Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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“For me, an expedition is a work of art expressed on a canvas of snow, air and time,” says Liv Arnesen, who in 2001 became one of the first women to cross the landmass of Antarctica on foot. In temperatures as cold as 35 degrees below zero, the Norwegian Arnesen, along with Minnesota native Ann Bancroft, walked, skied and ice-sailed for nearly three months across 1,700 miles of terrain riddled with rotten ice and hidden crevasses. No Horizon Is So Far is the inspiring true story of their ice-bound dream. Traveling in a place where temperatures plummet so low that “boiling water thrown into the air freezes instantly,” Arnesen and Bancroft shared their extraordinary experiences with more than 3 million school children from Houston to Taipei via a website, e-mail messages and satellite phone calls. Students followed the two former schoolteachers as they raced to finish the trek before the onset of the Antarctic winter, when round-the-clock daylight turns to endless stretches of darkness.

The Antarctica the women experience is more than just a desolate mass of white at the bottom of the world. It’s a wondrous landscape with “an endless horizon that shifts as you travel uphill or down. Sometimes it’s above your head, or at your midsection, or beneath your feet, but you never catch it.” Although Bancroft and Arnesen tried to cross the Ross Ice Shelf at the end of their transcontinental trek, treacherous weather conditions wouldn’t permit it. Following the heartbreaking decision to cut their trip short, the two placed a phone call to an elementary school class in Minnesota, where a young boy’s words put their deep disappointment in perspective. “I just wanted to tell you that both of you have been real role models to me,” he said. “I have a hard time in school, and I just used to feel like there were lots of things that I could never do. And now that you two guys have done this, I see that I can do anything I put my mind to. You changed my life.” Allison Block is a writer and editor in La Jolla, California.

"For me, an expedition is a work of art expressed on a canvas of snow, air and time," says Liv Arnesen, who in 2001 became one of the first women to cross the landmass of Antarctica on foot. In temperatures as cold as 35 degrees…
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Torn between Mexican-Jewishness and American-Jewishness, Ilan Stavans traces the roots of ethnic struggle in his earnest, rewarding memoir On Borrowed Words. The subtitle reference to the four languages in his life Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish and English sometimes seems more symbolic of the individuals in Stavans’ life, who wielded an even greater influence in his development. Indeed, a long stretch in the early chapters of the book tells us more about them than about him. Bobbe Bela, Stavans’ tough Yiddish grandmother; his father, an erratic Mexican actor; and Ilan’s brother Darian, whose stutter and genius on the piano add up to an unsolved, anomalous personality, are given chapters to themselves in which Stavans seems more on-looker and analyst than participant.

In a Mexican Jewish family of Eastern European origins, Stavans was always caught between countries and languages. But the prolific author, who has been a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee, states flatly, I never learned to love Mexico and spends considerable time examining his ambivalence toward the country and its culture.

At 24, he moved to New York City to become a newspaper correspondent and to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Stavans tried Zionism and political activism (and perfected his Hebrew) in Israel, took in Europe (most notably Spain, where he reconnected with the Spanish language), but felt less than complete until he returned to New York.

The truth is that all these uncertainties and strained ambivalences are unimportant in the face of Stavans’ one unswerving intellectual loyalty books.

Torn between Mexican-Jewishness and American-Jewishness, Ilan Stavans traces the roots of ethnic struggle in his earnest, rewarding memoir On Borrowed Words. The subtitle reference to the four languages in his life Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish and English sometimes seems more symbolic of the individuals in Stavans'…

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In the 1990s, most Americans had never heard of Bosnia, didn’t know a Croat from a Serb and couldn’t locate Yugoslavia on a map, even though Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing a euphemism for state-sponsored genocide had produced the bloodiest European conflict since World War II. The mounting casualties were humiliating to leaders of the West, particularly to President Clinton, who in his inaugural address had promised that when the will and conscience of the international community is defied, we will act with peaceful diplomacy whenever possible, with force when necessary. The problem was that Clinton and his senior people were preoccupied with the economics of domestic policy and had developed no clear foreign policy. How the U.S. groped its way through this dilemma is the major focus of War in a Time of Peace, a work that adds to the legendary status of David Halberstam as an author and historian. His latest book is a fascinating examination of the dynamics of U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War, a period extending from one President Bush to another.

As he did in The Best and the Brightest, the number one national bestseller about the Vietnam War, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Halberstam probes the bureaucracy to reveal the interplay between the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and Congress. His perceptive portraits of powerful U.S. and foreign government officials and military officers offer clues to explain not only what they did, but why they did it. He relates their tactics, thoughts and personal dramas. For example, we learn that Defense Secretary William Cohen, the sole Republican in the Cabinet, managed to stir Clinton to action on a critical decision to bomb Iraq by not-so-subtly suggesting to him that any delay would show the world that his troubles with Ken Starr had paralyzed him. We learn that hard-liner Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher’s successor, didn’t mind that her colleagues referred to the Kosovo campaign as Madeleine’s War but was irked that the use of her first name hinted of sexism. And Halberstam tells of Milosevic’s pointing a gun to his head and threatening suicide while his daughter shouted, Do it, Daddy! Don’t surrender, Daddy! before police took him away. Halberstam’s last 11 books have attained New York Times best-seller status. War in a Time of Peace might well make it an even dozen.

Alan Prince is the former editor of the Miami Herald’s International Edition.

 

In the 1990s, most Americans had never heard of Bosnia, didn't know a Croat from a Serb and couldn't locate Yugoslavia on a map, even though Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing a euphemism for state-sponsored genocide had produced the bloodiest European conflict since World War II.…

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The Associated Press, which prides itself on speedy reporting, appalled the civilized world on September 29, 1999, when it broke a half-century-old story. The news report claimed that U.S. military forces massacred as many as 400 civilians in the early days of the Korean conflict. According to the report, the slaughter denied by the Army and hushed up for years occurred in July 1950 in the South Korean hamlet of No Gun Ri. The story earned the Pulitzer Prize for reporters Sang-Hun Choe, Charles Hanley and Martha Mendoza. In The Bridge at No Gun Ri, these wire-service staffers have added depth and breadth to their initial account. They tell how aging U.S. veterans and surviving Koreans have tried to cope with haunting memories and tragic losses. The result is an even-handed and engrossing account of the carnage and its consequences.

Why the massacre? U.S. troops feared enemy soldiers had donned peasant clothes and joined civilian refugees streaming southward toward American lines. Without a way to identify disguised infiltrators, the U.S. plan to eliminate them became simple: Kill everyone. When a large group of refugees paused to rest near a bridge, American planes strafed them, killing about 100. Hundreds of others, most of them children, women and old men, managed to take cover beneath the bridge. In the next three days, some 300 were shot to death. The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies, recalls a survivor.

The three writers, combing through thousands of documents and conducting hundreds of interviews, established a clear record of the atrocities. Their findings triggered a U.S. investigation leading to an expression of regret from former President Clinton.

The Korean survivors’ emotion-stirring tales show how innocent victims driven by the power of family love managed to persevere despite their irreparably damaged lives. When the book is closed, one question is likely to linger in the reader’s mind: Could I have kept on going as they did?

Ex-newsman Alan Prince served in the Army during the Korean War.

 

The Associated Press, which prides itself on speedy reporting, appalled the civilized world on September 29, 1999, when it broke a half-century-old story. The news report claimed that U.S. military forces massacred as many as 400 civilians in the early days of the Korean conflict.…

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Sportswriter Jim Gorant takes readers on a different trip in Fanatic: 10 Things All Sports Fans Should Do Before They Die. Gorant sets off on a one-year mission to experience 10 signature sporting events the Super Bowl, the Final Four, the Masters and Wimbledon, among others. What makes people endure subfreezing temperatures to watch the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field? What sort of community arises in the small city of RVs inside the oval at Daytona or the shaded stands of Churchill Downs? Questions like these turn Gorant’s story into far more than simply a description of sporting events. Instead, he has combined an engaging travelogue with a study of human nature and a tale of internal exploration. Along the way there are moments of true friendship, excessive bacchanals and the discovery of what sports really mean to the fans, far beyond the momentary heroes and soon-forgotten scores. Fanatic is a worthwhile exploration of both sport and life.

Sportswriter Jim Gorant takes readers on a different trip in Fanatic: 10 Things All Sports Fans Should Do Before They Die. Gorant sets off on a one-year mission to experience 10 signature sporting events the Super Bowl, the Final Four, the Masters and Wimbledon,…
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If the rising price of airline tickets has you spending your summer vacation on American shores instead of jetting off to the Cote d’Azur, Stephen Clarke’s hilarious new book is the perfect antidote. (Readers too relaxed to turn the pages can check out the audio version.)

As you might have guessed from its irreverent title, A Year in the Merde doesn’t follow in the worshipful footsteps of such travelogues as A Year in Provence or Under the Tuscan Sun. Instead, Clarke’s roman à clef (loosely based on his own experiences as an Englishman working in Paris) is a laugh-out-loud comedy of errors as the hapless anglais Paul West moves to Paris to open an English tearoom. Language and customs are immediately an issue Paul struggles with his French co-workers’ ideas about what is English, tries to find a decent place to live in pricey Paris and juggles liaisons with his boss’ daughter and a French photographer.

The appeal of A Year in the Merde (the title comes from Paul’s unfortunate propensity for stepping in the dog droppings that litter Parisian sidewalks) isn’t its sometimes slapstick plot but its droll observations on everyday life for a foreigner in France. Paul’s difficulty ordering a normal-sized cafe au lait and his amazement at the lengthy list of French greetings (not limited to good morning good afternoon or good night, they also include the very specific have a nice rest-of-the-afternoon, among others) will strike a chord with anyone who’s ever tried to get by in a foreign country. Clarke, who originally self-published his book in France, clearly knows the country inside and out, and his unvarnished but affectionate portrait is escapism at its best.

Trisha Ping spent a year as an English assistant in Mulhouse, France.

 

If the rising price of airline tickets has you spending your summer vacation on American shores instead of jetting off to the Cote d'Azur, Stephen Clarke's hilarious new book is the perfect antidote. (Readers too relaxed to turn the pages can check out the…

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