bookpagedev

FictionHistorical Fiction

A 12th century magical mystery tour

Review by bookpagedev

Umberto Eco’s new novel Baudolino is a huge, beautifully conceived and executed tale of history, passion, love, imagination and guile. Challenging and illuminating, full of the digression, invention and brilliance Eco always provides, the book is an absolute joy to be savored.

During the sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders in 1204, Baudolino saves the life of a high court official named Niketas and, while the city is being burned and looted, he proceeds to tell the appreciative and increasingly intrigued gentleman his life story and quite a story it is.

Born in northern Italy to peasant parents, Baudolino very early on exhibited two qualities which would serve him, for better or worse, his entire life: a talent for languages and a penchant for lying. While still a lad, he charmed by wit and guile a military commander he met in the woods near his home. The commander, who turned out to be none other than Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in Italy on one of the many expeditions that would occupy him for years to come adopted Baudolino, and after a few years in court sent him to be educated in Paris.

There, Baudolino made a number of equally adventurous, imaginative and intellectually curious friends, and together they laid the foundation for an epic quest that is part myth, part hallucination, part reverie and a small dose of fact. This quest, which consumed the rest of their lives, was the pursuit of the kingdom of Prester John, the legendary priest-king of the east, said to rule over a wild and wonderful land of bizarre creatures, eunuchs and unicorns. Fueled in no small part by Baudolino’s fecund imagination and willingness to believe his own fabrications, the group eventually set out on the long and extravagant journey to find Prester John.

Moving between passages of slapstick hilarity and poignant beauty, Eco uses the venerable quest motif to unfold a narrative of great depth and feeling in which no less than the core of western theology is examined and elaborated with dazzling intelligence. Baudolino’s journey of the spirit takes him through his own middle age and beyond, and in the process we are treated to an insider’s view of the historical era of the Middle Ages, with all its inventions, brutality, hope, failure and promise. Christian relics, both real and counterfeit, play an important role in the story, along with an authentic one still debated today. Eco’s craftily developed introduction of this item is a delight.

The narrative comes full circle as we learn why Baudolino is in Constantinople to tell his tale. Another brilliant device takes the story one step further as Baudolino, in his 60s, makes yet another effort to redeem a life of near total fabrication. Whether or not he succeeds, we know by then, is of little importance, for as Baudolino says many times in many ways, believing in something makes it real. Sam Harrison, a writer in Ormond Beach, Florida, is currently working on his third novel.

Umberto Eco's new novel Baudolino is a huge, beautifully conceived and executed tale of history, passion, love, imagination and guile. Challenging and illuminating, full of the digression, invention and brilliance Eco always provides, the book is an absolute joy to be savored.

During…
Children's & YA

Fudge is back! Fudge is back!

Review by bookpagedev

There’s probably no better way to celebrate the 30th birthday of the hero of Judy Blume’s now-classic Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, first published in 1972, than the publication of a new Fudge book. And, thankfully for Fudge fans, the irrepressible 5-year-old hasn’t aged at all in this new celebration of family life, Double Fudge.

Double Fudge is the first Fudge book Judy Blume has written in 12 years. She based the original character of Fudge on the antics of her son, Larry. Now, at the urging of Larry’s 11-year-old son, Elliot, as well as thousands of fan letters, grandmother Judy Blume has given a new generation of young readers another warm and funny book to treasure.

In fact, Blume’s grandson is the inspiration for the new adventure, in which Fudge (Farley Drexel Hatcher to be precise) is driving his older brother, Peter, and the rest of his family crazy due to his obsession with money.

Blume got the idea from young Elliot. When he was small he believed that all you had to do to get money was put a card into a machine and money would come pouring out, says the author, whose books have been translated into 26 languages.

Of course, Fudge never does anything halfway. First, he skips down the stairs singing, Money, money, money . . . I love money, money, money . . . Next, he demands to be paid one dollar to pass the saltshaker at the dinner table. Then he decides he wants to make his own money, Fudge Bucks. I’m going to make a hundred million trillion of them, Fudge tells his family. Soon I’ll have enough Fudge Bucks to buy the whole world. Clearly, Fudge’s obsession is getting out of hand. His older brother, Peter, finds it embarrassing. He convinces his parents they simply have to do something. But Peter’s not entirely sure their idea is a good one: The family travels to Washington, D.C., to tour the Bureau of Printing and Engraving to show Fudge how real money is made.

While there, the Hatchers have an unexpected reunion with their long-lost relatives, the Howie Hatchers of Honolulu, Hawaii. Now Peter not only has Fudge to deal with, but twin cousins named Flora and Fauna, plus a 4-year-old mini Fudge, also named Farley Drexel! In Double Fudge, Judy Blume shows her extraordinary ability to create timeless and appealing characters and humorous family situations. Unlike J.K. Rowling, who always intended the Harry Potter books to be a series, Blume didn’t start out to write a series about the Hatcher family.

In fact, after writing Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, Blume didn’t expect to write about any of the characters again. But, says the author, Over the years I received thousands of letters from children begging for another Fudge book. Eventually I decided that if I got the right idea I’d give it a try. Then one day when I was in the shower an idea popped into my head. (The shower is a good place for ideas!) That particular time, the idea was to give the Hatchers a new baby, and Tootsie and the book Superfudge were born. After that came Fudge-a-Mania, which was inspired by a real family vacation in Maine.

In addition to the Fudge books, Judy Blume is the author of such children’s classics as Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, as well as Blubber and Forever. She has also written three best-selling adult novels.

Decade after decade, readers are attracted to Blume’s warm voice and understanding of childhood issues. In 1996, Blume was honored by the American Library Association with the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement. And it’s no surprise that, with 75 million copies of her books in print, she still receives thousands of letters each month.

Who knows, maybe one of those letters will inspire this amazing writer to give her readers one more story about Farley Drexel Hatcher! Deborah Hopkinson writes from Walla Walla, Washington. Her newest children’s title is Cabin in the Snow, book two in the Prairie Skies Series, available from Aladdin Paperbacks.

There's probably no better way to celebrate the 30th birthday of the hero of Judy Blume's now-classic Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, first published in 1972, than the publication of a new Fudge book. And, thankfully for Fudge fans, the irrepressible 5-year-old hasn't aged…
Biography

The life of a legend

Review by bookpagedev

Author of Zelda, the best-selling biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, Milford delivers a fascinating account of the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the first female poet to win a Pulitzer Prize. Seductive, beautiful and undeniably brilliant, Millay born in 1892 in Camden, Maine attended Vassar with the backing of wealthy patrons, where she began a tumultuous series of love affairs with women and men. From her Greenwich Village home, she composed brave, lyric verse that the reading public couldn’t resist. During the Depression, her books sold in the tens of thousands, and her controversial personal life kept her in the public eye. Millay’s reliance on alcohol, morphine and men are recounted here in vivid detail. This is biography at its best a page-turning account of a remarkable writer.

A reading group guide is included in the book.

 

Author of Zelda, the best-selling biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, Milford delivers a fascinating account of the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the first female poet to win a Pulitzer Prize. Seductive, beautiful and undeniably brilliant, Millay born in 1892 in Camden, Maine attended Vassar…

Travel

New series pairs authors and destinations

Review by bookpagedev

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don’t miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of titles from Edwidge Danticat and Michael Cunningham, assays an offbeat category: The ruminative. The idea is to pair a litterateur with a setting he or she finds especially evocative and to create an extended, moseying-around essay a walk," both literal and figurative. Forthcoming matches include Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate) on Mexico, Myla Goldberg (Bee Season) on Prague, Christopher Buckley on Washington, D.C., and Roy Blount Jr. on New Orleans. Intriguing as the prospects may be, the two initial titles raise some interesting questions, such as: Can an author be too close to a subject, so entwined as to neglect the need to reach out to the reader? Might a writer accustomed to spinning fiction lose his or her way without a narrative thread? In After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (Crown, $16, 160 pages, ISBN 0609609084), Edwige Danticat, who has probed her conflicted relationship with her natal land in such novels as Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones maintains a sense of suspense by playing up her dread of actually attending carnival. Little wonder she’s apprehensive, having been raised on her Baptist minister uncle’s warnings that People always hurt themselves during carnival gyrating with so much abandon that they would dislocate their hips and shoulders and lose their voices while singing too loudly." Further, the author is warned, Not only could one be punched, stabbed, pummeled, or shot during carnival, young girls could be freely fondled, squeezed like sponges by dirty old, and not so old, men." Danticat has returned to the island as an adult with a journalistic mission to cover carnival, but the nervous girl in her makes her approach the task perhaps too portentously. She interviews officials, quotes poets from Ovid to Octavio Paz, and takes preparatory field trips: to a cemetery, to the final resting place of a rusting steam engine (sought out as a symbol of 19th-century industrial Jacmel"), to an art show of carnival masks, to a remote and rare forest (much of Haiti has long since been stripped, largely for fuel, and partly to rout out revolutionaries). Then finally, 127 pages into the book, she faces up to the dreaded day.

Is the wait worth it? Retroactively, yes. Impatience melts as you realize how carefully, while seeming to dance around the topic, Danticat has laid the groundwork for witnessing the event and beginning to understand it. Carnival, as she describes it, is frightening: The image of an AIDS-awareness activist, for instance, who growls with blackened teeth and flashes blood-stained panties is indelibly disturbing. The gathering is also clearly cathartic, not only for the locals who yearly confront their demons (both traditional and modern) and celebrate a cycle of renewal, but also for visitors, as well, including the many Haitians who, like Danticat, have had to move abroad and yearn to recapture a sense of belonging.

Provincetown, that artsy sand-spit at the tip of Cape Cod which has served for centuries as an eccentric’s sanctuary" in Michael Cunningham’s apt phrase, is a far less foreboding place than Danticat’s Haiti. In fact, he asserts in Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown, it’s not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions." True, men consort openly in the grass maze enroute to Herring Cove beach (a pastime which strikes him as innocently bacchanalian, more creaturely than lewd," and circumnavigatable in any event), and you cannot walk more than 100 yards down crowded Commercial Street without being flyered" by an eight-foot tall counting the bouffant transvestite advertising a revue. The author describes one such encounter, in which a towering drag queen amused a 4-year-old by repeatedly doffing, on command, his blue beehive wig to reveal the crewcut beneath: The child fell into paroxysms of laughter," he writes.

Cunningham, whose novel The Hours won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, first came to town two decades ago as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, a cross-disciplinary incubator founded in 1968 by local luminaries such as Robert Motherwell and Stanley Kunitz. He admits his off-season sojourn was a total bust. Yet somehow, mired in a slough of despond and thwarted ambition, he fell in love with Provincetown, the way you might meet someone you consider strange, irritating, potentially dangerous but whom, eventually, you find yourself marrying." A summerer ever since, he understands the intricate weave of Provincetown’s social fabric far better than Peter Manso, whose gossipy potboiler Ptown, released in July, earned Land’s End some well-deserved collateral pre-publicity. Cunningham grasps the rhythms of the place and, like the many local poets he quotes (Kunitz, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Alan Dugan, Mary Oliver), has a gift for touching on the timeless. He describes a certain segment of August, for instance, as a deep blue bowl of perfect days, noisier than winter but possessed of a similar underlying silence: A similar sense that the world is, and will always be, just this way calm and warm, bleached with brightness, its contrasts subdued by a shimmer that makes it difficult to determine precisely where the ocean ends and the sky begins." His often-rambling walk" is essentially a love sonnet whose sentiments are easily shared. Sandy MacDonald, the author of Quick Escapes Boston (Globe Pequot), lives in Cambridge and Nantucket in Massachusetts.

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don't miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of…

Travel

New series pairs authors and destinationsm

Review by bookpagedev

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don’t miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of titles from Edwidge Danticat and Michael Cunningham, assays an offbeat category: The ruminative. The idea is to pair a litterateur with a setting he or she finds especially evocative and to create an extended, moseying-around essay a walk,” both literal and figurative. Forthcoming matches include Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate) on Mexico, Myla Goldberg (Bee Season) on Prague, Christopher Buckley on Washington, D.C., and Roy Blount Jr. on New Orleans. Intriguing as the prospects may be, the two initial titles raise some interesting questions, such as: Can an author be too close to a subject, so entwined as to neglect the need to reach out to the reader? Might a writer accustomed to spinning fiction lose his or her way without a narrative thread? In After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti, Edwige Danticat, who has probed her conflicted relationship with her natal land in such novels as Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones maintains a sense of suspense by playing up her dread of actually attending carnival. Little wonder she’s apprehensive, having been raised on her Baptist minister uncle’s warnings that People always hurt themselves during carnival gyrating with so much abandon that they would dislocate their hips and shoulders and lose their voices while singing too loudly.” Further, the author is warned, Not only could one be punched, stabbed, pummeled, or shot during carnival, young girls could be freely fondled, squeezed like sponges by dirty old, and not so old, men.” Danticat has returned to the island as an adult with a journalistic mission to cover carnival, but the nervous girl in her makes her approach the task perhaps too portentously. She interviews officials, quotes poets from Ovid to Octavio Paz, and takes preparatory field trips: to a cemetery, to the final resting place of a rusting steam engine (sought out as a symbol of 19th-century industrial Jacmel”), to an art show of carnival masks, to a remote and rare forest (much of Haiti has long since been stripped, largely for fuel, and partly to rout out revolutionaries). Then finally, 127 pages into the book, she faces up to the dreaded day.

Is the wait worth it? Retroactively, yes. Impatience melts as you realize how carefully, while seeming to dance around the topic, Danticat has laid the groundwork for witnessing the event and beginning to understand it. Carnival, as she describes it, is frightening: The image of an AIDS-awareness activist, for instance, who growls with blackened teeth and flashes blood-stained panties is indelibly disturbing. The gathering is also clearly cathartic, not only for the locals who yearly confront their demons (both traditional and modern) and celebrate a cycle of renewal, but also for visitors, as well, including the many Haitians who, like Danticat, have had to move abroad and yearn to recapture a sense of belonging.

Provincetown, that artsy sand-spit at the tip of Cape Cod which has served for centuries as an eccentric’s sanctuary” in Michael Cunningham’s apt phrase, is a far less foreboding place than Danticat’s Haiti. In fact, he asserts in Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown ($16, 176 pages, ISBN 0609609076), it’s not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions.” True, men consort openly in the grass maze enroute to Herring Cove beach (a pastime which strikes him as innocently bacchanalian, more creaturely than lewd,” and circumnavigatable in any event), and you cannot walk more than 100 yards down crowded Commercial Street without being flyered” by an eight-foot tall counting the bouffant transvestite advertising a revue. The author describes one such encounter, in which a towering drag queen amused a 4-year-old by repeatedly doffing, on command, his blue beehive wig to reveal the crewcut beneath: The child fell into paroxysms of laughter,” he writes.

Cunningham, whose novel The Hours won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999, first came to town two decades ago as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, a cross-disciplinary incubator founded in 1968 by local luminaries such as Robert Motherwell and Stanley Kunitz. He admits his off-season sojourn was a total bust. Yet somehow, mired in a slough of despond and thwarted ambition, he fell in love with Provincetown, the way you might meet someone you consider strange, irritating, potentially dangerous but whom, eventually, you find yourself marrying.” A summerer ever since, he understands the intricate weave of Provincetown’s social fabric far better than Peter Manso, whose gossipy potboiler Ptown, released in July, earned Land’s End some well-deserved collateral pre-publicity. Cunningham grasps the rhythms of the place and, like the many local poets he quotes (Kunitz, Mark Doty, Marie Howe, Alan Dugan, Mary Oliver), has a gift for touching on the timeless. He describes a certain segment of August, for instance, as a deep blue bowl of perfect days, noisier than winter but possessed of a similar underlying silence: A similar sense that the world is, and will always be, just this way calm and warm, bleached with brightness, its contrasts subdued by a shimmer that makes it difficult to determine precisely where the ocean ends and the sky begins.” His often-rambling walk” is essentially a love sonnet whose sentiments are easily shared. Sandy MacDonald, the author of Quick Escapes Boston (Globe Pequot), lives in Cambridge and Nantucket in Massachusetts.

Travel books generally adhere to one of two camps: the promotional (go here, see this, don't miss) and the vicarious (sagas of astounding adventures few would dream of trying to duplicate). The new Crown Journeys series, which debuts this month with a pair of titles…
Memoir

September paperback releases offer good choices for reading groups

Review by bookpagedev

America’s favorite Southern author returns with a delightfully down-home look at the life of his ornery grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, a tough-as-nails moonshiner and roofer who along with his equally ornery wife Ava raised seven children in the backwoods of Alabama. Bragg, who never knew his grandfather, interviewed a slew of relatives about Charlie, a man admired for his family loyalty, his honesty and his unabashed courage (he once stood up to a passel of drunks armed with an ax, a hammer and a shotgun). A moving collection of stories inspired by Charlie, this wistful memoir captures a long-gone era in rural America. Bragg’s newest entry in the chronicles of his unforgettable family will amply satisfy fans of All Over but the Shoutin’. A reading group guide is available in print and online at www.vintagebooks.com/read.

America's favorite Southern author returns with a delightfully down-home look at the life of his ornery grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, a tough-as-nails moonshiner and roofer who along with his equally ornery wife Ava raised seven children in the backwoods of Alabama. Bragg, who never knew his…
Children's & YA

Dogs will be dogs and vice versa

Review by bookpagedev

If Snoopy ever needed a soul mate, terrier Ike LaRue would fit the bill. Poor, misunderstood Ike: He has been banished for two months of behavior training at the Brotweiler Canine Academy, and he is miserable. But, like Snoopy, Ike is handy with a typewriter, and Dear Mrs. LaRue compiles his pleading letters home to his owner, Mrs. Gertrude R. LaRue, along with a few related newspaper articles that further relate his exploits.

Artist and writer Mark Teague’s books always feature great humor, intriguing, unusual plots and witty, eye-catching illustrations. Not surprisingly, Dear Mrs. LaRue: Letters from Obedience School serves up all the good things readers have grown to expect from the author.

Juxtaposing his letters home with scenes from what he actually experiences at the school, the book begins when Ike writes: Dear Mrs. LaRue, How could you do this to me? This is a PRISON, not a school! You should see the other dogs. They are BAD DOGS, Mrs. LaRue! I do not fit in.” The spread shows Ike mailing his letter in a plush, flower-filled area, with signs pointing to the pool and sauna. Ike’s imagination, however, features a Transylvania-like scene, complete with a winding road leading up to a foreboding castle, surrounded by bats, ravens and lightning.

Poor Ike. He can’t understand why Mrs. LaRue was so miffed when he ate her chicken pie, chased cats and tore her camel coat. Were you really so upset about the chicken pie?” he writes to his mistress. You know, you might have discussed it with me. You could have said, ÔIke, don’t eat the chicken pie. I’m saving it for dinner.’ Would that have been so difficult? It would have prevented a lot of hard feelings.” Kids will enjoy Ike’s hilarious comments and adventures, while adults will snicker at the sophisticated humor. Not surprisingly, Ike plots a daring escape from his canine prison and braves a long journey home. He ends up a hero, with the entire town saluting his bravery and holding signs that say I Like Ike.” Mark Teague has created a book full of canine capers, with superb details in every corner. Ike is so endearing, I wouldn’t be surprised if he returns in a sequel.

If Snoopy ever needed a soul mate, terrier Ike LaRue would fit the bill. Poor, misunderstood Ike: He has been banished for two months of behavior training at the Brotweiler Canine Academy, and he is miserable. But, like Snoopy, Ike is handy with a…
History

The muses that inspired men of genius

Review by bookpagedev

If you ever chuckled when you heard the phrase battle of the sexes,” thinking to yourself, that’s no battle, child,” Francine Prose’s book might make you reconsider. In The Lives of the Muses, Prose explores nine of the most tortured, devious relationships known to art and science. But instead of focusing on the famed artist in each couple, she looks at his lover, spouse or eroticized friend the artist/thinker’s muse, in other words.

People who saw Sharon Stone in the screen hit The Muse may scoff at the idea of a woman who can channel brilliant ideas to a genius. But, for Prose, there’s no getting around the role that women have played in bringing to fruition some of the world’s great masterpieces, from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary to the surrealist fantasies of Salvador Dali to the song lyrics of John Lennon.

Contemporary readers may find Prose’s chapter on Yoko Ono the most interesting. Was she the bloodsucker so many Beatle fans painted her to be, or did she inspire Lennon to think outside the rock and roll box? The truth lies somewhere in the gray area between those two extremes, Prose thinks. She wonders out loud how much of the contempt for Ono was racial prejudice and misogyny masquerading as compassion for John.

Lou Andreas-Salome will be less well-known to Prose’s readers, but she is arguably the most interesting and eclectic of Prose’s subjects. Andreas-Salome was a serial muse whose life intersected meaningfully with Frederick Nietszche, poet Rainer Rilke and Sigmund Freud. She liked to juggle two men at a time, while steadfastly refusing to have sex with anybody, including her husband, until her mid-30s when she entered into an extramarital affair with Rilke, who was 10 or so years her junior.

Prose’s fascinating book sheds light on a group of extraordinary women who filled a variety of roles some were lovers; some just friends. Some sought money and recognition, while others went after the ephemeral something akin to spiritual insight. In the end, what they all seemed to share was a deep, abiding hunger to be more than ordinary. And so they were. Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

If you ever chuckled when you heard the phrase battle of the sexes," thinking to yourself, that's no battle, child," Francine Prose's book might make you reconsider. In The Lives of the Muses, Prose explores nine of the most tortured, devious relationships known to…
LiteratureArts & Culture

Baseball bio is a real home run

Review by bookpagedev

When baseball’s All-Century Team was chosen in 1999, one of the pitchers picked was Sandy Koufax, a left-hander for the Brooklyn, and later, Los Angeles Dodgers a remarkable selection that was largely based on the strength of a five-year stretch when Koufax dominated the game like no one had before.

What is more remarkable, notes Jane Leavy, author of the new book Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, is that for a good portion of his career he pitched with an arm injury that kept him in constant pain, which he relieved with a mix of painkillers, ice baths and an analgesic balm that was so strong people cried when they were around him. As Leavy points out, Koufax had it all: movie star good looks, a nimble brain and tons of athletic ability. Like Hank Greenberg, a Jewish first baseman for the Detroit Tigers a generation before, Koufax was an icon for Jews across America. He helped belie the myth that Jews were incapable of excelling in physical endeavors.

Success never went to his head. He maintained friendships with his childhood buddies from Brooklyn, and around his teammates he was known for treating everyone the same, regardless of their color or hierarchy as an athlete. Leavy, an award-winning sportswriter and feature writer for the Washington Post, does a sensitive job in portraying him as an outstanding athlete and a thoughtful, complex man.

Baseball fan Ron Kaplan writes from Montclair, New Jersey.

 

When baseball's All-Century Team was chosen in 1999, one of the pitchers picked was Sandy Koufax, a left-hander for the Brooklyn, and later, Los Angeles Dodgers a remarkable selection that was largely based on the strength of a five-year stretch when Koufax dominated the…

NonfictionHumor

Tackling mission impossible

Review by bookpagedev

Haven’t you always wanted to form your own country? Why not take all the gold from Fort Knox or borrow” the Mona Lisa to pay for your personal sovereign nation? All these unlikely activities and more are detailed in Hunter S. Fulghum’s new book, Don’t Try This At Home: How to Win a Sumo Match, Catch a Great White Shark, Start an Independent Nation and Other Extraordinary Feats (For Ordinary People). Drawing on the success of the Worst-Case Scenario series, Fulghum goes one step further and provides instructions on how to perform the kinds of death-defying action hero stunts that look impossible even on the big screen. While readers are, of course, cautioned not to actually attempt any of these stunts, the instructions provided are surprisingly thorough. Each activity, from smuggling top secret documents to rescuing POWs, is accompanied by a detailed list of what you’ll need, approximately how long the mission will take and step-by-step instructions that guide you through the process.

While impractical, the outlines make for fascinating reading and will most likely increase your respect for anyone who could actually pull off these stunts. For most of us, the opportunity to be a real-life action hero will never come, but at least we can rest assured that, should the day arise, we’ll be prepared.

Haven't you always wanted to form your own country? Why not take all the gold from Fort Knox or borrow" the Mona Lisa to pay for your personal sovereign nation? All these unlikely activities and more are detailed in Hunter S. Fulghum's new book, Don't…
LiteratureArts & Culture

The men behind the bomb

Review by bookpagedev

Some of the most influential physicists of the 20th century were deeply involved in the creation of the atomic bomb and the much more destructive thermonuclear hydrogen bomb that followed. Patriotism led them to put their expertise at the service of their country. Now, in an authoritative new book, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller, Gregg Herken re-creates that turbulent period, focusing on three major figures of the era. Drawing on thousands of pages of declassified government documents from the United States and the former U.S.S.R., as well as many personal interviews and private papers, the author gives us fresh portraits of his subjects. Herken is a curator and historian of science at the Smithsonian Institution. His previous books include The Winning Weapon and Counsels of War, both concerned with various aspects of subjects discussed in his new book.

Lawrence and Teller had shown little interest in politics until 1940-1941. Oppenheimer, in contrast, was involved with numerous leftist causes and groups and some suspected him of being a Communist. As Herken demonstrates, Oppenheimer was under intense scrutiny, but a careful reading of official reports shows that no proof of disloyalty was ever found. Despite continuing concern, General Leslie Groves, who headed the Manhattan Project, ordered a security clearance for Oppenheimer in 1943, noting that, He is absolutely essential to the project." Oppenheimer’s views remained controversial throughout the early postwar years when he was regarded by many as the scientist of conscience in this country. Those who disagreed with him or suspected him of disloyalty were eventually able to get his security clearance taken away in 1954, one day before it was due to expire.

Herken deftly guides us through the scientific-governmental and political-military thicket, explaining how key decisions were made. He follows his three major figures bright, innovative, even brilliant scientists as they debate and maneuver to gain acceptance for their points of view. But it is not their story alone. Along the way we are made aware of the significant contributions of many others, including Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi and Alfred Loomis.

Herken writes that the plot" of this riveting book is taken from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: [I]t is a cautionary tale of arrogance, betrayal, and unforeseen consequences; of what comes from invoking forces both political and physical that one neither fully understands nor controls."

Nashville bookseller Roger Bishop is a longtime contributor to BookPage.

 

 

Some of the most influential physicists of the 20th century were deeply involved in the creation of the atomic bomb and the much more destructive thermonuclear hydrogen bomb that followed. Patriotism led them to put their expertise at the service of their country. Now,…

NonfictionEducation

Inside the halls of girls schools

Review by bookpagedev

In the midst of a heated public debate about whether girls do better in school without the distraction and competition of boys comes a perfectly timed book that offers a fascinating peek into the world of single-sex schools.

Author Karen Stabiner, a well-known journalist who has written for Vogue and The New Yorker, spent a year inside the minds of teenage girls at two very different single-sex schools. The uppercrust, private Marlborough prep school in Los Angeles draws girls with Harvard ambitions and the parental support (sometimes pressure) to make it happen. On the other hand, the girls at The Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem (TYWLS) come from neighborhoods where they must navigate a minefield of pregnancy, drugs and gangs. College is a distant, some would even say laughable, goal for many of these girls, who face the educational triple whammy of being poor, minority and female.

Stabiner began researching All Girls as a means of deciding the best educational course for her own daughter, and it will serve as a helpful guide for parents. But this is not just another book about educational philosophy. It’s a poignant, powerful investigation into the state of adolescent girls in America.

All Girls will invariably draw comparisons to that other book dissecting the pressure-filled lives of teenage girls, Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia, and rightfully so. The students at both Marlborough and TYWLS feel tremendous weight on their shoulders, because in addition to coping with the natural angst of adolescence, these girls are trailblazers in the battle for equal education. In both cases, they are expected to justify their schools’ existence as all-girls institutions: at Marlborough by getting bids to the nation’s best colleges, and at TYWLS by graduating and perhaps going on to a four-year school.

Stabiner illustrates this struggle by following several girls throughout the school year at TYWLS, the overachieving, almost robotically driven Maryam and naturally gifted but unmotivated Amy; and individualistic Katie and Harvard-obsessed Christina at Marlborough. Stabiner magnificently illuminates the fears, obstacles and triumphs facing these girls, making this book a highly satisfying read for anyone interested in the state of American education or simply a compelling tale of American girls. Amy Scribner writes from Washington, D.C.

In the midst of a heated public debate about whether girls do better in school without the distraction and competition of boys comes a perfectly timed book that offers a fascinating peek into the world of single-sex schools.

Author Karen Stabiner, a well-known…
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Beetle mania rolls on

Review by bookpagedev

The international automotive industry has foisted many products on this car-crazy world, yet nothing has ever registered as vividly or as memorably in the public’s imagination as the Volkswagen Beetle. Yes, it was small and funny-looking (some would say downright ugly), you could hardly see out the back window and traveling in a crosswind was always an adventure. But what the Beetle (or Bug") did best was run. And run. And run. Efficiency was its main selling point, followed closely by its rock-bottom price tag. The story of the Volkwagen’s birth and development is a fascinating one, and veteran television reporter and New York Times writer Phil Patton does a super job of telling it in his new book Bug. Patton digs deeply into the Bug’s origins in the 1930s, when, as the proletariat dream-car brainchild of Adolf Hitler and Germany’s Third Reich, no less a designer than the renowned Ferdinand Porsche (of stylish race-car fame) set to work bringing the Fuhrer’s vision to reality. There were snags, of course primarily World War II.

It wasn’t until the postwar era that the Volkswagen idea was brought to fruition, and the Bug became a symbol of Germany’s economic and industrial renewal. Then the worldwide Bug infestation began.

America went Beetle-happy in the late ’50s and early ’60s, spurred on by perhaps the most famous advertising campaign in history. The Doyle Dane Bernbach agency developed print and television spots that made buying a VW absolutely de rigueur for eggheads, unassuming idealists or anyone with an iconoclastic or countercultural streak (or a wobbly bank account). By the time the Beetle ceased production in the late 1970s, it had become the best-selling car of all time. Patton relates all of these episodes with authority and style, offering interesting glimpses into the personalities, creativity and philosophies of the principal players. He also provides an account of the late ’90s rejuvenation of the Bug, whose pedigree as a product of the global economy is a far cry from the utilitarian, Cold War-era atmosphere from which its legendary forebear sprung. This first-rate blend of business and social history should hit a chord of nostalgia with many readers.

Martin Brady writes from Nashville.

 

 

 

The international automotive industry has foisted many products on this car-crazy world, yet nothing has ever registered as vividly or as memorably in the public's imagination as the Volkswagen Beetle. Yes, it was small and funny-looking (some would say downright ugly), you could hardly…

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