Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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In How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question (9 hours), Michael Schur, creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator of “Parks and Recreation,” explores philosophical questions about how humans define good character and behavior and how to achieve it. The audiobook is read mostly by the author, whose well-paced, attentive narration keeps his humorous, personality-driven (albeit sometimes meandering) content clear and engaging.

Actors from “The Good Place” comprise the audiobook’s remaining cast, with Kristen Bell, D’Arcy Carden, Ted Danson, William Jackson Harper, Manny Jacinto, Marc Evan Jackson, Jameela Jamil and even philosophy professor Todd May (who had a cameo on the show) bringing distinctive tones, attitudes and comedic gravitas to their performances.

This is a lively audio production for thoughtful readers interested in questions of goodness (“Should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?”), and it’s perfect for listening in both spurts or over a single long stretch. How to Be Perfect turns serious questions into playful thought exercises to aid in making better decisions with less angst.

With guest appearances from the cast of “The Good Place,” this is a lively audio production for thoughtful readers interested in moral dilemmas.
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“My mother was part of a generation of women who inherited all the burdens of the past and yet found the will and the means to reject them,” writes Jyoti Thottam, a senior Opinion editor at the New York Times. When her mother was 15, she left her home at the southern tip of India and traveled more than 1,000 miles to Mokama, a small town in an area considered to be the poorest and most violent in the country. There, she spent seven years studying nursing at a hospital run by a handful of Catholic nuns from Kentucky. As an adult, Thottam found herself wondering: How did these unlikely events transpire?

After 20 years of meticulous research, Thottam has chronicled Nazareth Hospital’s history in Sisters of Mokama: The Pioneering Women Who Brought Hope and Healing to India. This immersive, transportive read starts with the hospital’s founding in 1947, in the midst of the Partition of India into India and Pakistan. The fact that six nuns from Kentucky even managed to travel to Mokama at this time—much less stay and transform a vacant building into a successful hospital and nursing school—is nothing short of miraculous.

Once the sisters reached Mokama, they faced endless deprivations, including bone-chilling cold; suffocating heat; monsoons; a scarcity of food, medicine and supplies; and a lack of electricity and running water in the early years. Undaunted, the resourceful nuns nevertheless insisted on the highest of standards. They put a container of water upstairs, drilled a hole through the floor and ran a rubber hose down to the operating room so that surgeons could scrub under a continuous stream of water before surgery. One sister even built a still to provide distilled water.

Thottam has done an excellent job of transforming numerous interviews, letters and records into a compelling narrative that conveys the hardships and triumphs of these dedicated nuns and the nurses they trained. Everyone was overworked, and things weren’t always smooth. The young, homesick Indian girls were only allowed to speak English, and the nuns could be extremely strict. In telling their stories, Thottam makes a multitude of personalities come alive and shares a variety of perspectives without passing judgment.

On the surface, Sisters of Mokama seems like such an unlikely story. It’s a good thing Thottam has documented this little-known saga so that generations to come will know it really happened.

After 20 years of research, Jyoti Thottam shares the immersive and unlikely story of a group of nuns from Kentucky who opened a hospital in India in 1947.
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Though it will probably be shelved in the True Crime section, Disco Bloodbath is only ostensibly about ultrahip New York party promoter Michael Alig’s 1996 co-murder and dismemberment of his drug dealer. The gruesome act and Alig’s subsequent imprisonment bookends what is really more of a fascinating memoir by St. James, an Alig friend/foe and well-known gadfly on the city’s predominately homosexual nightclub circuit.

Chronicling the scene and all its excesses between the demise of Warhol and the rise of the Club Kids, St. James is the catty tour guide to a Felliniesque netherworld. In it, days are spent deciding which outrageous way to dress or dye your hair for the evening’s activities, Special K is a designer drug and not a breakfast cereal, and the after-party entertainment just might include a middle-aged drag queen pulling fully lit Christmas bulbs out of his (or her) anus. St. James is the epitome of the literary convention known as the unreliable narrator. His recollections (amazing that he even has them, since he admits to being drugged up during much of the period) are filled with subjectivity, petty and pithy personality shredding, and yes a flamboyant queenly bitchiness accentuated by the hefty usage of bold, italic, and all-caps typefaces. But rather than off-putting, this is actually the book’s biggest strength, as St. James’s inimitable voice in full Diva mode rings through loud and clear even if it is a bit shrill at times.

Along the way he introduces many true-life and pathetic (but unforgettable) characters, happy when they’ve schmoozed successfully or gotten a mention in The Village Voice, but desolate when their supply of coke and the latest boy toy have run out, sometimes simultaneously.

So while the title might bring to mind a bad ’70s drive-in flick and no literal carnage takes place on the dance floor populated by has-beens, wannabes, and never-wases, Disco Bloodbath is a journey into a land of strange creatures with bizarre manners. Hmm, maybe they could also put a few copies in the Science Fiction section.

Bob Ruggiero is a freelance entertainment journalist based in Houston.

Though it will probably be shelved in the True Crime section, Disco Bloodbath is only ostensibly about ultrahip New York party promoter Michael Alig's 1996 co-murder and dismemberment of his drug dealer. The gruesome act and Alig's subsequent imprisonment bookends what is really more of…

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For pilgrims and seekers Over the centuries Christians have considered Rome almost as sacred as Jerusalem. Nothing proves this better than a stunning new book entitled Pilgrimage: A Chronicle of Christianity Through the Churches of Rome. The book unites a respectful but nicely gossipy text by June Hager, who has been writing about the churches of Rome for 15 years, with hundreds of beautiful photos by Grzegorz Galazka, who is one of the official papal photographers. All of the requisite stops on the tour are here, of course the Sistine ceiling, the towering dome of Saint Peter’s. But you encounter more than the top ten tourist sights. From Filippino Lippi’s amazing frescoes in Rome’s only Gothic church, S. Maria Sopra Minerva, to the S. Andrea della Valle’s Barberini Chapel, where Puccini set the first act of Tosca, the tour rambles engagingly from one unexpected stop to the next.

Pilgrimage will make you yearn to go to Rome, and you will need a guidebook worthy of your new ambition. Fortunately Fodor’s has anticipated your every wish with a new full-color guide in their Thematic Itineraries series, Holy Rome: Exploring the Eternal City: A Millennium Guide to the Christian Sights ($21, 0679004548).

Handy cross-referencing allows you to move easily between essays and site maps. Sidebars provide useful historical and cultural information. Calendars give schedules of millennial celebrations. More than 200 photos show an up-to-date Rome, after the current restorations of many monuments. Where is the only evidence of an Arian cult in the whole of Rome? Which church claims to have the chalice from which St. John drank poison? What are the best times to visit the most popular sites? The answers are all here.

Before you go, you may want to read up on Christianity and other beliefs in the newest contribution to Merriam-Webster’s lineup of world-class reference books the fat, gorgeous Encyclopedia of World Religions ($49.95, 0877790442). These 1,181 pages literally range from the African Methodist Episcopal Church to Zen, with stopovers in between for Halloween and the Qabbalah. You will find the dietary restrictions of the Jains and the Sermon on the Mount, Joan of Arc and the apocryphal Pope Joan, the concept of Limbo and a biography of spiritualist Madame Blavatsky. Whether you seek information on the Twelve Tribes of Israel or the Five Pillars of Islam, on Odin or Billy Graham, this impressive, exhaustive work will provide the answer.

For pilgrims and seekers Over the centuries Christians have considered Rome almost as sacred as Jerusalem. Nothing proves this better than a stunning new book entitled Pilgrimage: A Chronicle of Christianity Through the Churches of Rome. The book unites a respectful but nicely gossipy text…

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Ironic, isn’t it, that bookstores and libraries, where books and readers most often meet, are rarely the subjects of books themselves? One can find a few works of fiction in which bookstores play a role (try 84 Charing Cross Road), or others set in or around libraries (Dewey Death and Dewey Decimated are two of my favorite titles, and Deborah Adams’s All the Crazy Winters is set in a small public library in Tennessee). But books about bookstores and libraries are all too rare, especially books written for the general reading public.

Here’s one book on libraries that fills the bill: Fred Lerner’s The Story of Libraries, which chronicles the development of libraries from ancient Mesopotamia and Assyria to modern Europe and North America, from the sacred library of Ramses II to the computerized libraries of today and the digital libraries of tomorrow. The author, a librarian for over 30 years, holds degrees in history and library science from Columbia University.

True to its title, this is a book of stories: of the founding, the glory, and the slow death of the Alexandrian Library (four thousand bath houses of Alexandria were said to have been heated for six months with the papyrus scrolls of that great library); of how the Rule of St. Benedict helped keep libraries alive during the Dark Ages; of a Chinese bibliophile of the 15th century who wrote eloquently of the love of books; of how Lorenzo the Magnificent, the uncrowned prince of Florence, set up a lending library for Florentine humanists; of the library careers of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Casanova (yes, the Casanova), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; of why Lenin and his wife were such strong believers in the value of libraries; of how a young man named Melvil Dewey organized all knowledge by counting to ten.

In all cultures and all ages libraries have played a vital role, albeit in widely different ways. The tablet and scroll libraries of the ancient worlds, East and West, were often monuments to royalty and, like Shelley’s Ozymandias, king of kings, followed their leaders into dust and sand. Some, like the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamon, were repositories of culture and centers of learning. After the fall of Rome, and with it the libraries of the Caesars, monastic libraries, chains and all, became the lanterns of the Dark Ages. Private libraries sprang up across China centuries before Gutenberg; Chinese woodblock printing could produce a thousand copies of a book in a day. With the mass production of books in Europe, the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance and to libraries to which the general public, stirred by heady democratic notions, demanded access. Public libraries as we know them, libraries for the people, had to wait until the 20th century before coming to fruition, mainly in our own country.

If the past is prologue, then the library of the future will be an extension of the library of the late 20th century that has seen more changes than in the previous 40 centuries. In an electronic age, will the public library have a future at all? To survive, the author believes, the library will need to hold on to traditional functions such as cataloging and reading guidance both badly needed in a world awash in raw information while continuing to expand access to information in its manifold formats. This shift may parallel that experienced by libraries that made the change from papyrus and parchment to the product of movable type. The Story of Libraries provides a greater appreciation of that long journey of the world’s libraries over the centuries.

Edwin S. Gleaves is the State Librarian and Archivist of Tennessee.

Ironic, isn't it, that bookstores and libraries, where books and readers most often meet, are rarely the subjects of books themselves? One can find a few works of fiction in which bookstores play a role (try 84 Charing Cross Road), or others set in or…

Vagina Obscura is impressive in its scope and thrilling in the hope it offers to those whose bodies have been overlooked by the medical establishment.
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Dining as the Romans do Okay, so this is another in the seemingly endless expatriate paeans to foreign culture published in the post-Year in Provence era. And yes, Alan Epstein is tickled pink with himself at having pulled off living, even making a living, right in the heart of Rome; he finds it hard to get through a paragraph without tossing in a little vernacular Italian to remind us of his fluency. Even so, it’s hard not to like As the Romans Do: The Delights, Dramas, and Daily Diversions of Life in the Eternal City, not only because Epstein truly loves his adopted city but because unlike Peter Mayle and so many of his ilk, Epstein writes from within the cultural circle, not from without; and if you’ve grimaced at the clumsy ethnocentrism of some of those faux innocents abroad, you’ll be far more comfortable in the armchair of this transplanted Romantic.

More seriously, if you have ever visited Rome and fallen under the spell of its ageless and yet proudly ancient mysteries, you will be nostalgically moved at Epstein’s succumbing to the same seductions. There is still a bit of the gee-whiz in his descriptions of Roman food, social customs, architecture, etc. But he backs his passions with a wealth of detail, a touch of history, and a flourish of cinematic color. And his habit of tossing in hilarious asides with editorial abandon is itself entirely Italian. In fact, the most Italian thing about his writing is its reluctance to stop for a period.

For instance: Epstein sighs over the simple pleasures of everyday dining, “more satisfying on a day-to-day basis than the miscellaneous cooking that passes for the American variety at this point, or the vaunted, sauce French kind. (Mention French cuisine to a romana, and she will wave her hand and remind you that the French were still barbarians who ate with their fingers when Catherine de’ Medici arrived in 1535 to marry the king, introduce the Renaissance, and teach the francesi how to cook at the same time.) Just give me a plate of delicious risotto con zucca e piselli (rice with pureed pumpkin and peas), or spaghetti al pescatore at Luna Piena in Testaccio; or fettucine with tomatoes, basil and mozzarella at Gran Sasso on Via di Ripetta near the Piazza del Popolo, where Mom cooks in her blue apron and slippers in full view of the diners, and her two sons deliver the food . . . ” And on and on, page after page, until you are either starving or infuriated or captivated. Or, in equally Italian fashion, all of the above.

But after all this fervid extravagance, Epstein frequently makes a surprisingly succinct point: “Romans eat out to duplicate the experience of eating in, not to experience something new, exotic or foreign.” Why, yes, exactly.

If Epstein does sometimes go overboard, as when he details the invariably perfect hair, makeup, clothing, and style of the Roman women (although, in fact, they are almost uniformly stunning and do carry themselves with more disarming confidence than anyone except perhaps the Parisians) well, chalk it up to one of his previous professions matchmaker and “relationship counselor.” He may be a sort of motivational speaker for following your dream, but he’s earned it. He and his wife Diane were engaged within a month of their first date, married seven months later, spent an extended honeymoon in Italy, and embarked on a three-year campaign to become permanent residents of Rome. And five years later, they’re still ecstatic.

Wine made easy Romans are anything but wine snobs: A typical trattoria meal is priced to include some sort of antipasti, pasta, meat, or seafood and a carafe of wine, red or white. Table wine, vino paisano, whatever except in the fanciest of (American-influenced) restaurants, wine is easy come, easy go down.

Among the most popular table whites is Orvietto, which is produced in the neighboring province of Umbria. A blend of four grapes, predominantly what’s called procanico (trebbiano), it’s most often drunk young, when its green notes are crisp and punctual, but it can be allowed to mellow for a couple of years to deepen its browner undertones.

Antinori’s 1999 Orvieto Classico has a broomstraw pallor and a short, very crisp frontal assault of grapefruit, kaffir lime, pineapple, and cedar; at $11 a bottle, it definitely suggests an end-of-summer cocktail party. If you’re curious about Umbrian Chardonnays, try Antinori’s 1999 Castello della Salla; at about $12 a bottle, it’s an easy house wine, good now and probably deepening for another couple of years (although it will never be a really chewy wine). Narrow but complex, it presents a crisp heirloom apple nose and a complimentary front, with hints of grapefruit and toasted almond; allowed to warm a bit, it develops an ephermeral smokiness, a bit of nougat, and ripe pear. The finish is short but refreshing.

Eve Zibart is a restaurant critic for the Washington Post. This column reflects her dual interests in travel and wine.

Dining as the Romans do Okay, so this is another in the seemingly endless expatriate paeans to foreign culture published in the post-Year in Provence era. And yes, Alan Epstein is tickled pink with himself at having pulled off living, even making a living, right…

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