bookpagedev

Business & Finance

Cashing in, cashing out

Review by bookpagedev

Lately it seems as though all my friends are either getting rich or grousing about not getting rich while everyone else is. With the stock market and the overall economy steaming through yet another year of almost obscene prosperity, many Americans are rolling in the dough while others try to figure out how to get a taste of it.

There are new books out for both sorts of people: those who want to make the best of the money they have, and those still struggling to build up a nest egg. This month’s featured books cover how to start investing in the future, how to pick hot stocks, which hot stocks to pick, and what to do with all that moolah after retirement.

Let’s start simply. In Wealth Happens One Day at a Time: 365 Days to a Brighter Financial Future (HarperBusiness, $19.95, 0887309828), Brooke M. Stephens offers a combination of advice, affirmations, and action to demystify the process of reaching financial security. Like Dave Ramsey and other authors who address the basics of creating personal wealth, Stephens tells readers they can gain greater control over their lives by getting control of money.

It’s only natural for some people to feel intimidated about all the flashy wealth on display these days. This book is a self-help course in overcoming financial intimidation. One day at a time, it will help readers master the concepts of saving and investing even as they master their own emotions about money. Its 365 mini-essays move from the simplest of topics to such complex issues as Roth IRAs and testamentary trusts all explained in a breezy style with plenty of enlightening anecdotes.

Wealth Happens is a valuable road-map to personal enrichment. If you or people you care about have been meaning to get control of finances but just haven’t figured out where to start this book may be the highest-yielding investment you ever make.

Graduates of Stephens’s tutorial in personal financial management can move on to the small time with Gene Walden’s The 100 Best Stocks to Own for Under $20 (Dearborn, $19.95, 0887309828). Not every stock on Walden’s list is a small company, but most are small enough to have stayed off the radar screens of Wall Street know-it-alls in recent years. The author has applied sophisticated technical analysis to screen through the more than 8,000 stocks trading at more than $20 a share, finding a final 100 that excelled by a broad range of performance measures.

Imagine the rewards that can come from taking risks. Somewhere out there is the next Microsoft, priced today as cheaply as Bill Gates’s fledgling company was in 1987. A $10,000 investment then would be worth $1 million now. Walden argues convincingly that small stocks have been the 20th century’s most lucrative form of investment, and he makes a compelling case that his 100 picks are the hottest performers in this hot category. At a time when the true value of many high-flying stocks is very much open to question, Walden’s research can help investors find the market’s hidden gems.

Global Bargain Hunting: The Investor’s Guide to Profits in Emerging Markets traces another route to riches for intrepid investors. It’s true that the Asian financial crisis gave all emerging markets a bad name in 1998, soon after the first edition of this book came out, but the turmoil did nothing to shake the faith of authors Burton Malkiel and J.P. Mei in the less-developed world’s markets. Their new paperback edition incorporates the wisdom gained from the Asian experience and points stock-buyers toward the opportunities that abound in its wake.

Unlike Walden, Malkiel and Mei focus more on how to pick the right international stocks than on which stocks to pick. They devote plenty of attention to the pitfalls of investing in emerging markets, which range from high transaction costs to underdeveloped stock markets to corruption and even the risk of government expropriation. And they discuss which types of investment are and are not suitable for the typical individual buyer.

Like Walden, Global Bargain Hunting’s authors crunch numbers to reveal true values in the market that most investors could never discover on their own. You don’t have to be a math wizard to be persuaded by their valuation formulas, such as a calculation of domestic-growth-to-price/earnings ratios in ten nations that ranks the U.S., with its overheated stock market, dead last in investment values and Poland first. The message: Sell apple pie short; go long on kielbasa.

Malkiel and Mei explain complicated financial concepts in simple and clear language. They are admirably blunt about some of the dirty secrets of Wall Street, offering such insider warnings as: Initial public offerings of closed-end [mutual fund] shares are usually a rip-off. And, as Malkiel advocated (controversially at the time) in 1973’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street (6th edition 1996, W.W. Norton, $15.95, 0393315290), the authors tend to favor indexed funds over managed funds for international investors.

Global Bargain Hunting makes a strong case for buying into the developing world, even with all the financial hazards involved. Investors wary of buying at the top of the U.S. market will find this book a worthwhile form of armchair traveling.

So, suppose you profit from the advice of all three of these authors. Enjoy the warm, fuzzy feeling of success while you can, because what comes after it is the realization that you really have something to lose now. Margaret A. Malaspina wants to help you cope with your riches. Don’t Die Broke: How to Turn Your Retirement Savings Into Lasting Income (Bloomberg Press, $21.95, 1576600688) is Malaspina’s guide to a topic that Baby Boomers and others may not have thought about much as they squirreled away savings in 401(k) and IRA plans over the years: managing those accumulated, and often half-forgotten, assets before and during retirement.

Malaspina, who helped make fund manager Peter Lynch a superstar when she was a communications executive with Fidelity Investments, displays a thorough grasp of the wickedly arcane rules that govern retirement savings, especially when it comes time to start withdrawing them. Just as importantly, she finds ways to help ordinary readers understand those rules and what can happen when retirees inadvertently break them. The horror stories here, about incredibly damaging financial decisions made by smart people acting in good faith, will suffice to focus the minds of future retirees on what they have at stake.

Don’t Die Broke is not just for people approaching retirement age, either. Anyone, of any age, who inherits retirement-plan assets may face a bewildering series of choices, with little guidance from the IRS or the trustee holding the assets. Your heirs may wish you had died broke before it’s all over and, in fact, Malaspina contradicts her book’s title by offering sage advice on how to do just that. Effective estate planning, which may need to begin sooner in life than many would think, can shift enough assets out of an estate to avoid large tax burdens.

Malaspina’s work is important reading for any American who is saving for the future, because it hammers home the uncomfortable fact that just saving money is not enough. Every retirement account needs a game plan as well, and Don’t Die Broke will empower its readers to create solid strategies.

Briefly noted: Money, Greed, and Risk: Why Financial Crises and Crashes Happen, by Charles R. Morris (Times Books, $25, 0812931734), is a salutary reminder, in these heady times, of what can go wrong in the financial markets. Morris deftly surveys America’s two-century history of occasional busts, panics, and market hiccups, skewering the hubris almost always at the core of a financial disaster. In Succeeding Generations: Realizing the Dream of Families in Business (Harvard Business School Press, $35, 0875847420), Ivan Lansberg offers insightful case studies and astute analysis to guide parents, siblings, and other relatives through the tricky business of succession planning in a family company.

One of this month’s most intriguing works (remember, intrigue can have more than one meaning) is a former U.S. military spy’s primer on corporate espionage. Confidential: Uncover Your Competitor’s Secrets Legally and Quickly and Protect Your Own (HarperBusiness, $26, 006661984X), by John Nolan, provides chilling glimpses into the cloak-and-dagger world of finding out (and protecting) companies’ most valuable secrets.

And finally, aspiring tycoons can choose from among 50 potential role models in Lessons from the Top: The Search for America’s Best Business Leaders (Doubleday, $24.95, 0385493436 on sale August 17). Authors Thomas J. Neff and James M. Citrin, both executive search specialists, have finely honed their instincts for finding good leaders, and their chosen honchos sound off on life at the top in revealing interviews.

Journalist E. Thomas Wood is an editor with the Champs-Elysees.com family of European language-and-culture magazines.

Lately it seems as though all my friends are either getting rich or grousing about not getting rich while everyone else is. With the stock market and the overall economy steaming through yet another year of almost obscene prosperity, many Americans are rolling in…

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Throughout his remarkably comprehensive study of crying, Tom Lutz manages to combine very different media and disciplines film, anthropology, psychology while maintaining focus on the sheer humanity of tears. Weeping is a human universal, he writes. Throughout history, and in every culture, emotional tears are shed everyone, everywhere, cries at some time. The simultaneous disparity and unity of crying makes Lutz’s book compelling, since the variety of both cultures and experiences treated range widely, but also provoke comparison. Lutz draws from the tearful rituals of cultures all over the globe in his anthropological sections, noting that only women cry at Hopi funerals, and the Bara people of Madagascar use different grieving huts for men and women. The Colombian Kogi people, he notes, allow their babies to cry for long stretches of time. As he writes, Emotion work is always more complicated than it appears because its rules and boundaries are forever shifting as the culture changes. Mourning practices differ largely from culture to culture, and the relation of crying to grief shifts accordingly. Lutz writes of the people of the Solomon Islands, who were able to weep at the side of a coffin, then go back to laughing and joking. Lutz writes that the point is not just to show how artificial, even trivial, the expressions of grief are in other cultures, but that weeping is purely conventional, and that our own pieties about crying are suspect as well. Crying examines Western conventions alongside those of other peoples, and emphasizes the constructed nature of crying as well as its innateness. Fictional tears, too, play a part in our understanding of crying. From the labile Tita in Laura Esquival’s Like Water For Chocolate to Hemingway’s stoic men, crying or its absence characterize literary figures. At the movies, Lutz writes, images as widely divergent as those of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Titanic and Gregory Peck in Spellbound influence our understanding of what tears mean. Different audiences respond differently. As Lutz notes, Clearly who we are and what we believe determines when we cry as well. Ultimately, Crying delivers more a satisfying tour of the world of tears than any didactic answers. The language of weeping is spoken worldwide, even if it is understood in myriad ways. As Lutz writes, Every serious life change results in a reevaluation of one’s emotional options. ÔWho will write the history of tears?’ Roland Barthes asked. We all will. Eliza McGraw teaches English at Vanderbilt University.

Throughout his remarkably comprehensive study of crying, Tom Lutz manages to combine very different media and disciplines film, anthropology, psychology while maintaining focus on the sheer humanity of tears. Weeping is a human universal, he writes. Throughout history, and in every culture, emotional tears are…

Self-HelpFamily & Relationships

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Challenged to find meaning in his own final years, the esteemed Jungian psychologist James Hillman discovers, creates, or imagines the reader will eventually choose one of these verbs a rational, confident acceptance of the degeneration of old age.

But The Force Of Character, as Hillman stresses almost sternly, is not about facing or understanding death. This is no guidebook to the afterlife, no sweet vision of eternity. Nor does he present cheery prescriptions for combating the aging process. He believes that it is undignified, if not downright bonkers, to invest valuable psychological resources in vainly trying to stop the body’s inevitable, potentially illuminating decline. Rather than imagine 90-year-olds leaping in aerobics classes, Hillman teaches them to learn from supposed infirmities. Does short-term memory fade like the dew? Then use long-term memory to perform the important psychological work of long-term life review. When the physical senses fail and Chateaubriand tastes like cardboard, let the mind’s eyes take over, sharpening perceptions of life’s subtler beauties. Can’t sleep? Let the long hours of the night become a rich resource for deepening wisdom.

Hillman’s theme may at first seem radically contrarian: Old age uses infirmities to present a panoply of opportunities for refining character. Diminished physical faculties coupled with the active intelligence of the soul allow us to recognize and fully become a unique self.

Drawing upon a wealth of references to classical mythology, the Bible, poetry, philosophy, and rock lyrics, The Force Of Character maintains that our century foolishly disdains the historic importance of character, which Hillman distinguishes from morality or genetic inheritance.

He believes that we deny the last years, so valuable for reviewing life and making amends, for cosmological speculation and the confabulation of memories into stories, for sensory enjoyment of the world’s images, and for connections with apparitions and ancestors. That quote is Hillman’s prescription for imaginative, consequential aging. To the reader frantically seeking guidelines for preserving youth or promises of bliss in the hereafter, such rewards may seem too abstract and conjectural.

Of course, that is Hillman’s point. To concentrate on character is to find sense and purpose in the changes that define the decades past age 60 or so. In that transcendent sense, as he writes, Character is a therapeutic idea and determines the fragile image we finally leave to the world.

Charles Flowers recently received a Washington Irving Award for his book, A Science Odyssey.

Challenged to find meaning in his own final years, the esteemed Jungian psychologist James Hillman discovers, creates, or imagines the reader will eventually choose one of these verbs a rational, confident acceptance of the degeneration of old age.

But The Force Of…

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

e’re used to reading about lonely women whose lives revolve around the quest for a man. Literary tradition has long dictated that lonely fictional men, on the other hand, be cynically heroic, adventurous, living large lives, and taking large risks because they have nothing to lose.

In Blue Ridge, T.

R. Pearson challenges that tradition with a vengeance, giving us two lonely men who wander, lost as six-week-old puppies, through the wastelands of their own lives. It’s not that Ray Tatum and his cousin Paul Tatum don’t hold jobs or occupy reasonably respectable homes. They do. It’s their private, unspectacular tragedies that make them interesting the way they’re haunted by past failure, the way they can’t get a break from women, and their total failure at heroism.

Paul is an actuary, a job not ordinarily freighted with heroic opportunity. He likes tidy corners and straight sofa cushions. He can’t even win the loyalty of the dog he adopted from the pound. Ray’s job as deputy sheriff is theoretically more stimulating, but Ray is doomed to sacrifice justice to small town politics. It’s tempting to say that Blue Ridge is a seedy, white man’s Waiting to Exhale minus the happy ending.

Shaking up this stagnant psychic terrain is Kit, a super competent, beautiful, African-American forest ranger who threatens to steal the whole show with her low tolerance for small town nonsense. Kit is the kind of lady who can break up with her boyfriend long distance and throttle a redneck racist at the same time pay phone in one hand, windpipe in the other. The wreck she’ll make of Ray’s heart is such a foregone conclusion it hurts. Stylistically, Blue Ridge is a tour de force. Playing on reader expectation, Pearson pens two completely separate story lines (two subplots, if you will) that are brought together only in the last three pages of the book. This means the novel’s brilliant cohesion is in debt not to the plot, but to the subtle ways the two men’s lives run parallel.

Lynn Hamilton writes from Tybee Island, Georgia.

e're used to reading about lonely women whose lives revolve around the quest for a man. Literary tradition has long dictated that lonely fictional men, on the other hand, be cynically heroic, adventurous, living large lives, and taking large risks because they have nothing to…
LiteratureArts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Banned authors or their books are usually attacked for their socially, politically, or religiously unacceptable ideas or speech. Perhaps it’s not by chance that we observe Banned Books Week in September. After all, it’s the time of the year when students (those we encourage to think for themselves) return to schools and colleges and review reading lists for the year’s writing projects. While many students will recognize Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Lolita as banned material, they may be shocked to see Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass on the list as well. 100 Banned Books discusses the censorship histories of books both past and present and this is only the short list. Banning, as it turns out, is an old and established way of . . . well, keeping the lid on. The first list of forbidden books was probably compiled during the fifth century by the pope. The Vatican, however, didn’t abolish it until 1966, after running up a grand total of 4,126 books. The irony is that The Bible still ranks as one of the most censored books in history, yet it’s translated more times and into more languages than any other book and has outsold every book in the history of publishing. Another study in irony is popular sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a believable tale of a futuristic society in which all books are banned. It’s also on the list. 100 Banned Books clears up the fog about what’s been banned, when, where, and why. But it has more than court cases and public opinion. The book allows readers a bird’s-eye view of the values and opinions that this and other societies have held over the centuries with respect to politics, religion, sex, and social mores. Each listing begins with a brief summary of the book, followed by its censorship history, and a generous listing of newspaper, newsletter, magazine, and journal articles for Further Readings. The book provides a panoramic view of the full scope of book banning.

Pat Regel is a frequent reviewer for BookPage.

Banned authors or their books are usually attacked for their socially, politically, or religiously unacceptable ideas or speech. Perhaps it's not by chance that we observe Banned Books Week in September. After all, it's the time of the year when students (those we encourage to…

NonfictionEducation

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Victory in Our Schools is an explanation of the simple but effective plan John Stanford used to create change in the Seattle public school system. Like most large public school systems, Seattle’s was facing rapid decline in 1995. A decision was made to hire a new superintendent John Stanford, not another highly credentialed educator but a retired Army major general with the foresight to see the district had five thousand educators dedicated to their profession and only needed a leader. To Stanford, leading meant inspiring the community act on the simple directive to reach and teach all children. Stanford admits he knew nothing about education, and details spending months simply asking questions, trying to determine where help was needed, where procedures could be streamlined, why Seattle’s students were being underserved by so many qualified and dedicated folks. The results of his questioning and the organization of this book are the ten philosophical shifts he believed were necessary before the results everyone wanted could begin.

The ideas Stanford helped put in motion are not new to educators: focus on the students rather than the adults, involve the whole community in the process, establish exit standards, implement strict consequences when standards are not met, and make everyone accountable for the results. What is new is how Stanford followed through once the ideas were on paper. From the top down, everyone was held accountable for student progress. Principals could no longer hide behind office doors; district administrators had to come out into the schools; businesses were expected to provide not only funding but also tutors; parents were told and told again how they must help. And the standard by which the community would be judged was simple: student achievement. Three years later, scores had risen while drop-out rates and violence had declined. Each chapter is full of examples of how beliefs were made into reality. If you want effective volunteer tutors, give them coaching cards to use with the students. If you want parents to actively participate in improving students’ skills, teach them how.

It is also the story of how a man who failed sixth grade and looked back on it as the beginning of his success; it is about how he inspired those around him to act on what all educators know to be sound practices. The numerous quotes by those involved, from district administrators to janitors, from community leaders to the parents of students, all attest to the respect and honor in which the community held a man who simply wanted everyone to do their best so that every child could succeed.

Jamie Whitfield taught in public schools for 17 years.

Victory in Our Schools is an explanation of the simple but effective plan John Stanford used to create change in the Seattle public school system. Like most large public school systems, Seattle's was facing rapid decline in 1995. A decision was made to hire a…

Technology

Review

Review by bookpagedev

The faster I go, the behinder I get, runs the rustic saw, which would have made a good epigraph to James Gleick’s Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. For that matter, so would the famous cry from Walt Kelly’s comic strip, Pogo, We have met the enemy, and he is us, because in just about everything we modern Westerners do concerning time, we are our own worst enemy.

This utterly engaging book by the author of Chaos: Making a New Science is the best work in the science/technology/sociology genre I have read since Stanley Coren’s Sleep Thieves: An Eye-opening Exploration Into the Science and Mysteries of Sleep of three years ago. Like Faster, it, too, dealt with attempts to gain more time in its case, by stealing it from sleep time, a practice that is not only dangerous but almost always self-defeating.

Self-disappointing might be a better description of the efforts at saving time as with money, we never have enough depicted in Gleick’s book, which goes beyond such efforts to examine the concept of time and what we do with it. It is a book-length meditation studded with fascinating facts.

If there is a focus to this wide-ranging book, it is our frustration with our own desires in regard to time. We say we don’t have enough of it, yet our efforts to get more make our lives seem hurried and harried, a feeling we say we deplore but which we actually like.

We thought by squeezing more activities into less time, we’d be better off. Gleick quotes social historian Theodore Zeldin: Nobody expected that it would create the feeling that life moves too fast. Innovations fast ovens, quick playback, quick freezing, instant credit give us more minutes to bank, yet we still feel impoverished, so we cut back even more on sleep, breakfast, lunch, leisure.

Yet we thrive on it. Our ability to work fast and play fast gives us power, Gleick writes. It thrills us. If we have learned the name of just one hormone, it is adrenaline. No wonder we call sudden exhilaration a rush. So we look for more, because the connectedness pleases us, though it creates glut. Because we revel in the glut of cell phones, e-mail, multitasking, what have you. Entire technologies are devoted to facilitating multitasking think of waterproof shower radios. Economist Herbert Stein says the hordes of men and women walking the streets with cell phones pressed to their heads are trying to reassure themselves that they are not alone. Ultimately, he says, no matter who’s on the other end, they’re really calling Mommy.

It comes at a price, of course. Now it is rare for a person to listen to the radio and do nothing else, Gleick says. Even lovers of classical music find it hard to devote chunks of time solely to their passion. There is even a CD called Presto! World’s Fastest Classics, even though music is the art form most clearly about time. There are other, less benign forms of the price, but, as the author says more than once, it is a price we are happy to pay. While these ruminative aspects of the book are a delight, so are the facts upon which the ruminations rest. Such as the way telephone companies compress elements in a directory-assistance call to save time, or the elaborate flimflam of being put on hold for such things as computer technical support an estimated 3 billion minutes per year. They are simply shifting time from your ledger to the company’s.

There is a circuitousness about Faster that reflects the circuitousness of its topic. The complications beget choice; the choices inspire technology; the technologies create complication, Gleick says as he chases the tale of our chasing our tails, and there is no answer, unless acceleration finally gives way to paralysis.

Well, there is another answer, really. We could be like the Ankore of Uganda, whose slow pace of life makes them, by our lights, seem lazy. Yet in their laziness they are, in effect, contentedly creating, producing, and making time, as much time as they want, and none of it wasted. Whereas we are overbusily using, selling, and buying time, and constantly feeling it’s wasted.

But that’s no answer for us. We have been captured by our own worst enemy, and we love the captivity, going ever faster and getting ever behinder.

Roger Miller is a freelance writer. He can be reached at roger@bookpage.com.

The faster I go, the behinder I get, runs the rustic saw, which would have made a good epigraph to James Gleick's Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. For that matter, so would the famous cry from Walt Kelly's comic strip, Pogo, We have…

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Picture Hope and Crosby in space. But instead of Dorothy Lamour in a sarong, there’s an android in drag. Now you’ve got the general idea behind The Road to Mars, the zany sci-fi novel by Eric Idle, an original member of the zany comedy troupe Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Idle is not new to the written forum. His previous works include a novel, Hello, Sailor,; a play, Pass the Butler; and a children’s novel, The Quite Remarkable Adventures of the Owl and the Pussycat, for which he received a Grammy nomination.

The author spins a yarn reminiscent of the works of Douglass Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, et al). The comedy team of Lewis Ashby and Alex Muscroft, along with Carlton, their robot-Friday, are simply trying to land a good gig. Instead they find themselves caught up in interstellar intrigue complete with crumbling planets, terrorists, anti-terrorists, gravity-free romance, and a diva on the order of one of today’s most popular (some would say grating) talk show hostesses.

The duo, based on the likes of Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, and similar slim/portly comedians, finds a cushy job aboard the equivalent of a premier luxury-liner, only to see their subsequent jobs canceled, seemingly by the husband of the diva, whom they may have inadvertently insulted. From there, the twisting plot takes them to a space colony where havoc breaks loose: the city’s protective dome cracks, causing the chaos and confusion on which the author seems to pride himself. The Road to Mars is, in a sense, similar to Idle’s Circus days: it’s a bit mad-dash, all over the place. There is the main story, which is told in something of a flashback style by the narrator, who has his own agenda. Then there’s the subplot, as Carlton searches for the meaning of comedy in the universe. (His theory, that levity is the opposite of gravity, would earn him the Nobel Prize if he were human). Like a tone-deaf whistler attempting a pleasant air, his efforts are an indication that no matter how well you try to build an artificial person, there are some things you just can’t include. This has long been a subplot for robot lore in science fiction. Data, the android on Star Trek: The Next Generation, has also made an effort to dissect and incorporate humor into his programming.

The narrator has a tendency to break into the story at inopportune moments, but that just enhances the drama, especially towards the end, when all plot lines hurtle together and bring the tale crashing to the climax.

Ron Kaplan has two baseball book columns online, purebaseball.com and warningtrack.net.

Picture Hope and Crosby in space. But instead of Dorothy Lamour in a sarong, there's an android in drag. Now you've got the general idea behind The Road to Mars, the zany sci-fi novel by Eric Idle, an original member of the zany comedy troupe…

Graphic Novels & ComicsComics

Review

Review by bookpagedev

A fly-by-night kind of guy Frequently American heroes take the form of vigilantes outside the legal system. Batman certainly fits the mold. He is a loner, obsessed with vengeance and justice, and as popular culture has grown darker so has the world of the Batman. Few fictional villains of any kind rank near the Joker on a scale of heartless malevolence. Watson-Guptill has produced a striking collection of Batman artwork, Batman Masterpieces: Portraits of the Dark Knight and His World by Ruth Morrison. This is not a greatest hits anthology. The book comprises oversize reproductions of the paintings originally reproduced in a DC Comics/Fleer Master series set of collector cards gorgeous, melodramatic paintings beyond the scope of comic books. They present a fragmented narrative, the pieces of which had to be collected and assembled by card-buyers.

Batman Masterpieces features original sketches and extensive remarks by the artists on how they envisioned the many incarnations of an American cultural icon.

A fly-by-night kind of guy Frequently American heroes take the form of vigilantes outside the legal system. Batman certainly fits the mold. He is a loner, obsessed with vengeance and justice, and as popular culture has grown darker so has the world of the Batman.…

Mystery & Suspense

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Dashiell Hammett wrote fiction for only 12 years, but in addition to four novels he produced hundreds of short stories for pulp magazines such as Black Mask and mainstream periodicals like Collier’s and The American. Twenty of these stories, long unavailable, are collected in Nightmare Town.

Overall these are not Hammett’s best stories, but there is much to recommend them, not least of all Hammett’s often imitated but rarely equaled prose style, marked by its oddly poetic cynicism. Crisp dialogue, peppered with the street argot of the ’20s, keep the stories moving along at a good clip. Corruption, duplicity, and deception are rife.

Some of the more enjoyable selections are novella-length, a form that was common to the pulps and at which Hammett excelled. Zigzags of Treachery has all of the ingenious plot twists that a fan of The Maltese Falcon might crave. In the crafty whodunit The Assistant Murderer, Hammett breaks with tradition by substituting a conspicuously ugly detective for the usually rakish hero we expect in the genre. The title novella, Nightmare Town, is pure pulp fiction, a hyperbolic yarn about a town in which every single citizen is corrupt.

Three of the shorter stories feature Sam Spade, the consummate hard-boiled detective from The Maltese Falcon. One of Hammett’s enduring protagonists, the Continental Op, appears in seven. Among the more interesting pieces is The First Thin Man, an early, unfinished draft of Hammett’s final masterwork. Written in 1930, before he moved to Hollywood and met Lillian Hellman, this version of the story bears little resemblance to the published 1934 novel. The plot is substantially different, most significantly in the absence of Nick and Nora Charles, the hard-drinking, clever-talking crime solvers modeled on Hammett and Hellman.

There are also a few less typical stories in the book that stray a bit from Hammett’s usual turf. For example, in A Man Named Thin, the clever detective moonlights as a poet, of all things. But maybe that’s not really so strange. Hammett, after all, had been a detective before becoming a poet of sorts a poet of the gritty, rogue-filled, crooked streets he knew and wrote about so well.

Robert Weibezahl’s compilation of mystery-related recipes, A Taste of Murder, has just been published by Dell.

Dashiell Hammett wrote fiction for only 12 years, but in addition to four novels he produced hundreds of short stories for pulp magazines such as Black Mask and mainstream periodicals like Collier's and The American. Twenty of these stories, long unavailable, are collected in Nightmare…

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

ust when you’re sitting waist deep in oyster shells and about to give up hope of finding that elusive gem, voila!, you open one more and there it is a pearl, long envisioned in your mind’s eye, yet breathtaking in its startling simplicity when you actually see it.

From the vivid imagination of Terry Kay, author of To Dance with the White Dog, comes a tale woven around a single element, much like a pearl forms around a grain of sand, and becomes something rare, lustrous, and painfully beautiful. Taking Lottie HomeM is woven around a sensual and mesmerizing young girl, Lottie Barton. Kay tells us in his author’s note that Lottie was a minor figure in one of his early, unpublished manuscripts, but upon rereading it at the beginning of 1999 he realized he had found his grain of sand in the character of Lottie. But while this enigmatic young woman is at the heart of the book, it is her effect on others that propels the narrative forward. The people, particularly the men who come to know her, are moved and changed to such a degree that they alter the course of their lives to encompass her into their respective worlds. There is Ben Phelps, a young, serious-minded baseball player when he first meets her in 1904 on a train heading out of Augusta, Georgia. There is Foster Lanier, an older, former ball player who is torn by his desperate need for Lottie and his vow to return her to her home. And there are others. Kay entrances us with a story that grows outward, like a widening circle that keeps us wondering where and how it will all end. Taking Lottie HomeM is a novel about the early years of baseball, about traveling carnivals and cabin farms in the hills, about crushed dreams and persevering hope, about small town gossip and small town goodness, about lust and longing, and most of all, about love in its varied forms.

If there was ever a doubt that Terry Kay had another novel in him to equal To Dance with the White Dog, Taking Lottie HomeM should dispel that doubt and renew his reputation as a writer in whose skillful hands the simple becomes the surprisingly sublime.

Linda Stankard writes from her home in Cookeville, Tennessee.

ust when you're sitting waist deep in oyster shells and about to give up hope of finding that elusive gem, voila!, you open one more and there it is a pearl, long envisioned in your mind's eye, yet breathtaking in its startling simplicity when you…
LifestylesCrafts, Hobbies & Home

Review

Review by bookpagedev

The winter garden Adrian Bloom’s Year Round Garden: Color in Your Garden from January to December (Timber Press, $39.95, 0881924571) is gorgeous and absolutely packed with information. This could either be inspiring or daunting, depending on one’s level of gardening confidence and ambition. Reader be warned: Bloom’s garden is in England the magical gardening isle where everything that gets poked into the dirt blooms to Edenic excess. But, since climate varies wildly even in that tiny country, the plant directories provide a huge range of material, and we Yanks will find more than enough choices to satisfy our local requirements. If your goal is to have something pleasant in the garden every month of the year, pick Bloom.

The winter garden Adrian Bloom's Year Round Garden: Color in Your Garden from January to December (Timber Press, $39.95, 0881924571) is gorgeous and absolutely packed with information. This could either be inspiring or daunting, depending on one's level of gardening confidence and ambition. Reader be…

Fiction

Through novels, discovering real life

Review by bookpagedev

No one in the tony town of Fox Glen reads for pleasure. Students dissect literature like a lab animal, as high school student Carley Wells says, and adults skim respected works in a literary version of keeping up with the Joneses.

But when Carley writes in an English assignment that she’s never met a book she liked, her parents decide to "fix" their daughter and display their own commitment to the arts by commissioning a book designed to her specifications–one she’s sure to love, not just like. The irony is great; Carley’s mom Gretchen is the type of person who buys books to decorate with, not to read.

Besides, Carley isn’t as ignorant as her parents and teachers believe. Although she misuses her SAT words and hates to read, Carley rewrites stories constantly. If an exchange with her best friend, Hunter Cay, doesn’t go as she’d like, she’ll re-imagine it later in a game she calls "Aftermemory." By contrast, Hunter is so deeply enchanted by words that his daydreams are populated by writer crushes. It’s Hunter’s love of reading and a desire to pull him out of his self-loathing, drunken state that eventually convince Carley to give the author her parents hire, failed novelist Bree McEnroy, a chance.

When Carley finally says what she means, without relying on Aftermemory to rewrite her script, she recognizes the appealing attributes of words. And when Carley points out that the characters, not the literary devices Bree uses to mask her insecurities, are the point of stories, Carley is essentially explaining this story. It’s not about books or reading, after all, but about people and relationships. Isn’t that what the best stories show us?

In her debut novel, author Tanya Egan Gibson crafts a tale filled with nuanced characters. Though it’s populated by teenagers, like the best literature, How to Buy a Love of Reading transcends age classifications to appeal to teens and adults alike.

Carla Jean Whitley writes and reads in Birmingham, Alabama.

No one in the tony town of Fox Glen reads for pleasure. Students dissect literature like a lab animal, as high school student Carley Wells says, and adults skim respected works in a literary version of keeping up with the Joneses.

But…

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