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

Biography, Literature, Nonfiction

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.

Crafts, Hobbies & Home, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Garden Wonderland

With its seamless integration of gardening principles with advanced design ideas, Garden Wonderland is the perfect gift for new gardeners—or anyone in need of a little inspiration.

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Marvin Gaye: one more heartache

by bookpagedev

Cookbooks

Cookbooks

What love’s got to do with it

Review by bookpagedev

by Julie Hale

What love’s got to do with it You might fight like cats and dogs, but where would you be without dear old mom? Without her attention and affection? And endless advice? Sure, her helpful hints are often unasked-for (and sometimes shrilly delivered), but they’re sent with unconditional love the kind only mothers can provide. So take a tip from BookPage and remember mom this month with one of the terrific titles listed below.

Motivational speaker Cherie Carter-Scott, Ph.

D., commemorates the maternal role in <!–BPLINK=–>0767904281The Gift of Motherhood: 10 Truths for Every Mother<!–ENDBPLINK–>. Author of the best-selling advice book, f Life is a Game, These are the Rules, Scott, who has worked with Fortune 500 companies like American Express and IBM, offers 10 insights about motherhood that she has gleaned from personal experience and from years of coaching women all over the world. The universals she presents in the book Remembering to care for yourself is essential and Love shows up in many different forms are examined in-depth and illustrated by inspiring anecdotes from real-life moms. The Gift of Motherhood also functions as a how-to guide to parenting, proposing practical strategies for dealing with mother-daughter conflicts, for envisioning the type of mother you want to become and achieving that vision for being both friend and authority figure to your child. Each of Scott’s truths serves to demystify the role of mother, providing support for the struggling parent. Transcending race, religion and nationality, her words of wisdom and humor will energize future and seasoned mothers alike. With Busy Woman’s Cookbook, authors Sharon and Gene McFall share more than 500 recipes that are sure to ease a mother’s greatest domestic burden. For those without the time or inclination to experiment in the kitchen, this back-to-the-basics book offers three- and four-element recipes, composed of easily accessible ingredients, that take the complexity out of cooking. From Old Time Meat Loaf to Skinny Minny Pork Chops, from Cinnamon Coffee Cake to Sopaipillas, creative ideas for appetizers, entrees, salads and desserts are simply and briefly presented. Downhome or exotic, old-fashioned or new-fangled, there’s a dish for every food preference. Amusing anecdotes and fascinating facts (200 to be exact) about famous women enliven the text. A sturdy cover and spiral binding make the book easy to handle in the kitchen. Busy Woman lets the overwhelmed mother put meal planning where it belongs on the back burner.

For moms who are coming-of-age, consider <!–BPLINK=–>0696213907Fifty Celebrate Fifty: Fifty Extraordinary Women Talk About Facing, Turning and Being Fifty<!–ENDBPLINK–>, a book of sparkling photos and fabulous interviews from the editors of More magazine. The volume features candid talks with women who are better than ever at mid-life, including Diane Sawyer, Amy Tan, Susan Sarandon and Phylicia Rashad. The book includes a broad range of voices women from various cultures and career arenas who testify with pride about hitting their stride at 50. AIDS activist Beverly Mosley talks about living with HIV. Newscaster Judy Woodruff discusses coping with her son’s brain injury. These honest accounts of juggling family and career, of overcoming obstacles and achieving inner peace will inspire females of any age. Experience is sexy, says Susan Sarandon. And today, women can be sexy and 50. Indeed, the future has never looked brighter for these confident, accomplished women, each of whom combines the poise of youth with the wisdom that only age can bring. A tribute to diversity, beauty and individuality, Fifty Celebrate Fifty is a great way to remind mom that the best really is yet to come. The job of mother most often plays itself out not on the lofty levels of Hallmark splendor but rather in the trenches of day-to-day life. Cherie Carter-Scott The Gift of Motherhood

What love's got to do with it You might fight like cats and dogs, but where would you be without dear old mom? Without her attention and affection? And endless advice? Sure, her helpful hints are often unasked-for (and sometimes shrilly delivered), but they're sent…

On the beat with the NYPD

by bookpagedev

Biography

Biography

Separating the man from the moon

Review by bookpagedev

by MiChelle Jones

Journalist Leon Wagener faced the daunting task of chronicling a subject famously shy of the limelight when he took on One Giant Leap: Neil Armstrong’s Stellar American Journey. The book discusses Armstrong’s formative years, his career first as a naval and then test pilot and even includes information about his family life, yet he remains elusive, just beyond reach.

The first man to walk on the moon clearly never intended to spend a lifetime reliving the 21 hours he spent there. Wagener writes: “Each anniversary would inevitably be an opportunity for the world to compare the man he presently was to the man he had been that glorious July of 1969.” Armstrong generally limits his stints in NASA’s so-called publicity “barrel” to appearances at major commemorative events.

After leaving NASA, Armstrong became an engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati, where he co-founded the Institute of Engineering and Medicine. The group, which included Dr. Henry J. Heimlich (of maneuver fame) and Dr. George Rieveschl (discoverer of the first antihistamine), contributed several improvements to heart transplant technology based on space engineering. Armstrong also continued his lifelong interest in aviation, breaking records and narrating a television series documenting aviation firsts for which he flew or rode in significant aircraft.

Obviously, the moon landing must feature into any account of Neil Armstrong’s life. Wagener does an admirable job of covering Apollo 11, describing the carnival atmosphere surrounding the Cape and giving a brief rundown of the world of 1969. His detailed transcript-based passages about things like in-flight meals and the astronauts’ musical preferences put the reader in the capsule.

One has to wonder whether anyone but the most devoted techie or Mars fan will be reading about the twin rovers 35 years from now. The human presence has always made space voyages more compelling. For Armstrong and his fellow Apollo astronauts, part of their mission will always be to keep the moment alive not so much for those who remember, but for those who do not.

Journalist Leon Wagener faced the daunting task of chronicling a subject famously shy of the limelight when he took on One Giant Leap: Neil Armstrong's Stellar American Journey. The book discusses Armstrong's formative years, his career first as a naval and then test pilot…

What love’s got to do with it

by bookpagedev

Animals

Animals

Joining the rat race

Review by bookpagedev

by Michael Sims

Robert Sullivan is a naturalist renowned for two previous books, The Meadowlands and A Whale Hunt, both of which received many accolades. One day he realized that to ignore rats (the most common mammal in the world) in his beloved New York City would be to ignore one of America’s great immigrant success stories. Therefore, he began to study the rats about him. At night he hung out in an alley near garbage cans, watching rats through night-vision goggles; by day he researched the history of rats in New York and elsewhere. The resulting book, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants, is clever, literate, insightful, funny and sometimes even lyrical.

“To begin with,” the author explains, “Edens Alley is L-shaped, a cobblestone strip that is surrounded by brick walls a walled-in lane that was like my Walden, though I’m not so nuts as to want to actually sleep there or anything.” This sentence tells you a lot about Sullivan’s style: it’s colloquial, levelheaded and funny. His research habitat is halfway between Wall Street and New York Harbor, an overlooked “nowhere in the center of everything.” Sullivan shares Thoreau’s conviction that wherever you may be is the place to begin a deeper relationship with the universe.

The Norway rat, with the cartoonish scientific name of Rattus norvegicus, is one of the most adaptable creatures on our verminous planet. “Rats live in the world precisely where man lives,” Sullivan remarks. “I think of rats as our mirror species.” He observes but does not emphasize that, for example, rats are argumentative overeaters who seem to obsess on sex.

You would not expect to get to know a number of characters in a book of this sort. However, it teems with lively figures going about their lives. Not least among them, of course, is the author himself, who comes across as modest, ironic, sometimes courageous and endlessly curious about the great city in which he lives. But you will also meet many other New Yorkers, including an exterminator who has become something of a celebrity, intrepid health department medicos and numerous historical figures from New York’s past. Readers may share Sullivan’s surprise when suddenly, for the first time, he recognizes a particular rat and realizes that he has been at this curious nocturnal hobby for a very long time. Michael Sims’ most recent book is Adam’s Navel, chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Library Journal Best Science Book of 2003.

Wunderkind

by bookpagedev

Arts & Culture, Music

Music Arts & Culture

Who could ask for anything more?

Review by bookpagedev

by Edward Morris

Songs are the bookmarks in our memory that were either crafted painstakingly over a long period of time or dashed off in inspirational or deadline-imposed frenzy. But the circumstances of their creation, as Will Friedwald demonstrates in Stardust Melodies, is seldom as fascinating as tracing the routes by which they have insinuated themselves into our consciousness.

The songs Friedwald chronicles in his book are Star Dust, The St. Louis Blues, Mack the Knife, Ol’ Man River, Body and Soul, I Got Rhythm, As Time Goes By, Night and Day, Stormy Weather, Summertime, My Funny Valentine and Lush Life. Each of these classics was composed between 1914 and 1938. Making no claim that these are the finest, most popular or best-selling tunes of their genre, Friedwald proposes that each has triumphantly survived decades of changing tastes on its own intrinsic power. And yes, he does offer a plausible excuse for not including any Irving Berlin songs.

For each of his choices, Friedwald provides the historical context of the composition, an analysis of its musical structure and an account of how the song gained popular momentum. He ends each biography with Bonus Tracks, a brief discussion of noteworthy recordings of the song. For example, he cites his candidate for the zaniest version of As Time Goes By (Louis Prima’s on The Prima Generation album) and speculates as to who could have sung the best versions of Stormy Weather but didn’t (Jimmy Rushing, Helen Humes and Joe Williams). Much of the pleasure of reading this book is seeing the fun Friedwald has with his subject. Although he quotes fragments of lyrics from the songs he anatomizes, Friedwald doesn’t include the entire lyrics for any of the selections. This failure may stem from the cost of acquiring reprint permission. But aside from this omission, Stardust Melodies provides a penetrating and exhaustive introduction to 12 timeless tunes.

How the West was

by bookpagedev

Memoir

Memoir

A maverick’s take on the news

Review by bookpagedev

A maverick’s take on the news Jim Bellows, one of the most respected editors in journalism, made his name working for the smaller newspaper in town. And that was by design. While moving from daily to daily over the course of a career that spanned more than half a century, Bellows had a penchant for taking the smaller of a city’s two competing papers and revamping it to give the bigger one a run for its money.

In his colorfully written new autobiography, The Last Editor, Bellows tells the story of his maverick career at such publications as The Miami News, The New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Star, all of which are credited with revitalizing their cross-town counterparts: The Miami Herald, The New York Times and The Washington Post. By sparking vibrancy in declining, defeated newsrooms and fostering the talents of up-and-coming writers such as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin, Bellows brought new life to dying dailies.

His philosophy was simple: We’ve got to get the other paper to jump in our pond. We’ve got to make waves. We’ve got to liven things up.

Structuring his book like a long newspaper story (the important stuff is placed up high, he tells us), Bellows recounts such memorable periods of his career as his stint with The Washington Star, a paper that had been overshadowed by the venerable Washington Post, which was guided by legendary editor Ben Bradlee and basked in the fame of the Watergate stories by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. In a way, Bellows made his mark as the anti-Bradlee, tweaking the nose of the big daily by playing up stories the Post missed and incorporating new sections such as The Ear, an infamous gossip column. Never complacent, Bellows went on to infuse his vitality and philosophy into The Los Angeles Herald Examiner and then a series of broadcast and Internet media projects. The Last Editor is an enjoyable, lively account of his impressive career, written with all the verve and whirlwind energy that made the author’s life so memorable. Dave Bryan writes from Montgomery, Alabama.

A maverick's take on the news Jim Bellows, one of the most respected editors in journalism, made his name working for the smaller newspaper in town. And that was by design. While moving from daily to daily over the course of a career that spanned…

Learning to live with grief and loss

by bookpagedev

Arts & Culture, Pop Culture

Pop Culture Arts & Culture

Examining the roots of love

Review by bookpagedev

by Sandy MacDonald

Psychologist Carol Gilligan is best known for elucidating the ways in which preadolescent girls, acceding to societal expectations, learn to stifle their innate wisdom and exuberance. In her latest work, loosely encapsulating two decades of variegated studies, she broadens her area of inquiry to extend to both sexes (young boys entering grade school, she has observed, begin to curtail their expressiveness in much the same way) and, by extrapolation, to question the diminution of joy that typically accompanies growing up. Ultimately, her aim is to examine, and possibly uproot, Western civilization’s deeply ingrained adherence to a tragic story . . . where love leads to loss and pleasure is associated with death. It’s an ambitious undertaking, and Gilligan covers a lot of ground cited sources range from W.E.

B. Du Bois to the Indigo Girls to prove an elusive point. Central to her thesis is an insistent gloss on the ancient story of Psyche and Cupid, whose dramatic, near-tragic courtship ultimately gave birth to a child named Pleasure. Beautiful Psyche, Gilligan holds, was something of a proto-feminist, refusing to accept the image imposed on her by a patriarchal society and deciding instead to seek love on her own terms. This reductionist approach often rankles: after all, the beauty of myths, their enduring value, lies in the fact that their meanings can’t be so neatly confined.

Yet if one is willing to go along with this premise and attendant pronouncements, the journey yields all sorts of eye-opening moments, the most vivid of which involve Gilligan’s recollections of her own mother, whose social and private selves seemed scarcely the same person. Still, memories of pleasure resurface, as well as her encouragement of my pleasure. Love does invariably entail loss, in that those we love die; it’s the human condition. Gilligan is to be commended, though, for advocating in this brave, if sometimes frustrating book that we question our predilection for living on the far side of loss, east of Eden, as a way of protecting ourselves. Men and women alike, she contends, need to summon more courage if we are to transcend an age-old script. After all, as she notes: The birth of pleasure in itself is simple, but staying with pleasure means staying open. Sandy MacDonald is a writer based in Cambridge and Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Dark horse makes a run for the roses

by bookpagedev

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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.