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

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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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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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In the beginning was the word

by bookpagedev

Biography

Biography

The complex world of Aldous Huxley

Review by bookpagedev

by Roger Bishop

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is best known for his classic prescient satirical novel Brave New World, in which leaders maintain their power by thought manipulation. "The Machiavelli of the mid-twentieth century," the author said, "will be an advertising man; his Prince a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time." That novel was part of a unique literary career that began with poetry, included such acclaimed novels as Antic Hay, Eyeless in Gaza, and Island and explored various scientific and literary subjects, mysticism and mind-altering drugs among other topics, in elegant essays. In addition to authoring more than 50 books, he also wrote for the stage and screen.

Biographer Nicholas Murray traces Huxley’s life and the development of this thought and work in Aldous Huxley: A Biography. Huxley’s personal motto was aun aprendo or "I am always learning," appropriate for the grandson of Victorian scientist Thomas Huxley, a prominent supporter of Charles Darwin. Among his many interests were the environmental movement, nuclear weapons, militarism and ruinous nationalism. When he was 16 years old, Aldous suffered a serious eye infection that rendered him unable to do any reading for almost two years and left him with partial sight for the rest of his life. Murray notes that for Huxley, "It was a catastrophe which he always believed was the single most important determining event in his early life." One of the first wave of those to study the then new discipline of English literature at Oxford, Huxley was drawn to a literary career. He did not consider himself a born novelist. "By profession I am an essayist who sometimes writes novels and biographies, an unsystematic cogitator whose books represent a series of attempts to discover and develop artistic methods for expressing the general in the particular." In the 1930s, he began to be much more concerned with politics, society and the problems of the world.

Murray deftly conveys both Huxley’s outer and inner lives. Early in his career, his friendships included literary figures Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Later on, his friends were often scientists, physicians and academic specialists in various disciplines. The astronomer Edwin Hubble and his wife Grace were close friends of the Huxleys.

Personally, Huxley was not much interested in practical matters and enjoyed solitude. He was very close to his first wife, Maria, and dependent on her for many things she read books to him and served as his driver. In his later years, he became increasingly drawn to mysticism, but it was not insulated from the real world. He understood mysticism as data, real elements in life, not abstractions.

Murray’s carefully researched biography, including interviews with Huxley’s second wife Laura and son Matthew, gives us a vivid portrait of a complex figure. Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a regular contributor to BookPage.

The English-ification of the world

by Catherine Hollis

Nature

Nature

The disappearing Louisiana coast

Review by bookpagedev

by Alan Prince

Today, as on all other days in Louisiana’s bayou country, 50 acres of land will become water. In 10 months, a land area the size of Manhattan will be a part of the Gulf of Mexico. The main reason: Levees built to control Mississippi River flooding have deprived the wetlands of fresh sediments. In Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast, author Mike Tidwell says nutrient starvation threatens the source of a third of America’s seafood and endangers an entire subculture of America.

Tidwell immerses himself in the Cajun world, with its zesty cooking, toe-tapping music, and ingrained passion for and reliance on hunting, trapping and fishing. Amid new friends who have never flown, owned a credit card or read a book, he finds the soul of bayou life in a shrimper’s observation: “A bayou Cajun man, he loves two t’ings de most in de whole world: bein’ on de water and bein’ wit his family.” Let’s peek as Tidwell visits a tiny, tin-roofed house on stilts: Visitors pass through, each chiming in that the Leeville Bridge is going to be repainted. Everybody asks about the boy born to Tim’s second cousin Nikia across the street. Tim’s nephew comes by to make sure everything’s OK with the new outboard because he’ll be running Tim’s crab traps. Yes, there’s a TV set and it’s on, but it doesn’t stand a chance. Who could possibly follow the banter of a TV quiz show with so many kinfolk coming and going? Tidwell’s writing style makes it easy for readers to feel his new Cajun friends are their friends, too, and to wonder if their way of life must vanish because the rest of the nation doesn’t care enough. An active environmentalist, author of five books and four-time winner of the Lowell Thomas Award, the highest prize in American travel journalism, Tidwell outlines expensive solutions but says the main question is whether sufficient willpower can be mustered to tackle the problem.

Alan Prince is the former travel editor of the Miami Herald.

Today, as on all other days in Louisiana's bayou country, 50 acres of land will become water. In 10 months, a land area the size of Manhattan will be a part of the Gulf of Mexico. The main reason: Levees built to control Mississippi River…

A final odyssey to Africa

by bookpagedev

Memoir

Memoir

Battling the Alzheimer’s beast

Review by bookpagedev

by Alison Hood

Battling the Alzheimer’s beast There may be little grace mined from the back-breaking, ever-shifting process of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, but searing, sometimes soulful nuggets of epiphany occasionally surface during the process. Novelist Eleanor Cooney has woven keen insights, beloved memories and painful despair into a new memoir, Death in Slow Motion: My Mother’s Descent into Alzheimer’s. This brutally honest chronicle, rich with darkly humorous metaphor, relates the author’s desperate battle to save her mother from "the beast called Alzheimer’s." Cooney’s movable lens of memoir switches between her childhood and adult years, and we come to know her beautiful, brilliant and witty mother, East Coast writer Mary Durant. She "was a racehorse raring to run. She wanted action. She wanted flash and glamour." Complex, charming and gifted, she was also a woman who very much desired and was desired by men. After the heartbreaking early death of her third husband, the love of her life, Durant was profoundly depressed and chronically grieving. This, Cooney believes, was the true fundament of her mother’s disease: "I think grief literally burned out the circuits of my mother’s brain." We travel with Cooney as she navigates, with the dubious help of drugs and alcohol, the rough road deep into Alzheimer’s territory: the stunned initial coping, the difficult but hopeful care-giving and the agonizing realization of defeat ending in a beloved mother’s institutionalization. This is not a self-help book for those dealing with Alzheimer’s, but a truthful portrayal of the dreary and heartbreaking realities of the disease, especially the confusing search for caregiver support and an affordable, compassionate and clean care facility.

Cooney’s memoir does not end in death, but with an affirmation of life. At one point, the nursing facility calls to relate that Mary Durant has been found sharing the bed of a male resident, sleeping soundly and attired only in a shirt. Says the nurse, " . . . they’re adults, and they still have desires." Cooney laughs, giddily exuberant that part of her mother’s organic essence, her physical desire, has resurfaced. Another light still shining, not yet extinguished.

Alison Hood writes from San Rafael, California.

Battling the Alzheimer's beast There may be little grace mined from the back-breaking, ever-shifting process of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer's, but searing, sometimes soulful nuggets of epiphany occasionally surface during the process. Novelist Eleanor Cooney has woven keen insights, beloved memories and…

The deadly legacy of the Khmer Rouge

by bookpagedev

Religion & Spirituality

Religion & Spirituality

Spiritualists exposed sort of

Review by bookpagedev

by Alan Prince

Harry Houdini exposed seances because he felt they gave false hope to grieving survivors, so when that great magician visited the town of Lily Dale in the 1920s, some of the mediums there reportedly closed their doors and went into hiding. The attitude today is very different, as the psychics in the gated 167-acre community 60 miles south of Buffalo, New York, welcome skeptics and believers alike. One of 20,000 recent summer visitors, Christine Wicker, a Dallas Morning News religion reporter, made no attempt to hide her intent to write a book addressing the question: Are spiritualists good people who help others or are they cold-hearted deceivers gulling the weak? The result is the engrossing new book, Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead.

Wicker takes us into the lives of ordinary folks who, aching for word from departed relatives or friends, are willing to accept despite spiritualism’s checkered history of hoaxes and trickery brief messages that clairvoyants claim to have received from those who have “passed over.” No crystal balls, Ouija boards, tea-leaf or palm readings here. Instead, Wicker leads us to lectures, demonstrations and individual sessions conducted by some 36 seemingly sincere clairvoyants. One psychic runs a workshop on spotting angels among earthlings. Another medium, specializing in pets, informs a woman that her deceased dog was angry because her new puppy was using the former’s food bowl. Two of Wicker’s experiences are particularly arresting. During a one-on-one session, she is stunned when she is told things that she insists the medium could not possibly know. At one point, after brief training, she takes the psychic’s role. This, too, yields remarkable results. Did these two episodes convert the author from skeptic to believer? Wicker answers that query in her book a volume that poses tantalizing questions to non-believers who insist the universe operates solely on scientific cause-and-effect principles.

An angling adventure

by bookpagedev

Food & Drink

Food & Drink

A mineral more precious than gold

Review by Alan Prince

by Alan Prince

The salt industry proudly boasts that its product has some 14,000 uses in hundreds of industries. After reading Salt: A World History, you'll no doubt respond to "Please pass the salt" with a new measure of respect for the substance, since every one of us would perish without it. Author Mark Kurlansky has compiled a remarkable book in which he explores every aspect of the mineral that for centuries was one of the most sought-after commodities in human history, presaging, in a sense, what today is viewed as a dependence on foreign oil.

Kurlansky tracks the impact of salt on the political, military, economic and social lives of societies throughout history. He details, for instance, Mahatma Gandhi's leading thousands of Indians on an exhausting 240-mile march to the sea to make their own salt in protest of a tax on the substance. Gandhi was jailed, but the march was a tool that led to his ending British rule over India without striking a single blow. Another of Kurlansky's heroes is Anthony Lucas, who ignored the advice of geologists and drilled a Texas salt dome called Spindletop. He struck oil in 1901 and thus gave birth to the modern petroleum industry.

Salt deserves a place on the shelf next to Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, which earned Kurlansky a James Beard Award for Excellence in Food Writing, as well as a slot on the New York Times bestseller list. His new book brims with recipes from around the globe. Some of them are hundreds of years old, which just might entice a few adventuresome cooks back into the kitchen. And here's a taste of the countless other items spicing the text: some Lapplanders prefer salted coffee; sauerkraut was valued more than caviar in 19th century Russia; and in the United States, salt workers were considered so vitally important they were exempt from conscription in the Confederate army during the Civil War.

While homemakers and master chefs alike should enjoy this book, it's also likely to consume the interest of those who survive on TV dinners.

Alan Prince of Deerfield Beach, Florida, is an ex-newsman and college lecturer.

Revisiting a reckless youth

by bookpagedev

Sports

Sports

Great gifts for guys, from macho to genteel

Review by Martin Brady

by Martin Brady

Well, OK I’ll admit that not all men make a habit out of reading books. But for every guy who enjoys a novel now and then, there are dozens more who just might like an enlightening browse, an interesting bit of nonfiction, a useful how-to guide or, of course, cool pictures of cool guy-type things. Furthermore, if you can lay a neat gift book on a guy, he will be flattered that you pegged him for the literary type (even if you know better). These recent releases will make solid gift selections for that special guy, whether he be a sports nut, the manly fix-it type or even the rare genteel thinker.

Slam dunk

Certainly one of the finest gift sports books of recent years has to be At the Buzzer! The Greatest Moments in NBA History. A hip, knowing text by sports journalist Bryan Burwell accompanies hundreds of dramatic color photographs that chart the exploits of basketball’s greats Chamberlain, Russell, Havlicek, West, Bird, Dr. J., Magic and Michael from the league’s formative years to the present day. Important playoff game performances, heroic single-game scoring feats, great match-ups and eventful isolated moments are all captured in words and pictures. In addition, the book is accompanied by two audio CDs that present excerpts from pertinent original radio and television broadcasts. Ex-basketball star and TV commentator Bill Walton handles the narration on the discs, which feature the voices of Marv Albert, Brent Musberger, Dick Enberg and a host of other national and local play-by-play announcers.

Good bet

Another terrific volume for those hard-to-shop-for men on your list is A. Alvarez’s Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats. Alvarez, a poet, novelist and frequent New Yorker contributor, is also an inveterate poker player. After tracing poker’s development from various early Persian and French variations, he describes its rise as a uniquely American game that took hold in New Orleans, made its way up the Mississippi on riverboats and eventually became a big part of Las Vegas gaming culture. Drawing on his years of experience, including his participation in the World Series of Poker, Alvarez also offers fascinating anecdotes revolving around game play and the singular characters that inhabit professional poker tables. The author explodes poker myths it’s not about luck, for example discusses poker’s colorful contributions to the English language and even includes lore about poker-playing U.S. presidents (Nixon was one). Evocative color and black-and-white photos capture shuffle, deal, play and players in both fact and fiction.

Tool time

Without question, Tools: A Complete Illustrated Encyclopedia is the volume for that handyman guy we all know and love. Rich photography captures the broad array of tools found in the busy home workshop, ranging from measuring and cutting tools to assembly and finishing tools. Good historical background is provided on tool development, and there are a few interesting archival reproductions showing craftsmen at work in bygone eras. But mostly, the comprehensive coverage handsaws, planes, chisels, lathes, power drills, pliers, vises stresses selecting the right tools for the right jobs and using them with efficiency and artfulness. Helpful appended material (including a micropedia, a glossary and a directory of sources) rounds out this attractive addition to any do-it-yourselfer’s bookshelf. Comedian Tim Allen would drool.

Fast lane

Not everyone idolized Dale Earnhardt, but the void left in NASCAR racing with his untimely demise at the Daytona 500 earlier this year can’t be underestimated. Sports Illustrated senior writer Leigh Montville does a super job of explaining the Earnhardt charisma and legacy in At the Altar of Speed: The Fast Life and Tragic Death of Dale Earnhardt. Where Earnhardt’s devoted and fanatical blue-collar following is concerned, Montville shows the appropriate reverence, quoting a representative sampling of those who idolized the Michael Jordan of his sport. We learn of Dale’s humble North Carolina origins, his rise to NASCAR greatness as "The Intimidator," his marital missteps and eventual success as husband and family man, and his emergence as racing’s most respected elder statesman. Montville also covers that tragic day in February with dramatic restraint. But perhaps most interesting is his profile of the car-racing culture, its rise as the fastest-growing sport in the U.S., and the way Earnhardt managed to maintain his common-man appeal while amassing lifetime earnings in excess of $40 million.

Car talk

Yeah, guys dig cars. They stand for status, speed and sex appeal, don’t they? They’re also awesome to look at, and Cars: A Celebration just might be the ultimate coffee-table gift book on the subject. It’s thick (almost 600 pages), and packed with nearly 2,000 color photos of 146 different cars their interiors, exteriors, engines and distinctive design elements. Coverage is international, including automobile makes such as Aston Martin, Ferrari, Daimler, Lambhorgini, Fiat, Renault, Volvo, Mercedes, Volkswagen and MG. But the view of U.S. cars through the years offers not only an automotive charge but also some definite American sociocultural nostalgia. Thunderbird, Mustang, Galaxie, Edsel, Falcon, Bel Air, Corvair, Corvette, Impala, Cougar, Riviera, GTO, Eldorado these and many more vintage U.S. car models are displayed in all their kitschy glory. The coverage here dates from about the late 1940s, and also includes such infamous pipedream failures as the DeLorean and the Tucker. Quentin Willson’s accompanying text is smartly written, informative about the cars’ appeal (or lack thereof) and includes occasional brief profiles of car designers and company executives. Gorgeous photography makes this a must purchase for that favorite car buff. (And considering the size of this lush volume, it’s actually a good value at $50.)

Say what?

Finally, any sensitive guy will admit his manners could use a refresher course. As a Gentleman Would Say: Responses to Life’s Important (and Sometimes Awkward) Situations is the latest entry in a series of Gentlemanners books designed to remind us of the most thoughtful and decent ways to cope with potentially tough social situations. Co-written by John Bridges and Bryan Curtis, the book posits dozens of scenarios at parties, dining out, at work, in love and friendship, making a toast and gives some possible responses, both the taboo, humorous types and the well-considered gentlemanly ones. A witty and useful book, appropriate for maybe more men than we would like to think about.

Well, OK I'll admit that not all men make a habit out of reading books. But for every guy who enjoys a novel now and then, there are dozens more who just might like an enlightening browse, an interesting bit of nonfiction, a useful how-to…

Red, white and blue Christmas

by Lynn Green

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