bookpagedev

LifestylesCrafts, Hobbies & Home

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Dummy, how does your garden grow? The writers of the Dummies series of garden books are modest folks. They label the series for beginners, but these helpful books are also for those who have come back to gardening after a long absence and need a review of the basics. Even the experienced gardener isn’t knowledgeable about every facet of gardening the field is too vast. These books offer all gardeners an introduction to any unfamiliar area of gardening by using an easy-to-read, easy-to-understand format that is both instructive and entertaining. Gardening for Dummies (IDG Books, $19.99, 1568846444) by Michael MacCaskey and the Editors of the National Gardening Association is a gardening encyclopedia in miniature. It’s fully illustrated and covers the most current tips, techniques, and resources in major areas such as annuals, perennials, vines, trees, shrubs, lawns, soil, pruning, propagation, weeding, and pest control. For those who don’t know a Cape Cod Weeder from a dibber, there is even a section on tools. The appendix lists books and magazines that will broaden your gardening knowledge while the section on gardening Web sites will answer questions and provide further information. Vegetable Gardening for Dummies (IDG Books, $19.99, 0764551299) by Charles Nardozzi and the Editors of the National Gardening Association teaches the fundamentals of vegetable gardening. If you think store-bought tomatoes taste the way tomatoes are supposed to taste, you’re in for a surprise. The basics of soil, climate, and water are covered as well as cool season and warm season vegetables, legumes, vine crops, salad crops, herbs, fruits, and many other edibles. Disease identification and prevention for each vegetable is included, and there’s a bonus delicious recipes. Vegetable Gardening for Dummies is an excellent reference for the first-time vegetable gardener.

Landscaping for Dummies (IDG Books, $16.99, 0764551280) by Philip Giroux, Bob Beckstrom, Lance Walheim, and the National Gardening Association takes the mystery out of landscaping and will convince you that there can be more to your backyard than just a fence and a lawn; you can customize your outdoor space to suit your needs. The book covers everything from planning to planting and also includes a chapter on problem situations accompanied by helpful diagrams. Chapters on patios, arbors, trellises, decks, walls, gates, and paths will show you how to create more visual beauty and interest while keeping costs down. If you don’t know where to begin in designing your home landscape, this book will get you started.

No matter what your level of gardening expertise, 1,001 Ingenious Gardening Ideas is another reference you should add to your gardening library. Edited by Deborah L. Martin, this book offers environmentally safe, non-toxic suggestions to make gardening easier, plants sturdier, and yields bountiful. There are chapters on creative garden care, season stretchers, seed-starting secrets, and solutions to garden problems. There are gardening ideas, tips, and suggestions about everything from vegetables and herbs to birds and butterflies. In addition, there are also sources for ingenious gardening supplies, a recommended reading list, and the latest USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. Clear illustrations serve as helpful guides as the author takes you through each season with advice for making your garden less work intensive and more cost affective. There are tips for all gardeners here.

If there were no gardening references on your bookshelves, this selection of four would offer the best, basic advice covering the most general areas of horticulture. The topics they don’t cover can be found in the sources listed at the end of each book. But the best part about these books is that most of the information is usable year-round not only during the growing season.

Pat Regel writes and gardens in Nashville.

Dummy, how does your garden grow? The writers of the Dummies series of garden books are modest folks. They label the series for beginners, but these helpful books are also for those who have come back to gardening after a long absence and need a…

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Jane Hamilton writes lovely, thoughtful books about trying to take life as you find it, dealing realistically with harsh, immutable truths and surviving in spite of them. In her first novel, The Book of Ruth, the main character learns to transcend the dismal future that her abusive family history portended. In A Map of the World, a moment of neglect results in the death of a child, and the woman who is responsible must learn to live with herself.

In The Short History of a Prince, Walter McCloud is faced with a double whammy: the death of his brother and his own homosexuality. Walter is 15 years old on the day this novel starts, the day his older brother’s illness is discovered. Daniel will die of it about a year later. And Walter is agonizingly aware that Daniel is the heterosexual son, the one who’d have produced grandchildren for his parents, the one who’d have stayed close to home. Home where to find it, how to get there is and remains the big issue in Walter’s life. Home is where Walter imagines he might achieve a sense of belonging whether it is in his parents’ comfortable Midwestern suburb or at his mother’s family’s country estate at Lake Margaret, passed down through several generations. But even at 15, Walter knows he is never going to fit in, nor is he likely to realize his dream of becoming a ballet dancer. Passion and drive, intention and ambition, hope and hard work are not enough. There are some truths like death, lack of innate talent, and homosexuality that resist all attempts at manipulation, and Walter confronts several of them.

Neglected by his grieving parents, brokenhearted over his first love affair, humiliated, guilt-ridden, Walter leaves for New York, where he goes to college, finds a “career” working in a dollhouse store, and attempts to satisfy himself with a series of short-lived sexual relationships.

But 23 years later, Walter, now in his mid-thirties, is forced to concede it isn’t working for him. “A friend had dragged him to the Y, to a seminar on taking charge and living in the moment, but the theories and techniques were suspect, Walter thought. The moment, after all, was a flash in the pan. Life, he knew, had meaning and was fully possessed only as it was remembered and reshaped.” Almost reluctantly, Walter begins to reflect and make changes.

He gets his teaching certification, and accepts a job back in the Midwest, where, he knows, his sexual orientation will have to stay hidden. He attempts to forge a relationship with his much younger sister, born after Daniel’s death, who, with her tract house, car-salesman husband, and generic toddler, seems to him frighteningly conventional. He learns to teach literature to mostly uninspired adolescents, and he makes awkward stabs at finding a significant other.

Through all of this, he is bolstered by only a few reassuring constants: his friend Susan, with whom he’d studied ballet; his parents; and the house at Lake Margaret, which is in danger of being sold off. In fact, it is in dealing with that looming catastrophe that Walter starts to pull himself together, to begin making decisions about what has value and what does not.

Not a lot happens in this novel, and often what does happen seems to happen offstage. But somehow Walter’s dilemma, his struggle to find a place for himself in the world, is rendered so vividly that by the last sentence, in which is expressed the smallest, most fragile tendril of hope, an entire world of possibility has been envisioned, and the hope belongs not only to Walter but also, passionately, to the reader.

Reviewed by Nan Goldberg.

Jane Hamilton writes lovely, thoughtful books about trying to take life as you find it, dealing realistically with harsh, immutable truths and surviving in spite of them. In her first novel, The Book of Ruth, the main character learns to transcend the dismal future that…

Mystery & Suspense

Review

Review by bookpagedev

The Seville Communion is a literary mystery and thriller so tight it could hold hot water. With each page there seems the opportunity for more danger, more strength, more weaknesses, more blood (either hoped or dreaded) leaving the reader continuously baited. Arturo Perez-Reverte, the author of The Flanders Panel and The Club Dumas, has created a story and characters so real and likable (even the evil ones) that the reader can’t help but become emotionally involved.

Originally released in 1995 in Spanish under the title La Piel del Tambor, the translator Sonia Soto does a skillful job in capturing the nuances of both the Spanish and English languages, with a little Latin thrown in for the priests.

The story at first seems deceptively simple. A hacker breaks into the Vatican computer system and sends a personal message to the Pope regarding the fate of a local church in Seville, Spain. There are two deaths, both accidental. The e-mail letter, however, differs with authorities and implies anonymously that the church building itself is responsible. Concerned mostly with the reality of the security breach and not the crack-pot message, the Vatican sends one of its best to investigate. In a textbook study of how things are not always as they appear, it is here that storyteller Perez-Reverte begins to tie the reader in knots in an intriguing and foreign location with old and new blending seamlessly together in a realistic story which is rich in history and frighteningly contemporary at the same time. Romantics will fall in love with Seville and with the investigating priest from Rome who serves as the main character. What Richard Chamberlain was to The Thorn Birds, Father Quart is to Seville. He is attractive, disciplined, and tested. Unlike Chamberlain’s character, though, Quart’s discipline comes not from faith, but from pride. Characters begin to emerge and evolve quickly. All can betray and be betrayed. It becomes clear to the reader and to the main character that what is at stake is much more than electronic security or the survival of a particular parish. For what would it profit a person to gain any of these and lose his own soul in the process? The challenge is a serious one. You must determine how Seville unravels before Perez-Reverte tells you, and he waits until the very last line to do it. From intricate plot to well-developed characters, every storytelling element is here for the lazy “reader” (film rights sold to Canal Plus and Iberoamericana), but don’t wait for the celluloid.

If we are to believe the sad publishing statistics that the average American buys only one book per year, this should be that book. If you can afford the luxury of two books, read this one twice. It’s that good.

Reviewed by Clay Stafford.

The Seville Communion is a literary mystery and thriller so tight it could hold hot water. With each page there seems the opportunity for more danger, more strength, more weaknesses, more blood (either hoped or dreaded) leaving the reader continuously baited. Arturo Perez-Reverte, the author…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Several years ago there was an actor, a former bodybuilder, who starred in some B-grade movies. While these films had made money, they really hadn’t taken his career to the next level. Then his agent sent him a script, a science fiction story about a man who is sent into the past to prevent an assassination. Would he be interested in playing the hero? The bodybuilder was muscular, but he wasn’t stupid; the part he really wanted, he told the agent, was that of the assassin. The agent pitched this to the director, James Cameron, and the bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger, became The Terminator and a star.

Let’s face it, in movies and in literature the villain is often the most interesting character. Look at John Milton’s Paradise Lost the devil gets all the good lines. So it is in Daniel Silva’s new novel, The Mark of the Assassin, a thriller set against the background of modern-day geopolitics and the covert war waged by intelligence agencies behind the scenes. A war that is suddenly made hotter by the actions of one man, a freelance killer for hire with a trademark signature three bullets in the face.

CIA operative Michael Osbourne is drawn into this war when a jumbo jet is shot down over Long Island. A middle-east expert, Osbourne is called in when the body of a known terrorist is found near the crash site with three bullet holes in its face. The evidence points to a Palestinian splinter group, but Osbourne isn’t so sure. What follows is an investigation that takes him to three continents as he unravels a startling conspiracy, and puts him on a collision course with the assassin known only as October.

The Mark of the Assassin shines is in its portrayal of October, otherwise known as Jean-Paul Delaroche, a deep-cover Soviet killer without portfolio. At least without a killer’s portfolio. Delaroche does have a portfolio of sorts he is also a painter who takes his art seriously. Indeed, there are many layers to Delaroche, and I liked the fact that as many things as Silva shows us, we never quite find out what makes the assassin tick. The one gripe I have with this book, and this is really not against Daniel Silva specifically, but to the authors of all thrillers, is the need to make up what I call the “Presidential cast of characters,” that is “President Smith,” “Secretary of State Jones,” etc. If they’re peripheral characters, write ’em out, I say. Use real politicians. It worked marvelously for Frederick Forsythe in The Day of the Jackal. It could have worked here. At any rate, the real story in The Mark of the Assassin is the assassin himself. Reviewed by James Neal Webb.

Several years ago there was an actor, a former bodybuilder, who starred in some B-grade movies. While these films had made money, they really hadn't taken his career to the next level. Then his agent sent him a script, a science fiction story about a…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Many believe that the U.

S. left prisoners of war in Vietnam. The premise of MIAs being alive somewhere has colored the diplomacy of the U.

S. toward Vietnam and of course given fiction writers a place in which to let their imaginations run free. Patrick Davis’s debut novel is a case in point. There was a prisoner of war camp in Vietnam called Cao Dinh, the very mention of which made the top brass freeze, and others in the Pentagon react very nervously. What happened there? What fearful tragedy hides behind falsified record books? General Raymond Watkins, the Air Force Chief of Staff, has been sent to Vietnam to look around, and presumably to lend his support to diplomatic moves for recognition of that country. Upon his return, however, General Watkins is discovered dead in his quarters. He had been tortured by means common to the North Vietnamese during the war, in which a fish net was put over the victim’s skin and drawn tight until the flesh that was protruding from the net could be cut off.

Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Jensen is the officer assigned to the murder investigation, but he finds a paucity of clues. The general’s personal computer and those in his office have been fed a virus; some of the hard drives are even removed. Following the general’s final phone call from his office Colonel Jensen is led to a Vietnamese restaurant, and ultimately to the murder of one of the owners. This is a fun book to read, for just when the reader thinks he or she knows who the murder mastermind is, that particular suspect turns up dead. But Colonel Jensen plods doggedly on, pursuing the few leads he has. There are lives, reputations, and careers at stake in this mystery, and finally it becomes a test of the colonel’s loyalty to the brass in the Pentagon versus his own brand of integrity and patriotism. Make note of this fine new writer this military thriller surely won’t be his last.

Reviewed by Lloyd Armour.

Many believe that the U.

S. left prisoners of war in Vietnam. The premise of MIAs being alive somewhere has colored the diplomacy of the U.

S. toward Vietnam and of course given fiction writers a place in which…

Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

he mix is the message Sourcebooks was not the first trade publisher to package audio CDs, photos, and text into a mixed-media package the publisher of an instructional guitar manual takes that honor but it certainly has been the most successful.

Sourcebooks’ first mixed-media book, We Interrupt This Broadcast by Joe Garner, sold an astonishing 600,000 copies, catapulting it onto the bestseller lists in 1998. A second mix-media book documenting famous events in sports, And the Crowd Goes Wild, also by Joe Garner, has sold over 500,000 copies since it was published last year.

Sourcebooks president Dominique Raccah says her company wasn’t caught off guard by the success of We Interrupt This Broadcast (they had invested in a substantial first printing), but they were surprised by the way it zoomed up the bestseller charts. “I think bestsellers always are a surprise,” she says. “I would not be cocky enough to admit, or to even really think, that I knew what would stir the public consciousness to gain that type of success.” Not surprisingly, Raccah thinks mixed-media books are the wave of the future: “I think it needs to be. I think kids have a very limited attention span not just kids, but readers in general and they require a little more help to get into texts these days. I think audio is a great supplemental way to expose people to the experience [of reading a book].” Two new mixed-media books are due out this year from Sourcebooks: And the Fans Roared, author Joe Garner’s third in this series, and The Second City by Sheldon Patinkin.

Garner’s book is a follow-up to And the Crowd Goes Wild and focuses on sports events that were overlooked in the first book. Included are text, photos, and sound bites of Mike Tyson’s prize fight disqualification for biting Evander Holyfield’s ear, Viking Jim Marshall’s “wrong way” run against the San Francisco 49ers, and basketball’s Larry Bird stealing the ball in the last seconds of a legendary playoff game against the Detroit Pistons.

The Second City marks a departure from other books in the series, for it is about that most elusive of all art forms comedy. Most people will probably recognize the name of the comedy troupe, but those who do not will certainly know the wacky comedy of Second City alumni such as John Belushi, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Gildna Radner, Martin Short, Chris Farley, and others.

To compile this book, author Patinkin went back over 40 years of taped performances and rehearsals to select the best moments. As a director, teacher, and advisor to the comedy troupe since its inception in the 1950s, Parinkin certainly knew his way around the material. The book’s photographs and text compliment audio CDs of the actual comedy in a way that puts the reader in the center of the action. The audio, with the familiar voices of Belushi, Murray, Myers, and company, is hilarious.

“This book is wild,” admits Raccah. “It is probably the wildest book I’ve ever done. It has a real feel to it, a real history . . . it is going to surprise a lot of readers. The audio is really funny and it gives the book a feel that I have never seen in a performing arts book.” Reviews or the lack of them are the only thing that concerns the Sourcebooks executive. “We have lots of problems getting these books reviewed. [Reviewers] don’t know what to do with mixed media books. We had very few reviews for the first book. The booksellers are hand selling it, God bless them.” So, how do you follow a book as funny as The Second City? With some of the best poetry ever written in American, read by some of the country’s top poets Sourcebooks’ next mixed-media book, due out in fall 2001, will be edited by an advisory panel that includes a current and past poet laureate of the United States. “We’ve been working on this book for three years,” says Raccah, who then adds with a laugh, “It’s like producing a movie.” James L. Dickerson is the former publisher of Nine-O-One Network magazine and the author of numerous books, including the recently published Dixie Chicks: Down-Home and Backstage.

he mix is the message Sourcebooks was not the first trade publisher to package audio CDs, photos, and text into a mixed-media package the publisher of an instructional guitar manual takes that honor but it certainly has been the most successful.

Sourcebooks'…
Science Fiction & FantasyShort Stories

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Nebula Awards 32, edited by Jack Dann, contain stories that are almost as good as Tolkien’s tales. No surprise since this volume honors the short stories, novellas, and novelettes that were voted by the professional members of the Science Fiction Writers Association as the best science fiction and fantasy of the year for 1996.

These millennium-ending stories feature Leonardo Da Vinci’s flying machine, a vampire story in a nursing home, an alternative American Civil War, time travel, and Mayan archaeology. My only disagreement is that I would have voted for Ursula LeGuin or Allen Steele in the novella category over Jack Dann, but that’s a small quibble about an outstanding array of the best modern science fiction has to offer.

Reviewed by Larry Woods.

Nebula Awards 32, edited by Jack Dann, contain stories that are almost as good as Tolkien's tales. No surprise since this volume honors the short stories, novellas, and novelettes that were voted by the professional members of the Science Fiction Writers Association as the best…

Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

he mix is the message Sourcebooks was not the first trade publisher to package audio CDs, photos, and text into a mixed-media package the publisher of an instructional guitar manual takes that honor but it certainly has been the most successful.

Sourcebooks’ first mixed-media book, We Interrupt This Broadcast by Joe Garner, sold an astonishing 600,000 copies, catapulting it onto the bestseller lists in 1998. A second mix-media book documenting famous events in sports, And the Crowd Goes Wild, also by Joe Garner, has sold over 500,000 copies since it was published last year.

Sourcebooks president Dominique Raccah says her company wasn’t caught off guard by the success of We Interrupt This Broadcast (they had invested in a substantial first printing), but they were surprised by the way it zoomed up the bestseller charts. “I think bestsellers always are a surprise,” she says. “I would not be cocky enough to admit, or to even really think, that I knew what would stir the public consciousness to gain that type of success.” Not surprisingly, Raccah thinks mixed-media books are the wave of the future: “I think it needs to be. I think kids have a very limited attention span not just kids, but readers in general and they require a little more help to get into texts these days. I think audio is a great supplemental way to expose people to the experience [of reading a book].” Two new mixed-media books are due out this year from Sourcebooks: And the Fans Roared, author Joe Garner’s third in this series, and The Second City by Sheldon Patinkin.

Garner’s book is a follow-up to And the Crowd Goes Wild and focuses on sports events that were overlooked in the first book. Included are text, photos, and sound bites of Mike Tyson’s prize fight disqualification for biting Evander Holyfield’s ear, Viking Jim Marshall’s “wrong way” run against the San Francisco 49ers, and basketball’s Larry Bird stealing the ball in the last seconds of a legendary playoff game against the Detroit Pistons.

The Second City marks a departure from other books in the series, for it is about that most elusive of all art forms comedy. Most people will probably recognize the name of the comedy troupe, but those who do not will certainly know the wacky comedy of Second City alumni such as John Belushi, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Gildna Radner, Martin Short, Chris Farley, and others.

To compile this book, author Patinkin went back over 40 years of taped performances and rehearsals to select the best moments. As a director, teacher, and advisor to the comedy troupe since its inception in the 1950s, Parinkin certainly knew his way around the material. The book’s photographs and text compliment audio CDs of the actual comedy in a way that puts the reader in the center of the action. The audio, with the familiar voices of Belushi, Murray, Myers, and company, is hilarious.

“This book is wild,” admits Raccah. “It is probably the wildest book I’ve ever done. It has a real feel to it, a real history . . . it is going to surprise a lot of readers. The audio is really funny and it gives the book a feel that I have never seen in a performing arts book.” Reviews or the lack of them are the only thing that concerns the Sourcebooks executive. “We have lots of problems getting these books reviewed. [Reviewers] don’t know what to do with mixed media books. We had very few reviews for the first book. The booksellers are hand selling it, God bless them.” So, how do you follow a book as funny as The Second City? With some of the best poetry ever written in American, read by some of the country’s top poets Sourcebooks’ next mixed-media book, due out in fall 2001, will be edited by an advisory panel that includes a current and past poet laureate of the United States. “We’ve been working on this book for three years,” says Raccah, who then adds with a laugh, “It’s like producing a movie.” James L. Dickerson is the former publisher of Nine-O-One Network magazine and the author of numerous books, including the recently published Dixie Chicks: Down-Home and Backstage.

he mix is the message Sourcebooks was not the first trade publisher to package audio CDs, photos, and text into a mixed-media package the publisher of an instructional guitar manual takes that honor but it certainly has been the most successful.

Sourcebooks'…
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Review

Review by bookpagedev

With The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, J.

R.

R. Tolkien secured for himself a special place in fantasy literature. Many of those tales of Middle-earth were originally written or spoken as family stories and letters to Tolkien’s children, and his newly released fantasy tale Roverandom evolved in the same fashion.

In 1925 Professor Tolkien, his wife Edith, and their children John, age eight, Michael, age five, and Christopher, age one went on holiday to the Yorkshire coast. While playing on the beach Michael lost his favorite toy a miniature lead dog painted black and white. This loss caused heartbreak for five-year-old Michael, and to compensate Tolkien invented a story in which a real dog named Rover is turned into a toy by a wizard and then lost by a boy on the beach. There he encounters adventures on the moon and under the sea.

Tolkien’s canine hero, who comes to be known as Roverandom, meets a wonderful cast of characters including a “sand-sorcerer,” the Man-in-the-Moon, a wise old whale, and a dangerous dragon who causes lunar eclipses with his smoky “red and green flames.” This delightful fantasy story will charm every reader and is accompanied by Professor Tolkien’s own illustrations.

Reviewed by Larry Woods.

With The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, J.

R.

R. Tolkien secured for himself a special place in fantasy literature. Many of those tales of Middle-earth were originally written or spoken as family stories and letters to…

Business & Finance

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Books for grown-up baby boomers If you’ve been watching closely, you’ve noticed that members of the generation born between 1946 and 1964 are often now simply called boomers rather than the more formal baby boomers, as they used to be known. Sure, the simple boomers is snappier and hipper-sounding. It’s also a lot more accurate. That’s because the generation whose size, influence, and self-referential world view has altered every aspect of American life is certainly not babyish anymore. (A note of disclosure: I’m a card-carrying member of the boomer group.) The boomers are now finding (often to their utter surprise) that they are all grown up and not fully prepared to finance and emotionally weather such important life milestones as their children’s higher education and their own approaching retirement. Some new books are here to help.

The generation that keeps on ticking Don’t Stop the Career Clock: Rejecting the Myths of Aging for a New Way to Work in the 21st Century by Helen Harkness (Davies-Black Publishing, $17.95, 0891061274) is a blast of optimism for 40-something boomers and those even later in life who think they are on the downhill slope. Harkness, a career counselor, successfully bursts many of the stereotypes of aging that equate the addition of years with mental and physical deterioration and a loss of value in the work world. She tells people to focus on their functional ages, not their chronological ones. At one point she writes: The greatest of all remedies for the fear of age and death is a burning desire for achievement, backed by useful service to others. Busy people seldom have time to worry about dying. Harkness spends time in this book examining medical studies that refute myths about age and links to mental and physical decline. She also offers practical advice, with checklists and exercises, for people interested in a mid-life career switch or a chance to go into business for themselves. In an interesting note on the age 65, still considered by many a magical number at which time people should close up the working portion of their lives, Harkness writes: In the 1930s, when the U.S. government was establishing the age for receiving Social Security benefits, 65 was adopted as the age for retirement. This was a time when life expectancy was around 45 and the unemployment rate was 25 percent. How mindless can this be for today’s work force, with life expectancy at 78 and rising rapidly, and unemployment at its lowest level in 25 years? Finding financial security Okay, so your retirement won’t be as traditional as that of your parents. Still, you’ll need some extra financial security as you grow older to give you greater flexibility and allow you to slow down your work schedule if that’s what you want. Don’t know where to start on that complicated trail? A good place is If You’re Clueless About Financial Planning and Want to Know More by Seth Godin and John Parmelee. The book lives up to the promise inherent in its title in that it doesn’t assume much prior knowledge and does provide good basic instruction. The range of subjects is quite wide, from different types of stock and bond investments to life insurance to college financial aid and more. Given the subject range, none of the topics gets in-depth treatment, but there are many referrals about where to find more information in other books and via the Internet.

Retiring comfortably It’s become an accepted axiom that people retiring in the next quarter-century will need a lot more than Social Security payments to comfortably support themselves. The demographic swell of boomers hitting retirement age around the year 2015 will put unprecedented pressure on the Social Security system. Debate is already under way in Washington, D.C., about ways to save or reform the system. Meanwhile, surveys of younger people reveal deep skepticism about what will be left for them when they reach retirement age, despite lifetimes of contributions. While urging people to assume that Social Security will not form the lion’s share of their retirement income, John F. Wasik, author of The Late-Start Investor: The Better-Late-Than-Never Guide to Realizing Your Retirement Dreams (Henry Holt, $14.95, 0805055029), makes interesting points that should serve to dispel the worst doom and gloom about the future of Social Security.

Wasik writes: Why does anyone in Washington think the 77-million-strong baby boom generation will want less from these programs after they worked so hard to make retirement a pleasant, more financially secure experience? If anything, given the selfishness traditionally ascribed to the me generation, they will want more out of retirement programs, not less. And as this generation gains power in politics, you will see a huge decrease in the political ill will toward big government programs. Wasik, special projects editor for Consumers Digest magazine, provides a balanced, common-sensical approach toward finding a New Prosperity as one approaches retirement. He urges reduced spending to increase the amount of money available for investing; an inventory to make sure you know exactly what you have and what your sources of income are; and growth-oriented investments that take advantage of any tax deferments available. Wasik goes beyond the purely financial and offers advice on how to make later life more balanced and rewarding.

As for investments, Wasik is not afraid to get specific. In a section on mutual funds, he offers recommendations for portfolios for people at different stages of life, including those with as little as five years remaining to retirement. Wasik takes the widely held view that the closer one is to retirement, the less risk he or she should carry in their investments. For those interested in their own investment decisions, Wasik offers specific individual stock recommendations.

Homeward bound Perhaps your later-in-life plans don’t include a total cessation of work, but you would like to shift gears, or, at a minimum, reduce your daily commute. The trip to work doesn’t get any shorter than when you work at home. It’s a growing trend likely to gain even more momentum in the 21st century as technological advances allow people in more occupations to work from home. Work at Home Wisdom: A Collection of Quips, Tips, and Inspirations to Balance Work, Family, and Home by David H. Bangs, Jr., and Andi Axman (Upstart Publishing Co., $9.95, 1574101005) takes a look at the human side of at-home work. Light on the practical aspects of working at home such as tax implications and equipment needed (that’s left to countless other books), the authors instead focus on how to stay sane and prosperous while going it alone. Among the salient pieces of advice offered in the book: Keep your work confined to your home office and don’t let it spread around the house. That will give you a better chance at maintaining the separation between the personal and professional when both cohabit the same domicile. The authors also urge stay-at-homes to set clear guidelines with those they live with about when they are allowed to be disturbed during working hours. (They offer: a fire, a flood, blood, and so on. ) The book is also good on ways to fight the loneliness that can plague the at-home worker. (The authors know the territory from personal experience; both are writers who run their own at-home shows.) They suggest ways to increase human contact that can also be productive for business and personal growth. Staying at home is increasingly a route to business success. Consider this fact offered by the authors: An astonishing 45 percent of the companies in the Inc. [magazine] 500 list were started in their founder’s residence . . . Neal Lipschutz is managing editor of Dow Jones News Service.

Books for grown-up baby boomers If you've been watching closely, you've noticed that members of the generation born between 1946 and 1964 are often now simply called boomers rather than the more formal baby boomers, as they used to be known. Sure, the simple boomers…
Science Fiction & Fantasy

Review

Review by bookpagedev

ne of the major issues in fantasy literature is the desire, use, and abuse of power, which can take many forms. Two novels being released on the eve of the American presidential election examine different types of power and the different personalities who strive to attain it. The Sumerian legend of Gilgamesh, a powerful king who wanted to augment his power with immortality, has a tendency to appear in fantasy every few years. He’s frequently used in a straight retelling of the ancient epic, such as a Robert Silverberg’s Gilgamesh the King, but in other cases, Gilgamesh is brought into modern times, most recently in Brenda Clough’s How Like a God. Stephan Grundy’s third novel, Gilgamesh, is a glorious and straightforward retelling of the legend.

By today’s standards, Grundy’s Gilgamesh is anything but a hero. A young man when the novel opens, he is filled with arrogance, lust, and an unwillingness to consider that anyone else might have useful advice. Gilgamesh has bought into the idea that as part god, he has a divine right to rule the city-state of Erech.

Grundy follows the epic of Gilgamesh closely, using the characters and situations to explore the traits that make a good leader. While Grundy has chosen to examine power by writing about a near mythic period, Laurel K. Hamilton brings magic, in the form of fairies, to the modern world. Hamilton, author of the popular series featuring vampire hunter Anita Blake, launches a new series with A Kiss of Shadows (Audio). Set in modern day Los Angeles, her latest novel is a steamy mixture of urban fantasy and detective noir. Fantasy fans will relish Hamilton’s in-depth examination of the fairies’ magical world. Merry Gentry, a runaway fairy princess, works for a detective agency in a world where the fairy folk are accepted, if not always understood. Her world is gritty, brought home by the early introduction of a case initiated by the abused wife and lover of Alistair Norton. While it might be easy to dismiss power in Hamilton’s book as the ability to do magic, in reality power appears in the form of freedom of choice. Merry attempts to give her clients the freedom to make of their lives whatever they want without fear. For Norton, power is the ability to steal his partners’ free will and force them to submit to his demands.

Steven Silver writes from Northbrook, Illinois.

ne of the major issues in fantasy literature is the desire, use, and abuse of power, which can take many forms. Two novels being released on the eve of the American presidential election examine different types of power and the different personalities who strive to…
Science Fiction & Fantasy

Review

Review by bookpagedev

ne of the major issues in fantasy literature is the desire, use, and abuse of power, which can take many forms. Two novels being released on the eve of the American presidential election examine different types of power and the different personalities who strive to attain it. The Sumerian legend of Gilgamesh, a powerful king who wanted to augment his power with immortality, has a tendency to appear in fantasy every few years. He’s frequently used in a straight retelling of the ancient epic, such as a Robert Silverberg’s Gilgamesh the King, but in other cases, Gilgamesh is brought into modern times, most recently in Brenda Clough’s How Like a God. Stephan Grundy’s third novel, Gilgamesh, is a glorious and straightforward retelling of the legend.

By today’s standards, Grundy’s Gilgamesh is anything but a hero. A young man when the novel opens, he is filled with arrogance, lust, and an unwillingness to consider that anyone else might have useful advice. Gilgamesh has bought into the idea that as part god, he has a divine right to rule the city-state of Erech.

Grundy follows the epic of Gilgamesh closely, using the characters and situations to explore the traits that make a good leader. While Grundy has chosen to examine power by writing about a near mythic period, Laurel K. Hamilton brings magic, in the form of fairies, to the modern world. Hamilton, author of the popular series featuring vampire hunter Anita Blake, launches a new series with A Kiss of Shadows (Audio). Set in modern day Los Angeles, her latest novel is a steamy mixture of urban fantasy and detective noir. Fantasy fans will relish Hamilton’s in-depth examination of the fairies’ magical world. Merry Gentry, a runaway fairy princess, works for a detective agency in a world where the fairy folk are accepted, if not always understood. Her world is gritty, brought home by the early introduction of a case initiated by the abused wife and lover of Alistair Norton. While it might be easy to dismiss power in Hamilton’s book as the ability to do magic, in reality power appears in the form of freedom of choice. Merry attempts to give her clients the freedom to make of their lives whatever they want without fear. For Norton, power is the ability to steal his partners’ free will and force them to submit to his demands.

Steven Silver writes from Northbrook, Illinois.

ne of the major issues in fantasy literature is the desire, use, and abuse of power, which can take many forms. Two novels being released on the eve of the American presidential election examine different types of power and the different personalities who strive to…
Travel

Review

Review by bookpagedev

A Trip to the Beach: Living on Island Time in the Caribbean audio) is a cheery first-person recounting of how two Vermonters, Melinda and Robert Blanchard, take up permanent residence on their favorite vacation spot, the island of Anguilla. The Blanchards, who had lost control of their previous food business when it went from cottage industry to corporation, decide to shake off the snow and the sour grapes by selling their New England home and becoming restaurateurs to the wealthy island tourists.

As a storyteller, Melinda (Mel for short) Blanchard has acquired her own sort of island rhythm, alternating between diary-detailed retellings of the day-by-day travails of building a restaurant long distance via Miami’s Home Depot (i.e., back in the "real world") and frequent mentions of the personal time-outs, beautiful sunsets, pick-up friendships that become business partnerships, and temporary passions for sailing that she and Robert fall into. (Although both are listed as authors, Mel writes in first person.) She also has a pleasant post-Heartburn habit of tossing in the odd recipe, and an obvious fondness for the people and passion for the flora of the region. She easily evokes that peculiar sense of administrative limbo produced in the islands by the paradoxical confluence of good-humored indifference to urgency (hence, the references to living on "island time") and the enormously time-consuming bureaucracy that requires all paperwork in triplicate. The long build-up to the restaurant’s opening night, which becomes a comedic near-disaster of too many customers and not enough dumplings and lobsters, has the ring of rueful truth cushioned by the comfort of ensuing success. It can be a little off-putting, or perhaps guilt-inducing, to read the references to extensive wine lists and expensive imported ingredients in a society where lean-tos are still fairly common, though the fact that Anguilla is a resort economy is a given for the whole setup. In fact, it gives a dramatic roundness to the story, because when Hurricane Luis ravishes the island, the resort, and the restaurant, it not only gives Mel a reason to pick up the pruning shears and get back to work, it also reminds us of the essential force of real island life: nature.

Still, this shapeliness loses some of its appeal when you notice the acknowledgments page. "The sequence of events in this book took place over a span of ten years and two restaurants. We have taken the liberty of condensing the time frame into one year so as to capture the spirit of life in Anguilla." That’s some kind of island time.

Nevertheless, it’s an ingratiating read and an easy one; and while I’m not sure I’ll ever make Miguel’s Banana Cabanas (a smoothie of Coco Lopez, Bailey’s Irish Cream, bananas and white rum), or the cornbread with pineapple, creamed corn, and Monterey Jack, I might try the coconut-sesame jasmine rice for the grilled tuna. And I will hope to see that sunset over Anguilla.

Choosing a Chardonnay – On opening night, according to Mel, Bob Blanchard, who was moving from table to table, talking to guests and going over the wine list, "had difficulty cutting short a debate over the virtues of Napa versus Bordeaux, and could have talked for hours about why American vintners insist on making Chardonnay so oaky." I agree with his oak index, which I also find much too high as a rule; but on behalf of the millions of Americans who obviously enjoy an assertive oak element (and who may not know that "Napa" and "California" are not synonymous), I would point out that under the grandchildren of Ernest and Julio, the Gallo of Sonoma label has made significant advances in quality varietals (in the $12-$15 range) and, more notably, into single-vineyard varietals (in the mid-$20s) and even superpremium estate wines. It’s the Goldilocks story, with the Gallo of Sonoma Chardonnay as the "baby" and the Estate Chardonnay as Big Bear.

The lower-end Gallo of Sonoma Chardonnay wines, both the Russian River and the Sonoma County blend, are surprisingly big buys for the price, with almost as much perfume and tropical fruit as Miguel’s blender killers, and a lot fewer calories. The ’97 Estate Chardonnay is even more tropical and showy, and at $45, up against stiff competition.

But all in all, it’s the Mama Bears, the single vineyard chards, that seem just right for this book, either the $20 Stefani Vineyard from the Dry Creek Valley or the $22 Laguna Ranch Vineyard from the Russian River Valley (the tasted vintages were both ’97s).

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for the Washington Post.

 

A Trip to the Beach: Living on Island Time in the Caribbean audio) is a cheery first-person recounting of how two Vermonters, Melinda and Robert Blanchard, take up permanent residence on their favorite vacation spot, the island of Anguilla. The Blanchards, who had lost control…

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