bookpagedev

Biography

Review

Review by bookpagedev

We all felt as if we knew Dr. Benjamin Spock that approachable face, the twinkle in his eye. He was the quintessential baby doctor, the man whose advice transformed the way America raised its children. Our parents quoted him with devotion, and new parents still turn to his handy book when all else fails at 2 a.m. His is the kindly voice reassuring us that the baby’s colic will get better, that her feeding schedule will right itself, that bed-wetting is not a disaster. For half a century hisBook of Baby and Child Care has begun with Spock’s comforting words, “Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.” How odd, then, to discover that indeed we don’t know Dr. Spock. That, as it turns out, we know less about the man himself than we thought we did. Thomas Maier’s timely and admirable biography, Dr. Spock: An American Life attempts to reconcile the Spock we knew with the one we didn’t. The resulting portrait is, as Maier admits, “very complicated.” Complicated, and fascinating, too. Spock’s was the voice that turned back the Victorians’ harsh, “scientific” approach to raising children (advice such as, tie the baby’s thumbs to either side of the crib so he’ll stop sucking them, and don’t kiss the baby ever). Spock advocated breast feeding long before it was fashionable. He took a courageous stand against the prevailing theory of his day when he incorporated the then-controversial theories of Freud into his work and told Baby Boomer parents that their children were reasonable beings who needed guidance, not debased creatures who needed the rod more than they needed a hug.

Yet for all that, Spock was emotionally unavailable to his own children. He demanded their absolute obedience. Spock was a husband who refused to recognize his wife’s mental illness and alcoholism, a grandfather who remained oblivious to his grandson’s depression until it was too late.

In fact, this biography contains two stories, not one. Maier gives us both the public man and the private; and if the reader finds that the two don’t quite mesh until Spock reaches old age, that perception only reflects the reality of the man’s life. He was very much an icon, a celebrity. And he was a private individual, too a father, a husband, a friend. Tragically, for much of his life, Spock was much more successful at celebrity than at intimacy. The people closest to him were often those pushed farthest away.

This conflict is played out against the colorful backdrop of history. “Benny” Spock was born before telephones were invented, yet he lived long enough to have his own Web page. A child of privilege, he graduated from Yale and was an Olympic athlete who loved to flirt, to dance and drink. In midlife, Spock became an ardent socialist and an anti-war demonstrator. He lived long enough to marry both a 1920s flapper and a 1960s feminist.

At every stage of Spock’s life, Maier explores the contrast between the public and private spheres, raising the question which reoccurs like a leitmotif in this biography: How much can we change? Are we destined to repeat the patterns we learned as children, or can we transform ourselves at our deepest, most heartfelt levels? It was a question Spock contemplated often, and his answer, in the end, was idealistic. He thought we could. Yet his own life illustrates the struggle.

Reviewed by Amy Lynch.

We all felt as if we knew Dr. Benjamin Spock that approachable face, the twinkle in his eye. He was the quintessential baby doctor, the man whose advice transformed the way America raised its children. Our parents quoted him with devotion, and new parents still…

Business & Finance

Review

Review by bookpagedev

E’s a mystery Picture yourself hanging ten in the famed surf of Hawaii, enjoying a day of better-than-average waves, just having a totally tubular time. Now, imagine that the reason for the high surf is an incoming tropical storm and you missed the forecast this morning.

If that scenario seems gnawingly familiar, you’re probably one of millions of people all over this Web-woven world trying to make sense of the Internet’s impact on how we do business. For many, using the World Wide Web is not about carefree surfing any more. It’s about survival in an increasingly merciless electronic commerce (or e-commerce ) marketplace.

Our featured new books this month deal with the anxiety that corporate managers, employees, and entrepreneurs are all feeling as they come to terms with the necessity of mastering e-commerce and other online competencies. At enterprises of all sizes in all industries, hallways are abuzz with nervous conversations about the huge opportunities waiting to be exploited on the Web and about the harsh blows that competition will deal to those who fail to exploit it properly.

It’s inevitable that books about Web business would abound while it’s a hot topic. But one new title stands out as the most lucidly argued of any I have seen, with the broadest relevance to a wide range of business situations: Dead Ahead: The Web Dilemma and the New Rules of Business (Allworth Press, $24.95, 1581150334), by Laurie Windham with Jon Samsel.

This is a book about real life, at a time when businesses are being forced into making high-stakes commitments to an evolving paradigm. I know from firsthand experience how baffling, frustrating, and even frightening it can be to decide how and where a company will make its early Web investments. It’s easy to tell that the rules of business are indeed new, but it can be vexing to figure out how they apply in one’s own case.

Windham, a San Francisco consultant, cuts to the core issues that business strategists need to focus on after they get past the initial acceptance of the Web as an inevitable part of their future. Windham guides the reader toward an understanding of how the Web reshapes nearly every aspect of business, from management structure to the most basic marketing premises to the new ways companies must approach their capital needs in the wired world and beyond. Dead Ahead is a first-rate prop to bolster the confidence of reluctant cybernauts.

Jonathan Ezor takes on many of the same issues in Clicking Through: A Survival Guide for Bringing Your Company Online (Bloomberg Press, $19.95, 1576600734). Offering an attorney’s perspective but also an entrepreneur’s mind-set, lawyer and columnist Ezor sets out a primer to help small businesses cope with the dangers inherent in Web-based business.

Those risks, as he makes clear, are both legal and tactical. It’s as easy to infringe someone else’s copyright inadvertently online as it is for someone else to poach your own. There’s a world’s worth of law and regulation that even a well-meaning Web site can transgress. Questions can arise about just who owns the material your company pays Web developers to create. The devil lurks in the details of contracts with technology vendors such as Web hosts, and the other party to the contract may be the only one with a full knowledge of those details. Ezor provides sound counsel on what questions to ask and what points really matter in negotiating with all the parties involved in weaving a Web presence.

Clicking Through is about opportunity as well as risk. But its warnings and suggestions concerning the things that can go wrong in e-business are sobering words of wisdom for companies about to fly enthusiastically into the enticing Web. This book will empower businesses to manage their online risks intelligently so that they can pursue online opportunities without fear of the unknown.

In The E-Commerce Book: Building the E-Empire (Academic Press, $39.95, 0124211607), authors Steffano Korper and Juanita Ellis convey a deep understanding of Internet applications in business. That’s hardly a surprise, since these information technology experts and educators have been working at the cutting edge of online business since the very Stone Age of the World Wide Web way back in 1994.

Would-be e-emperors will find this guide to empire-building as comprehensive as they could possibly hope for and will find plenty of inspiration as well. Lest anyone doubt the vigor of the Web marketplace, the authors sketch out its potential in terms that will convert all doubters. Maybe the figure of $2.2 trillion in worldwide e-commerce activity by 2003 is just too large to digest, so let’s look at some smaller numbers from the book. Number of years it took for use of the automobile to spread to one quarter of the population: 55. For the telephone: 35 years. For the Internet: 7 years. Message delivered: This new medium is catching on at lightning speed, and if your company doesn’t reach its customers through the Web, your competitors will.

Korper and Ellis approach e-commerce from a technologist’s point of view though, as the books mentioned above make clear, online business makes techies of everyone in the office, stripping the old high priests from the MIS department of much of their mystical power, but also leaving behind anyone who fails to master the basics of Internet technologies. It’s fortunate that these writers have a gift for gently acquainting the intimidated novice with the rapidly evolving tech phenomena that may well shape his or her future, from XML language to EDI connectivity to asymmetric key encryption.

Despite its attention to high-tech topics, The E-Commerce Book is a big-picture view of the Web’s brave new world. For any business leader trying to get e-commerce right the first time, this title will be an indispensable resource.

Our fourth book doesn’t present itself as another work about the Internet, but the very fact that Web applications are so central to its strategic vision makes it an important volume for business people coming to grips with the new online economy. Steven Wheeler and Evan Hirsch, authors of Channel Champions: How Leading Companies Build New Strategies to Serve Customers (Jossey-Bass, $35, 0787950343), are consultants with Booz-Allen and Hamilton, who cast a laser focus on one of the ultimate goals of all business efforts, online and otherwise: building a connection with the people who buy a company’s products and services.

Channel Champions is the book to pick up in the quiet moments of the morning before you boot up and begin your hectic online business day. Its core premise is refreshingly simple: Good businesses build good channels and tend them with loving care. A channel is simply a means of reaching the customer. Channels, Wheeler and Hirsch argue, have always been with us; a 5-and-10 store is (or was) one form of channel, a big-box superstore is another, and a virtual store that exists only online is another.

Obviously, channels are changing these days. Unintended consequences can result. Channels that worked for the decade preceding last Thursday may not work come Tuesday. The Web channel can fail to reach key customers, and it can eat into traditional sales channels. The authors guide the reader through these shoals by showing how the world’s best companies have channeled successfully how Wilsonart built a distributor network that delivers on its promise to deliver kitchen counters within ten days to anywhere in the U.S., how Saturn sells a transportation service to beat out rivals who just sell cars, how Dell dominates personal computer sales by selling directly to customers.

Briefly noted: Michael Lewis, of Liar’s Poker fame, has written the most engaging and dramatic business book of the year: The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (W.

W. Norton, $25.95, 0393048136; Nova Audio Books, $17.95, 1567408567). Lewis plays Boswell to one of the wild sages of our era, Netscape founder Jim Clark, intrepidly riding along as the entrepreneur tries to launch a health care technology company and the world’s most computerized yacht simultaneously.

U.C.L.A. Professor Richard Rosecrance surveys the increasingly integrated global economy in The Rise of the Virtual State: Wealth and Power in the Coming Century. Rosecrance draws analogies from the experiences of great and lesser national powers, going back hundreds of years to buttress his argument that we are literally on the verge of entering a new world: a universe where traditional measures of national might have no meaning and where a country’s most valuable resources are often the least tangible ones.

The Biology of Business: Decoding the Natural Laws of Enterprise (Jossey-Bass, $28.50, 078794324X) presents a radical new management theory, set out in essays by editor John H. Clippinger and nine other contributors. Borrowing principles from scientific thinking, the authors postulate a thought-provoking new approach to running organizations as complex adaptive systems. Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture products.

E's a mystery Picture yourself hanging ten in the famed surf of Hawaii, enjoying a day of better-than-average waves, just having a totally tubular time. Now, imagine that the reason for the high surf is an incoming tropical storm and you missed the forecast this…

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

The science fiction genre has long been noted for themes such as exotic exploration and alternative futures. Some of the best writing in the field extrapolates today’s social, economic, and political trends into the near-term future, and examines their impact on the quality of human and alien life. Joe Haldeman in Worlds; Robert Heinlein in The Sixth Column; Arthur C. Clarke in 2001, and certainly Kim Stanley Robinson in his Gold Coast series and Mars trilogy, mastered this school of futuristic fiction. Robinson continues his recent near domination of this sub-genre in Antarctica. In Robinson’s panoramic saga, a radical environmentalist political group plots an “ecotage” their form of sabotage used to protest the corporate pillage of Antarctica as they cut off communications for explorers, scientists, and commercial interests in Antarctica, and as they destroy oil exploration encampments who are attempting to engineer the drilling and export of 50 million barrels of untapped oil. As you might anticipate, these eco-saboteurs have the best of intentions, but in this harsh environment, even organized plans may not be realized and small mistakes produce large and terminal disasters. Their illicit purposes are much like the continent that Robinson writes so eloquently about: “First you fall in love with Antarctica, and then it breaks your heart.” Robinson depicts Antarctica itself so well that it seems almost like an alien world. Intrigued by the fact that Antarctica is the part of earth most like his beloved Mars, Robinson took literary research to new heights in this book with the help of a grant from the National Science Foundation, which afforded him a six weeks adventure in Antarctica.

Reviewed by Larry D. Woods.

The science fiction genre has long been noted for themes such as exotic exploration and alternative futures. Some of the best writing in the field extrapolates today's social, economic, and political trends into the near-term future, and examines their impact on the quality of human…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Review

Review by bookpagedev

In every city with a major military presence, a district can be found which serves the libidinal cravings of the personnel stationed there. The closer the proximity to the enemy, the broader the range of services offered. In Itaewon, the pleasure quarter of Seoul, Korea, arrangements can be made to satisfy the most jaded and unusual of tastes for the price of a package of American cigarettes or a bottle of Scotch. Still, staggering quantities of dollars and “won” are exchanged for products and services of a decidedly x-rated nature. The authorities, both local and military, tend to look the other way, as long as things don’t get too out of hand. It is the job of CID officers George Sueno and Ernie Bascom to make sure that things don’t get too out of hand. They carry a badge. (Okay, two badges . . . ) Buddha’s Money is the third outing for Martin Limon’s rough and tumble anti-heroes. The first, Jade Lady Burning, involved the criminal antics of a high-ranking officer; the second, Slicky Boys, found Sueno and Bascom deeply involved with an underground organization of thieves. This time, somewhat older and marginally wiser, the two are in a race against time to find an ancient jade skull which purportedly is inscribed with a map to the lost riches of Kublai Khan. Normally, this sort of venture would be outside their purview, except that the daughter of a retired Army man has been kidnapped and held for a particular ransom the jade skull. The kidnappers believe that the girl’s father, now a quasi-legitimate dealer in Asian antiquities, is the go-between in a deal to smuggle the skull out of the country, and give him a deadline after which his daughter will be killed. The only problem is he doesn’t have the skull. He turns to Sueno and Bascom in desperation.

The heroes are well-drawn, multi-dimensional characters. Sueno, the narrator, is an East LA orphan, for whom the Army is the only parent he has ever known, while Bascom, the contrapuntal brawling palooka, is happiest when he has a beer in one hand and a woman (or women!) in the other. This time, however, the major female attraction, the sensuous Lady Ahn, seems to be interested in Sueno . . . or is she? After all, she wants the jade skull as well. So, for that matter, does the nefarious Mongol monk, Ragyapa, who will stop at nothing in resurrecting his Evil Empire. Let’s not forget Choi So-lan, the bald little Buddhist nun, who has every intention of setting herself afire in the town square if the skull is not returned to her sect. And just where does Herbalist So, the enigmatic head of the notorious slicky boys, fit in? Buddha’s Money, of all the Bascom and Sueno novels, has the most far-fetched premise, with a latter-day Raiders of the Lost Ark feel. Still, the action is nonstop, the dialogue is crisp, and the mood is edgy and tense from beginning to end.

Reviewed by Bruce Tierney.

In every city with a major military presence, a district can be found which serves the libidinal cravings of the personnel stationed there. The closer the proximity to the enemy, the broader the range of services offered. In Itaewon, the pleasure quarter of Seoul, Korea,…
Business & Finance

Review

Review by bookpagedev

E’s a mystery Picture yourself hanging ten in the famed surf of Hawaii, enjoying a day of better-than-average waves, just having a totally tubular time. Now, imagine that the reason for the high surf is an incoming tropical storm and you missed the forecast this morning.

E's a mystery Picture yourself hanging ten in the famed surf of Hawaii, enjoying a day of better-than-average waves, just having a totally tubular time. Now, imagine that the reason for the high surf is an incoming tropical storm and you missed the forecast this…

LiteratureArts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

So much fiction has been published over the last few decades that any complete catalogue would be gargantuan. And given the tremendous amount of new writing, searching for the worthiest novels is a daunting task. Nevertheless, David Rubel has sifted through the annals of contemporary writing and produced The Reading List, a new reference book listing 110 of the most influential authors of contemporary literary fiction. “Because we didn’t want to sell you a book the size of the Yellow Pages, we had to pick and choose,” Rubel writes. To be included, an author must be alive and still writing, have published more than one book, and have written in more than a single genre. In addition, writers included have all received critical acclaim. No geographical limitations were set, so a wide array of countries are represented by authors like Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Kenzaburo Oe (Japan), and Amos Oz (Israel). In addition to a short biographical summary, the entry for each author includes a complete list of the author’s fiction in chronological order. Books that by consensus are an author’s best are starred, and excerpts from reviews are presented alongside those entries. At the end of each author’s section, Rubel recommends a group of authors of related substance or style. What makes The Reading List stand out from other dry reference tools is Rubel’s unpretentious, informal tone. In one biographical note, for example, he writes, “although his French-sounding name confuses some people, Louis de Bernieres is thoroughly British.” Be advised, however, that the present book makes no mention of Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele, or John Grisham. Those and other popular writers are either not sufficiently literary, or are associated too closely with a particular genre. But many other popular writers, like Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, and John Irving are listed. And with or without big name writers, Rubel’s list will keep any reader busy for quite a long time. Critics seldom agree about the value of new fiction, and by definition, contemporary writers have yet to stand the test of time. As Rubel notes in his introduction, few readers are likely to be interested in all of the authors presented here. By the same token, just as few readers will come away empty-handed. As a welcome reminder of the wealth of great authors now writing, The Reading List successfully whets the appetite for contemporary literary fiction. Reviewed by Jeremy Caplan.

So much fiction has been published over the last few decades that any complete catalogue would be gargantuan. And given the tremendous amount of new writing, searching for the worthiest novels is a daunting task. Nevertheless, David Rubel has sifted through the annals of contemporary…

Children's & YA

Review

Review by bookpagedev

When the new baby comes, what will happen to me? The question that often haunts the imaginations of expectant siblings is the subject of Robins Ballard’s When I Am a Sister. With the steady rhythm of her text and her warm illustrations, Ballard allows us to listen as a child voices her fears about life with a new baby. The big-sister-to-be in Ballard’s book is about to return home to her mama after another summer with Papa and stepmother Kate. Now that Kate is pregnant, this child wants to know what will be different when she returns next summer. Who will read to her at night? Where will she sleep? Will there still be room for her in the car? Sitting on either side of her, Papa and Kate reassure the child that though life will be different with the new baby, she too will be growing and changing. When she comes back she will be ready to have her own bedroom downstairs, ready to start reading to them, and, finally, she will be ready to be someone’s sister. Comforted and ready for next summer, our big-sister-to-be, who can’t wait to see her mama again, heads home. Each of the child’s fears sharing a room with a crying baby, being left out of a family hug is depicted in a small gray and white illustration. In contrast, Papa’s descriptions of the loving, inclusive, but very different future are painted in smooth watercolors that spill over two pages. Ballard’s artwork, quiet and unobtrusive, gives a friendly feel with its use of rounded line and uncluttered space. Ballard continues to write and illustrate about important relationships for children and families such as moving, making friends, separation from a parent. Her books encourage readers as her characters encounter the same issues that knock at the doors of our own homes. Reviewed by Anna Claire Straughan.

When the new baby comes, what will happen to me? The question that often haunts the imaginations of expectant siblings is the subject of Robins Ballard's When I Am a Sister. With the steady rhythm of her text and her warm illustrations, Ballard allows us…
Audio

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Kaye Gibbons weaves marvelous prose from the emotional havoc hateful fathers stir in their daughters. But as in Ellen Foster a tour de force told from the perspective of a young girl bounced from one unfit home to the next, who possesses remarkable candor, even humor the daughters in Gibbons’s stories are survivors. On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon is the story of Emma Garnet Tate, the daughter of Southern plantation owner Samuel P. Tate, “man of means, by God,” who is fighting an eternal battle to overcome his lowly beginnings. A self-made man, he is fiercely jealous of his eldest son’s opportunities. Whately confounds his father by rejecting his future inheritance: “I do not think I will ever live here,” Whately demurs. “If I take up your living, I will take up your Negroes. Thank you though.” Instead, Whately loves literature, a passion he instills also in Emma Garnet, further infuriating their father he craves a daughter with great feminine charms, not the bright and competent young woman Emma Garnet is becoming.

To Tate’s mortification, Emma Garnet marries a young doctor, Quincy Lowell, of a prominent “Yankee” family from Boston. The couple moves to Raleigh, North Carolina, where Emma Garnet lives with the greatest peace and joy she has ever known for a time.

The Civil War is on the horizon, and the Lowells are in the thick of it. As the bloodshed mounts Emma Garnet joins her husband in the hospital tending to the soldiers and later moves into their home (the piano is Quincy’s impromptu operating table). The Lowell home becomes a tight operation, run by Emma Garnet and Clarice a cherished slave from Emma Garnet’s childhood whom she and Lowell freed and hired for wages. Though common throughout the war, there’s a subtle irony in Clarice’s care of the soldiers who would die for the South’s right to own slaves.

Never melodramatic, the story captures the lie of the war that there’s honor in joining what Emma Garnet sarcastically terms “the chivalric dead.” To a newspaper’s account of a soldier shot by sniper who “no doubt died in regard of his Cause,” Emma Garnet responds, “No doubt he died wishing he was home, thinking Yankees and Negroes might not be worth the exquisite pain in his side . . .” The author of five novels including A Virtuous Woman and A Cure for Dreams, Kay Gibbons has considerable critical acclaim to live up to. In On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, she has exceeded it.

Reviewed by Rosalind S. Fournier.

Kaye Gibbons weaves marvelous prose from the emotional havoc hateful fathers stir in their daughters. But as in Ellen Foster a tour de force told from the perspective of a young girl bounced from one unfit home to the next, who possesses remarkable candor, even…
Children's & YA

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Today’s adolescents are obsessed with body image. Statistics show that girls are especially worried about being overweight, with some dieting for the first time as young as ten years old. Author and teen advice columnist, Cherie Bennett, touches the heart of this teen obsession with weight in her novel Life in the Fat Lane. The story is at times funny, at times heart-wrenching, and at all times realistic.

Lara Ardeche lives the life every teen dreams. She’s thin, popular, a straight-A student, and a beauty pageant winner from a long line of pageant queens. To top it off she’s a nice person who cares about her peers, evidenced by her friendships with kids from both the “popular” and “unpopular” crowds. Her enviable life fades when she rapidly begins to gain weight no matter how hard she diets and exercises. Within seven months she gains 100 pounds. Though Lara tries to convince her parents and pageant consultant that her problem is physical, they believe she’s “letting herself go” due to adolescent troubles. A battery of medical tests from a variety of specialists all show negative results. When she is finally diagnosed with a rare metabolic disorder, the long-awaited “magic wand” solution is not part of her fate. She may remain fat forever.

Bennett accurately portrays Lara’s struggles to deal with her imperfect life and the many compounding family problems she had been too self-absorbed to notice before her weight problem. She battles self-hatred, learns who her true friends are, feels her father’s embarrassment and denial of her disorder, and faces prejudice as an overweight person. Lara is not the only one in her family who learns that beauty is something from within and that living the life expected of her by others will not bring her happiness. Bennett knows and tells Lara’s story from first-hand experience, having gained weight from steroids prescribed for rheumatoid arthritis. Her captivated readers will find a new definition for perfection as they follow Lara’s journey to inner happiness.

Reviewed by Lisa Wroble.

Today's adolescents are obsessed with body image. Statistics show that girls are especially worried about being overweight, with some dieting for the first time as young as ten years old. Author and teen advice columnist, Cherie Bennett, touches the heart of this teen obsession with…
FictionWomen's Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Islands are magical places, no doubt about it. Whether you live on one, as I do, vacation on one, or read about them, islands stir some deep core of fantasy. Island Justice is a satisfying island book. Elizabeth Winthrop understands and better still, makes us understand the feeling of a close-knit community that knows everyone else’s business and personal life, that pulls together when it needs to.

When Maggie Hammond’s godmother, Nan, dies and leaves her island home to Maggie, a sophisticated world traveler, a furniture conservator who works with museums in London, Madrid, Amsterdam, and Prague, Maggie sets about selling the cluttered Victorian house. The task of getting the house ready for sale takes longer than she expects, and Maggie gets caught up in off-season island life. The body of an island man, missing for several days, washes up on her beach. Islanders rally around his daughter and give Maggie, who found the body, the support she needs. “You’re entitled to fall apart,” she is told. She learns about a serious problem in one of the families. Should she remain silent, closing her eyes the way the islanders have been doing? Should she call in authorities from the mainland? What role should she play? In Island Justice, Winthrop packs onto her small island (12 miles long, three miles wide) adventure, romance, mystery, and humor. We learn a bit about furniture conservation, a bit about training Vishlas, hunting dogs. When Randy Baker spots a school of fish off the beach: “ÔHallelujah,’ he shouted, and got on the radio with a single call. He knew he was breaking the cardinal rule of the island. The radio was to be used only for emergencies. But the fishermen had come up with a simple code. . . . Within twenty minutes, there were twelve fishermen lining the beach, calling news of lures and catches to one another.” Kasha, Maggie’s Siberian husky, is hurt badly and must get to the mainland. The word goes out, “Get down to the ferry will you, and try to convince Dan to hold that boat.” Besides being a good yarn, the story has the feel of an island. We hear the bell buoy, the fog horn, the gulls, we struggle along with Maggie to back a car onto the ferry. I was sorry when I finished this wonderful, rich book. Now that I’ve discovered Elizabeth Winthrop, I am off to my favorite island bookstore to order her previous novel, In My Mother’s House.

Reviewed by Cynthia Riggs.

Islands are magical places, no doubt about it. Whether you live on one, as I do, vacation on one, or read about them, islands stir some deep core of fantasy. Island Justice is a satisfying island book. Elizabeth Winthrop understands and better still, makes us…
Food & Drink

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Wined and dined Oxford University Press has just released greatly revised second editions of their already classic encyclopedias on wine and food. The Oxford Companion to Wine ($65, 019866236X), edited by well-known international wine critic Jancis Robinson, addresses not only the expected topics such as the history of champagne, the faddish popularity of merlot, and tours of Provence and Burgundy it also offers fascinating entries (and charming illustrations) about such topics as the importance of wine imagery in the pre-Islamic Arab poets, differences in vineyards as far apart as Argentina and Australia, and the wine-related origin of the term symposium. Although encyclopedic and exhaustive, the book assumes no prior knowledge of wine, and therefore becomes a gift to both the connoisseur and the novice. The same unassuming breadth characterizes The Oxford Companion to Food, edited by English food writer Alan Davidson. This gorgeous book reminds us that the world is our gingerbread house, that over the centuries adventurous cooks have popped practically everything on earth into their mouths, tinkered until they found the best method of preparation, and passed along their judgments. Entries cover topics ranging from potatoes to aphrodisiacs, from escargot to bats. What is mold and what is its relationship to food? Why do we eat dogfish but not dogs? How do salt and sugar work? The answers to these and thousands of other questions are in this single volume.

Wined and dined Oxford University Press has just released greatly revised second editions of their already classic encyclopedias on wine and food. The Oxford Companion to Wine ($65, 019866236X), edited by well-known international wine critic Jancis Robinson, addresses not only the expected topics such as…

Fiction

Haunting page-turner from Barbara Kingsolver

Review by bookpagedev

Alone on her mountain, Deanna is hugging a secret. A coyote pack has recently moved to the Appalachian Mountains overlooking Zebulon Valley, Virginia, where this story is set. Despite Deanna’s determination to protect them, the coyotes’ fate is precarious. Will they survive the malevolence of farmers and bounty hunters to the last page of Prodigal Summer? This suspense is but one of the many factors that makes Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel a haunting page-turner. Deanna has more in common with Lusa, a young widow living in the valley, than either woman knows. Both are scientists and environmentalists, striving to reconcile the economic interests of their Virginia tobacco farming town with the larger needs of the planet.

We wait for their lives to intersect, but Kingsolver spins their stories slowly, bringing them closer and closer together until their meeting is inevitable.

Prodigal Summer isn’t the first novel in which Kingsolver reveals her environmental ethos, but it is perhaps the first one that openly demonstrates how formidably well versed she is in natural history. Her detailed knowledge of the Appalachian ecosystem is especially impressive. But where science writing is frequently dry, Kingsolver makes the sex life of moths and coyotes riveting reading. In her hands, the silent war between organic farmers and those that believe in pesticides has the firm grip of a 1950s detective thriller.

Though Kingsolver’s politics are transparent in Prodigal Summer, she never reduces her characters to stereotypes. In the elderly Garnett, for instance, the novelist delivers a heartwarming, sometimes humorous portrait of an aging gentleman farmer, baffled at the changing mores which assail him from all sides, even in a rural Virginia farming town.

Without ridiculing him, Kingsolver shows that Garnett’s troubles the extinction of the American chestnut and a hardy strain of crop-devouring insects are the result of pesticide use and clear cutting, practices which Garnett still naively supports. Yet Kingsolver’s portrait of him is overwhelmingly forgiving and sympathetic. His diminishing eyesight, his Friday afternoon seafood buffet ritual, his inner turmoil, in which chivalry contends with petty revenge, are portrayed with uncanny realism. Readers will be deeply moved by his longing to restore the chestnut to the forests of America. They will perceive early on that he is in love with his neighbor, the rebel Nannie, a woman close to his own age. And they will ache for him to make this discovery himself.

It will be tempting for reviewers to call Prodigal Summer a manifesto against agricultural pesticides and bounties on predator animals. But Prodigal Summer should not be sold short. It is beautifully conceived fiction, with symmetry, suspense and complex characters as subtly crafted as any being written today.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

Alone on her mountain, Deanna is hugging a secret. A coyote pack has recently moved to the Appalachian Mountains overlooking Zebulon Valley, Virginia, where this story is set. Despite Deanna's determination to protect them, the coyotes' fate is precarious. Will they survive the malevolence of…

Children's & YA

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Despite all the advantages males have in our culture, it is nevertheless difficult to find books that engage boys. Differences between the sexes are real, and as hard as parents, teachers, and librarians try to be gender-neutral, there is still a strong tendency to identify books as “boy” books or “girl” books. Girls are much more willing to cross gender lines to read a “boy” book than vice versa. This attitude hurts boys by depriving them of many wonderful stories that might nurture their souls.

Over the last few years, several volumes have been published which promote books for girls. However, there is a far greater need for books that keep boys engaged in reading. Many boys totally cease reading for pleasure by the time they are ten, and they are lucky if they happen to rediscover the joy of books.

Frustrated parents often go to bookstores or libraries desperate to find the one book that will spark their son’s interest. To serve that need Kathleen Odean has written Great Books for Boys: More Than 600 Books for Boys 2-14. This volume suggests books for boys on a broad range of topics and is arranged by age level. It provides detailed annotations to help steer parents and teachers toward the best in books. Topics go beyond the usual sports and outdoor adventures to include biographies, science, hobbies, and poetry. Parents may want to start with the last chapter which lists special resources for locating books, tips for reading aloud, and a list of books about sexuality.

While written for adults, the book has a vocabulary that is accessible to middle-grade readers who may want to explore these listings for themselves. Odean, a school librarian for 16 years, is also the author of the companion volume published last year, Great Books for Girls.

Reviewed by Phyllis Grubbs.

Despite all the advantages males have in our culture, it is nevertheless difficult to find books that engage boys. Differences between the sexes are real, and as hard as parents, teachers, and librarians try to be gender-neutral, there is still a strong tendency to identify…

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