Elyse Graham’s thrilling history of how scholars and librarians helped the U.S. outsmart the Nazis is a pulpy delight.

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Bold, offbeat illustrations by Ricardo Diseño lead the way in the spooky-fun Eerie Legends.

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Naturalist Joanna Brichetto uncovers the beauty of urban landscapes in her wonder-inducing debut, This Is How a Robin Drinks.

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Former star NFL running back Jerome Bettis won a Super Bowl ring following the 2005 season, then bowed out of the game after 13 years of consistent excellence with the Rams and Steelers. Bettis is probably headed for the Hall of Fame, and since retirement has tried to make a go of it in broadcasting. The Bus: My Life In and Out of a Helmet is Bettis’ life story, co-authored by Gene Wojciechowski, one of ESPN.com’s better contributors. Essentially, this is a straightforward pro forma treatment, typical of the as-told-to sports genre. The prose isn’t scintillating with Wojciechowski striving to keep his subject’s conversational voice front and center but Bettis’ tale of youthful behavioral struggles in Detroit (gangs, drugs) followed by college greatness at Notre Dame and his subsequently eventful pro career will doubtlessly rope in committed football fans.

What the pros know

by bookpagedev

Sports

Sports

Big fan on campus

Review by bookpagedev

by Martin Brady

Austin Murphy’s Saturday Rules: A Season with Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines) finds the veteran Sports Illustrated writer traipsing across the country throughout last year’s college football season. He offers a lively you are there diary-like account of his journeys to all the big Division I programs, featuring in-depth analysis of the various teams’ fortunes, including important wins and critical losses, all leading up to the post-season bowl games. Interview focus with a distinctly human-interest slant is on the young athletes (the stars and the lesser-known), but is more so on the high-profile coaches such as Pete Carroll at USC, Charlie Weis at Notre Dame and Urban Meyer at Florida. Murphy’s essentially chronological reportage eventually zeroes in on the Bowl Championship Series and Florida’s title-winner over Ohio State, yet he saves the very best for last via a sit-down visit with the key players responsible for underdog Boise State’s stirring and jarringly spectacular victory over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, without doubt one of the greatest games in the annals of the college gridiron.

Austin Murphy’s Saturday Rules: A Season with Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines) finds the veteran Sports Illustrated writer traipsing across the country throughout last year’s college football season. He offers a lively you are there diary-like account of his journeys to all the big Division I programs, featuring in-depth analysis of […]

At home with the Alcotts: Louisa May and Bronson

by bookpagedev

Arts & Culture, Pop Culture

Pop Culture Arts & Culture

Oops, I did it again!

Review by bookpagedev

by Thane Tierney

It happens about every 10 words the ums, uhs, you knows the verbal placeholders we use while our minds race ahead of our tongues, the verbal gaffes like substituting interweb for Internet or replacing loofah with falafel (as commentator Bill O’Reilly is rather famously alleged to have done in a telephone call). Armed with a master’s degree in linguistics and a doctorate in English, author Michael Erard lumps a variety of faux pas under the heading of disfluencies in Um. . . Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, which makes them sound more remarkable than most of them really are. Our verbal miscues are plentiful and inevitable, but only occasionally riotous or ruinous. If we’re really lucky, like the notorious Rev. William Spooner, not only will actual blunders (such as exalting God as a shoving leopard ) bring us fame, but invented ones such as a camel passing through the knee of an idol will be ascribed to us, enhancing our renown.

Viennese professor Rudolf Meringer’s famed battles with Sigmund Freud over the cause of Fehlleistung (literally faulty performance, now widely known as Freudian slips ) are documented in detail here, as is the cross-cultural nature of the vocal glitch. In the Wichita tongue, for instance, the word kaakiri, or something, takes the place of uh, and similar verbal tics can be detected even in sign language. From Mrs. Malaprop, whose penchant for garbled speech in the 1775 play The Rivals has given us the catchall word for verbal blunders, to President George W. Bush, whose so-called dubyaspeak has given rise to such howlers as 2004’s This is a historic moment in history, as far as I’m concerned, Erard deftly picks his way through a junkyard of spoken debris to inform, enlighten and entertain in equal measure.

Verbal blunderologists swarm among us like birdwatchers in spring, and we are all unwitting targets for their nets. So be forewarned: Um is a mystery you won’t want to hiss, and if you do, may sod rest your goal.

A JENaissance for reality TV addicts everywhere

by Linda Stankard

Memoir

Memoir

Gray matters

Review by bookpagedev

by Linda Stankard

To dye or not to dye? That is the question posed by Anne Kreamer’s Going Gray. In a bold move, Kreamer, at 49 (but feeling 35), decided to leave the corporate environment, begin writing full time and let her gray-haired self come out. When I made my decision to go gray, she writes, I had no idea that the choice would elicit such emotionally laden responses. In Going Gray, she interviews women in various careers who have chosen to live confidently with their natural hair color. Emmylou Harris, the sixty-year-old country singer, is the great American icon for gray-haired female sexiness, she notes. On the subject of exposing one’s true self, Harris tells her, Who wants to put on an act twenty-four hours a day? Despite our culture’s obvious obsession with looking as young as possible for as long as possible, Kreamer cites the recent frenzy of media stories concerning Helen Mirren’s beauty, and Meryl Streep’s dynamic portrayal of an absolutely ungrandmotherly white-haired magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada as evidence of a shifting consciousness.

But there are plenty of dissenting voices, too. Kreamer admits her friend, famed writer/director/producer Nora Ephron, whose latest book, I Feel Bad About My Neck, is a collection of wise and witty essays about aging, has no plans to stop coloring her hair. She’s 66. How we choose to grow older is deeply idiosyncratic, Kreamer says, and is a matter of individual taste and circumstance depending on one’s age, romantic status, professional situation, class, race, ethnicity, geography, all of it. Whether ’tis nobler to wear the inevitable signs of aging proudly or to take arms against them Going Gray explores this contemporary conundrum in the most, well, colorful terms. Linda Stankard is dyeing to be seen as a successful Realtor in Piermont, New York.

To dye or not to dye? That is the question posed by Anne Kreamer’s Going Gray. In a bold move, Kreamer, at 49 (but feeling 35), decided to leave the corporate environment, begin writing full time and let her gray-haired self come out. When I made my decision to go gray, she writes, I had […]

A+ for laughter

by bookpagedev

History

History

Ward, Burns turn attention to WWII

Review by bookpagedev

by James Webb

In the 1980s, Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns created what may be the most riveting and revolutionary documentary in television history, The Civil War. While many have tried to recapture this lightning in a bottle including Burns and Ward themselves they’ve never quite reached that compelling mix of conflict and human emotion. That will change this fall when PBS airs another Burns and Ward documentary about another war the Second World War. The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945, is the companion volume to the series, and if words and pictures are any indication of what is to come, this could be another watershed cultural moment.

The two authors freely admit in the book’s introduction that an event like WWII is too big, too multifaceted, to even attempt anything like a comprehensive look. Instead, as they did with The Civil War, they present the big picture by focusing on the human element through the fates of four small towns: Luverne, Minnesota; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Mobile, Alabama. They weave in personal stories of people from those towns, the people they met, loved and married. The War tells us how raw recruits from the Midwest survived Normandy; how Japanese-Americans from West Coast detention camps formed one of the most decorated divisions in Italy; how East Coast kids lived through the hell of Bataan; how Southern shipbuilders got a taste of a future battle when blacks and whites had to work together. There’s the wistful tale of a young girl’s childhood in a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines, and the hair-raising story of a pilot who walked away from more than his share of crashes.

The War is lavishly illustrated, and the accounts of its survivors who are dying, the authors point out, at a rate of 1,000 a day bring a human perspective to an event almost incomprehensible in scope. If Ward and Burns can bring our nation’s all-too-often idle consciousness to bear on the true costs of war, we’ll all be better served.

Baby boomer James Neal Webb is proud of his father’s service in the Navy.

In the 1980s, Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns created what may be the most riveting and revolutionary documentary in television history, The Civil War. While many have tried to recapture this lightning in a bottle including Burns and Ward themselves they’ve never quite reached that compelling mix of conflict and human emotion. That will change […]

A sensitive look at caring for an aging family member

by Alison Hood

Memoir

Memoir

Two men, one name

Review by Ron Wynn

by Ron Wynn

Wes Moore—Rhodes scholar, army officer and one-time Special Assistant to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—discovered one day in a newspaper article that he shared a name with someone whose life had taken a far different turn. Though they were born only a year apart in the same Baltimore neighborhood, the other Wes Moore was now doomed to spend the rest of his life in prison after committing a robbery that culminated in the death of a police officer. Determined to discover how two people from such similar backgrounds could wind up in vastly different circumstances, one Wes Moore decided to research the other.

The Other Wes Moore shows there are no easy explanations. Moore the author makes no attempt to justify the imprisoned Moore’s actions, even while detailing a familiar litany of neglect, absence of male role models and bad choices. The successful Wes Moore also shows he was far from perfect in his youth, but thanks to his loving family’s insistence that he fulfill his potential, he excelled in academics and forged a satisfying career. Through hundreds of interviews, not only with his namesake, but with police, social workers and others, Moore’s book reaffirms the impact that even one tough parent can have on a child’s ultimate success or failure.

It also dispels some myths, most notably the contention that everyone who grows up in the mean streets eventually either emulates the negative behavior surrounding them or is overcome by it. Writer and journalist Moore emphatically says the other Wes Moore is not a victim. But he does see him as another person who fell through the cracks. Their one-on-one discussions crackle with intensity, as the two men frequently disagree. Still, the author continually wrestles with the reality that they aren’t nearly as different as their social positions indicate.

While in prison, Moore has acknowledged his guilt, converted to Islam, become a grandfather and accepted the fact that he’ll probably never be released. The two Moores share the priority of keeping other young men, especially black kids, from mimicking his behavior and making the same mistakes. The Other Wes Moore contains a detailed resource guide, providing parents with the names of organizations that can help them in times of need and offer counsel before problematic cases degenerate into hopeless outcomes. He knows he can’t save everyone, but Wes Moore is determined to do whatever he can to prevent the emergence of more “other Wes Moore” situations.

The man who managed the war

by Roger Bishop

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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.