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The Icon and the Idealist

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
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NonfictionMiddle Grade

‘Their hope kept them alive.’

Behind the Book by Christina Soontornvat

Children's author Christina Soontornvat's first work of nonfiction, All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys' Soccer Team, is an extraordinary feat of research and storytelling. As BookPage reviewer Linda Castellitto observes in her starred review of the book, Soontornvat doesn't just recount the events of the rescue, she also includes "fascinating, accessible analyses—supplemented by photos, diagrams, maps and more—of the cultural, technological, scientific and spiritual considerations that affected the rescue effort, from Buddhism to climate change to political protocol." In this essay, Soontornvat shares what the members of the Wild Boars soccer team taught her.

Now that my book is almost out in the world and the early reception to it has been overwhelmingly positive, I feel comfortable admitting that I was terrified to write it. Though I had written novels and had a background in science writing for museums, All Thirteen was my first nonfiction book. It didn’t help that it dealt with perhaps the biggest news story to come out of Thailand in years, and one of the most talked about current events of my lifetime. The pressure I felt to do the story justice was overwhelming. Fortunately, I also dealt with very tight deadlines, so I didn’t have much time to dwell on self-doubt. But whenever I paused to think about how daunting my task was, I would feel huge waves of anxiety.

I never expected that researching the story of this rescue would not only help me overcome those fears but would also teach me important lessons that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

When I flew to Thailand in October 2018 to conduct interviews and research, I had a vague idea of what the overarching theme of the book would be. I had planned to tell an uplifting success story of international cooperation. Now, don’t get me wrong: That theme completely applies to the cave rescue. The way that people from all over the world were able to come together to pull off the unprecedented mission is incredibly inspiring. If only our elected leaders could tackle every problem in this way!

But my main takeaway from my research, which became the central theme of the book, is a much deeper idea, and it is one that I have come back to again and again:

Mentality is everything, and hardship makes you resilient.

This is something I understood on some theoretical level before I started working on the book, but my research showed me real-life examples of why this is true.

Resilience and the ability to calm the mind were traits possessed by many of the rescuers who labored so hard aboveground to find the boys. It was particularly apparent in the rescue divers who dove each boy safely out of the cave. Cave diving is a dangerous business. It is vital not to panic, and yet the very act of cave diving puts you in situations that would be nearly impossible not to panic in. The men who rescued the boys and their coach were veteran rescue cave divers who have been through some pretty harrowing near-death scrapes in their careers. They are the best in the world at what they do because they stay calm, they don’t let their fear overtake their mental state, and they lean on their years of experience to solve new problems.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of All Thirteen.

I learned so much from interviewing the rescuers, but the boys of the Wild Boars team ended up being my greatest teachers. When I first began this project, I could not fathom how a bunch of ordinary kids ages between the ages of 13 and 17 could have survived such a harrowing ordeal. They spent 10 days in near-total darkness, without food, suitable shelter, clean water or any communication with the outside world. But this was not the first time the Wild Boars had been tested.

They are an adventurous bunch; prior to their journey into the cave, they had gone on numerous excursions, biking up mountains and hiking to waterfalls. Together, they had already practiced pushing their bodies to their limits. And of course, on the soccer field, they had also tested themselves physically and practiced working together as a team. It’s true, none of these experiences even comes close to being trapped in a cave for 10 days in the dark. But I believe that facing challenges together made them resilient—both as individuals and also as a unit, which was key to their survival.

Their coach, Ekkapol Chantawong, was only 25 years old during the rescue, but already he had suffered many hardships. He lost most of his family to disease when he was just a child. Orphaned, he spent most of his youth living in temples, where he trained as a novice monk for years before he became a soccer coach. A fundamental principle in Buddhism is that we are our minds, and that by calming and retaining control over our mental state we can affect our physical well-being. The boys could not have had a better guide to keep their hopes alive while they waited in darkness.

Yes, these boys were ordinary. And that is what is so extraordinary about the rescue, and what I hope that readers take away from the book. We are all ordinary and extraordinary, too. No, we are not trapped in a dark cave miles below the earth. But I know that I am not alone in having experienced some dark moments in the past few months. But everything we need is inside us already. We are stronger than we think we are. We have been through difficult times, and we have made it out, and we will do so again. We are in control of our minds, which are the most important things to be in control of when everything else around us is spinning out of control.

The Wild Boars never gave up hope that they would make it out of the cave. Their hope kept them alive. Sometimes when I feel hopeless, I think about them. Why should I lose hope when they never did? It has been an honor to write this book and to share their story of hope and resilience with the world.

 

Author photo by Sam Bond

Author Christina Soontornvat shares the lesson she learned from the members of the Wild Boars soccer team, whose extraordinary rescue she chronicles in her book, All Thirteen.

8 Things You Never Knew About the Mob

If you think you know about the mob just because you've seen The Godfather, think again. Russell Shorto, author of Smalltime, about the little-known history of mobs in small-town America—and in his own family—dishes on eight things about the mob that might be unbelievable if they weren't true.
True Crime

On being conned (just a little)

Behind the Book by Tori Telfer

Tori Telfer reflects on the fine line between herself and the dazzling con artists she profiles in her raucous romp, Confident Women.

I spent most of 2019 perched on a stool in a coffee shop, “writing.” I was supposed to be writing a book about con women—con women in the court of Marie Antoinette and con women in Olympic-mad Beijing and con women who came down from Canada to wreak havoc on the tender hearts of Cleveland’s finest businessmen. But there were times when I clutched my almond croissant like a woman possessed and just sat there, staring into space, consumed by one burning question:

Have I ever been conned?

I had a mercenary reason for asking myself this question. I had been struggling with the introduction to my book, trying to cram every single thing there was to say about cons and women into a few punchy pages, and the resulting introduction read like a Google Drive document that was being edited by 10 people at once. I needed a better way in. I needed an anecdote—something to start the book off with a bang. And wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if the anecdote involved me being conned?

If I could just dredge up some suppressed memory about being cheated by a crook or swindled by a spiritualist, the introduction would practically write itself. Sure, I knew on an intellectual level that being conned was not something to wish for. The victims in my book were seriously damaged by their run-ins with con women. They were broke, despairing, ashamed, traumatized. Some of them were even dead. But I couldn’t help trawling through my memories anyway, searching for con artists at every turn, asking myself, Wait, was she a con artist? Was he?

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Tori Telfer’s Confident Women.

There was the roommate who lied to me about . . . well, everything. She told me, for example, that she’d been given the phone number of the lead singer from Dashboard Confessional while sunbathing on an abandoned beach.

There was the man who convinced me that he needed money for a tow truck to come and get his broken-down truck. He sat with me on the curb, chatting about his tattoos, as my boyfriend took $40 out of an ATM behind us. We were entirely convinced that he was going to come back in the morning and repay us. He was even in costume as a construction worker. It was as though we had attended a piece of interactive theater, not a petty fleecing.

And then there was the time I chatted with a known con artist on Facebook Messenger. I had been researching her cons but ultimately decided not to include her in my book after our interaction. She told me that Roman Polanski wanted to make a movie about her life. I decided to leave her story up to him.

But none of these interactions felt compelling enough to make it into my book. Instead of the stuff of great introductions, they felt like the stuff of . . . life. Who among us hasn’t been lied to on Facebook Messenger, or had trouble with a roommate, or given money to someone who may have been pulling the wool over our eyes? Instead, I found a fantastic article from the 1970s about a con artist named Barbara St. James who changed her hair color a lot and used her as my opening anecdote. But afterward I was left with all those small stories from my past—those microswindles, if you will—wondering what to do with them.

“The world of the microswindle is not as clear-cut as one might hope.”

As much as the microswindles irritated me, I had to admit that I was a bit of a microswindler myself. I have lied more times than I care to admit. (Ask me about the time I made up the story of my first kiss.) In living rooms and on Facebook Messenger and while sitting on plenty of curbs, I have pretended to be a little bit different than the person I truly am. It didn’t seem fair, then, to interpret the interactions I’d had with microswindlers as examples of Me Being Good (or at least naive) and Other People Being Bad. I started thinking of them less as moral and more as transactional. They were a sort of payment, I thought—payment for the privilege of trusting other people.

If I am going to trust most of the people I interact with, then yes, every now and then I will have to fork over $40 for something shady or listen to an anecdote about Dashboard Confessional or Roman Polanski that probably isn’t true. And the payment isn’t entirely one-sided, either. I only chatted with the con artist on Facebook Messenger because I was thinking about writing about her—thinking about absorbing her life story into my book, like some sort of soul-sucking spirit. And as far as my old roommate and my friend on the curb? I have used them as anecdotes in conversation again and again. I am using them now. The world of the microswindle is not as clear-cut as one might hope.

The macroswindles that made it into my book were more clear-cut. After opening my book with Barbara St. James, I lined up the rest of my chapters—the woman from Beijing, the woman from Versailles, the woman from Canada and all the rest—and the resulting cast of characters was big, fascinating, compelling. Their tales were twisted and bizarre and sometimes confusing, but there was often some clarifying moment: a trial, say, or a prison sentence. Their stories were special, for lack of a better word—special enough to be worthy of a book. But their stories were just bigger, not other. They were still on the same spectrum as the woman on Facebook, as the guy on the curb, as my old roommate, as me.

 

Author headshot © Charlie Kirchen

Tori Telfer reflects on the fine line between herself and the dazzling con artists she profiles in her raucous romp, Confident Women.
Nonfiction

How Elizabeth Letts discovered the freedom of the open road—in the midst of lockdown

Behind the Book by Elizabeth Letts

The Ride of Her Life tells the story of Annie Wilkins’ epic horseback road trip from Maine to the West Coast in 1954. As author Elizabeth Letts finished writing her book in 2020, she learned from Annie how to find contentment and freedom even during quarantine.

Annie Wilkins inspired me. In 1954, 62 years old, penniless and unwell, she set off from Maine on the cusp of winter believing she could ride her horse all the way to California. When I decided to write about her, I thought I’d found a path to escape just like she had. I imagined myself gliding down endless highways as I did research for my book, freed from the concerns of daily life. I’d be Annie, unfettered, alone, no cell phone in my pocket relentlessly calling me to the things of this world. Or at least, that’s how I pictured it would go.

And no wonder escape was my fantasy. I’m a member of the “sandwich generation,” juggling the demands of a frail, aging parent and a growing teenage son. My life is punctuated by ordinary things—grocery shopping and doctors’ appointments, kids’ sports practices and calling the plumber. Most of the time, I find it hard to leave town even for a few days. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Ride of Her Life.

Despite all this, I geared up to investigate Annie’s epic adventure, a journey that I had already planned to retrace inch by inch—if I could just find the time. In 2017, I started to follow Annie’s route in chunks. Using vintage maps for guidance, I sought out a landscape that no longer existed but whose traces nonetheless remained in plain sight if you knew where to look—filling stations with a couple of pumps out front, roadside diners and motor courts, Main Streets of small towns. America as it was, just on the cusp of being transformed by the massive interstate highway system. Each time I ventured out, I was caught up in the romance of the vast American landscape. Each time, I hurried home before I was quite finished, wishing I had more time to stay on the road.

I confess I envied Annie’s freedoms—a woman on her own, with her horse and dog for company, doing precisely and only what she pleased. I often wished I, too, could leave everything behind—the instant messages, the emails, the work and home responsibilities that modern technology allows us to bring along so that we never truly get away. 

“As I spun the results of my research into a story, my own vista grew smaller. But Annie’s world got bigger and bigger as she traveled to the wide-open spaces of the West.”

The Ride of Her Life was mostly complete when, in late February 2020, I decided to squeeze in another trip. I didn’t know it would be the last one—but as every reader now knows, the world was about to change. Within a month, my son was sent home for online schooling; my older daughters both moved home. The quiet sanctuary where I did my writing was filled with people jostling for desk space, fridge space and bandwidth. I moved my laptop from my home office into my bedroom and immersed myself in what solitude I could find.

Throughout the next months, as I spun the results of my research into a story, my own vista grew smaller. But Annie’s world got bigger and bigger as she traveled from the wooded confines of New England to the wide-open spaces of the West. And it seemed that the longer I stayed in my own home, the better I understood Annie. She was a single woman, short and square, working class and proud of it, divorced and with no children at a time when women were judged mostly by their relation to others—mother, wife, widow. Annie Wilkins never went anywhere or did much of anything except work in the kinds of jobs available to a woman with a sixth grade education. She was trapped in a life that was pretty much inevitable for her. She had no means of escape.

“The binds I had chafed at were less like boundaries and more like the yellow lines on the highway—not walls to keep me confined but guidelines to keep me straight on the road.”

And how did she respond to that? Unfailingly, for the first 62 years of her life, she just kept going. Not a word of complaint. She adopted her father’s motto—“Keep going and you’ll get there”—which is helpful for a journey, even if it’s the ordinary journey of life.

As I wrote about Annie’s life and travels, I began to perceive that I hadn’t really been stuck before. The binds I had chafed at were less like boundaries and more like the yellow lines on the highway—not walls to keep me confined but guidelines to keep me straight on the road.

Yes, Annie’s journey was epic, but the things she carried—her pluck and determination, her faith in the essential goodness of the world and her love for her animal companions—were all things she possessed before she started. And so, as I sat at home with my laptop, slowly growing used to the restricted world we’ve been living in, I learned that the truest journeys of our lives take place in our hearts. That’s the lesson Annie taught me. And it was a lesson I needed to learn.

 

Author photo credit © Ted Saunders

Writing about an epic horseback road trip from 1954 helped author Elizabeth Letts find contentment in the pandemic world of 2020.
NonfictionHistoryFood & Drink

The top 12 weirdest moments in food history

Behind the Book by Matt Siegel

In his debut book, Matt Siegel takes intel from nutritionists, psychologists, food historians and paleoanthropologists and weaves together an entertaining account of the food we eat. These 12 surprising food facts offer a taste of the weird, wonderful backstories you’ll find in The Secret History of Food.

1. In 1893, the Supreme Court had to rule whether tomatoes were a fruit or a vegetable. This happened not long after people finally decided that tomatoes weren’t poisonous (a belief that lasted for hundreds of years, owing largely to their botanical relationship to mandrakes and deadly nightshade) and that they weren’t used to summon werewolves (the tomato’s scientific name, Solanum lycopersicum, literally means “wolf’s peach”).

2. People used to think potatoes caused syphilis and leprosy. This was chiefly because of their resemblance to the impacted body parts of the afflicted. Now, of course, potatoes are America’s favorite vegetable, largely thanks to french fries. (Tomatoes are in second place, owing largely to their use in frozen pizza and canned tomato sauce.)

3. Vanilla isn’t very “vanilla.” While vanilla has unfortunately become a synonym for “ordinary,” it’s really anything but. For starters, it’s the only edible fruit to come from orchids, even though they’re the largest family of flowers. Vanilla gets its name from Spanish conquistadors, who named it after the Spanish word for “vagina.” It has to be pollinated by hand using a technique developed by an enslaved 12-year-old named Edmond Albius. And it’s the world’s second most expensive spice behind saffron.

4. The first breakfast cereals were intentionally bland. Ready-to-eat breakfast cereals were created in the 1800s by religious health reformers who believed sugar and spices were sinful and that consuming them incited bodily temptation, leading to such sexual urges as chronic masturbation and adultery—and ultimately resulting in eternal damnation.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Secret History of Food.

5. Our affinity for certain comfort foods begins in the womb. Research suggests many of our adult food preferences are influenced by flavors (e.g., vanilla) present in breast milk and amniotic fluid, which absorb flavors and odors from the parent’s diet. Meanwhile, other food preferences, such as people’s polarized responses to cilantro, go back even earlier to the genetic inheritance of specific taste receptors.

6. People used to believe personality traits and intellect were passed on through breast milk. As a result, early wet nurses were screened for things like breast shape, manners and vices such as day-sleeping and gambling addiction to ensure their milk was “child friendly.”

7. An entire ear of ancient corn used to be about the size of a cigarette. Over thousands of years, corn was selectively bred from a nearly inedible weed into the modern staple many cultures now depend on.

8. There’s a decent chance the honey in your cupboard comes from lawn weeds or poison ivy. And that’s OK. (Though there’s also a chance it’s not honey at all but a mixture of corn syrup and yellow food coloring . . .)

"Cinnamon, it was said, came from giant bird nests and had to be transported using rafts without oars on a treacherous journey that took five years and was powered by courage alone."

9. Fidel Castro was obsessed with American dairy. He spent decades funding the genetic manipulation of a dairy “supercow” named Ubre Blanca (“White Udder”) that produced four times the milk of American cows, was assigned a security detail in an air-conditioned stable and was eulogized with military honors and a life-size marble statue after her death.  

10. No one wanted to eat Patagonian toothfish until they were rebranded as Chilean sea bass in 1994. Now they sell for $29.99 a pound at Whole Foods. 

11. Spice traders used to make up stories about the exotic origins of spices so they could sell them for more money. Cinnamon, it was said, came from giant bird nests and had to be transported using rafts without oars on a treacherous journey that took five years and was powered by courage alone. Black pepper was said to grow in forests guarded by serpents that had to be scared away by setting the trees on fire, which explained why black pepper pods were the color of ashes.

12. The adage “you’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar” isn’t really true. Rather, catching flies depends on a host of complex variables including the age, gender, sex drive, mating status, thirst and stress level of each fly—as well as the concentration of the vinegar, the time of day and the season. (Even then, some research suggests you’ll catch even more flies with beer or human semen, with one scientist calling semen “the crack cocaine of the fly world.”)

Everything you never knew about Patagonian toothfish, Cuban supercows and cinnamon sticks
RomanceNonfictionFictionYA FictionYAMemoir

The Hold List: Sophomore stunners

Feature by the editors of BookPage

We’re turning our attention to successful sophomore titles that soared over the high bars set by their authors’ first books.

The Lawrence Browne Affair

Cat Sebastian‘s first romance novel, The Soldier’s Scoundrel, had a pitch-perfect sense of the English Regency period and the dangers of being a gay man in that era. But in her second book, The Lawrence Browne Affair, Sebastian takes the queerness that has always lurked behind within gothic fiction and thrusts it fully into the light. Lawrence Browne, Earl of Radnor, is convinced that he’s going insane due to his difficult family history, his attraction to men and the panic attacks he experiences. When a well-meaning vicar hires him a secretary, Lawrence thinks it will be easy to scare him away with his supposedly “mad” behavior. But Georgie Turner is not a normal secretary: He’s a con man looking for a place to lie low, and the only thing that scares him about Lawrence is the horrendous state of his financial accounts. Sebastian’s wry wit is on full display, and her ability to make the thrills of initial attraction palpably real gives this romance all the wonder of an unexpected second chance.

—Savanna, Associate Editor

Transcendent Kingdom

As a book review editor, to admit that you haven’t read that novel that everyone else and their mother have raved about—well, it doesn’t feel great. For a time, Yaa Gyasi’s bestselling, universally heralded 2016 debut novel, Homegoing, was the source of one of my primary shame spirals. But then September 2020 rolled around and with it her follow-up, Transcendent Kingdom, a tremendous novel of heart, mind and soul. It’s about Gifty, the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants who grows up in an all-white evangelical Christian community in Alabama, and grapples with the complexities of her family alongside her own experience of moving from the mysteries of faith to the vast, limitless discourse presented by her career as a neuroscientist. As widely as these questions range, the novel is extremely tight, even tidy, and that kind of storytelling is precisely the way to my heart. It sent me hurrying to Homegoing, finally ready for anything and everything Gyasi has to offer.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Stray

Stephanie Danler’s debut novel, Sweetbitter, became a bestseller and was adapted into a television series, launching her career into the stratosphere. Her second book, Stray: A Memoir, published in May 2020, after the U.S. had gone into lockdown but before the publishing world had pivoted to remote book events, so it didn’t receive the same attention as Sweetbitter—despite being emotionally potent, beautifully written and gripping to boot. As Stray opens, Danler has moved back to California, where she grew up with parents who were beautiful, unstable addicts. The treacherous landscape of Laurel Canyon kicks up memories of her painful past while an affair dissolves in the present, and as she weaves between the two, trauma takes on a dreamy, phantasmagoric quality, as ubiquitous as the heat. As far as second books go, this one is a mature achievement. And if you have a thing for devastating dysfunctional family memoirs, Stray can hang with the best of them.

—Christy, Associate Editor

I’ll Give You the Sun

The first thing to know about I’ll Give You the Sun is that it was published four years after Jandy Nelson‘s debut, which is an eternity in YA publishing, where authors typically write a book a year. The second is that, perhaps because Nelson took that time, it’s extraordinary on every level. It’s full of sentences that seem as though Nelson came to an intersection while writing and instead of deciding to turn or go straight, she levitated her car and flew to the moon. And then there’s its structure: two narrators, twins Noah and Jude, and two timelines, when they’re 13 and when they’re 16, before and after a tragedy that altered the paths of their lives. Breathtaking is a word critics like, and it comes close to describing the experience of reading this book. But it’s more like the way a roller coaster feels once your stomach is back where your stomach belongs and you’re careening down the track, relieved and ecstatic to still be alive, nearly weightless, almost in flight.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

The Days of Abandonment

In the decade between Elena Ferrante’s first and second novels, her debut was made into a movie, and still no one knew her identity. During that time, certain literary circles obsessed over knowing who Ferrante really was, but perhaps if they gave The Days of Abandonment a closer reading, they would discover how irrelevant and destructive such a question is. Following a woman, Olga, in the aftermath of her husband’s desertion and infidelity, this sophomore novel shows how closely and precariously identity and reality are linked. We see Olga’s life crumble until she finally reaches a nadir from which the only way forward is up. Being confined inside a narrator’s thoughts during a time of such catastrophe and despair is a specialty of Ferrante’s, and here her powers reach a goosebump-inducing, worldview-shattering peak. While the Neapolitan novels might be considered her masterpiece, The Days of Abandonment has everything one could get from Ferrante.

—Eric, Editorial Intern

The editors of BookPage recommend successful sophomore titles that soared over the high bars set by their authors’ first books.

Family & Relationships

Dating guides share helpful tips for getting lucky in love

Feature by Trisha Ping

Just in time for February 14, publishers are releasing scads of dating advice books promising a one-way ticket to relationship bliss. But in the sea of books with snappy titles, how to discover which one is best for you? And how long before the author brings forth the inevitable nugget of wisdom from "Sex and the City"? Read on to find out.

The Book: A Practical Handbook for the Boyfriend: For Every Guy Who Wants to Be One, for Every Girl Who Wants to Build One

The Authors: Actress Felicity Huffman is best known for playing working mom Lynette on "Desperate Housewives"; Patricia Wolff is a playwright. Both are hilarious.

The Hook: This is a relationship book for guys, and it has the vintage-style noir illustrations to prove it.

Who Should Buy: Those who look for laughs with their relationship advice. But let’s face it: This book may be "for the boyfriend," but women will be the ones buying it for their boyfriends or brothers (or themselves).

Sample Quote: "A man’s emotional checklist is pretty basic: Am I hungry? Am I sleepy? Am I horny? If he’s content in all three areas, he’s pretty much okay. A woman’s emotional checklist reads more like a Russian novel. It’s long, complicated, confusing, and you spend a lot of time trying to keep the characters straight."

First Mention of "Sex and the City": page 91.

 

 

The Book: He’s Just Not in the Stars: Wicked Astrology and Uncensored Advice for Getting the (Almost) Perfect Guy 

The Author: Jenni Kosarin is a sex columnist.

The Hook: A man’s suitability for everlasting love and faithfulness is written in the stars. By pairing his Sun sign (determined by birth date) with his Venus sign (determined by birth year), you can "discover your man’s predisposition in love." Though the writing is sometimes reminiscent of US Weekly ("love profiles" of celebrities, and their romantic histories, are included), the astrological profiles are scarily accurate.

Who Should Buy: Anyone who thinks the stars tell all, or serial daters. If you’re in a relationship, just read the page on your current squeeze’s sign in the bookstore.

Sample Quote: "Isn’t it time someone tells the real story about how you should define men in love?"

First Mention of "Sex and the City": page 2.

 

 

The Book: Better Single than Sorry: A No-Regrets Guide to Loving Yourself and Never Settling

The Author: Jen Schefft won her season of "The Bachelor" when she became engaged to Andrew Firestone in the finale. After their break-up, she starred in "The Bachelorette" but ended up turning down all 25 of her eager suitors.

The Hook: Being alone is better than being in a bad relationship, so wait for the right man. And don’t let your parents, grandparents or smug married friends make you feel guilty about your single status.

Who Should Buy: Fans of Schefft (though don’t expect any meaty behind-the-scenes gossip about the TV show), or any woman who’s fed up with feeling bad about being single.

Sample Quote: "If you focus too much attention on the idea of getting a ring or having a wedding, you’ll lose sight of the most importation thing: the marriage. When I walk down the aisle, I want to feel 100 percent certain that the man waiting at the altar is the best person for me. I won’t let the glare of a diamond cloud my judgment. In fact, I’ve had one, and I assure you it doesn’t guarantee happiness."

First Mention of "Sex and the City": page 10.

 

 

The Book: Kiss and Run: The Single, Picky, and Indecisive Girl’s Guide to Overcoming Her Fear of Commitment

The Author: Elina Furman is a self-proclaimed commitment-phobe, and she’s written several books on dating and singles.

The Hook: Men aren’t the only ones with commitment issues. Don’t let a fear of commitment keep you from saying "yes" to true love and happiness.

Who Should Buy: Jen Schefft. (Just kidding.) Women who could say yes to at least three of Furman’s Top Ten Signs You’re Commitment-phobic, which include "You have a long and elaborate list of requirements for your ideal mate" and "You have a habit of dating ‘unavailable’ men."

Sample Quote: "If you’re choosing to be with someone who isn’t ready for a serious relationship, what does that say about you? Remember the Golden Rule: IF YOU’RE WITH A COMMITMENT-PHOBE, YOU ARE A COMMITMENTPHOBE."

First Mention of "Sex and the City": page 12.

 

 

The Book: Secrets of a Fix-Up Fanatic: How to Meet and Marry Your Match

The Author: Amateur matchmaker Susan Shapiro also wrote the memoir The Five Men Who Broke My Heart. Her narrative voice comes across as a bit smug at times—but after sending 12 couples to the altar, maybe she’s earned it.

The Hook: Getting someone you know to hook you up is the best way to find a good match—but you also need to learn to recognize the men who are marriage material and fix yourself up before you can be fixed up.

Who Should Buy: Singles with a large network of social, trustworthy friends—after all, any setup is only as good as the person making the connection.

Sample Quote: "The beauty of having someone near and dear to you set you up is that there’ll be no surprises or shocks about what lies ahead . . . you can feel semicertain that your next suitor will not be a tranny in hiding, a serial adulteror, or an axe murderer."

First Mention of "Sex and the City": page 3.

 

 

The Book:  Actually, It Is Your Parents’ Fault: Why Your Romantic Relationship Isn’t Working, and How to Fix It

The Authors: Philip Van Munching wrote Boys Will Put You on a Pedestal (So They Can Look Up Your Skirt), and psychoanalyst Bernie Katz counsels families and couples on Long Island.

The Hook: Your childhood experiences shaped your personality and set the course for your adult life. If you can understand the way they did that, you too can have a healthy, conflict-free relationship.

Who Should Buy: Those with an interest in psychoanalysis; anyone who believes in nurture over nature; people who can’t seem to be in a relationship without conflict (Van Munching says that’s because you’re playing out dysfunctional relationships from your childhood).

Sample Quote: "[W]e don’t ask ourselves the single most relevant question when it comes to figuring out the origin of our longing for someone else: What does the personality trait I seem to be so drawn to in others reveal about me?"

First Mention of "Sex and the City": page 30.

Trisha Ping is currently single, but refuses to hold her parents responsible.

Just in time for February 14, publishers are releasing scads of dating advice books promising a one-way ticket to relationship bliss. But in the sea of books with snappy titles, how to discover which one is best for you? And how long before the author…

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