherlands into Belgium, where he will serve as a guide to two children who are fleeing from the Germans. Facing threats from enemy soldiers, braving sub-zero temperatures and chill winds, Piet and the youngsters set out on their journey disguised as students enjoying a day on the ice. To help speed them on their precarious mission, Piet thinks of his hero, Pim Mulier, the first person to successfully complete the Elfstedentocht, a much-celebrated skating race that takes place every year on the canals and waterways of his homeland. With Pim as his inspiration, Piet leads his two friends to safety across the frozen landscape in an act of courage that will inspire readers of all ages. Niki Daly’s impressionistic illustrations seem to belong to the era. His fresh-faced young characters and smoky winter scenes add to the timelessness of this remarkable tale. Julie Hale writes from Austin, where snowflakes are rarely seen.

Children's & YA

Children's & YA

The splendor of the seasons

Review by bookpagedev

by Julie Hale

Young readers will learn to appreciate nature’s diversity with Now It Is Winter by Eileen Spinelli. The story features six little mice, all terribly tired of winter, and their wise mother, who helps them see and savor the magic of the snowy months. The mice are anxious for spring, for raspberries and cream rather than oatmeal and brown sugar, for paper kites and a band of April beach instead of blizzards. They paint sunny scenes even as they dress to go into the snow-covered outdoors, where they twirl on a pond in tiny ice skates and tumble down whitened hills. While the young ones wish for the future, their mother advises them to relish winter, to appreciate the present moment. Now is the blessing, she tells them in the final stanza. Now is the time to be. The little creatures are delicately depicted by illustrator Mary Newell DePalma, who accents her soft silvers and grays with dashes of vibrant color. Spinelli’s brief, poetic lines are filled with lovely images. Simple yet profound, this touching little tale is just right for reading aloud. Julie Hale writes from Austin, where snowflakes are rarely seen.

Young readers will learn to appreciate nature's diversity with Now It Is Winter by Eileen Spinelli. The story features six little mice, all terribly tired of winter, and their wise mother, who helps them see and savor the magic of the snowy months. The mice…

Children's & YA

Children's & YA

Frosty fun

Review by bookpagedev

by Julie Hale

Capturing the thrills and chills of icy weather, Hello, Snow by Hope Vestergaard is a lively look at the perfect winter’s day. This spirited tale, told in jaunty rhymed stanzas, follows the adventures of a young girl who is drawn outdoors after a heavy snowfall. The storyline is classic: after dragging daddy out of bed, the little girl bundles up in a purple snowsuit, bright green hat and matching gloves, and heads out into the invigorating air, greeting nature with a grin: Hello sunshine! Hello wind! Snowflakes tickle on my chin. While Dad, armed with a shovel, does his duty in the yard, the girl and a neighbor lad throw snowballs and build a snowman. Then the sledding starts. The children’s brisk trips downhill, made with a little brown mutt on board, result in a series of spills. But nothing can spoil the fun of this special day: Brush the snow off. Hello, friend. Good-bye tears. Let’s go again! Bright illustrations by Nadine Bernard Westcott are the perfect complement to these icy events. Bluebirds swoop through each scene, and a striped cat trails along behind the sledders. This is a delightful story that will make readers wish for wintry weather.

Julie Hale writes from Austin, where snowflakes are rarely seen.

Capturing the thrills and chills of icy weather, Hello, Snow by Hope Vestergaard is a lively look at the perfect winter's day. This spirited tale, told in jaunty rhymed stanzas, follows the adventures of a young girl who is drawn outdoors after a heavy snowfall.…

Animals

Animals

Seeing the world in a different way

Review by bookpagedev

by Lynn Hamilton

Do cats have ESP? One man wondered why the family cat went to the door to greet his wife exactly five minutes before she got home every day. The couple lived several floors up in an apartment building, and the wife got home at different times of day. An animal behaviorist finally worked out that the small feline could hear its mistress greet the elevator operator all the way down on the ground floor as she stepped onto the elevator. This and other fascinating insights appear in Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation, co-authored with Catherine Johnson. Grandin’s theory is that animals have a unique intelligence that is hard for ordinary humans to appreciate. But not so hard for Grandin. She is autistic, and she believes the autistic human mind with its simpler emotions and more diffuse observations of the world is closer to the animal brain. As a teenager, Grandin was already taking cues from animals on how to deal with her problems. Observing livestock go through a squeeze chute which calmed them during inoculations, Grandin built a squeeze chute for her own use, and it helped quiet her nerves during severe anxiety attacks. Later, Grandin used her empathy with animals to design more humane slaughter facilities for meat-packing plants. She sees these plants from the cattle’s point of view the terrifying chain, the troubling reflection and too-dark corridor and points out the problems, with amazing results.

Grandin says the normal human mind screens out a lot of its landscape. We see what we’re looking for, while animals and autistics process reality more indiscriminately, fixating on something the ordinary human doesn’t even notice. Grandin writes, for instance, about being riveted by computer screen savers. Grandin’s book, written for the non-scientist, will appeal to anyone with an interest in animals from pet owners to ranchers to animal rights activists. Her book has enormous implications. Not since Jane Goodall’s research on the chimpanzee’s use of tools has there been a book that so successfully challenges our definitions of what is human and what is animal.

Nature

Nature

Art meets science

Review by bookpagedev

by Lynn Hamilton

Thomas Marent has been capturing the beauties of the rainforest with his Nikon for 16 years, and now the best of his life’s work has been collected in a new coffee table book, titled simply Rainforest, written with Ben Morgan. Marent’s book steers clear of rainforest politics in favor of gorgeous full-page, full-color photos of its wonders. Perhaps the book’s most remarkable achievement is the minutia: close-up photos of stick insects, leaf hoppers, grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars and other creatures that might escape the attention of other rainforest travelers. Marent’s astonishing photos of the rare walking leaf an insect that has evolved to mimic a fallen autumn leaf nearly to perfection are accompanied by a single paragraph explaining that the photographer had been looking for such an insect for 10 years. Most thinking people already know that the dwindling rainforests of the world are treasure troves of biological diversity, but somehow the photos of six different varieties of strawberry frog make that more real for those who live outside the canopy. The book comes with a CD of rainforest sounds.

Thomas Marent has been capturing the beauties of the rainforest with his Nikon for 16 years, and now the best of his life's work has been collected in a new coffee table book, titled simply Rainforest, written with Ben Morgan. Marent's book steers clear…

Taking flight with the little airline that could

Review by bookpagedev

by Sharon Secor

Travel writer and aviation editor Barbara S. Peterson first interviewed jetBlue founder David Neeleman in 1999 while researching an article on new airlines. Neeleman was full of great ideas and lots of promises. He had $10 million in freshly raised funds in the bank, but no airplanes, no staff and no pilots. His airline flew on paper only. Peterson revisits jetBlue in Blue Streak: Inside jetBlue, the Upstart that Rocked an Industry, which chronicles the airline from its birth as an entrepreneurial dream through the day-to-day pace of its aircraft and crew.

Neeleman, a travel and airline industry maverick, cut his teeth at Morris Air, a Utah-based airline that looked and felt like Southwest Airlines. Southwest bought Morris in 1993 and brought its leadership, including Neeleman, into the Southwest family. Neeleman lasted five months at Southwest; a tidy buyout package allowed him to plan a new kind of airline. In her CondÅ½ Nast Traveler piece, Peterson was skeptical that jetBlue could survive the next five years; she’d seen too many upstarts fail. But in 2000, a government report provided a prescient outline for the future for jetBlue. Airline in- siders expressed the belief that regional jet service would be the travel vehicle of the future, linking America’s major cities to its rural towns and the heartland through a network of smaller airplanes and numerous rural airports. Long lines at airports would evaporate, prices would drop and the traveling public would be happy again. In short, the airline industry would be competitive.

JetBlue has become a model for jet-service philosophy. It provides friendly service, fair pricing, reliable flights and customer responsiveness. Its planes are known for their luxurious cabins and free DIRECTV in-flight television, leather seats and even flying Pilates cards. More importantly in the hyper-competitive airline industry, jetBlue is making money. Blue Streak is an engaging peek into the open cockpits of the airline industry, its foibles and pitfalls, written by someone who knows the industry, yet still loves to fly. This book is the chronicle of one little airline that could. Sharon Secor writes from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Biography

Biography

The elder statesman

Review by bookpagedev

by Lynn Hamilton

Nelson Mandela, one of the most interesting men of the 20th century, also has one of the most interesting faces. That makes Mandela: The Authorized Portrait one of the most exciting books to come out this year. The book is a detailed narrative of Mandela’s life, heavily dosed with images that capture his evolution from young man-about-town to honored South African president. Mike Nicol, whose arching narrative unifies the often sprawling effort to hitch photos and captions to story, follows the South African leader closely as he departs to school, the first in his family to do so. Later, Nicol chronicles Mandela’s career in law, his first failed marriage, followed quickly by his wedding to Winnie Mandela, his underground war on apartheid as the Black Pimpernel, his 27 years in prison and so on. Punctuating this riveting narrative are brilliantly assembled photos that capture important moments in Mandela’s rise, fall and resurrection. The book also features first-person commentaries from celebrities like former President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Muhammad Ali, as well as friends and fellow revolutionaries who knew and worked alongside Mandela in the struggle for South African freedom.

Biography

Biography

Such devoted sisters

Review by bookpagedev

by Anne Bartlett

Winston Churchill was indisputably one of the great political figures of the 20th century. But as a young man just starting out, he had more than a little help from his mom. With the assistance of her male friends, Jennie Jerome Churchill got her boy Winston into a good cavalry regiment, despite a less than stellar academic performance at the British equivalent of West Point. She got him accredited as a war correspondent. She got him his first book contract. He took it from there.

Jennie smart, loyal, generous was one of the earliest and most remarkable of a bevy of rich American women who married British aristocrats in the late 19th century, injecting cash and energy into families that often had little of either. Her equally charming sisters, Clara and Leonie, took a similar path. The three of them, their husbands and children are the subject of Elisabeth Kehoe’s first book, The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters and the English Aristocratic World into Which They Married, which meshes biography with social and political history to create a beguiling chronicle of a long-gone world.

The Jerome girls’ own mother was a social climber, but they insisted on marrying for love sometimes to their later regret. The aristocrats they chose Lord Randolph Churchill for Jennie, Moreton Frewen for Clara, Jack Leslie for Leonie were disappointing husbands, to various degrees. But all three women remained emotionally loyal, even as they found extramarital romance with assorted European royals.

Though in decline, the aristocrats still ran the British Empire. Kehoe capably describes the Jerome clan’s roles in the struggle over Irish Home Rule, the Boer War, the First World War and the Russian Revolution. But she is most effective in bringing us into an exotic social world where the rich could do pretty much anything they wanted, as long as they did it behind closed doors and kept their mouths shut. The Jeromes didn’t escape the tragedies that afflict all families. But along the way, they had more fun than most and accomplished much still worth knowing about. Winston may have been named Churchill, but he was a Jerome at heart. Anne Bartlett is a journalist who lives in South Florida.

Lifestyles

Lifestyles

Comfortably chic

Review by bookpagedev

by Deanna Larson

Shoppers drive hundreds of miles into the heartland, drawn to Nell Hill’s, the home furnishing store in Atchison, Kansas, known for its layered, lived-in, neo-Victorian style. Proprietor Mary Carol Garrity has become a bit of a cult figure for her warm, relaxed presentation over preparation philosophy and her affection for both the antique and valuable and the worn and found. Her comfortable but elegant style has now expanded into books, including Nell Hill’s Style at Home and Nell Hill’s Christmas at Home. The newest addition, Nell Hill’s Entertaining in Style, features luscious photography that further illustrates Garrity’s great eye for decorating with accessories like old china, textiles and cast-iron urns, and her expertise in pulling it all together using natural elements from pumpkins, gourds and pine cones to tree boughs and tons of faux foliage. Garrity’s home, as well as the homes of friends, is the scene for parties including Easter brunch, a summer sip and see (baby shower), a fall garden mini-fete and a Christmas Eve supper. Close-ups, detailed descriptions and tips reveal why the settings look so enticing, and menus and some recipes are also included. Garrity takes a confident, stylish approach that turns a bunch of fabric, furniture and objects into an expressive home and a magnet for friends and family. My goal is to so captivate guests, Garrity writes, they won’t notice if the mashed potatoes or turkey have gotten a little cold.

Shoppers drive hundreds of miles into the heartland, drawn to Nell Hill's, the home furnishing store in Atchison, Kansas, known for its layered, lived-in, neo-Victorian style. Proprietor Mary Carol Garrity has become a bit of a cult figure for her warm, relaxed presentation over preparation…

Arts & Culture, Pop Culture

Pop Culture Arts & Culture

We talk pretty someday

Review by bookpagedev

by Michael Alec Rose

Viewers far and wide of Do You Speak American?, the television series airing this month on PBS, will be inspired to buy this companion volume in order to read it without any clothes on. Bostonians will peruse it stack naked; New Yorkers can enjoy it stock naked; and Georgians are sure to breeze through it stalk naked. The co-authors have traveled high and low in every sense of those words across the United States: up into the hills of Appalachia and the halls of ivy; Down East along the Maine coast, down into San Fernando Valley, and down, down, down, into the glorious swamp of pop lyrics. Their objective: to catalogue the unhemmed latitude of American popular speech that Walt Whitman celebrated 150 years ago as the genius of our nation. MacNeil and Cran begin their journey on a battleground of ideas, fought over by advocates of two opposing linguistic theories. The prescriptivists worry about the decline of proper English usage (and civilization along with it) in the United States. They wish to preserve fine writing and elegant speech, to uphold a morality of language in short, to prescribe to Americans how they should speak American. The descriptivists are blither spirits by far, content to look around and listen and learn how Americans are actually writing and speaking, and then report in full on those unruly goings-on.

MacNeil and Cran make it abundantly clear that, however much linguistic researchers may hope to pin down Spanglish or Ebonics, Americans (particularly minority groups) are always way ahead of them, changing the language from day to day. In the course of his interview for the PBS series (transcribed in the book), even John Simon, the most outspoken elitist critic of the American language, cannot help speaking in run-on sentences that sound deliciously low (as Henry Higgins would have remarked). This irony will probably be lost on the TV screen, but it’s stock naked on the page. Michael Alec Rose is a professor at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music.

Lifestyles

Lifestyles

A wealth of ideas

Review by bookpagedev

by Deanna Larson

If you own white- and black-tie apparel, occupy a home that wouldn’t be cramped with 100 guests, and think relaxed is making wild mushroom risotto cake and poached pears wrapped in pastry for a dinner party, you’ll relate to the elaborate ideas in designer and lifestyle author Carolyne Roehm’s A Passion for Parties. If you’re like rest of us, you’ll still enjoy seeing what a lot of money, time and a staff can accomplish when celebrating holidays and other special occasions. Roehm throws an elegant autumn hunt club barn dance at her place in Connecticut, Christmas in Aspen, an intimate Valentine’s Day dinner in Paris, a children’s Halloween party complete with cobweb mazes and buckets of dry ice, and Fourth of July with fireworks. The parties are illustrated like Vogue fashion spreads, and more ambitious readers can tackle the included recipes to lend their events that classy Roehm touch.

If you own white- and black-tie apparel, occupy a home that wouldn't be cramped with 100 guests, and think relaxed is making wild mushroom risotto cake and poached pears wrapped in pastry for a dinner party, you'll relate to the elaborate ideas in designer and…

History

History

When MLK met LBJ

Review by bookpagedev

by Roger Bishop

When Martin Luther King Jr. met Lyndon Baines Johnson on December 3, 1963, the latter did most of the talking. King told reporters afterward, I have implicit confidence in the man, and unless he betrays his past actions, we will proceed on the basis that we have in the White House a man who is deeply committed to help us. Despite highs and lows in their relationship, the two men achieved two historic legislative landmarks, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

By the spring and summer of 1965, however, King began to publicly raise doubts about the administration’s Vietnam policy. In an April 1967 speech, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient and minister explained his opposition to the war and denounced the country’s role in world affairs. Johnson called the speech an act of disloyalty to the country. Nick Kotz tells the dramatic story of these complex men and their tumultuous times in Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. Kotz draws on tapes of LBJ’s telephone conversations, the so-called Stegall files named after a confidential secretary to LBJ and several thousand documents released in response to Kotz’s Freedom of Information Act requests. The effect is a powerful narrative that makes events come alive.

We are made aware of the constant pressures on each man, both from their opponents and supporters. Kotz shows Johnson’s legendary skill at guiding legislation through Congress in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. We see how King, though told by both presidents Kennedy and Johnson to stop demonstrations because it made passing legislation more difficult, continued because those who marched believed that traditional methods alone would never win them equality. Kotz shows us that LBJ, not known as a great public speaker, could be eloquent on the subject of civil rights. This well-written study helps us to better understand two men without whom Kotz says the civil rights revolution might have ended with fewer accomplishments and even greater trauma. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and frequent contributor to BookPage.

Lifestyles

Lifestyles

Time to celebrate

Review by bookpagedev

by Deanna Larson

A bible in the frugal but fabulous periodicals category, Real Simple magazine and its associated books are packed with arty still lifes and easy and adaptable templates for parties that whisper hip without trying too hard. Among those featured in Real Simple Celebrations include Thanksgiving dinner; a holiday open house; New Year’s Eve potluck; an all-purpose shower; and a backyard barbeque with Campbell’s soup cans adding a Warholian touch. Clever and inexpensive invitations, decorations, table settings, guest activities and party favors using easy-to-find items are enticingly illustrated. Simple, classy and mostly make-ahead recipes and festive alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks are featured for each event. Add preparation and clean-up lists, etiquette tips (like the brilliant suggestion for getting guests to leave an open house), a pull-out Party by Numbers wheel to help figure booze and food quantities and inventive ways to use party leftovers, and the book becomes indispensable for the sociable and stylish short on time and cash.

bookpagedev

Journey by ice

The splendor of the seasons

Frosty fun

Seeing the world in a different way

Art meets science

Taking flight with the little airline that could

The elder statesman

Such devoted sisters

Comfortably chic

We talk pretty someday

A wealth of ideas

When MLK met LBJ

Time to celebrate

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