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NonfictionMemoir

True tales of love and marriage

Feature by Amy Scribner

If a heart-shaped box of chocolates just won’t cut it this Valentine’s Day, pick up one of these unique takes on finding—and keeping—love. They’re entertaining, thought-provoking and way lower on calories than a chocolate cherry cordial.

MEET ME IN MANHATTAN
What is it about New York City romances? We love those stories about couples who happen upon each other at the top of the Statue of Liberty or wandering through Times Square. Author Ariel Sabar has a theory about why Manhattan is so conducive to coupling: It’s all by design. “If you want strangers to talk, give them something to talk about: an unusual sculpture, a mime, a juggler, a musician, a street character. . . . It takes two strangers with ostensibly nothing in common and, through a shared, immediate experience, links them, even if just for a moment.”

Sabar’s thoroughly engaging Heart of the City profiles nine couples who met at famous New York City public spaces, much like his own parents, a Kurdish Iraqi father and upper-crust American mother who met by chance in Washington Square Park. The stories span generations, from the sailor who met a lost teenage girl in Central Park in 1941, to Claire and Tom, who met in 1969 at the top of the Empire State Building (“with its setbacks, clean lines, and needle-tip mast, the building looked like some precision scientific instrument, a scalpel under operating room lights”). Sabar has teased out each of these couples’ magnificent, ordinary stories and compiled them into a sparkling love letter to the city.

SUPPLY AND DEMAND
Want a more practical take on love? Settle in with Spousonomics, a wry and convincing treatise from two financial journalists on why economics is the key to building a marriage that endures through good times and bad. Paula Szuchman, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and Jenny Anderson of the New York Times clearly explain why common marital problems can be solved by applying simple economic principles. Fights over housework are really just an issue of division of labor. Are never-ending arguments the bane of your marriage? You might be loss-averse. And sex, say Szuchman and Anderson, is a simple “function of supply and demand.”

The thing is, Spousonomics actually makes a lot of sense, and you don’t feel like you’re reading a hellish undergrad textbook. When they explain the principle of incentives (a tool to get what you want), you understand that in economics, incentives work because they entice you to buy a pair of shoes just to get a second pair half off. In a marriage, incentives work because they get your husband to finish his honey-do list. Spousonomics “doesn’t demand that you look each other in the eye until you weep tears of remorse. It doesn’t require you to keep an anger log, a courage journal, or a feelings calendar.” It is simply a common-sense, laugh-out-loud guide to a happier marriage.

HEART, SOUL . . . AND KIDNEY
Angela Balcita has already undergone one kidney transplant and needs another when her new college boyfriend Charlie O’Doyle offers his kidney—an unorthodox way to kick off a romance, to be sure. Moonface is about what happens after she says yes to this most unusual proposal.

Balcita writes with humor and dignity about her second transplant at age 28, outlining the incredibly complex, fascinating process of removing and replacing an essential part of the body. But at its core, Moonface is a not-so-simple love story. “I wanted to take all of him, not just his kidney,” Balcita writes. “I wanted us to be like one person, one brain and one body, moving through the world. It was already starting to feel this way.”

Most gratifyingly, unlike so many memoirs of illness and recovery, this one keeps going after Balcita gets better. It won’t spoil the reader’s enjoyment to reveal that she and Charlie stay together and even have a baby. With her sharp ear for dialogue and unflinching honesty, Balcita offers a sweet story of love and healing.

If a heart-shaped box of chocolates just won’t cut it this Valentine’s Day, pick up one of these unique takes on finding—and keeping—love. They’re entertaining, thought-provoking and way lower on calories than a chocolate cherry cordial.

MEET ME IN MANHATTAN
What is it about New…

Memoir

Behind the scenes with the Pioneer Woman

Feature by Eliza Borné

Want a behind-the-scenes look at the Pioneer Woman’s lifestyle? Assistant Web Editor Eliza Borné went to the ranch to interview Ree Drummond for our February issue—and came back with some video. Click through to watch! 

Want a behind-the-scenes look at the Pioneer Woman's lifestyle? Assistant Web Editor Eliza Borné went to the ranch to interview Ree Drummond for our February issue—and came back with some video. Click through to watch! 

Memoir

On the front lines of motherhood

Feature by Amy Scribner

We mothers know it isn’t an easy job. You struggle to find work-life balance. Your house is a wreck. You haven’t had a full night of sleep since Clinton was president. But these inspiring, honest and heartfelt books will remind you that raising children is both a blessing and a challenge—and that you deserve to celebrate Mother’s Day each year.

A FRESH NEW VOICE
In this wry, warts-and-all memoir, Good Housekeeping contributing writer Kyran Pittman offers up snapshots from her life, and she is nothing if not very, very human. We’re barely into the first chapter of Planting Dandelions when she reveals that she cheated on her first husband. Later in the book, she writes about very nearly cheating on her second husband, and she is equally candid on plenty of other topics, including nearly losing their house to foreclosure.

Yet this confessional tone is balanced with her clear affection for family life in all its messiness. Now a mommy of three, Pittman is just as passionate when writing about life in suburbia as when musing on postpartum sex.

“The slope of my nutritive backslide can be plotted by each of my kids’ first birthday cakes,” she writes. “When the oldest turned one, I made him a whole wheat carrot cake with pineapple-sweetened cream cheese on top. Two years later, it was a homemade chocolate layer cake, frosted with buttercream, for my middle child. Three years after that, I ran by the warehouse club and picked up a slab of corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oil, spray-painted blue, for the baby.”

Being a mom isn’t always (or even usually) glamorous, but Pittman recognizes the beauty of family life in this interesting, funny and fresh entry in the mommy memoir genre.

ADVICE YOU CAN TRUST
I’ll be honest: This book reminded me why I will never, ever have another baby. I was exhausted just reading the section called “A baby’s life: sleeping, eating, peeing and pooping,” with its accompanying chart on 24 hours in the life of a newborn. On the plus side, I was glad to learn my stomach wouldn’t be in any better shape had I used cocoa butter during pregnancy.

The Mommy Docs’ Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy and Birth is full of such useful tidbits, penned by three Los Angeles OB/GYNs whose TV show “Deliver Me” airs on Oprah’s new network. With common-sense information and advice on everything from breastfeeding to baby blues, these are the doctors every new mommy wants at her side.

The comparisons to the seminal What to Expect When You’re Expecting are inevitable, but the Mommy Docs write in a more conversational, matter-of-fact tone. With anecdotes sprinkled throughout the book, authors Yvonne Bohn, Allison Hill and Alane Park share their own experiences as mothers and doctors. They do occasionally lapse into medical jargon, but mostly this is a thorough and useful guide from conception to pregnancy and delivery.

THE GIFT OF LOVE
This book touts itself as “dispatches from the ridiculous front lines of parenthood,” but it’s actually more like “dispatches from two incredibly selfless and loving humans.” Astonishing and deeply humbling, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is two-time National Book Award finalist Melissa Fay Greene’s account of raising four biological children and five more adopted from Bulgaria and Ethiopia.

After their eldest biological child left for college, Greene and husband Don worried they’d be empty nesters before they knew it. Some might solve this by planning a home remodel or a retirement vacation. Instead, the couple brought home five more children over the next decade.

“Donny and I feel most alive, most thickly in the cumbersome richness of life, with children underfoot. The things we like to do, we would just as soon do with children,” Greene writes. “Is travel really worth undertaking if it involves fewer than two taxis to the airport, three airport luggage carts with children riding and waving on top of them, a rental van, and a hall’s length of motel rooms?”

But Greene is no Mother Theresa (thank goodness). In one of the most affecting chapters, she writes candidly about her struggles after bringing home their new son, Jesse. He doesn’t speak English and is developmentally delayed from years in a Bulgarian orphanage. Greene anguishes over her decision, at one point thinking, “If I leave right now, drive all night, and check into a motel in southern Indiana, no one could find me.”
Needless to say, Jesse eventually fits into the family as one of many puzzle pieces. In the end, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet is a lovely patchwork of moments from a house filled with love, life and acceptance.

LIFE GOES ON
“Four months ago I saw my husband lying in a coffin. Tomorrow I get to hold my baby boy in my arms for the first time.”

In Signs of Life, a clear-eyed account of the months following her husband’s accidental death at age 27, author Natalie Taylor recounts what it was like to be a five-months-pregnant widow, navigating a strange new world with humor and honesty.

A high school English teacher, Taylor turns to classic literature to help tell her tale. It’s a neat trick that works surprisingly well. She compares her sense of powerlessness to that of migrant farm worker George from Of Mice and Men, and her grief and frustration to the scene from The Catcher in the Rye when Holden Caulfield breaks his parents’ windows after the death of his brother. Pop culture also figures in Taylor’s imagination, as when she fantasizes about a version of the popular TV series “The Bachelor,” which she would call “The Widowette”: “I’d insist that the entire show be filmed here in Michigan, in the middle of February when the days are gray and bleak and snowy and no one has a tan,” she writes. “The first guy to wake up early and scrape the ice off of my car and shovel the driveway gets a rose.”

Taylor’s story really kicks into high gear after she gives birth to son Kai. Through sleepless nights and maternity leave, she struggles to find her new normal. This is a story remarkably free of self-pity, instead focusing on the power of relying on others and drawing on the strength you didn’t know you had.

We mothers know it isn’t an easy job. You struggle to find work-life balance. Your house is a wreck. You haven’t had a full night of sleep since Clinton was president. But these inspiring, honest and heartfelt books will remind you that raising children is…

MemoirCookbooks

Cooking up a special treat for Dad

Feature by Martin Brady

Fatherhood can be a challenge filled with responsibility, frustration and even pain, when life and relationships don’t go smoothly. But love, hope, pride and a sense of personal reward are the fulfilling part of the deal, and this selection of new titles helps to express the importance of the tie that binds.

AT HOME IN THE KITCHEN

A cartoonist, and also an editor and writer for The New Yorker, John Donohue exploits a wonderful idea about men and food and emerges with Man with a Pan: Culinary Adventures of Fathers Who Cook for Their Families. Fact is, many of the world’s great chefs are men, so there’s no startling revelation here about males being savvy in the kitchen. But Donohue deftly links the phenomenon to the societal changes in modern-day life, where women and men are increasingly exchanging traditional roles, a situation that has opened the doors wide to average guys exercising culinary muscles—and proving to be pretty darn good at it.

Donohue solicits testimony mostly from writers, editors and journalists—including Stephen King—who supply interesting accounts of their personal excursions into the cooking life and recommendations for their favorite cookbooks, plus a few recipes each. Screenwriter Matt Greenberg’s Grilled Burgers with Herb Butter look straight-ahead delicious, as does musician and short story author Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s Peanut Butter Soup. King’s Pretty Good Cake seems simple enough (and tasty), yet the range of the submissions overall is ethnically rich (Manuel Gonzales’ Mexican Chocolate Pie!) and occasionally exotic (Shankar Vedantam’s Yashoda’s Potatoes), and some creations are doubtless more difficult to achieve than others (for example, Slatecontributor Jesse Sheidlower’s Bacon-Wrapped Duck Breast Stuffed with Apples and Chestnuts). Donohue cleverly peppers the text with funny, sophisticated cartoons, making Man with a Pan uniquely smart and also very useful. A must-have for kitchen-friendly dads, this volume should reap rewards down the road for family appetites everywhere.

GOING THE DISTANCE

Veteran CBS newsman Jim Axelrod has had an interesting career covering presidents and world events and hobnobbing with broadcast journalism icons like Dan Rather and Ted Koppel. Yet when shifting fortunes at his job filled him with self-doubt, Axelrod went into reflective mode. His resultant book, In the Long Run: A Father, a Son, and Unintentional Lessons in Happiness, is essentially a memoir of his upbringing, adulthood and working life, but the book’s main thrust concerns Axelrod’s sudden and quixotic attempt to match his late father’s running time in the New York Marathon. The senior Axelrod, a lawyer who wreaked some emotional havoc on his own family, serves as focal point for his son, who strives to reconcile their relationship and adopt his father’s achievement-oriented approach to running as a way to reconnect with the past and his memory of a loving man. The middle-aged Axelrod endures some expected physical lumps in getting into shape, but more importantly, his very readable text imparts some heartfelt lessons about the father-son bond.

THE GAME OF LIFE

Author/journalist Steve Friedman also strives to reconnect with Dad, and in his case golf is the activity that must serve as the linking metaphor. Not so easy, though, since the author despised the game growing up, mainly because he saw it as a barrier between him and his father, who played constantly. Friedman’s Driving Lessons: A Father, a Son, and the Healing Power of Golf tells the story of his return to his hometown in the St. Louis suburbs, resolved to learn golf under his father’s tutelage and make the conscious attempt to understand the game—and also dear old Dad. This brief book offers warm, funny and ironic chapters in which we view the author learning to golf—not an easy task, mind you, once you hit a certain age—and assessing his own life and career status, but mainly benefiting from his father’s encouragement and simple life philosophy. Both warm and cautiously unsentimental, Driving Lessons is a welcome little read and a great gift idea.

COMING HOME AT LAST

Finally, in the category of gut-wrenching fatherhood experiences comes A Father’s Love: One Man’s Unrelenting Battle to Bring His Abducted Son Home. Co-authored with Ken Abraham, David Goldman’s personal tale is one of intense confusion, misunderstanding and deep hurt, not to mention a years-long investment of time and money in a battle in international courts to regain custody of his son.

Seemingly happily married in 2004 and the father of young son Sean, former successful model Goldman was stunned to discover that when his Brazilian wife, Bruna Bianchi, left the U.S. for a vacation with their son in her homeland, she had no intention of ever returning. So began Goldman’s five-year nightmare of attempting to have Sean returned to him, a journey of unimaginable heartache and loss in which he encountered stiff legal challenges, negotiated the thicket of long-distance international diplomacy, raised awareness among American government officials and the media, and combated the determined resistance of Bianchi’s Brazilian family, who refused to return Sean to his father even after his mother’s sudden death.

Goldman’s account seems repetitive at times, mainly because there were so many starts and stops in the process, but ultimately his tireless pursuit of Sean—by way of working the complicated legal system and marshaling support from lawyers, high-profile American officials and TV networks—does pay off. His bittersweet reunion with his son, and a sense of hope for their future together, concludes the coverage. The Goldman story gained a fair amount of attention in the States, and this eventful recounting should draw many interested readers.

Fatherhood can be a challenge filled with responsibility, frustration and even pain, when life and relationships don’t go smoothly. But love, hope, pride and a sense of personal reward are the fulfilling part of the deal, and this selection of new titles helps to express…

NonfictionMemoir

Portaits of the sporting life

Feature by John C. Williams

Sports fans with a nose for books will have plenty to keep them busy this winter, with major new titles on baseball, football, basketball and outdoor pursuits. The styles are diverse, too: Releases include photo-heavy coffee-table tomes, brisk memoirs and literary nonfiction.

GUTS & GLORY
The best bet of the season is The Big Show: Charles M. Conlon’s Golden Age Baseball Photographs. This collection, compiled by Neal and Constance McCabe and introduced by Roger Kahn, focuses on the period from 1904-1942. Conlon was an amateur photographer who never quit his day job, but this book is an argument that his player portraits deserve the status of high art. The selections include plenty of super­stars—Cobb, Gehrig, Ruth and DiMaggio all appear—but the real delight is in the photos of lesser players such as Buzz McWeeny and Sunset Jimmy Burke. Each photo is given a caption that tells the story of the man it portrays: Bugs Raymond, who was beaten to death with a bat after a semi-pro game; Jimmy Archer, who lost the ability to extend his throwing arm when he fell into a vat of boiling soap; and the countless players whose careers succumbed to alcoholism. For those interested in prewar baseball, this is a wonderful historical document, and it’s a delight to pore over the old-time uniforms, the bats and the gloves and the primitive catching equipment. But the appeal of the book runs deeper. The men portrayed just happen to be baseball players. At their best, Conlon’s photos capture a humanity that comes through regardless of sport.

For more flash (if not more style), try 100 Yards of Glory: The Greatest Moments in NFL History. Co-written by Joe Garner and broadcaster Bob Costas, this is an NFL-approved catalog of league history, told in the form of superlatives: the greatest Super Bowls, the greatest catches, the greatest comebacks and so on. The photos can’t hope to match Conlon’s—with some exceptions, most are of sports-page quality—and there is plenty of room for argument about the anointed highlights. Though some choices seem rather present-minded—is Sean Payton really a coaching great?—the book does a good job covering moments from the pre-Super Bowl era. There’s a lot of material here, and Monday-morning quarterbacks will enjoy thumbing these ample pages. In case paper and ink are not enough, the book comes with a DVD containing archival NFL video.

HOOPS HEAVEN
Since the NBA has recently been plagued by labor strife, many basketball fans will enjoy looking back to the league’s happier days. When the Garden Was Eden: Clyde, the Captain, Dollar Bill, and the Glory Days of the Old Knicks should serve nicely. Author Harvey Araton, a longtime Knicks reporter currently writing for the New York Times, does excellent work bringing to life a team that many consider “the most intelligent ever”: Willis Reed, the quiet, inspiring center; Walt Frazier, whose flashy style belied a root conservatism; Phil Jackson, a lesser player who would become the most celebrated of basketball coaches; and Bill Bradley, who transitioned from forward to U.S. senator. This so-called “old” basketball club reached its apex only 40 years ago, but the book shows how the team’s style was far removed from the star-focused game of today. These Knicks truly played as a unit—remarkable, considering the strong individual personas that Araton ably profiles. (As one of his interviewees puts it, the team was a group of “many personalities, but somehow no egos.”) The book makes something of a stab at placing the Knicks against the backdrop of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, but the real action here is on the court. 

The court fades to the background in Shaq Uncut, Shaquille O’Neal’s post-retirement memoir, co-authored with Jackie MacMullan. The big center liked his teammates to dish him the ball, and now he dishes back on Penny Hardaway, Kobe Bryant and Pat Riley, among others. Shaq doesn’t hit all that hard, but he still manages to emerge an unsympathetic character. We learn much less about what motivates the man than about how he likes to spend his money. (One suspects the two topics are not unrelated.) His well-known love of law enforcement is discussed but essentially goes unexplained; there is more, albeit only slightly, about his relationship with his tough stepfather and his disdain for the biological father who abandoned him and his mother. But even if Shaq hasn’t earned the right to dub himself the Big Proust, the memoir’s candid quality will satisfy those who care to glance inside the mind of a modern-day hoops star.

FACING CHALLENGES
Room for Improvement: Notes on a Dozen Lifelong Sports is a memoir of outdoor life far removed from the arenas of spectator sport. John Casey, a National Book Award–winning novelist (for Spartina), describes years of challenging his own capabilities, often by rowing, hiking, cross-country skiing or running, usually at long distances. This might sound intimidating to the sedentary reader, but Casey takes a thoughtful approach, aware of his physical inadequacies as he probes the purpose behind his sporting passions. The essays here, several of which were published as magazine articles, are occasionally fragmentary, and they are held together by not much more than the progression of time from Casey’s young manhood to older age. But an erratic overall pace does not detract from the nuggets in each piece. The book will immediately appeal to those who share Casey’s need for physical challenge, but even the less athletically adventurous will discover something worthwhile in Casey’s reflections. 

Sports fans with a nose for books will have plenty to keep them busy this winter, with major new titles on baseball, football, basketball and outdoor pursuits. The styles are diverse, too: Releases include photo-heavy coffee-table tomes, brisk memoirs and literary nonfiction.

GUTS & GLORY
The…

MusicMemoir

Tuneful bios strike the right note

Feature by W.S. Lyon

This year brings thoughtful looks back at the careers of legendary musicians, whose public lives and stirring songs have moved listeners from the 1940s to the instantaneous now.

ALTERNATIVE VIEW
Pearl Jam Twenty is a book to get lost in, the kind to open slowly, a book that draws you in by its feel, its heft, its outward austerity. Like liner notes, it at once celebrates the band’s cool and invites you to find in them some piece of yourself—the conversations scrawled on concert tickets, the set lists smoothed out after having been balled up and cast aside, the image of 50,000 arms raised in the air. The message is clear: We can’t believe we created all this, and we couldn’t have done it without you.

Twenty is a fan book, both a companion piece for and a thing apart from the Cameron Crowe documentary of the same name. Crowe sets the tone with an adoring and personal introduction to the book: Defying the stereotypes of self-destructive American rock bands, Pearl Jam has managed to stay true to their own creative process with a “clear-eyed spirit that comes from believing in people and music and its power to change.” Through snippets of interviews and conversations that span more than two decades, Twenty is a nearly week-by-week account of the band’s triumphs, failures and history-making success.

STILL MY GUITAR
As a boy, George Harrison was bad in school and curious about guitars. In Hamburg, Harrison transformed from a boy into a man and, with his mates, into the most beloved musical act of all time. As a Beatle, he marveled at the mania circling his life, often turning a skilled and curious lens back at those swirling hordes. Eventually, his curiosity would again transform him, this time sending him Eastward and inward toward the mysticism of LSD and Hindu spirituality. Later, out of pure interest, he would go on to bankroll Monty Python’s Life of Brian and sponsor a young Formula One champion.

An ode to “the quiet Beatle,” George Harrison: Living in the Material World is linear and chronological. Its author, Harrison’s widow Olivia Harrison, shies away from direct personal commentary. Despite the near lack of point of view, the images themselves tell a story of two Georges: the public and the spiritual, the wry and the despondent. It’s a striking companion piece to the recent Martin Scorsese documentary of the same name that aired on HBO.

The two most powerful images in the book were taken by Harrison himself. One is of a cadre of faceless photographers shooting away at him from beneath the giant, menacing blade of an airplane propeller, an unbroken ring of onlookers gawking from the sidelines of the landing strip. The other is a self-portrait in the mirror, years later, of a hollow, bearded face holding a ball of pure light and ringed, Christ-like, by the reflected aura of the flash.

With 260 images and hundreds more diary clippings, quotes and reminiscences from his famous friends, Living in the Material World exposes Harrison in a manner true to his legacy: richly, with quiet steps, into an open-ended finish.

DAYLIGHT COME
Harry Belafonte’s My Song: A Memoir is a surprising, captivating portrait of the plucky singer and actor. From an impoverished boyhood with his stern Jamaican mother, to the showbiz break given him by jazz legends Charlie Parker and Max Roach, to his integral role in the nonviolent civil rights movement, and on to his continued passions as an entertainer and activist in Africa and around the world, this is an American life sustained by humanity and well worth its weight in words.

Co-author Michael Shnayerson writes deftly and with great power in a highly readable style. The story never flies too high, grounding itself in the humble past each time it nears soaring. This plays well for Belafonte, who comes across as entirely genuine. He’s equally frank when sharing the stories of his counsel with civil rights leaders, his friendship with Sidney Poitier and his mischievous pursuits of the women in his life. But the book focuses on Belafonte’s lifelong fight against injustice, a fight he continues today. After all, “Banana Boat Song” might sound like a romp, but day-o! is the cry of an abused working class.

BIRD ON THE WIRE
Part memoir of a lifelong struggle with alcohol, part litany of names, places and events associated with the folk movement of the 1960s, Judy Collins’ Sweet Judy Blue Eyes is on all counts a ballad in a familiar key. Collins is famous for her crystal-clear voice and weepy eyes, and for transfiguring the songs of others. Here, she sings in her own words, telling her own tale. But her deep connection to her father, who passed on to her the gift of music and the curse of booze, is sweetly recounted, and the struggles behind the music are told with a light touch. Collins has a remarkable set of memories to share, a view from the inside of America’s most legendary musical moment—Baez, Dylan, Stills, Cohen—and she paints it vividly with a sharp if occasionally odd sense of detail.

This year brings thoughtful looks back at the careers of legendary musicians, whose public lives and stirring songs have moved listeners from the 1940s to the instantaneous now.

ALTERNATIVE VIEW
Pearl Jam Twenty is a book to get lost in, the kind to open slowly, a…

ParentingMemoir

Experiences only a mother could love

Feature by Amy Scribner

Motherhood wreaks havoc on your body, your brain cells and your wallet—and you wouldn’t have it any other way. Just in time for Mother’s Day, we’ve chosen five new releases that embrace the stickiest, messiest, sweetest, most exhausting job of all. Pick one up as a present for Mom or as a gift for yourself.

A GRAND ADVENTURE

Anyone who read Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott’s seminal book on the trials and tribulations of motherhood, will be flabbergasted to learn that her infant son, Sam, is now a 19-year-old father. Although the pregnancy was a surprise, Lamott welcomes her new grandson, Jax, with her hallmark humor and faith (and a healthy dash of neurosis) in Some Assembly Required.

She writes candidly of her mixed feelings about the baby’s mother, a lovely but headstrong young woman who keeps Lamott firmly at arm’s length when it comes to raising Jax. Still, the two women forge a deep, if sometimes fragile, bond as they set about the messy business of building an extended family. Insightful, poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, Some Assembly Required is Lamott at her very best.

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

The subtitle of Making Babies, Anne Enright’s marvelously irreverent look at having children later in life, is “Stumbling into Motherhood,” and that is just what the Irish writer did when she and her husband had their first child after 18 years of marriage.

Is there anything better than a book that doesn’t romanticize pregnancy? When Enright recalls her pregnancy as a time in which she “sat and surfed the Net like some terrible turnip, gagging and leaning back in my chair,” I laughed in agreement. I kept laughing throughout the whole book, including the section called “How to Get Trolleyed While Breastfeeding.” (“Trolleyed” being a very Irish way of saying “drunk.”)

That’s not to say some of that laughter wasn’t through a few tears. Never has the bittersweet impact of motherhood been summed up more poignantly than by Enright. “This is what motherhood has done to me,” she writes. “I cannot watch violent films (I used to quite like violent films), I can’t even watch ones where the violence is ironical (I used to love irony). I cry at all funerals. I look with yearning at the airport road. I am complacent to the point of neglect about my body. I shop where the fat girls shop (it is a different place). For months I do not shop at all.”

Making Babies is a must-read for anyone who’s ever experienced the joys of motherhood—and ’fessed up to its agonies.

TO THE TOP

I was bracing to be slightly annoyed by the ambitious mother and her overachieving mountain-climbing daughter in Up: A Mother and Daughter’s Peakbagging Adventure. But Patricia Ellis Herr is no tiger mom, pushing her daughter Alex to the brink. She is simply a mom who recognized her daughter’s boundless energy and helped her harness it.

The duo climbs nearly 50 New England peaks during their year-and-a-half adventure, an amazing accomplishment given that Alex was only five years old when they started. The quest is not without its harrowing moments, such as when Herr forgets to put windproof gloves on Alex and they have to turn back 200 yards from summiting for fear of frostbite. Add to this the fact that Herr’s husband—Alex’s father—lost both his legs to frostbite in a mountain-climbing accident at age 17.

But Up is marked more by the sweet, small moments the mother-and-daughter team experience while climbing, as when Alex asks her mother why a boy told her she can’t be good at math because she’s a girl. Herr’s account is really half hiking reference manual and half meditation on how to instill independence and confidence at a young age—an odd and oddly compelling combination.

TREASURING THE UNEXPECTED

As soon as the doctor laid the baby in her arms, Kelle Hampton knew her daughter had Down syndrome. “I will never forget my daughter in my arms, opening her eyes over and over . . . she locked eyes with mine and stared . . . bore holes into my soul. Love me. Love me. I’m not what you expected, but oh please love me.”

Hampton is best known for her acclaimed blog, Enjoying the Small Things. In Bloom, a searing and brave portrait of her baby’s first year, Hampton opens up about her fears and jubilation, and what she calls “the throbbing pain of losing what I had expected.” She recounts the late nights doing Internet research on what to expect as Nella grew up, and the triumph of their first walk for Down syndrome awareness.

Filled with personal photos from the delivery room through Nella’s first birthday, Bloom gives a whole new meaning to the term “open book.”

SONG OF MYSELF

My Story, My Song is the slim but lyrical memoir of Lucimarian Roberts, the mother of “Good Morning America” co-anchor Robin Roberts. The elder Roberts, who has become known to GMA viewers through her daughter’s occasional references and a couple of appearances on the program, reveals a delightfully upbeat voice at the age of 87. In the book, co-written with Missy Buchanan, she recalls her racially charged childhood in 1920s Akron, Ohio, her years at historically black Howard University and her experiences as the wife of a career Air Force officer and the mother of four. Primarily, though, My Story, My Song focuses on Roberts’ Christian faith and the gospel music that has been a constant companion throughout her life.

“I sing because the music of the church speaks my soul language,” she writes. “I sing because these songs are tightly woven into the texture of who I am. Lucimarian Tolliver Roberts. Child of God.” Brief reflections from daughter Robin are sprinkled throughout, small but beautiful gems in a truly sparkling book.

Motherhood wreaks havoc on your body, your brain cells and your wallet—and you wouldn’t have it any other way. Just in time for Mother’s Day, we’ve chosen five new releases that embrace the stickiest, messiest, sweetest, most exhausting job of all. Pick one up as…

ParentingMemoirGraphic Novels & ComicsCookbooksComics

Something special for dear ol’ dad

Feature by Martin Brady

Fathers usually don’t expect much for Father’s Day—a simple hug is plenty. But you could also acknowledge dad with a gift book, which these days might span topics from engineering to sports to cooking. The following selection of new books has dad and his modern-day versatility covered.

REACHING FOR THE SKY

From the publisher of last fall’s wonderful Mountaineers comes another richly illustrated volume that merges information on the lives of remarkable individuals with useful descriptions of their great achievements. Engineers, edited by Adam Hart-Davis, focuses on familiar names such as Robert Fulton, Eli Whitney, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and other world-renowned innovators whose work dramatically changed human lives. But the coverage here—reaching back to the ancient world and through the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, all the way to the Space Age—also extols many lesser known originators of essential engineering feats. The subject matter is far-ranging—aqueducts, ships, steam engines, electricity, airships, the automobile, architecture—in other words, any discipline that falls under the book’s titular category. Besides its plentiful photos and drawings, the text is loaded with informative sidebars and timelines. The technically inclined dad will love it.

LET’S GET COOKING

It’s hard to imagine cooking as an extreme sport, but that’s what we find in Daniel Duane’s How to Cook Like a Man: A Memoir of Cookbook Obsession. Duane is a Bay Area surfer-dude and writer whose entry into the world of fatherhood inspired him to play adventurous chef to his wife and two daughters. He embraces haute cuisine like an ancient warrior, inspired mainly by cookbook author and restaurateur Alice Waters, who happened to be Duane’s preschool teacher many years before. Duane eventually encounters Waters again when she hires him as a writer, but that episode is tangential to his epic crusade through thousands of recipes over an eight-year period. Specific food preps are recounted in some detail, but what Duane does with, say, duck fat, turnips, wild truffles or a whole cow stashed in his freezer is secondary to his fanatical Zen-like food rap and its effects on those around him. The book’s unexpected highlight: the description of a simple egg dish Waters whips up for Duane on the fly—served with a glass of Domaine de Fontsainte rosé.

THREE OF GOLF’S GREATEST

Veteran golf writer James Dodson’s American Triumvirate: Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and the Modern Age of Golf blends social history with biography, focusing on the game’s somewhat shaky mid-20th-century status, when its growth was hampered by the Depression and World War II. Golf’s saviors emerge with Snead, Nelson and Hogan, each born in 1912 and all achieving superstar status, their lively competitions helping to sustain the game’s popularity and eventually spurring a postwar period of prosperity in which tournaments became more plentiful and the purses much larger. Dodson makes the case that this trio provided the historical bridge to the ever-more-prosperous eras of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods. More so, his authoritative prose profiles three distinctly different individuals—the gentlemanly Nelson, the maverick Snead and the somewhat misunderstood Hogan—whose love of the game was complete and whose career paths were unavoidably intertwined.

LONG DISTANCE JOURNEY

Scott Jurek is an ultramarathoner whose exploits were profiled in the 2009 bestseller Born to Run. Now this amazing runner tells his own story in Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramara­thon Greatness. With co-writer Steve Friedman, Jurek charts his difficult early life in rural Minnesota, where his mother was ravaged by multiple sclerosis and family dynamics were always challenging. Yet somehow he soldiered on, finishing college, becoming a physical therapist and, most importantly, finding fulfillment as a runner. Achievement in “shorter” marathons led to success in more grueling races, chiefly the Western States Endurance Run, a 100-mile trek that Jurek won seven straight times. While his personal story is inspiring, the book also focuses on Jurek’s transition to a completely vegan diet. Recipes are included, as are training tips for amateur runners who want to step up their game.

RIDING HIGH

Humorist Dan Zevin, a 40-something father of two, finds himself totally digging his new wheels in Dan Gets a Minivan: Life at the Intersection of Dude and Dad. “Have I told you my minivan has a built-in DVD player?” he gushes, as he embarks on his Brooklyn-based “Mr. Mom” phase. That’s a term Zevin strenuously objects to, but when your wife’s a New York City publishing bigshot and you’re the one hiring nannies. . . . Anyway, Dan’s a modern guy and a very funny writer—so as he narrates the family trip to Disney World, relates his experiences learning tennis and the guitar, relives his court date when he’s cited for not cleaning up after his dog, etc., other dads (and moms) will find plenty of humor in his misadventures. Besides philosophizing on changing priorities and other midlife concerns, Dan also has some endearing moments with his own dad, and those passages are justification enough for this entertaining volume’s Father’s Day relevance.

SUPERHERO TRIVIA

Finally, we have Brian Cronin’s Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent?, which should prove a popular gift for anyone who ever curled up with a comic book. From Batman and Robin to Archie and Jughead, comic book characters have a unique pop history that spans generations. Superfan and blogger Cronin pays homage through dozens of entertaining lists of names (e.g., “Fifteen Alliterative Comic Book Names Created by Stan Lee”), storylines (e.g., “Five Most Iconic Panels in Marvel Comics History”), cultural impact (“Six Bob Dylan References in Comic Books”), TV and movie trivia (“Four Interesting Ways That Actors Lost Out on Superhero Roles”) and more. If it all sounds deliciously geeky, it is.

Fathers usually don’t expect much for Father’s Day—a simple hug is plenty. But you could also acknowledge dad with a gift book, which these days might span topics from engineering to sports to cooking. The following selection of new books has dad and his modern-day versatility…

NonfictionMemoirEducation

Go to the head of the class

Feature by Angela Leeper

National debates on education reform have never been fiercer. Four new memoirs that range from inspiring to determined to hilarious fuel the discussion as their authors reflect on challenges and innovations in public schools, charter schools, educational nonprofit programs and even homeschooling.

ROOKIE IN THE CLASSROOM
Before his successful career in acting, Tony Danza earned a degree in history education, fully intending to become a teacher. When he found himself pushing 60, separated from his wife of more than 20 years and dealing with the cancellation of his talk show, Danza decided to return to his first, unfulfilled passion: teaching. His year spent as a 10th grade English teacher at Northeast High, an inner-city public school in Philadelphia, was depicted in the brief 2010 A&E television series, “Teach.” In I’d Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had, to be published in September, he gives an enlightening, behind-the-scenes look at what happened when the cameras weren’t filming.

In his toughest role yet, with his harshest critics seated right in front of him, a tearful and frustrated Danza struggles to uphold the school’s mantra—“engage the students.” Often at odds with his producers, who only want to heighten the drama for television, he fights to keep his experience as authentic as possible for both himself and his students. His observations about teaching, from wondering how technology will shape the way kids learn to the emphasis on testing, echo common national concerns. With the help of his “half-sandwich club,” based on his father’s practice of sharing his sandwiches, he reaches out to any student in need. Ultimately finding teaching to be rewarding yet emotionally grueling, Danza brings the profession the recognition it deserves in this touching and candid account.

A BORN LEADER
Founder and CEO of Harlem Village Academies Deborah Kenny has always believed in social justice, but after her husband’s death from leukemia in 2001, she realized that if she really wanted to make a difference in the world, she would have to put her sadness aside. Born to Rise chronicles her arduous path to open not one but two charter schools in Harlem neighborhoods that had some of New York’s lowest test scores. In a time when there was little information on starting a charter school in the state of New York, Kenny quit her job and raised her three children on her meager savings while building the schools’ framework, seeking startup funding and performing hundreds of other pivotal tasks.

Deciding early on that an ideal school should focus on hiring and developing superior teachers rather than setting up a curriculum to be strictly followed, Kenny revolutionized public education. Her heartfelt narration reveals numerous mistakes along the way, from not remembering to have the school building unlocked on the first day to forgetting her own sense of fun amid the business of running a school, and celebrates such triumphs as ranking first in math scores across the state’s public schools and the bittersweet farewell of Harlem Village Academies’ first high school graduates. In the process of building these schools, Kenny realizes that she’s also built a culture and community. Anyone interested in school reform—whether parents, teachers or leaders—should begin with this powerful story.

ANNUAL GIVING
A Year Up by Gerald Chertavian shows that school age children are not America’s only underserved population. As the nation’s demand for high-quality, entry-level workers increases, an estimated 5 million young adults ages 18-24 are currently unemployed and don’t possess more than a high school diploma. Suddenly a multi-millionaire when his startup dot-com business was sold and inspired by his “little brother” David, from the Big Brothers Big Sisters mentoring program, social entrepreneur Chertavian created Year Up, a nonprofit workforce development program for urban young adults, in 2000. Starting with 22 students from Boston’s tough inner-city neighborhoods, the thriving program has spread to eight additional cities.

Chertavian describes with sincerity and detail the journey toward implementing this one-year program that combines marketable computer skills with professional skills, followed by an internship with a top company. He also profiles numerous students and staff who have overcome such hardships as homelessness, poverty, neighborhoods infested with drugs and violence, limited education and the responsibilities of single parenting. Some of his key decisions, like placing Year Up centers in downtown financial districts to get students out of their dangerous neighborhoods and into the setting of the corporate world, reveal the secrets of his success. Most importantly, Chertavian demonstrates that an investment in America’s young people is an investment in America’s future.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Frustrated by her daughter Alice’s constant finagling out of doing her math homework and not, as they say, “reaching her full potential,” Quinn Cummings decided to give homeschooling a try for one year. Assuming that the homeschool movement began in the U.S. during colonial times (it did start in the U.S., but not until 1982), she gives herself homework, exploring the nearly 2 million homeschooled children and myriad homeschooling philosophies. The result is the frank and irreverent The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling in which the former child actor from The Goodbye Girl and the 1970s television drama “Family” searches for the ideal way to homeschool her daughter (and validate her decision).

Cummings doesn’t limit her information gathering to Google searches. She observes children without limits at a Radical Unschooling conference in Boston, chaperones a Christian homeschool prom in Indiana, sneaks into the Sacramento convention of a secretive, ultra-authoritarian Christian sect and engages in other laugh-out-loud encounters, all in the name of research. Hearing over and over again about the doomed fate of homeschoolers—no socialization—she interjects French lessons, team sports and the playground into Alice’s repertoire, all with mixed results. Realizing that some of Alice’s best learning—and bonding—occurred on their routine hikes, Cummings also discovers that there’s no typical homeschool family, just as giving children their best start isn’t limited to one curriculum.

National debates on education reform have never been fiercer. Four new memoirs that range from inspiring to determined to hilarious fuel the discussion as their authors reflect on challenges and innovations in public schools, charter schools, educational nonprofit programs and even homeschooling.

ROOKIE IN THE CLASSROOM

Memoir

The stuff Olympic dreams are made of

Feature by Martin Brady

What does it take to become an Olympic athlete? Three top competitors—including two Olympic veterans and one who will participate in this summer’s games—have crafted memoirs that describe their early life challenges and their struggles to achieve on the world athletic stage.

Swimmer Amanda Beard has competed in every Olympics since 1996, gaining a total of seven medals, including two gold. She participated in 2008 without medaling and fell just short of qualifying this year (at the age of 30). In the Water They Can’t See You Cry, co-written with Rebecca Paley, is Beard’s account of her personal life and her Olympic experiences, a journey strewn with disappointments—from her parents’ divorce to her own struggle with self-esteem and body image issues, including episodes of self-mutilation. Beard's narrative is heartfelt, and she ably recounts the confusion of her youth and the dedication to swimming that helped her push through the uncertainty found in other areas of her life. With athletic success have come opportunities in self-marketing and product endorsements and especially high-profile modeling gigs with Maxim, FHM and Playboy, all of which Beard has embraced in the spirit of savvy entrepreneurship while continuing to strive in the pool. Yet she has also found happiness in marriage and motherhood, and appears now to have finally balanced her professional endeavors with personal satisfaction. Her memoir also provides interesting viewpoints on the Olympic social culture at the games in Atlanta, Sydney, Athens and Beijing, and serves as a readable profile of an athlete who first achieved internationally as a teenager, then continued to compete in spite of physical changes (specifically, a sudden growth spurt in late adolescence) and emotional upheavals.

Lopez Lomong’s upbringing in Africa is in stark contrast to Beard’s California experience. Still a boy when separated from his parents and siblings during civil war in his native Sudan, Lomong ended up in a U.N. refugee camp in Kenya, where, under the auspices of Catholic Charities, he was eventually accorded an opportunity to emigrate to the United States, where he was adopted by a supportive foster family in Syracuse, New York. Co-authored by Mark Tabb, Lomong’s Running for My Life: One Lost Boy’s Journey from the Killing Fields of Sudan to the Olympic Games relates the frightening and almost miraculous tale of his survival in Africa, his adjustment to America (including gaining citizenship in 2007), and his transition from talented soccer player to world-class distance runner with Olympic aspirations. Lomong was the 2008 Olympic flag bearer for the U.S. in Beijing and will compete in London in the 5,000-meter race. Lomong’s inspiring memoir also includes the back-story on an HBO feature in which he returned to Africa to reunite with his parents, whom he thought were dead, and his brothers, who eventually immigrated to the U.S.

Reigning Olympic decathlon champion Bryan Clay won the silver medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics and took the gold in ’08 in Beijing. (In June, at the U.S. Olympic trials, Clay clipped a hurdle and failed to qualify for the London games.) In Redemption: A Rebellious Spirit, a Praying Mother, and the Unlikely Path to Olympic Gold, co-written with Joel Kilpatrick, Clay reveals that his journey has been one of emotional as well as physical challenge. Like Beard a child of divorce, he dealt with serious anger issues through his younger years, seeking out opportunities to party hard in his adolescence even while gaining strength as a multifaceted athlete. His mother’s religious influence played a key role in Clay enrolling in California’s small Azusa Pacific University, a stoutly Christian college but one that also boasts a strong track and field program. There, Clay honed his competitive skills, met the woman who would become his wife, and found comfort in commitment to his Christian faith—all on his way to Olympic glory. 

What does it take to become an Olympic athlete? Three top competitors—including two Olympic veterans and one who will participate in this summer’s games—have crafted memoirs that describe their early life challenges and their struggles to achieve on the world athletic stage.

Swimmer Amanda Beard has…

NonfictionMusicMemoirBiography

Their stars still shine

Feature by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

As Pete Seeger reminds us in his now-iconic ballad, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” there’s a season for everything. This fall is the season for a cavalcade of music memoirs and biographies, books that will make music lovers weep, laugh and sing.

IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL
This year the Rolling Stones will gather no moss but rake in the coin, as no fewer than four new books celebrate the band’s 50th anniversary. In music critic Philip Norman’s admiring and adoring biography of rock’s legendary bad boy, Mick Jagger, we meet the entire cast of characters who’ve feasted at the Stones’ banquet over the years—from Marianne Faithfull and Brian Jones to Jagger’s first girlfriend, Chrissie Shrimpton, Ronnie Wood and many others. At the center of it all is the canny middle-class Jagger, who carefully controlled and orchestrated his rebellious image to distinguish himself and the band from the well-scrubbed lads from Liverpool. Gathering interviews from everyone in Jagger’s life except Jagger himself, Norman takes us for a revealing walk down the moonlight mile of Jagger’s life, from his youthful embrace of the blues through the controversies surrounding the Altamont Music Festival, the arguments with band mate Keith Richards, and Jagger’s own constant need to reinvent himself as performer. Wild horses can’t drag Stones fans away from this riveting tale of a rock legend who’s still trying to find satisfaction.

MY MAN'S GOT IT MADE
In the early 1970s, one of the frequent guests at the Stones’ banquet was a star-crossed lad from Waycross, Georgia. Gram Parsons’ story is well known to many: Charming, handsome and talented young man with a trust fund grows up in a dysfunctional family, leaves home to carry his crystal voice and brilliant songwriting to music circles, rises quickly to radiant stardom, dies young in 1973 and is immortalized as the founder of cosmic American music and country rock. Journalist Bob Kealing rehearses this familiar story in his mesmerizing Calling Me Home: Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock, but he also draws upon dozens of new interviews with Parsons’ family, friends and fellow musicians. Kealing offers a compulsively readable and intimate portrait of a young man who introduced the pure strains of country stars such as the Louvin Brothers and Merle Haggard to rock.

LIKE A BIRD ON A WIRE
When Leonard Cohen returned to the stage to much acclaim in 2007 after an extended absence, his fans embraced him as a long-lost pilgrim, and indeed he had been holed up in a Buddhist retreat center, looking for tranquility and order in his life. In I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, music critic Sylvie Simmons vividly chronicles the life of a musician whose song “Hallelujah,” affirming his faith in life and love, has become one of the most-recorded songs in pop history. Simmons draws extensively on Cohen’s private archives, unpublished writings and his vast store of published writings, as well as interviews with close friends, rabbis and Buddhist monks as she traces Cohen’s path from his early life in Montreal through his rise to fame as a raspy-voiced singer-songwriter in the 1960s and ’70s, his retreat from the public eye and his return. In this elegantly crafted biography, Simmons captures the artist who, in spite of all his highs and lows, is still sharp at the edges, a wise old monk, a trouper offering up himself and his songs.

AIN'T I A WOMAN
While Cohen has recently returned to the music scene, soul singer Bettye LaVette never left it, and she’s finally getting some long-overdue recognition for her powerful, heart-wrenching singing. Unflinchingly honest, LaVette, with writer David Ritz, shares the searing story of her struggle to gain recognition for her tremendous talent—praised by her friends Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding and others—and the many obstacles along the way that kept her from stardom in A Woman Like Me. As a teenager, she hit the charts with “My Man—He’s a Lovin’ Man,” and though life continued to push her down, LaVette never lost hope. Her stunning rendition of the Who’s “Love Reign o’er Me” at the Kennedy Center Honors catapulted her back into the spotlight in 2008. Energetic and frank, LaVette’s unforgettable memoir spotlights a star that still shines.

THE GAMBLER
On a train bound for nowhere, country legend Kenny Rogers met up with success. In his aw-shucks, sit-down-and-listen-for-a-spell memoir, Luck or Something Like It, the singer-songwriter who has sold tens of millions of records asks us onto his front porch as he reminisces in never-before-told stories about his upbringing in a poor part of Houston, his love for his parents and family, his love of music at an early age, his five marriages and his artistic partnerships with Dolly Parton and Barry Gibb, among others. With a twinkle in his eye and a song in his heart, Rogers gracefully recalls the ups and downs on his wild ride to fame, grateful to have had the good fortune to remain in the spotlight as an entertainer for more than 50 years.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE
Read a review of Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace.

As Pete Seeger reminds us in his now-iconic ballad, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” there’s a season for everything. This fall is the season for a cavalcade of music memoirs and biographies, books that will make music lovers weep, laugh and sing.

IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL
This…

MemoirFood & DrinkCookbooks

A moveable feast: food & travel

Feature by Robert Reid

Robert Reid is the U.S. Travel Editor for Lonely Planet. In a column written exclusively for BookPage, he highlights terrific travel books, both old and new. This month, he selects some of the best books for foodies who love to travel—or travelers who love food!

I’ve long considered the bulk of travel itineraries—going to an art museum, seeing a monument, climbing a tower for a city view—as merely “the space between meals.” It’s the food that anchors the days, be it sit-down chic off the Champs d’Elysses or 50-cent noodles on plastic stools on a cracked sidewalk in Hanoi. To eat! That is to travel.

Before you set off, there are amazing food-related travel books that cover the world or focus on some of the world’s most interesting destinations.

Food Lover’s Guide to the World is an indispensable new pictorial tour through the great cuisines of the world, including travel tips and recipes if you want to bring the world back home to your kitchen. For a more literary choice,  A Moveable Feast takes the Hemingway title literally, with a collection of bite-sized essays by well-known writers focused on the tasty fusion of travel and food experiences, including contributions by Anthony Bourdain, Pico Iyer and Elizabeth Eaves.

Italy always wins for foodie travel. Beth Elon’s A Culinary Traveler in Tuscany gives 10 off-the-beaten-track, recipe-filled itineraries around Italy’s most famous food and wine region. Elon arrives in lesser-known towns, like Filattiera during its July 1-4 festival La Fame e la Sete (the hunger and the thirst), where the aroma of sizzling meats hangs over the old village square filled with tables for that night’s feast.

Italian food continues in New Yorker staff writer Bill Buford’s Heat, which gives an illuminating behind-the-scenes look at a great New York Italian restaurant. After daringly inviting celeb chef Mario Batali over for dinner, Buford signs up to be a ‘kitchen slave’ at his acclaimed restaurant Babbo. The result is a fun and intimate book, where Buford learns to butcher a hog and jets off to Italy to learn more from Batali’s former teachers.

Pastry chef David Lebovitz had wanted a Paris home address since he learned that the French clip the tips of haricots verts (green beans) before tossing them in a pot—toujours! A couple of decades later his dream came true, when he left the restaurant business in San Francisco and moved to France. Lebovitz recounts his stumbles with life as an expat in Paris, along with dozens of new French-inspired recipes, in his memoir The Sweet Life in Paris. Warning: reading Lebovitz’s story may make you book a flight to the City of Light or induce uncontrollable chocolate urges.

Robert Reid is Lonely Planet’s U.S. Travel Editor. If he could choose his last meal on Earth, it would be a picnic lunch of Vietnamese imperial rolls at Nevada’s Valley of Fire State Park.

Robert Reid is the U.S. Travel Editor for Lonely Planet. In a column written exclusively for BookPage, he highlights terrific travel books, both old and new. This month, he selects some of the best books for foodies who love to travel—or travelers who love food!

NonfictionMemoir

True tales of Christmas joy

Feature by Heather Seggel

These three books about Christmas have little in common, which should come as no surprise. We each observe the season in different ways. There is one common thread between these books, though, and it’s not jolly old Saint Nick: Each features an absolutely hair-raising drive through a holiday blizzard. Read, enjoy—and don’t forget your snow chains.

Julia Romp’s The Cat Who Came Back for Christmas gives away the story’s end in the title, but once you’ve met single mother Julia and her son George you’ll still cheer. For years, neighbors and teachers complained about George’s disengaged and combative behavior, but nobody knew what was wrong or how to fix it. One day mother and son took a stray cat to the vet. When they came to check on the animal, George began to open up to it, speaking in a high voice, making eye contact and almost instantly warming up. They adopted “Ben,” and he became a lifeline for George, who by now had been diagnosed with autism. When Ben runs away, George regresses, turning his rage on his mother. But Julia applies the same persistence to finding Ben that she had to caring for George, and things end well. Romp tells a hard story, and it’s easy to sympathize when she asks for help repeatedly and is instead viewed as a potential child abuser. Her love for her family—son and cat both—shines through, and if you’ve put off microchipping your pet, this story will encourage you to make that appointment.

BEHIND THE BEARD

Sal Lizard was just a working stiff with a bushy white beard when someone asked him to play Santa as a one-time gig. Being Santa Claus details Lizard’s journey into work as a full-time Santa, working in malls, making home and hospital visits, and loving the job. As one might expect, bringing cheer to terminally ill children is heart-wrenching work, and the hospitals he worked at had designated areas where employees could cry without the patients seeing. The hard times were offset by a job that let him bring joy to old and young alike, and Lizard seems made for the task. He’s playful with older kids who doubt Santa is real, and willing to get on the floor and play with younger kids who are scared by him (to the consternation of mall staff). Lizard tells his story with the help of Jonathan Lane, who interviewed him extensively and collected his best stories here. It works well; reading the book feels like being entertained, possibly over milk and cookies, by a relative overflowing with heartwarming anecdotes.

THE SPIRIT OF THE SEASON

Joseph Bottum’s The Christmas Plains is considered a memoir, but it’s as much about Christmas, language and landscape as it is his personal history. Moving his family to the Black Hills of South Dakota, where he lived as a boy, to reclaim a sense of fixed geography for his daughter, Bottum muses about his childhood holidays and considers the works of Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton and Dylan Thomas, and the ways in which they have influenced our experiences and recollections of Christmas. Bottum has a fresh take on the perennial complaint that Christmas is too commercial, pointing out that the inflatable snowmen and profusions of tinsel come from a knowledge that “a real thing comes toward us in December, and they layer it over with whatever fake or genuine finery they can find—not to hide it but to honor it.” His spare descriptions of the desolate Western plains alongside the hustle and bustle of New York City at Christmas are lovely, and his gentle insistence on the spiritual amid the commercial is a welcome tonic.

These three books about Christmas have little in common, which should come as no surprise. We each observe the season in different ways. There is one common thread between these books, though, and it’s not jolly old Saint Nick: Each features an absolutely hair-raising drive…

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