2book

Children's & YAPicture Book

Baseball’s original sins

Feature by John C. Williams

The towering baseball book of the season is a revisionist treatment of the sport’s earliest days. Other titles suggest the continuing relevance of this past to baseball’s present.

INVENTION VS. EVOLUTION
After three decades of research, John Thorn has published a major history on the sport’s origins, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game. It has long been known that Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball, as was once claimed. Now we learn that Doubleday’s more believable replacement, Alexander Cartwright, didn’t have that much to do with it either. Both, it seems, were beneficiaries of posthumous lobbying campaigns. Thorn makes the intriguing suggestion that Doubleday’s ascendance was due to his association with Theosophy, an esoteric spiritual movement that just so happened to claim the allegiance of early baseball magnate Albert Spalding, spearhead of an official commission to discover the national pastime’s origins. As for Cartwright, he played on the Knickerbocker club that is routinely credited with staging the first modern baseball game in 1845; but Thorn argues that his role has been overstated, much to the neglect of other club members who helped develop the rules. What’s more, the rules these Knickerbockers played by in 1845 would have been strange to the modern spectator. Pitches were thrown underhand, bases were not spaced at 90 feet until 1857, and the “first” game did not use a shortstop because the position did not yet exist. Thorn’s argument, then, is one that common sense should dictate, but that we Americans have rejected out of need for a creation myth: No one “invented” the game of baseball, but rather it evolved over a long period of time. By insisting that baseball has one father, we have forgotten all its grandfathers, the different versions of the game played in rural areas, in cities outside New York and, most fascinatingly, in Massachusetts, where the field was 360 degrees and there was no such thing as foul ground.

Thorn is also interested in the game’s development beyond the rules. A major theme of the book is the tension between baseball’s ideal and its reality. This tension was apparent from the earliest days. A key virtue of the sport was said to be its “manliness,” but the Knickerbockers were for the most part fat, citified white-collar workers. Their club was meant to be exactly what that word connotes: a gathering of elites. But a blue-collar element threatened the gentility of the sport. Indeed, Thorn argues that without gambling, baseball would have never become what it is today. Along with fighting and drinking—one actually used to be able to purchase a whiskey at the ballpark—gambling completed early baseball’s trifecta of sin. Owners would continually try to eliminate these vices as various leagues emerged and faltered in the last quarter of the 19th century. But the owners had their own vices, particularly in the way they treated players, and their avarice played no small role in the game’s early struggle for stability.

IN SUPPORT OF LEISURE
In light of Thorn’s history, it is interesting to read the perspective of a much later commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti, in the reissue of 1989’s Take Time For Paradise: Americans and Their Games. This slim volume is best described as an academic meditation on leisure (albeit with baseball as Exhibit A): Aristotle, Shakespeare and Milton are cited, but there’s not one mention of any particular player. The book places Giamatti firmly within the idealist rather than the realist school. His particular focus is on baseball’s communal nature, though he does attempt to grapple with technological change and the way it atomizes spectators. Gambling, which so concerned early baseball owners, is not mentioned at all—strange, perhaps, considering that Giamatti was the man who agreed to banish Pete Rose. Giamatti is more concerned here with cheating, which he considers to threaten the integrity of the game. Giamatti died suddenly in 1989, so he did not live to see the era of rampant steroids use. One wonders how he would have dealt with the issue considering his strong words here.

THE BUSINESS OF BASEBALL
Thorn’s early baseball owners come to mind while reading The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First. In telling the story of the Tampa Bay Rays (née Devil Rays), Jonah Keri introduces us to Vincent Naimoli, the team’s original owner. Way back in the deadball days, owners owned multiple clubs and cannibalized the rosters to create one super team and multiple anemic ones. This had a way of depriving the fans of competitive baseball. Naimoli achieved the same result, but in a more modern fashion: He squandered money on overrated talent. Naimoli managed to gain even more detractors by instituting policies seemingly intended to alienate fans. Enter a new team of Wall Street wunderkinds, who used a rebranding effort to change the club’s image, fan-friendly policies to put people in the seats and new statistical metrics to put a winning squad on the field. Voila—the Rays became AL champs. This book will inevitably be compared to Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, but it imparts a broader sense of what it takes to run a successful sports franchise, off the field as well as on, and it is more of a general business primer than Lewis’ book. The Extra 2% might be criticized for a somewhat simplistic good-guy, bad-guy structure—the hapless early management team did develop key players, after all, a fact that Keri doesn’t adequately explain. Nevertheless, the book provides an entertaining case study, as well as an interesting vantage point from which to consider baseball’s business past.

 
John C. Williams has written for the Oxford American, PopMatters and the Arkansas Times.

 

The towering baseball book of the season is a revisionist treatment of the sport’s earliest days. Other titles suggest the continuing relevance of this past to baseball’s present.

INVENTION VS. EVOLUTION
After three decades of research, John Thorn has published a major history on…

Fiction

Winter fiction takes a magical turn

Feature by Julie Hale

At BookPage, we know there’s no better solution to beating the winter blues than escaping into the pages of a magical piece of fiction. So this month we’re spotlighting works by three visionary writers who take experimental approaches to storytelling. Employing elements of fairy tale and fantasy, these authors dispense with the principles of science, turn history on its head and redefine reality—and they make it all seem believable. So suspend your skepticism, dear reader, and get set for an adventure. A little old-fashioned enchantment is the perfect way to keep January’s chill at bay.

Alice, out of wonderland
Although it’s been a almost a century and a half since her first appearance in print, Alice Liddell, the adventuresome girl who provided Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) with the inspiration to write Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, remains a source of fascination for many a bibliophile. Melanie Benjamin uses her true story as a springboard in Alice I Have Been, her beguiling new novel. Fleshing out historical facts with fictional details to create a full-bodied portrait of Carroll’s heroine, Benjamin traces the arc of Alice’s life, portraying with authority her evolution from a high-strung youngster into a refined wife and mother.

In her 80s when the novel begins, Alice looks back on her past and serves as a lively, wry narrator. Among her memories are the days the Liddell family spent with Dodgson, the picnics and explorations they shared, and the eventual—and controversial—distance that developed between them. The novel passes effortlessly through various eras, moving from the 1930s to Victorian times and back again, and it’s during her mature years that Alice discloses her impatience with fame. The recognition brought to her as a literary character has proven burdensome, and in the end, she feels confined by the role that will ultimately immortalize her. This is an ingenious expansion of Alice’s story, convincingly conceived and meticulously crafted, a delightful bit of literary sleight of hand by Benjamin.

Adventures in time travel
Blending fantasy, history and mystery, Matthew Flaming offers an intoxicating mix of genres in The Kingdom of Ohio, his bold and inventive debut. The novel’s protagonist, a silver miner from Idaho named Peter Force, arrives in New York in 1901 and takes a job excavating tunnels for the city’s incipient subways. Not long after his arrival in Manhattan, he meets the mysterious Cheri-Anne Toledo, who tells him about a forgotten place called the Kingdom of Ohio and insists that she’s the daughter of its monarch. In Ohio, Cheri-Anne claims, she collaborated with the engineer Nikola Tesla on an apparatus that has, in a cosmic accident, carried her into the future and deposited her in New York. Peter doesn’t believe her at first, but when he and Cheri-Anne get caught up in a scheme that’s linked to Thomas Edison and J.P. Morgan, he realizes that she may indeed come from another realm—and possess knowledge that could change the course of history. Flaming examines big issues in this book—questions about the nature of reality and the ways in which technology has altered daily life—and his explorations give the narrative a rich thematic foundation. A spirited tale that channels the energy and verve of old New York, Flaming’s novel is fresh, artful and full of surprises.

A frosty fairy tale
Ali Shaw brings an uncommon world into being with his debut The Girl with Glass Feet. Set on a wintry archipelago called St. Hauda’s Land, a distant group of islands where albino beasts inhabit frost-encrusted forests and nature asserts itself in strange ways, the narrative focuses on delicate, melancholy Ida Maclaird. After visiting the archipelago, Ida finds that her body—feet first—is turning gradually into glass. Searching for a way to end this awful metamorphosis, she leaves her home on the mainland and returns to the islands, where she meets an introverted native named Midas Crook. Crook works in a florist shop and takes photographs, and he has a cold, hard exterior of his own. But after he meets Ida, he softens, and the quest to arrest her terrible transformation soon consumes him. Ida’s salvation rests in the hands of the reclusive Henry Fuwa, who knows secrets about St. Hauda’s Land. As Midas and Ida search for Henry—and as Ida’s mutation continues—the two find themselves in a race against time.

Written in the tradition of magical realists like Haruki Murakami and Gabriel García Márquez, The Girl with Glass Feet is a singular, slippery narrative that defies easy categorization. Shaw writes finely honed prose and knows how to wring maximum suspense out of a tightly woven plot. His is an accomplished first novel—a hypnotic book with an atmosphere all its own.

At BookPage, we know there’s no better solution to beating the winter blues than escaping into the pages of a magical piece of fiction. So this month we’re spotlighting works by three visionary writers who take experimental approaches to storytelling. Employing elements of fairy tale…

Children's & YA

Siblings see a hidden world

Feature by Alice Ray

Ever since the first Harry Potter book hit the bestseller list, children’s literature especially fantasy has been a hot commodity with editors. And if a story is strong enough to get people into bookstores, film producers figure it’s a sure bet to draw them into theaters. The success of the film versions of Eragon and The Chronicles of Narnia are ample proof.

Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi’s playful five-book series for middle-grade readers, The Spiderwick Chronicles, is next in line to get the star treatment. On February 15, the story of twins Jared and Simon Grace, and their older sister Mallory, will be brought to theaters by Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Studios in a film directed by Mark Waters. The three Grace children move to an old Victorian mansion in upstate New York with their mother. There, in a secret room, the children find an old book, Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You, written by their great-great uncle, that classifies the different types of fairies, goblins, brownies, ogres and other magical creatures. They also uncover a seeing stone, a way to catch a glimpse of the Unseen World surrounding the ramshackle mansion. Longtime friends Black and DiTerlizzi came up with the idea for the series as a way to work together. Black, whose acclaimed novels (Tithe, Valiant and Ironside) are for a teen audience, and DiTerlizzi, a Caldecott Medal winner who writes and illustrates picture books (including G Is for One Gzonk!), found common ground in writing for middle-grade readers. The co-creators collaborated on every aspect of the series. Holly and I would discuss in detail the best way to tell the story, and, at the end of the day, she would go off and actually write the story and I would draw the illustrations, says DiTerlizzi. But, he continues, I helped with structuring the plot, and she offered lots of feedback on the visuals. The duo, who also share executive producer credits on the film, must be pleased that their best-selling series is being brought to life by an all-star cast. Though the Graces (like their creators) are American, the children’s parts will be played by young talent from overseas: British actor Freddie Highmore (August Rush) stars as the twins (both of them!) and Irish actress Sarah Bolger (Stormbreaker) has the part of Mallory. Emmy-nominated actress Mary-Louise Parker plays their mother, Helen. The goblins and other inhabitants of the Unseen World are voiced by other well-known actors, including Martin Short, Seth Rogen (Knocked Up), and Nick Nolte, who plays Mulgarath, the villanous ogre who wants the Field Guide.

Those eager for the release of the film will be happy to hear that Simon &andamp; Schuster has plenty of movie tie-in books ($10.99 each, or $49.99 for the boxed set) in bookstores January 1. In addition to re-releasing the original novels with movie cover images, the publishers have commissioned all-new works, like The Spiderwick Chronicles Movie Storybook and The Official Spiderwick Chronicles Movie Companion, both of which contain stills from the film and interviews with the cast. There are also activity books galore, including a Make-Your-Own Field Guide Carry-Along Coloring Kit and Uncle Arthur’s Art Studio.

So go ahead, lift up your seeing stone and enter the magical world of the Spiderwick Chronicles.

Ever since the first Harry Potter book hit the bestseller list, children's literature especially fantasy has been a hot commodity with editors. And if a story is strong enough to get people into bookstores, film producers figure it's a sure bet to draw them…

NonfictionBiography

The origins of Darwin’s theories

Feature by Howard Shirley

As the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth arrives, along with it come three books celebrating the scientist and his revolutionary ideas. All three offer intriguing views on the man and his theories, and their mutual impact on society and science.

Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution by Adrian Desmond and James Moore places Darwin and his ideas within the context of the worldwide struggle with slavery that eventually exploded into the American Civil War. Darwin was born into a family at the forefront of the British abolitionist movement, growing up during the days of Wilberforce—British emancipation was passed while Darwin was aboard the HMS Beagle. But that was an opening salvo, and to Darwin’s horror the pro-slavery forces latched onto science as a rationalization, declaring that the various races of man were distinct species created independently—with Europeans conveniently the dominant race. This idea was anathema to Darwin on a moral level as well as a scientific one, and authors Desmond and Moore set out to show how Darwin’s fury over slavery drove his theory of the unified descent of man as much as did his innate curiosity about nature.

Darwin’s Sacred Cause is a compelling narrative, well researched and convincingly presented, offering a new understanding of who Darwin was and the passions that motivated his thought. Particularly eye opening is the surprising connection between Darwin’s theory and the Christian abolition movement as they together fought a scientific community that rejected the Christian belief that all mankind was descended from a single pair. The story of that unlikely alliance is fascinating to follow, full of colorful characters both noble and vile, revealing how science and religion were debased by the evil of racism.

Darwin’s Garden: Down House and ‘The Origin of Species’ by Michael Boulter uses the garden of Darwin’s country home—Down House—as a picture of the progress of evolution science and ongoing biological studies. Still in existence today (maintained both as a museum and a living laboratory as Darwin used it), the garden at Down House becomes, in Boulter’s words, a metaphorical path through both history and modern science, its plants and animals offering the same insights to the reader as for Darwin. Here are fascinating glimpses into the lean edge of modern biological science, beautifully tied to the simple pleasure Darwin found in experimenting in his garden. Like a stroll with the scientist himself, the book points out that for all we do know about life, we still do not even fundamentally understand the events happening in a quiet English garden, much less the raucous turmoil of the living world. Science, like life, Darwin might say, continues to evolve.

After Darwin
Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America by Barry Werth is as much about the societal impact of Darwin’s theory as it is about Darwin himself. On November 9, 1882, a remarkable group gathered at the famous Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York to host a banquet honoring the ideals of evolution, and in particular the philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer. Though Darwin himself had died seven months before, everyone attending acknowledged the naturalist as the founder of the movement (with the possible exception of the rarely humble Spencer). It was a night to praise the ideals of evolution and look forward to the golden age the philosophy would bring. The dignitaries present ranged from the capitalist Andrew Carnegie to the famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher, with an assortment of scientists, politicians and orators mixed into the bunch. The story of how each came to be at the banquet is the story of how Darwin’s theory of evolution was influencing American thought in the latter 19th century.
Werth’s book is a thoroughly involving read, weaving history and biography together as the various actors move toward the culminating dinner. It is a tale of philosophy, science, political chicanery, public scandals, capitalism, socialism and eccentricity on many sides. The final contrast between the attendees’ assumptions compared to the eventual progress of history (for good and ill) ends the book on an ironic note. The banquet at Delmonico’s may not have signaled a triumph for anyone, but the book is a deliciously evolving read.

Howard Shirley writes from Franklin, Tennessee.

As the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth arrives, along with it come three books celebrating the scientist and his revolutionary ideas. All three offer intriguing views on the man and his theories, and their mutual impact on society and science.

Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a…

Fiction

National Poetry Month: a sampling to celebrate

Feature by Diann Blakely

Some of the finest titles to enjoy during National Poetry Month aren’t, strictly speaking, collections of verse. Instead, they’re biographical studies, letters and/or interviews with poets: Stanley Plumly’s Posthumous Keats, which swoops back and forth temporally like one of the poet’s odes; Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop’s correspondence, Words in Air, the loving story of poetic friendship that lasted 30 years; Letters of Ted Hughes, hailed as the best since those of the aforementioned Keats; and Stepping Stones, a hefty new collection of interviews with Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney by Dennis O’Driscoll.

Irish eyes
Heaney is one of a long line of poets to graduate from—and teach at—Queens University in Belfast, and he might be called the grandfather of The New North, an impressive anthology edited by Chris Agee and recently published by the premier house for Irish poetry in this country, Wake Forest University Press. The collection intersplices, with the work of younger poets, several “seniors,” from Heaney to his students Paul Muldoon and Medbh McGuckian, as well as Ciaran Carson, whose signature twining, long-lined narratives are continued in his collection For All We Know. Perhaps the most interesting and best known of the newer names here is Nick Laird, the last poet in The New North and the author of this year’s On Purpose. Laird typifies these younger Northern Irish poets in that his work is less concerned with the “Troubles” that haunted the two previous generations; their poems, as Agee notes in his introduction, “are much more likely to be interested in new technology, ecology, Eastern Europe, or bilingualism.”

Gaelic, anyone?
J.D. McClatchy, the longtime editor of the Yale Review and the recently appointed president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has just brought out Mercury Dressing. Quintessential McClatchy, the poems balance mandarin wit with enormous learning, a fully 21st-century sensibility and a deft use of the demotic: “At the second intermission of Manon / We were bored and on a third vodka. . . .”

Updike’s farewell
There are comparisons to be drawn between McClatchy’s poems and those of the late John Updike, though the latter had a sometimes derided lighter touch. Endpoint and Other Poems, assembled in the weeks immediately before his death, consists of the last eight years of Updike’s verse. In “Requiem,” one of the book’s last and darkest works, Updike laments that his age dictates that he will not die a prodigy; indeed, indifference or bewilderment that he hadn’t already died is more likely to greet his passing. Endpoint’s last three poems, however, strike a brighter note, in particular the final work, which celebrates his wife’s new vision after a cataract operation on her birthday, offering “A cake of love from your own / John.”

Rita Dove, former poet laureate and longtime professor at the University of Virginia, mastered the formal narrative with her third verse collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah. She continues in that vein in Sonata Mulattica, the tragic, fact-based story of a virtuosic violinist. Son of a white woman and “an African prince,” George Polgreen Bridgetower is possessed of fingers “agile as the monkeys from his father’s land” as they play the strings of his instrument. He travels to meet the young genius Beethoven, whose plans to dedicate a sonata to Bridgetower are incinerated by—guess what?—trouble over a woman.

Small wonders
Many of the year’s best collections have been published by small publishing houses, which, along with university presses, comprise the backbone of poetry publication. For example, Graywolf’s Elizabeth Alexander wrote and read the inaugural poem, and Coffee House Press author Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler ($16, 90 pages, ISBN 9781566892186), a Category-5 sequence about Katrina, was a National Book Award nominee. Overlook has just issued a collection not-really-for children (unless their parents are willing to pay for years of therapy), Shut Up, You’re Fine ($14.95, 144 pages, ISBN 9781590201039), by Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-nominated author Andrew Hudgins with illustrations by the acclaimed Barry Moser; and BOA Editions recently issued one of the year’s most interesting books, The Heaven-Sent Leaf ($16, 72 pages, ISBN 9781934414156), a collection of parable-like poems about that seemingly most unpoetic of subjects, money, by former hedge-funder Katy Lederer. Finally, Copper Canyon’s 2008 list included C.D. Wright’s Rising Falling Hovering ($22, 100 pages, ISBN 9781556592737), whose singular mix of Ozarkiana, the avant-garde and social consciousness has made her one of today’s most interesting and admired poets.

Diann Blakely’s most recent poetry collection is Cities of Flesh and the Dead (Elixir Press).

Some of the finest titles to enjoy during National Poetry Month aren’t, strictly speaking, collections of verse. Instead, they’re biographical studies, letters and/or interviews with poets: Stanley Plumly’s Posthumous Keats, which swoops back and forth temporally like one of the poet’s odes; Robert Lowell and…

Remembering those who fought our nation’s wars

Feature by John T. Slania

The true impact of war is often lost in the numbers. It is only when a human face is introduced that we fully understand what it means to go to war. In a month when our country memorializes its war heroes, these four books help humanize the war experience in a powerful way.

Picturing war
World War II: The Definitive Visual History leads the reader on a chronological journey through World War II. An oversized book filled with hundreds of photographs, graphics and maps, it begins with the unsettled political landscape following World War I and the circumstances that enabled Hitler and Mussolini to gain power. It chronicles key battles, such as Guadalcanal, D-Day and Iwo Jima, and the bombing of Hiroshima. It also explores the aftermath of the war, including the rebuilding of Germany and Japan and the growth of Communism. But it is the photographs and personal stories that are truly gripping. The key figures—Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Eisenhower—are well represented. So, too, are images and stories of the common man, from the foot soldier to the concentration camp survivor. World War II is a worthy book for the shelves of the serious student of war, or for the coffee table of any reader who seeks a comprehensive history of the world’s greatest conflict.

In Mark Faram’s Faces of War: The Untold Story of Edward Steichen’s WWII Photographers, we are treated to the war photography of Edward Steichen, a veteran art and commercial photographer who did some of his most memorable work while in the U.S. Navy. Steichen gained fame shooting fashion and celebrity photographs for Vogue and Vanity Fair, but at the outset of World War II, the 62-year-old enlisted in the Navy. He was named a lieutenant commander and led a team of photographers in capturing images aboard ships and aircraft carriers in the Pacific Theater. Steichen captured images of men at war, and also at leisure in the belly of naval vessels. The black-and-white photographs are striking considering that despite the tight and often tense conditions aboard Navy ships, Steichen was able to find dramatic lighting and place his subjects at ease. Steichen created simple, but profound images that changed the art and craft of war photography.

Lives forever changed
The subjects of A More Unbending Battle: The Harlem Hellfighter’s Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home also had a dramatic impact on the history of war. They were the members of the U.S. 369th Infantry, the first African-American regiment to serve in World War I, better known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Author Peter Nelson relates that these men distinguished themselves from most other black soldiers, who were relegated to supply duties, and earned a chance to fight in the trenches in Europe. But they were unable to overcome their country’s segregationist tendencies, and fought with the French and not with white U.S. soldiers. Despite this slight, the Harlem Hellfighters served with distinction and became one of the most feared fighting units in the war.

Soldiers Once: My Brother and the Lost Dreams of America’s Veterans is Catherine Whitney’s book-length essay recalling the tragic life of her brother, a Vietnam veteran, and the United States’ continued involvement in war. The story begins on the day before September 11, 2001, when Whitney buries her 53-year-old brother, Jim Schuler. He served three tours in Vietnam, but as he aged, his life unraveled. As Whitney searches for answers to her brother’s experience with post-traumatic stress syndrome, she reflects on the costs of war for a new generation of soldiers sent to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Soldiers Once is part memoir, part meditation and a thoughtful look at the impact of war.

John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago. His late father, Gerard Slania, earned the Silver Star and Bronze Star Medal as a soldier in World War II.

The true impact of war is often lost in the numbers. It is only when a human face is introduced that we fully understand what it means to go to war. In a month when our country memorializes its war heroes, these four books help…

Memoir

Real life with father

Feature by Joanna Brichetto

Father’s Day is not always a Hallmark moment. The reality of family life is usually far from perfection; for some it is farther than others. Take these three authors: children of fathers gone for good, for bad or just gone, and all left with a legacy of regret, guilt, shame or uncertainty. Each book records the drama of adult children struggling to determine who their fathers really were, and at the same time, by the very act of writing, who they are, themselves.

In Either You’re In or You’re In the Way, twin brothers Logan and Noah Miller chronicle their own wild ride of a filmic tribute to their father. The boys were blue-collar to the bone, living from odd job (roofer, bouncer) to even odder job (Abercrombie & Fitch model), trying to make enough to support themselves and their chronically homeless alcoholic dad. But when Mr. Miller suddenly dies during a routine stay in a jail cell, alone and ill, the twins vow to take his story to the world: to make a movie that will help redeem the suffering of a good man. They have never been to film school, written a script, shot a scene, nor have a single contact in the biz, yet within a year, they manage to write, fund, act in and produce a feature film. Despite ridiculous odds, the twins assemble an Academy Award-winning cast and crew with Ed Harris in the lead role. Perversely, it is thanks to the horror of the father’s end that his sons turn tragedy into a triumph of his own making. Either You’re In or You’re In the Way is told in a careening, no-nonsense, seat-of-the-pants style that is no doubt similar to the way the twins actually lived it. By the way, the boys’ movie, Touching Home, has already garnered accolades at a prestigious film festival, and is now making its way to wider audiences.

Then there is the age-old Oedipal story of a boy who literally doesn’t know who his father is. In Go Ask Your Father: One Man’s Obsession with Finding His Origins Through DNA Testing Lennard J. Davis, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, doggedly pursues answers to complicated questions, questions that several key players hoped would never be asked. After a lifetime of ignoring a persistent “underlying murmur” that his dad was not, in fact, his biological father, Davis investigates every possible clue to uncover the truth. What follows is a mix of memoir, genealogical mystery and a concise history of artificial insemination and DNA testing. “Obsession” is an apt word to describe Davis’ pursuit, yet there is no guarantee that even this level of exhausting and exhaustive research will produce all the right answers. Who was his real father: the man he called Dad, his ne’er-do-well uncle, an anonymous sperm donor, or perhaps most shocking, his mother’s gynecologist? Which man would he prefer to turn out to be so? And what does being a “real” father mean? Do genetics truly define us, and if so, to what degree? Toward the end of Go Ask Your Father, one particular family photo speaks a thousand inscrutable words in response.

Danzy Senna’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History is a completely different exploration of personal identity. The 1968 wedding of her parents—a blue-blood Boston Brahmin mother and a Southern black father—would seem a match made in civil rights heaven, but the eight-year union and violent divorce turn out to be domestic hell. As the product of two clashing cultures and colors, Senna is shaped by the labels forced upon her by her own parents, and by the problematic reception America grants a child of mixed-race heritage. It is no accident that both of her novels, Caucasia and Symptomatic, involve a female, biracial protagonist, but now this acclaimed writer hopes to dig beneath fiction for fact. She focuses on her father: a man whose past is anything but clear, even to himself. He is abusive, alcoholic, brilliant, beautiful, drifting, maddening and mysterious. Senna travels South on the trail of contradictory rumors and legal records, negotiating this alien landscape wherein the very nature and definition of family are called into question. Ultimately, her search leads to a reframing of identity for four generations, including her infant son, and the exposure of a complex middle ground of meaning, far from black and white.

Joanna Brichetto writes from Nashville.

Father’s Day is not always a Hallmark moment. The reality of family life is usually far from perfection; for some it is farther than others. Take these three authors: children of fathers gone for good, for bad or just gone, and all left with a…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Novels to feed the hungry heart

Feature by Joanna Brichetto

Who doesn't like food and love, together or apart? Together, they are magic, and whether it began with Chocolat or Like Water for Chocolate, "foodie fiction" is hot. Three new choices are showcased below: all centered on a female character at or near 40, all tending toward the literary rather than strictly romance or chick lit. Each one is a sensual exploration of foods simple and complex, homey and exotic, and above all, slow. Slow food allows time for the invocation of vivid and luxuriant metaphors (a food is said to be something else: a particular feeling, wet autumn leaves, a magnolia petal, a lover's lower lip, the smell of a mahogany desk and so on). Some descriptions are so inventive they verge on outright cross-sensory synesthesia. And be forewarned—each of these novels will make you very, very hungry.

A pinch of humor

Nancy Spiller's Entertaining Disasters is aptly titled. The double entendre captures the plight of the unnamed narrator to a tee. A freelance food writer, she makes it her business, literally, to orchestrate exquisite dinner parties and record every detail for newspaper and magazine articles. Unfortunately, her journalistic output belongs not under "Style" or "Living" or "Food," but firmly under "Fiction." She makes it all up. Why? Because, without exception, every dinner party she has actually sponsored was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish. As a result, her social anxieties have escalated into party paralysis. So, for 10 years she has conducted only imaginary gatherings: sparkling dinner parties peopled by an anonymous and utterly fictitious roster of L.A.'s most beautiful.

Until now. Suddenly, her editor, who has no inkling of her secret, invites himself to her next soiree. Since he's a busy man, the first available date is five months off, which gives our narrator nearly half a year to obsess about one dinner party. Her borderline stream-of-consciousness, tangential terror splits into fascinating diversions about food and food history, and ultimately, about herself. Her past gradually emerges, pulled from silence by a smell, a taste, a touch or a memory of a particular ingredient. Now, at midlife, she is ready to examine the list of her own ingredients: who she is and what she wants.

A dash of romance

The central character of The Lost Recipe for Happiness, by Barbara O'Neal, is also starting over. Elena Alvarez arrives in Aspen poised for the professional opportunity of a lifetime: her own kitchen in an upscale, new restaurant. Poised, that is, with a broken body, a broken family and a string of broken relationships behind her. Thirty-seven, unmarried with no children, she is deservedly proud of her decades of slow, hard work up the kitchen ladder from slave to sous to chef.

Elena has been rebuilding her life since she was a teenager, when a horrific accident killed her boyfriend and several family members. Elena alone survived—albeit with horrific injuries—and she remains haunted by her past. So much so, perhaps, that she is in danger of missing a different opportunity: the possibility of true love. The unlikely candidate is Julian Liswood, who is not only a four-time-divorced hotshot film director, but her new boss, as well. The story alternates between third-person viewpoints of these two, and as the intricacies of each is revealed, the plot thickens quicker than a béchamel sauce. A nice touch is the bit of magic realism O'Neal (aka novelist Barbara Samuel) throws into the mix, giving Elena a bit of ghostly guidance and a sixth sense that serves her well.

Mix with friendship

In The School of Essential Ingredients, by Erica Bauermeister, eight people are brought together in a monthly cooking class with an intuitive and slightly mysterious chef, Lillian. With the exception of one couple, all are strangers to one another and to a certain degree, to themselves. Lillian's slow but startling method of instruction spills over into their inner lives, gently nudging each to explore what needs to be examined. Along the way, of course, they cook. True to Lillian's style, they cook without written recipes, guided by senses, memory and instinct.

Perhaps the most satisfying character study is the glimpse of Lillian's own genesis as a chef, and her earliest attempts in the kitchen. As a damaged child, she begins with little more than sheer will. With patient, methodical, focused experimentation (and a little help from a Wise Woman archetype), she begins what can be described as a journey of faith. Transforming basic ingredients into new works becomes a type of spirituality, a religion. With it, she saves her own mother, finds her own calling and masters her profession. Delicious.

 

Joanna Brichetto is trying to slow down.

Who doesn't like food and love, together or apart? Together, they are magic, and whether it began with Chocolat or Like Water for Chocolate, "foodie fiction" is hot. Three new choices are showcased below: all centered on a female character at or near 40, all…

Pop Culture

Woodstock turns 40

Feature by Ron Wynn

1969, when the Woodstock Music & Art Festival began. An event that brought more than half a million people to Max Yasgur’s farm in the Catskill Mountains of New York for three days of music and celebration, Woodstock signaled the popularity and potency of modern rock ’n’ roll in American society, and ultimately led to the creation of today’s popular music empire and celebrity culture. Three books, two new volumes and an updated reissue, provide exhaustive and often spirited accounts from insiders, historians and participants in the epic festival that paved the way for the convergence of commerce and culture that constitutes such contemporary spectacles as Bonnaroo.

Behind the scenes
The Road to Woodstock: From The Man Behind The Legendary Festival is famed promoter and artist manager Michael Lang’s account of the maneuvering, deal-making and deft planning that resulted in Woodstock. Only in his 20s, he’d already organized the Miami Pop Festival in 1968 and enjoyed producing other shows and concerts. He deemed himself part of a new generation rejecting the old social order and embracing fresh ideas about such issues as civil rights, sexuality and drugs. Lang envisioned Woodstock as much more than a series of concerts: it would also be a forum for alternative political and social philosophies, and a chance to debunk myths about long-haired kids, their music and their heroes.

The book documents the daily improvising on details like staging, security and contracts. Lang recruited the help of everyone from The Hog Farm, a commune whose assistance ranged from aiding victims of drug overdoses to providing food for hungry kids, to off-duty cops who took security gigs against the wishes of their superiors, and apprentice carpenters who helped design and build sets with minimal or no specifications.

It also contains several rare photographs and many great stories. These include Lang recruiting Peter Townshend of The Who by keeping him awake and plying him with alcohol, and getting a terrified Richie Havens to open the concert, then having him do so many encores he forgets the words to a number and starts wailing “Freedom.”

History of a phenom
If Lang’s book takes an ultra-personal approach, Brad Littleproud and Joanne Hague’s Woodstock: Peace, Music & Memories is the prototypical historical chronicle. Littleproud and Hague were too young to attend the festival, but they interviewed its co-creator and promoter Artie Kornfield, along with numerous Woodstock survivors. Their colorful chronicles add spice to what would otherwise be a dry factual summary of the concert and related episodes.

Kornfield’s anecdotes dovetail almost exactly with Lang’s, while the spicy rhetoric of such figures as peace activist Wavy Gravy shows that not everyone at Yasgur’s farm was in a joyous and giving mood. There are also 350 color and black-and-white pictures, many of them great candid shots of folks enjoying the music, being overcome by the spectacle and reveling in the atmosphere.

Picturing legends
Like Lang and Kornfield, photographer Elliott Landy considered himself part of the new order Woodstock was created to serve. But his involvement and connections came from the journalistic rather than musical end. He took pictures for various underground and alternative newspapers and magazines, and became friends with Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin before the festival. Landy was also a prolific contributor to record labels, providing spectacular shots that would become legendary album covers.

While Woodstock Vision: The Spirit of A Generation  was first released in 1994, this latest version includes a special 90-page photo commemorative of the Woodstock festival personally selected by Landy from his archive. Because of his relationships with artists, his photos were never posed or staged. Whether it’s classic album covers like Dylan’s Nashville Skyline or Janis Joplin and Richie Havens before and after gut-wrenching Woodstock performances, Landy’s Woodstock Vision gives incredible entry into the personalities of icons.

There will be many other Woodstock retrospective items coming in the days leading up to the anniversary date. Still, these books are a fine addition to the legacy of sources that evaluate the three-day journey that helped change a nation’s culture.

Ron Wynn writes for the Nashville CityPaper and other publications.

1969, when the Woodstock Music & Art Festival began. An event that brought more than half a million people to Max Yasgur’s farm in the Catskill Mountains of New York for three days of music and celebration, Woodstock signaled the popularity and potency of modern…

Science Fiction & Fantasy

An epic quest

Feature by Sean Melican

When the Barenaked Ladies sang “Everything old is new again,” they probably weren’t referring to science fiction and fantasy. But if this month’s offerings are any indication, they certainly could have been. For August we have a new vision of elves, a Dyson sphere populated by historians, pirates and fools, and an anthology of vampires inhabiting a multitude of ecological niches.

The title of Elfland leads one to expect a traditional fantasy story—the orphaned hero, the last surviving remnant of the monarchy, a motley and moral fellowship, a great quest—but readers will be pleasantly surprised by the directions in which the story branches. Yes, the narrative engine is driven by the threat of a world-ending ice giant, Brawth, and the efforts of one man, Lawrence Wilder, the Gatekeeper between Earth and the Otherworld, to contain Brawth.But Freda Warrington’s novel rises above other fantasies by focusing on the lives of the densely interwoven Wilder and Fox families who are concerned with the threat, but not consumed by it. Though it’s branded as a fantasy, Elfland shares as much with mainstream fiction as it does genre. The novel begins when the oldest child is not yet an adolescent and ends well after he’s spent time in prison for murder and has (borrowing from the romance genre) stolen the heart of a woman who once despised him. The novel generates greater emotional responses from the warp and weft of the families’ twisted skein, including adultery, betrayal, incest, love, lust, murder and brutal secrets brought to light. It is a strong beginning for a series that has the potential to attract a diverse group of readers.

A fantastic new world
Even though three books in the Virga series come before it, The Sunless Countries doesn’t require any outside knowledge—an odd discovery in light of the novel’s philosophical stance. Virga is a mini-Dyson sphere with a nuclear fusion engine as its sun, and various wheeled cities rotating around even smaller fusion engines. Leal Maspeth is a tutor hoping to be promoted to faculty, but what is a historian to do when the ahistorical Eternists (straw-men stand-ins for Creationists and Wikipedia-ists) have taken control of her city? And what is she to do when she falls in with Hayden Griffin, the hero and sunlighter, just as a voice resounds through the world warning of impending doom for all Virga? As in many otherwise excellent hard science fiction novels, the characters here suffer from a certain flatness. Virga is a superb example of world-building, with complex visual wonders deftly handled by Karl Schroeder’s writing. Curiously, Leal’s historical view is oddly old-fashioned, seeing history as a collection of static, objective facts, which she sticks to despite the evidence that her own historical role will be read one of two ways—heroine or quisling—depending on whether she is alive or dead when the Eternists eventually fall. A fifth novel is demanded.

The vampire authority
Popularly, vampires have ranged from bogeymen to darkly sensual to angst-ridden, but John Joseph Adams’ hefty anthology, By Blood We Live, resurrects 37 incarnations. There are familiar names with familiar stories, most notably Armstrong, King, Lumley and Rice, who is represented by her only published piece of short fiction. Vampires appear in historical and mythological contexts, from the sinking of the Titanic to James Wentworth’s South Pole excursion, the American West to 1930s China, Roanoke to Fallujah. Often the setting is merely a place to locate the vampire, but some authors venture much further. In “Snow, Glass, Apples,” Neil Gaiman brilliantly re-examines the underlying assumptions of the Snow White mythology, and with Lilith Saintcrow’s pitch-perfect “A Standup Dame,” we are treated to a consideration of gender roles in noir genre. We learn what happened to Elvis and Gatsby, Jesus and the devil’s own son, among others. There is also lust, parasitism, violence and narrow escapes. More than anything, this anthology demonstrates that the vampire is not only undead but mutable, and in the best writers’ hands, a tool for analyzing our mortal frailty and resilience in the teeth of unadulterated evil and unimaginable love.

Sean Melican is the new science fiction and fantasy columnist for BookPage. In alphabetical order, he is a chemist, father, husband and writer.
 

When the Barenaked Ladies sang “Everything old is new again,” they probably weren’t referring to science fiction and fantasy. But if this month’s offerings are any indication, they certainly could have been. For August we have a new vision of elves, a Dyson sphere populated…

Children's & YAPicture Book

Back to school, with a smile

Feature by Robin Smith

With year-round school schedules and earlier and earlier starting dates, it’s sometimes hard to say when the back-to-school season for American kids begins. Those of us of a certain age know that school should start after Labor Day, but that, like cassette players and phones with cords, is just a quaint old-timey idea in many parts of the country.
No matter the start date in your area, it won’t be long before kindergartners and elementary school kids are looking for books to explain the world of school to them. Whenever your new school year begins, you can be ready with these new offerings and know that they will help pave the way to a successful school year.

It’s not just kids who go to school—buses make the daily trek, too. Poet Marilyn Singer explores in exuberant rhyme the trip to school in I’m Your Bus, illustrated by Evan Polenghi. Every page bustles with brightness and sparkle, and even the traffic lights on the dedication page have big smiling faces, ready for school! Short, easy-to-read rhymes keep this story moving. “Sweepers sweeping, bakers baking. / Dawn is barely even breaking. / Time for buses to be waking!” All the vehicles, from street sweepers and trucks to taxis and limos, are painted with wide, welcoming smiles—just the encouragement youngsters need to face a new school year. This would be a wonderful book to read on one of the first days of kindergarten, even if your kids walk or drive; the rhythm is infectious and the words are easy to memorize, which makes this a perfect choice for children who are excited about learning to read.

French lessons
Once parents have gotten their children over their concerns about school buses, the real issue will have to be faced: school itself. No matter the happy faces that parents put on, some kids do not want to go to school, ever. A newcomer to America, Stephanie Blake, has just the antidote for this reluctance with I Don’t Want to Go to School! Originally published in France, this is the humorous tale of Simon, a mischievous little rabbit who does not want to go to school. Each time one of his parents tells him all the great things that happen at school, he answers with just two words, “No way!” Despite his firm statements, the time for the first day keeps drawing nearer and nearer. Using a mixture of half-page illustrations, saturated primary colored backgrounds and amusing graphic elements, the story will have new readers  delightfully unsure whether Simon will even go to school, let alone like it. American children will enjoy some of the details that mark this book as a little bit Continental—the children have chocolate mousse in the cafeteria, nap under a communal blanket and the blackboards and posters are written in cursive with the numbers one and seven jauntily crossed. Simon’s many facial expressions are a marvel as well. The endpapers alone will make the most worried kindergartner laugh! Simon might be the perfect friend to carry to school on the first day.

New beginnings
A much more serious offering about school adjustment is My Name is Sangoel by Karen Lynn Williams and Khadra Mohammed, illustrated by Catherine Stock. This is the gentle story of one refugee boy from Sudan and his adjustment to life in his new country, the United States. Young readers will quickly empathize with Sangoel as he, his mother and sister enter the bustling airport, filled with English signs and people speaking English. Because his father was killed in Sudan and he carries his Dinka name, Sangoel is the man of the family and the only one who speaks any English. The biggest adjustment for Sangoel is school. Everywhere he turns, people mispronounce his name, and he fears he will lose even that connection to his father. But his ingenuity pays off when he figures out a way to let everyone know just how his name is pronounced. Through soft watercolors and the occasional torn photo or fabric collage, Stock’s illustrations let the reader understand exactly how Sangoel is feeling and what a tremendous challenge it is to move to a new country and continent. Books like this tend to be preachy, but the writers keep the focus here on young Sangoel and his adjustment without veering into the political. Most schools in America have refugee children or children who are adjusting to a new culture and language; this is a book, along with Aliki’s excellent Marianthe’s Story, that should help build compassion in many classrooms.

Robin Smith teaches second grade in Nashville.

With year-round school schedules and earlier and earlier starting dates, it’s sometimes hard to say when the back-to-school season for American kids begins. Those of us of a certain age know that school should start after Labor Day, but that, like cassette players and phones…

Science Fiction & FantasyYA FictionYA

Sense of Wonder: Harnessing the power within

Feature by Sean Melican

This month our fantasy triptych includes the story of a young woman who is too beautiful and powerful for even the most powerful men, a machine too powerful for the Wild West and a former slave whose power may destroy him.

In the world of Kristin Cashore’s Fire, every living creature has a monster analogue, distinguishable by unnatural colors and a lust for blood—particularly monster blood. Though she does not lust for blood, Fire is a human monster. Her beauty causes uncontrollable lust in weak-willed men, and through a form of telepathy she can force men to do her will—though she is understandably reluctant to do so. Her father and his puppet king destroyed their kingdom through excess and cruelty, and Fire quickly finds herself embroiled in court politics, assaulted by the king and used as a tool to interrogate spies. She faces internal conflict as she sees the manipulation of human will too similar to her father’s amoral and casual brutality, but also necessary to the defense of the kingdom. To make matters worse, she falls in love with the prince—and his daughter. Aside from sharp writing, the strength of Fire lies in Cashore’s depiction of womanhood. The author plays with traditional gender fantasy roles, giving us a strong but feminine character whose physiology generates her strengths and weaknesses, and male characters who are aggressive chauvinists and misogynists—not the asexual ideal heroes of Tolkien’s pale imitators. The enchanting prequel to Cashore’s beloved young adult novel Graceling, Fire is an excellent book for all ages—particularly young women.

Steampunk in Seattle
There are plenty of alternate Civil War novels, but none quite like Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker. In the 1860s, Leviticus Blue builds a gold-mining machine in response to a Russian contest. But something goes terribly wrong—either intentionally or by accident, we don’t quite know—and the Boneshaker destroys the banking district of Seattle and unleashes a gas that turns the living into the living dead. A wall is built around Seattle to contain the gas and the zombies. Sixteen years later, Leviticus’ widow attempts to rescue their son, Ezekiel, who has braved the wall to vindicate his universally hated father. Behind the wall, a man who may or may not be Leviticus—and who may or may not have robbed the banks—has built a kingdom of the living, and he has other plans for Ezekiel and his mother. What follows is a fantastic whirlwind tour of an alternate history and a steampunk version of The Lord of the Flies. While slightly marred by a few too many similar chase scenes, Boneshaker offers fans of both steampunk and the New Weird much to enjoy.

Fantasy pick of the month
Flesh and Fire gives us another unlikely hero. Jerzy is a slave plucked from the vineyards because he shows a talent for creating spellwines. The reader learns (as Jerzy does) that these magic wines were omnipotent until the vines were split into types by a semi-deity who ordered that vintners and governing entities be entirely independent from one another. This Command has been kept and vigorously enforced, but has led to a stagnation in the development of government and particularly the evolution of spellwines. Peace has been held for centuries, but a new malevolent and destructive power appears which no one can identify. The narrative develops slowly, but the patient reader is rewarded with the skillful unfolding of a richly developed world heavily dependent on religious interpretation—a delightful discovery especially as the novel eschews slavish imitation of Grecian mythology or thinly veiled criticism of Christianity, instead presenting a history and mythology which informs and guides the powerless and the powerful. Laura Anne Gilman also approaches the issue of slavery from an alternate viewpoint; Jerzy sees slavery as a natural and moral behavior, is unable to recognize any other option, and questions the meaning of “freedom” through an examination of what it means to be guided by a dead deity’s Commandments. Moral questions are deeply embedded in the novel, with a brilliantly limited authorial intervention, and presented through well-developed characters and first-class world-building. Since this is subtitled “Book One of The Vineart War,” we can only look forward to the sequel(s).

In alphabetical order, Sean Melican is a chemist, father, husband and writer.

This month our fantasy triptych includes the story of a young woman who is too beautiful and powerful for even the most powerful men, a machine too powerful for the Wild West and a former slave whose power may destroy him.

In the world of Kristin…

Cozy Mystery

Two winning mysteries

Feature by Joanne Collings

It is fascinating how two mysteries with first-person narrators, similar settings (small towns) and heroines (women struggling over whether to divorce their husbands) can be so different. Working Stiff goes for laughs, while For Better, For Murder tugs at the heartstrings.

In Working Stiff, set in Wisconsin, Mattie, a former nurse, has just started working as a coroner after finding her surgeon husband in a compromising position with another nurse. Since the house she shared with her husband is right next door to her new place, Mattie can’t help spying on him, and one night she witnesses him arguing with the other woman. Shortly afterward, Mattie is called to a murder scene: the victim is the other woman, making her husband the primary suspect.

Mattie has earthy sensibilities and big appetites; despite her unresolved marital situation, she finds herself very attracted to the detective investigating the case. Unable to contain her own curiosity, fueled by her need to know if her husband is guilty of more than infidelity, Mattie, in her new role as deputy coroner, starts her own investigation. Since she knows everyone in the victim’s world, she can do this with some ease. Both Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie are invoked, and several funny episodes occur on the way to Mattie solving the crime and coming to a decision about her marriage.

Here’s hoping Annelise Ryan will give us more of Mattie’s mother (“a modern day Nostradamus” and “many-times honored member of the Disease of the Month club”) in the next installment.

Meanwhile, in Lisa Bork’s For Better, For Murder, set in New York’s Finger Lakes, Jolene Asdale is struggling to keep her car business alive when a dead body falls out of the Ferrari she is showing to a customer. That’s bad enough, but the victim is a man she briefly dated and recently had a widely witnessed (and wrong interpreted) discussion with about business zoning. The man who is investigating the murder is the husband she hasn’t been able to bring herself to divorce even though she left him three years before. And then Jolene’s bipolar sister, who has been overhearing threats to Jolene (or are they just more of her voices?), disappears from the state psychiatric facility. Is she now part of a team robbing local convenience stores? Jolene’s husband Ray is convinced Jolene knows more about everything than she is admitting. Meanwhile, she’s trying “not to notice that Ray still carries a picture of [her] in his wallet.”

Jolene turns detective to save herself and her sister, giving Bork a chance to explore what’s it’s like to own a small business in a small town where everyone knows your business. Like Ryan, she includes gay characters while taking care to point out that there are still difficulties with being gay in a small town. Jolene, whose family history of mental illness haunts her, is a touching character. The plot is a little complicated, but the series has promise and the book ends with a happy twist.

Joanne Collings cozies up with a good book or two in Washington, D.C.

It is fascinating how two mysteries with first-person narrators, similar settings (small towns) and heroines (women struggling over whether to divorce their husbands) can be so different. Working Stiff goes for laughs, while For Better, For Murder tugs at the heartstrings.

In Working Stiff, set in…

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