Art, Art, Lifestyles, Nonfiction

The Work of Art

The Work of Art is a visionary compendium of ephemera that makes visible the bridge between idea and artwork.

Biography, Nonfiction

Ingenious

Richard Munson’s splendid biography of Benjamin Franklin provides an insightful view of the statesman’s lesser known accomplishments in science.

Biography, Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature Biography

Didion and Babitz

Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is a freewheeling and engaging narrative about two iconic literary rivals and their world in 1970s Los Angeles.

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Surviving the crash

by bookpagedev

Business & Finance

Business & Finance

Girls getting ahead

Review by bookpagedev

by Stephanie Swilley

Today’s modern woman has come a long way she no longer has to sound or act like a man to get ahead in the workplace but females still occupy only eight percent of the top-level jobs in major companies, according to Fortune magazine. Unconscious behaviors are keeping women from breaking the glass ceiling, says Lois Frankel, a corporate coach for hundreds of women and men. Her new book, Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office (Warner, $19.95, 288 pages, ISBN 0446531324), is a must-have for all women with CEO aspirations. Frankel shows women how to “quit bein’ a girl” by exposing 101 mistakes that sabotage their careers. She breaks down the behaviors into seven categories, including How You Sound, How You Look and How You Play the Game. Some of the mistakes are not revolutionary (speaking softly, needing to be liked, having the wrong hairstyle, etc.) but each one is illustrated with real-world examples and coaching tips that have worked for Frankel’s clients. Women are urged to start with a quick self-assessment test, then focus on the two areas that need the most improvement. Frankel is direct and honest yet supportive as she zeroes in on the unconscious girl behaviors that keep women from reaching the top.

Girls just starting out on their quest for success should pick up Wildly Sophisticated (Perigee, $15.95, 272 pages, ISBN 0399529470), by Nicole Williams. The hip author who created the “Drinks After Work” networking phenomenon recommends that gals pinpoint their passion, choose a great boss and learn to deal with relationships of all kinds (she even covers how to date at work). The funny “Career Confessions” from real women are a special treat in a book best enjoyed while wearing Manolos and sipping a Cosmo.

Being your own boss Entrepreneurs Caitlin Friedman and Kimberly Yorio have written the insightful book they wished they could have read when starting their own PR agency in 2000. The Girl’s Guide to Starting Your Own Business (HarperResource, $21.95, 256 pages, ISBN 0060521570) will hold your hand through every stage of starting a successful business.

The authors address the unique challenges that women face (finding female role models, balancing family and work, being a boss without being a bitch), and the “scary stuff” like insurance, incorporation and technology. Fortunately these savvy business owners don’t advise doing it all on your own, and their tips on hiring a lawyer, accountant and bookkeeper are essential.

The authors’ enthusiasm is infectious and they give a list of chick flicks (Baby Boom, Sliding Doors) and CDs (Aretha Franklin, Madonna) to provide more inspiration. The Q&andAs with other female entrepreneurs offer another been-there-learn-from-me perspective.

For more seasoned advice, turn to four business pros who founded Eight Wings Enterprises LLC, an angel investment company. After watching ambitious women suffer start-up pitfalls time and again, they decided to put their knowledge on paper. The result is The Old Girls’ Network, a wise book that shows women how to create an elevator pitch and warns against the five things never to say to an investor. The real gold mine is the appendix “tool kit” which is full of detailed templates, quizzes and references.

Good Business Eschewing rambling preliminaries, Roger Lowenstein jumps right into the spellbinding story of the bubble that burst in Origins of the Crash (The Penguin Press, $24.95, 259 pages, ISBN 1594200033). The author of Buffett and When Genius Failed vividly explains the rise and fall of the 1990s stock market in plain, easy to understand language (finally, someone explains why stock options are evil!). But Lowenstein delivers more than just a history recitation. He delves into the culture that helped shape these events to explain how the myriad attempts at corporate governance failed so spectacularly. Looking ahead, Lowenstein predicts more bubbles and crashes, saying that “Wall Street may be incapable of reform.” This fascinating analysis may reveal more about the future than Wall Street would like to admit.

Today's modern woman has come a long way she no longer has to sound or act like a man to get ahead in the workplace but females still occupy only eight percent of the top-level jobs in major companies, according to Fortune magazine. Unconscious behaviors…

A diplomat and an intellectual in the Cold War

by Roger Bishop

Nonfiction, Pop Culture

Nonfiction Pop Culture

Object lessons

Review by bookpagedev

by Linda M. Castellitto

“A world drowning in objects,” the title of the introduction to Deyan Sudjic’s The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects, is an apt description of the things-filled lives so many of us lead. It’s timely, too: rather than reveling in our objects, he explains, we’re feeling overwhelmed by them. How did it get this way? What makes one object more desirable than another? Sudjic, director of the Design Museum in London, intelligently and thoroughly explores the emotional and thought processes behind our appreciation of and craving for beautifully designed objects. In doing so, he provides a history of the people and innovations that have been instrumental in shaping our tastes and environment.

He turns his curator’s eye on everything from cars to computers to banknotes, and offers analyses of the evolution of objects’ roles as status indicators. For example, thanks to the advent of high-end computers, iPhones, BlackBerries and the like, the fountain pen is not as attractive a status object as it once was—but the watch is. Why? Because it’s jewelry, which has a “long history of addressing the emotional and tactile interaction between people and things.” Sudjic also examines how designer archetypes (the chair, lamp, certain types of architecture, etc.) frequently are re-imagined and addresses the role of fashion in design and vice versa.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is his explication of design vs. art, where he writes of the “taint of utility.” Or: art is art because it is useless, whereas design solves a problem and/or performs a function . . . but price “can have the effect of making a useful object useless” because something might be too pricey to use in everyday life. The Language of Things is filled with such moments of clarity, including Sudjic’s warning that, although design offers us a way of understanding the world, “We find ourselves seduced into constantly searching for the fleeting high of a new possession, a new purchase, and a fascination with the new.” An excellent point—and one of many in this insightful book, which is, of course, nicely designed.

Linda M. Castellitto is surrounded by designers in North Carolina.

Girls getting ahead

by bookpagedev

Essays, Family & Relationships, Humor, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Humor Family & Relationships Essays

Mother and daughter tell it like it is

Review by Amy Scribner

by Amy Scribner

The premise of this newest essay collection by mother-daughter writing team Lisa Scottoline and Francesca Serritella may be shaky—that moms and daughters the world over are best friends who sometimes get on each other’s nerves—but why quibble? Scottoline and Serritella, who tag team a column in the Philadelphia Inquirer called “Chick Wit” and had a hit with their last combined effort, My Nest Isn’t Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space, are seriously funny and seriously honest.

As always, Scottoline is at her acerbic, slightly off-color best when she ponders life as a middle-aged single mom with a houseful of unruly pets. Her take on how declining hormone levels equal lost sex drive: “Whether you’re married or not, this is excellent news. Why? Because you have better things to do and you know it. Your closet floor is dusty, and your underwear drawers are a mess. Your checkbook needs balancing, and it’s time to regrout your bathroom tile. Get on it. The bathroom, I mean.”

Serritella, 25, is still finding her own voice, an understandable situation given that her mother is an internationally best-selling novelist with 25 million copies of her books floating around. Many of Serritella’s essays mimic her mother’s trademark one-liner style, and even the topics she tackles (pets, her lack of a boyfriend) echo Scottoline’s choices. The Harvard grad obviously has chops—she just needs a little seasoning.

Despite the pair’s obvious mutual love and admiration, Best Friends, Occasional Enemies never lapses into schmaltz. Quite the opposite. You’re not getting any giving-birth-is-a-miracle musings from Scottoline. “Childbirth is not beautiful,” she writes. “Children are beautiful. Childbirth is disgusting. Anyone who says otherwise has never met a placenta. I’m surprised ob-gyns don’t have post-traumatic stress from seeing a few of those a day.”

What you will get, though, are sweet, funny, clear-eyed observations on the pleasures and pitfalls of family.

Remembering a life of crime

by Catherine Hollis

American History, History

History American History

A new perspective on Ellis Island

Review by bookpagedev

by Martin Brady

Journalist and historian Vincent J. Cannato’s American Passage: The History of Ellis Island is about an uncertain chapter in America’s past, one most people might automatically deem unfair or at least depressing. But, as the saying goes: it is what it is. When put into its proper context, as Cannato sure-handedly does, Ellis Island’s desultory existence emerges as a functional, if flawed, reality of its time, when millions of immigrants sought wholesale entry into the U.S.

The huddled masses yearning to be free certainly figure into Cannato’s narrative, but they’re only the pawns in the game. We don’t get to them for a while anyway, as the author first offers an overview of New York Harbor’s island system, plus background on what was formerly known as Gibbet Island, used as a place for hanging pirates in the early 19th century and later as a munitions depot. Immigration was handled loosely back then, but as the influx of Europeans to the Land of Liberty increased heading toward the 20th century, so did point-of-entry corruption and exploitation, not to mention Anglo-Saxon xenophobia and nativist fears about diseased, lunatic, criminal and poverty-stricken aliens infiltrating the shores. (On the other hand, big business was licking its chops at the prospect of cheap labor. Sound familiar?)

Indeed, 12 million immigrants washed through Ellis Island’s portals from 1892 to 1924, and Cannato trenchantly outlines the political, administrative and public policy ideas behind its operation, while also introducing readers to a host of government officials heretofore little-known, such as longtime Ellis Island commissioner William Williams, who was a stickler when it came to “tightening the sieve that would strain out larger numbers of undesirable immigrants.” There are sad stories about Ellis Island, some recounted here. Some folks were sent back from whence they came, some died in detention, sometimes families were split up. But much of the anecdotal reportage only seems to reinforce with some logic the notion that, faced with an onslaught of potential new citizens, any government might want to rightfully process them systematically. (And by the way, Cannato says Ellis Island officials did not change people’s names; they hardly had time enough to deal with all the human bodies and the appropriate settlement issues. Most immigrants who changed their names did so later on of their own accord or at the urging of relatives or friends.)

After World War I, and with immigration on the decline, the U.S. turned to the so-called consulate system for screening newcomers, which rendered Ellis Island generally irrelevant, though it continued to function through the years as a detention center, including during World War II and the Cold War. In the 1950s, it went up for sale. Finding no takers at the government’s asking price, and after a few more decades of federal indecision, it finally was remade into a museum in 1990, now attracting two million visitors a year.

Rather than tug at heartstrings about the great melting pot experience, American Passage focuses instead on delivering a well-written and thoroughly researched text about the workings of a uniquely historical bureaucracy, the development and reform of early immigration law, the sociopolitical impulses that fueled a teeming era—and a strange little island whose place in our history is now only a faraway memory.

Martin Brady writes from Nashville.

Finding the right school

by bookpagedev

Biography

Biography

A larger-than-life African adventure

Review by bookpagedev

by Maude McDaniel

Everything about Africa seems outsized—the landscape, the beauty, the dangers, the passions. Wildflower, the story of some of the greatest African nature films and, more especially of those who made them, is outsized as well. The “wildflower,” Joan Root, herself beautiful as a Hollywood heroine, helped produce ground-breaking documentaries like The Year of the Wildebeest and Mysterious Castles of Clay (a 1978 Oscar nominee) in the 1970s. She was extraordinarily sensitive to the destructive times she lived in and uniquely gifted in her quiet ability to do everything possible to reverse, or at least, restrict the damage.

Born in 1936 to a white Kenyan settler, Joan grew up “in the arms of the wild.” (As a baby, she was kidnapped by a big red monkey who surrendered her for a banana.) After finishing school in Switzerland, she returned to Kenya to help her parents run a photo-safari business, where she met and married Alan Root, a free spirit whose daredevil dominance complemented Joan’s overly controlled inner depths.

Mark Seal’s empathetic account, expanded from an article in Vanity Fair, sees her as one of the world’s two “greatest wildlife filmmakers” of their time. The other was her husband, whom she enabled in all ways, good and bad. With Alan’s spark and physical hubris shepherded by Joan’s astounding ability to plan and participate in the filming without turning a hair, they produced film after film.

For 28 years they appeared to have the perfect marriage, except for the occasional dalliance on Alan’s part. Joan’s ability to live with this seems outsized too, but she put herself heart and soul into protecting the precious ecosystem in Kenya against the depredations of an international flower business.

Joan put her safety into the hands of a young local, which turned out to be a mistake. Shot to death by assailants who invaded her property, she died at the age of 69. This absorbing biography will assure her place in the list of individuals who deserve appreciation for their willingness to put themselves on the line (and in the line of fire) for the natural world and its treasures.

Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland.

Two kids who changed R&B

by bookpagedev

Business & Finance

Business & Finance

For better or worse . . .

Review by bookpagedev

by Stephanie Swilley

If family financial disputes are ruining your romance, then pick up a copy of The Family CFO: The Couples Business Plan for Love and Money. Financial experts Mary Claire Allvine and Christine Larson have created a clear and direct process to take the emotional turmoil out of money matters. First, convene a Board of Directors to define the family’s goals, appoint a Cash Manager to handle day-to-day operations and name an Investment Manager to deal with debt and retirement planning. From there, the authors outline a five-step plan to take you through the process of financial decision-making. A lot of number crunching is required, but don’t be discouraged the book provides worksheets and tools. A rational approach to money problem-solving is worth the effort, and it just might keep you out of marriage counseling.

Masterful portraits of modern America

by Louis Gulino

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Trending Nonfiction

Nonfiction Politics Memoir

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

Maria Ressa

By Sarojini Seupersad

Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.