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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Dorothy Hamill, on and off the ice

by bookpagedev

Health & Fitness, Lifestyles

Lifestyles Health & Fitness

Cancer vixen

Review by bookpagedev

by Alison Hood

Kudos to filmmaker/author Kris Carr for her indefatigable courage and yeehaw! humor as she shares her experience with cancer in both a documentary film (Crazy Sexy Cancer) and companion book, Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips. A spunky cancer survival manual, Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips is a practical, powerfully positive and in-your-face guide for younger women (from 20-somethings to women in their early 40s) who face a cancer diagnosis and are not about to let the C-word win.

In 2003, actress and party cowgirl Carr was feeling punk after a week of excess. She thought she’d sweat out her hangover in a yoga class; the next day she was breathless and in severe abdominal pain. A doctor’s visit revealed a rare, stage IV vascular cancer that had attacked her lungs and liver, making the latter look like Swiss cheese. Confronted with a slow-growing, apparently untreatable cancer, Carr heeded her doctor’s advice to strengthen her immune system through radical changes to diet and lifestyle. Says Carr, I quickly perked up. . . . Dr. Guru didn’t know it, but in that moment he planted the seeds for a personal revolution. Following a soulful foreword by cancer survivor/musician Sheryl Crow, eight relentlessly honest and cheerleading chapters (plus a comprehensive resource section) speak to women not as cancer victims, but as triumphant survivors. Covered are concerns from the emotional ( Holy shit! I have cancer, now what?), the nutritional and sexual ( Eat your veggies and Bandage or bondage ), to the practical ( Cancer college ). One dynamic thing that Carr did for her own healing was to form a posse, a group of women with cancer who made up her sassy support group/cancer stitch-and-bitch. Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips includes their profiles and stories and reveals the heroic and compassionate ways in which they responded to and dealt with cancer, thereby graduating from cancer babes to cancer cowgirls.

A boomer’s frothy ode to Starbucks

by bookpagedev

Technology

Technology

Think small

Review by bookpagedev

by Ron Wynn

Mark J. Penn’s Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes looks at the economy from the perspective of a cultural and political analyst. Besides being CEO of Burson-Marsteller, Penn served as a pollster to Bill Clinton; he is currently an advisor to such powerful types as Sen. Hillary Clinton and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. Thus, he is in a position to anticipate not only major shifts in social and fiscal policy, but also smaller cultural changes.

The many trends that Penn and co-author E. Kinney Zalesne identify as having significant future impact range from the potentially divisive (a sizable increase in the number of ex-convicts in the general population; a rise in the ranks of highly educated, connected and well-financed domestic terrorists and terrorist sympathizers) to the quirky (more left-handers, more office romances and more people eschewing the practice of sun-bathing). They encompass the curious (a surge in the number of 20-year-olds who knit; the increased popularity of archery) and the intriguing (growing numbers of Latino Protestants; second-home buyers).

Some readers might question some of Penn’s other contentions, particularly that less-educated voters are becoming more issue-oriented and sophisticated than their supposedly smarter comrades or that anti-Semitism is declining. But as the person who identified soccer moms as a key constituency long before his rivals, Penn is not given to shallow analysis or premature conclusions. Microtrends is a book you’ll return to often over the next few years to track the accuracy and validity of its predictions.

Mark J. Penn's Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes looks at the economy from the perspective of a cultural and political analyst. Besides being CEO of Burson-Marsteller, Penn served as a pollster to Bill Clinton; he is currently an advisor to such…

Stand up and yell

by bookpagedev

Sports

Sports

Get your game on

Review by bookpagedev

by Martin Brady

Finally, we come to a book that may prove vital to football fans no matter which game (college or pro) is their main obsession. Stephen Linn’s Fox Sports Tailgating Handbook: The Gear, the Food, the Stadiums is a handy, sturdily bound paperback catering to the needs of those who love football, but maybe love the cult of football even more. Tailgating isn’t just about the game; it’s about socializing, eating, drinking and joining in fanatical revelry. This omnibus tells you how to do it right at every NFL and major college venue nationwide. Linn, who has a franchise on this subject through his other books and TV appearances, provides coverage on the best tailgating equipment (grills, coolers, furniture, etc.), safety tips, recipes (some supplied by real-life tailgaters), fan gear and profiles of a few of the most tricked-out vehicles (buses, RVs, etc.) you’ll ever see in a crowded game-day parking lot. The heart of the book is the listing of specific tailgating information for university campuses and pro facilities. Here we get history on teams and venues, pertinent contact information, radio affiliations, shuttle-bus schedules and, most importantly, the details on when and how tailgaters can do their thing and any restrictions they need to be aware of to pull it off with minimal interruption. Many of us simply are not tailgaters (too much hassle, too many logistics). But for those who are immersed in the art form, Linn’s volume is a practical necessity.

Finally, we come to a book that may prove vital to football fans no matter which game (college or pro) is their main obsession. Stephen Linn's Fox Sports Tailgating Handbook: The Gear, the Food, the Stadiums is a handy, sturdily bound paperback catering to…

Hot and not

by bookpagedev

Sports

Sports

What the pros know

Review by bookpagedev

by Martin Brady

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

Memoir

Memoir

Viewing the world through a distorted lens

Review by Catherine Hollis

by Catherine Hollis

Prosopagnosia (“face blindness”) is a rare neurological disorder that inhibits a person’s ability to recognize a face: When Heather Sellers brings her new husband and two stepchildren home to Florida to meet her parents, she notices the “tiny elderly woman” staring at her angrily in the gas station, but literally doesn’t know her own mother. A lifetime of social anxiety and misunderstandings (hugging the wrong man, offending her best friend by walking right past her) isn’t, however, the only perceptual challenge Sellers documents in her stunning memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know.

Growing up with a mother who nailed windows shut, who followed suspicious vehicles on the highway and insisted that her daughter walk on her knees to save the carpet, also gave Sellers a thoroughly distorted lens through which to view the world. Amazingly, Sellers was in her late 30s before she developed any sense that her mother was mentally ill; she couldn’t recognize that the disorder and dysfunction in her own childhood was the result of her mother’s paranoid schizophrenic delusions (not to mention her father’s alcoholism and cross-dressing). This sets up a neat parallel between the twin detective stories Sellers narrates: the uncovering of her mother’s illness and the discovery of her own prosopagnosia, both of which create a skewed sense of reality.

Composing a memoir is like composing a life; for Sellers, the process of writing itself helps to correct the distorting mirrors of childhood. As a writer (if not in her messy life), Sellers is confident, a master of her craft. Her memoir is paced like a work of suspenseful fiction, moving back and forth between her childhood and her present-day quest to uncover the truth about herself and her family. A third narrative strand—about the breakdown of her marriage to libertarian Dave, who first helps her to recognize her own perceptual distortions—is equally compelling. Sellers’ balanced approach to these difficult but loving relationships is hard-won and appealing.

Despite the dire subject matter, Sellers’ writing is sprightly, even funny; this is a memoir to be devoured in great chunks. The pleasure of reading it derives both from its graceful style and from its ultimate lesson: that seeing our past for what it really was, and forgiving those involved, frees us up to love them all the more, despite their (and our) limitations.

Big fan on campus

by bookpagedev

Arts & Culture, Music

Music Arts & Culture

Stories from the heart of Music City

Review by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

In her admiring and humorous foreword to Marshall Chapman’s unforgettable memoir, Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, novelist Lee Smith praised the way that Chapman excels at images that perfectly capture a time, place or way of life. Ingeniously, in that memoir, Chapman told the story of her life, and of the changing scene of the country music business from the 1970s into the late 1990s, by telling the stories behind 12 of her songs. Now, in They Came to Nashville, Chapman invites 15 of her friends—such as Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, Miranda Lambert, Bobby Bare and Willie Nelson—to tell their own tales about how they first heard about Nashville, how they ended up in Nashville and why they stayed.

Reading these wide-ranging interviews is like sitting in on intimate conversations between old friends reminiscing about good times and bad in a city where the promise of a music career inspires musicians to persevere doggedly in pursuit of their dreams. Bobby Bare recalls, for example, the electricity he felt in the air when he arrived in Nashville from L.A.: “You couldn’t help but get caught up in it. You’d get very creative and want to do something. It was magic.” Miranda Lambert remembers how lonely and scared she felt during her first year in Nashville, even as her stomach fluttered with excitement every time she realized she was in Music City.

When Chapman asks her friends to describe their first 24 hours in Nashville, Willie Nelson hilariously responds: “I got drunk—layed [sic.] down in the middle of Broadway.” Emmylou Harris, who had lived in New York City and Boston, recalls her early reluctance to put down roots in Nashville. She compares the city to “some guy you’ve known all your life and he’s a friend, but you never really thought romantically about him. Then all of a sudden, you wake up one morning and you realize this is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.”

They Came to Nashville is a fitting tribute to Music City, and it’s enough to convince anyone that Marshall Chapman is a musician, singer-songwriter and writer that you’ll want to spend the rest of your life with.

At home with the Alcotts: Louisa May and Bronson

by bookpagedev

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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.