A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again: essays and arguments - David Foster Wallace

A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again: essays and arguments - Wallace, David Foster

Summary: A collection of keen observations, witty analysis, and essays on a wide range of subjects exposes the fault lines in today's society - (Baker & Taylor)


Booklist Reviews
Celebrated Illinoisan writer Wallace's meganovel, Infinite Jest (1996), was megasuccessful, and these intelligent, funny essays are outstanding. In "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," Wallace presents himself as a young Midwest tennis star with an unathletic, intuitive, yet winning style of play. But Wallace writes about far more than the sum of his self, widening his field of vision to embrace wind, earth, and mathematics, creating a virtual cyclone with his highly idiosyncratic perceptions, perfectly correct cadence, and casually hip lexicon. He applies this arsenal of literary power tools to even greater effect in one of the most original, comprehensive analyses yet of television and the pervasive "culture of watching," discussing such fine points as the tyranny of television's institutionalized, self-referential irony and its tremendous influence on American fiction. Wallace has also written in his edgy way about David Lynch, a state fair, and, in the masterful title piece, his addling experiences on a seven-night Caribbean cruise during which he endured hours of despair interrupted by moments of stunned amazement. ((Reviewed February 15, 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews

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The Middlesteins - Jami Attenberg

The Middlesteins - Attenberg, Jami

Summary: Two siblings with very different personalities attempt to take control of their mother's food obsession and massive weight gain to save her life after their father walks out and leaves her reeling in the Chicago suburbs.


Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* The Middlesteins, a Jewish family of strong temperaments and large dysfunctions, living in the middle of the country in Chicago and its suburbs, revolve around Edie, a woman of gargantuan appetites. Attenberg (The Melting Season, 2010) marshals her gift for mordant yet compassionate comedy to chart Edie's rise and fall in sync with her ever-ballooning weight. Smart, generous, and voracious in every way, Edie is a lawyer who loves food and work more than her pharmacist husband. Her daughter, Robin, a private-school history teacher, is anxious and reclusive. Edie's even-keeled, pot-smoking son, Benny, is married to Edie's opposite, petite and disciplined Rachelle, an ambitious stay-at-home mother of twins. After Edie loses her job and rolls past the 300-pound mark, she becomes a medical crisis waiting to happen. Finally galvanized into action, her in-denial family is both helpful and destructive, each effort and failure revealing yet another dimension of inherited suffering. A flawless omnicient narrator, Attenberg even illuminates the life of the man who owns foodaholic Edie's favorite Chinese restaurant while executing perfect flashbacks and flash-forwards and subtly salting this irresistible family portrait with piquant social commentary. Kinetic with hilarity and anguish, romance and fury, Attenberg's rapidly consumed yet nourishing novel anatomizes our insatiable hunger for love, meaning, and hope. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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Confections of a closet master baker - Gesine Bullock-Prado

Confections of a closet master baker - Bullock-Prado, Gesine

Summary: "A former Hollywood insider chucks it all to become a master baker in this hilarious, poignant morsel of a memoir. As head of her celebrity sister's production company, Gesine Bullock-Prado had a closet full of designer clothes and the ear of all the influential movie studio heads. But she was miserable. The only solace she found was in her secret passion: baking..."--Dust jacket.

Booklist Reviews
On first face, Bullock-Prado's life seems wildly improbable. Born to an opera-singer mother and government-worker father, she toured the world's cultural capitals as her mother's career advanced. She eventually became an attorney and a Hollywood producer. Tiring of that life and happily married, she started a bakery in Vermont. Despite slim profit margins and long hours, she found herself completely content. She glories in the day-to-day creativity of the pastry chef and loves both her local staff and the customers who crowd into her shop every day for a cup of coffee and a croissant, a piece of cake, or one of her celebrated macaroons. Life is not always tranquil, especially when crews show up for food television tapings, or when her movie-star sister visits and does a turn as a salesgirl. Recipes for many of the confectionery's offerings appear, the most appealing featuring Vermont maple syrup. Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.

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The disappearing spoon - Sam Kean

The disappearing spoon: and other true tales of madness, love, and the history of the world from the periodic table of elements - Kean, Sam

Summary: The periodic table is one of man's crowning scientific achievements. But it's also a treasure trove of stories of passion, adventure, betrayal, and obsession. The infectious tales and astounding details in The Disappearing Spoon follow carbon, neon, silicon, and gold as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, war, the arts, poison, and the lives of the 'frequently' mad scientists who discovered them.

Kirkus Reviews
In his debut, Science magazine reporter Kean uses the periodic table as a springboard for an idiosyncratic romp through the history of science.Ranking Dmitri Mendeleev's creation of the first version of the periodic table ("one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind") alongside achievements by Darwin and Einstein, the author extends the metaphor of a geographical map to explain how the location of each element reveals its role—hydrogen and chlorine in the formation of an acid, carbon as the building block of proteins, etc.—and how gaps in the table allowed for future discoveries of new elements. Kean presents the history of science beginning with Plato, who used the Greek word for element for the first time in the belief that elements are fundamental and unchanging. The author then looks at Marie Curie, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903 for her discovery that the radioactivity of uranium was nuclear rather than chemical. Kean suggests that nuclear science not only led to the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb, but was instrumental in the development of computers. The women employed by the Manhattan Project, he writes, in "hand-crunching long tables of data…became known by the neologism ‘computers.' " The author is a great raconteur with plenty of stories to tell, including that of Fritz Haber, the chemist who developed nitrogen fertilizer and saved millions from starvation, and applied his talents in World War I to creating poison gas, despite the protests of his wife, who committed suicide. "Between hydrogen at the top left and the man-made impossibilities lurking along the bottom," writes the author, "you can find bubbles, bombs, money, alchemy, petty politics, history, poison, crime, and love. Even some science." Nearly 150 years of wide-ranging science, in fact, and Kean makes it all interesting.Entertaining and enlightening. Copyright Kirkus 2010 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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Justy my type - Simon Garfield

Just my type: a book about fonts - Garfield, Simon

Summary: A romp through the history of fonts and the lives of the great typographers, revealing the extent to which fonts are not only shaped by but also define the world in which we live.

Booklist Reviews
After confessing his stamp-collecting obsession in The Error World (2008), Garfield shares his ardor for typefaces in this ambushing and revelatory celebration. He begins by praising the computer's role in making us all font-savvy as we select among familiar and exotic offerings, from Arial to Ravie. But this easy access belies the deep story of the creation of alphabets from Gutenberg on. Garfield opens our eyes to type's technical evolution, the subtleties of font design (beauty versus readability), how type has gender, and even "type etiquette." But this isn't all p's and q's. Garfield matches flesh to type in avid profiles of gifted typographers, including the scandalous Eric Gill, Claude Garamond, John Baskerville, Frederic Goudy, and Luc(as) de Groot, creator of Calibri, which "has changed the whole look of mass communication." Signage, political campaigns, newspapers, websites, the ubiquitous Helvetica—how profoundly type shapes our world! Garfield's romping history (with multitype text) is zestfully informative. And who can resist a book with the sentence, "Hermann Zapf will always be remembered for his dingbats"? Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

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Heads in beds - Jacob Tomsky

Heads in beds: a reckless memoir of hotels, hustles, and so-called hospitality - Tomsky, Jacob

Summary: "A humorous memoir by a veteran hospitality employee that reveals what goes on behind the scenes of the hotel business. Includes tips on how to get the most out of your hotel stay"-- Provided by publisher.


Booklist Reviews
Comparisons to Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential (2000) are inevitable but not entirely accurate. Yes, both Tomsky and Bourdain purport to expose the underbelly of service industries with which most readers are familiar, hotels and restaurants. But where Bourdain is all rock 'n' roll, egotistical bluster, Tomsky is surprisingly earnest and sympathetic; there are, after all, no television programs called Top Desk Clerk. He wants your respect, not your adulation. Sure, he tosses off a few requisite f-bombs, instructs readers on how to steal from hotel minibars, and name-drops Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, more so because he seems to feel the genre demands it. Indeed, it would be easy to pen a book about crazy hotel guests. But this memoir succeeds, instead, in humanizing the people who park our cars, clean our hotel rooms, and carry our luggage. You will never not tip housekeeping or your bellhop again. Tomsky fell into hotel work and proved to be rather good at it; the same can be said for his writing. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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The news from Spain - Joan Wickersham

The news from Spain: seven variations on a love story - Wickersham, Joan

Summary: A collection of stories that explores the power of love and the impossibility of controlling or understanding it features characters from various times and regions, from Mozart's eighteenth-century collaboration with librettist Da Ponte to a 1940s love triangle. - (Baker & Taylor)

Booklist Reviews
The impish recurrence of a phrase, the news from Spain, links these seven stories, appearing in them in widely varying ways. It is a reminder of their deeper cohesion. Though they jump from eighteenth-century Prague to New York in the 1940s and feature a race-car driver, a teenaged girl, and a middle-aged bride, they make a similar point: love is flawed, uneven, and impossible to pin down. There is love in all forms here—a child for a parent, a wife for a cheating husband or a lover, an aide for his charge—but it never runs smoothly. Wickersham asserts, through a character, that love stories are dreams and invention . . . guesswork. By presenting the blind enthusiasm of a crush and later its disillusionment, the sad realization of loving more or less than a partner, and the distorting pull of differing needs and obligations in a relationship, she demonstrates how biased and baseless narratives of love can be. Characters tell themselves stories of passion or betrayal, and readers see the reality of their frail, imperfect emotional faculties. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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Treme Television Series (DVD)

Treme Television Series (DVD)

Summary: Amid the ruins of New Orleans, ordinary people--musicians, chefs, residents--find themselves clinging to a unique culture and wondering if the city that gave birth to that culture still has a future.


Video Librarian Reviews
The food ain't bad, but it's the music that's New Orleans' lifeblood—a truism that rings loud and clear in Treme, the outstanding HBO series set in the Crescent City. Indeed, the opening scene finds residents parading in song just three months after Hurricane Katrina. Music permeates every episode, ranging from the expected Dixieland and zydeco to hip hop, rock, and more, delivered by veteran greats (Ernie K-Doe, Lee Dorsey, the Meters, Allen Toussaint) and newcomers (such as Trombone Shorty). Of course, there's a dark side as well: New Orleans here is barely starting to recover from the epic disaster—homes are gone, neighborhoods are barren, folks are missing, the government is essentially useless, and the line between cop and criminal is sometimes nonexistent. All of this is brought to life via multiple storylines and characters, including John Goodman as loud-mouthed writer Creighton Bernette and Melissa Leo as his activist wife, Toni; Wendell Pierce as trombonist Antoine Batiste and Khandi Alexander as his ex-wife, Ladonna; Clarke Peters as Albert Lambreaux, a man who returns from Houston to rebuild his ruined home; and Steve Zahn as clueless hippie DJ Davis McAlary. Not all of them get through the season unscathed, which is only natural in a show that emphasizes authenticity—from its plain, profane dialogue to its almost complete lack of gloss and glamour. Compiling all 10 episodes from the 2010 debut season, DVD and Blu-ray extras include audio and music commentaries, and behind-the-scenes featurettes. Exclusive to the Blu-ray release are interactive viewing modes featuring information about the culture and music of New Orleans. Highly recommended. (S. Graham) Copyright Video Librarian Reviews 2011.

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Justified Television Series (DVD)

Justified Television Series (DVD)

Summary: Due to his old-school style, U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens is reassigned from Miami to his childhood home in the poor, rural coal-mining towns in Eastern Kentucky. Lawman Givens is a tough, soft-spoken gentleman who never gives an inch.



Video Librarian Reviews
Originally adapted from an Elmore Leonard short story, this FX-aired series stars Timothy Olyphant as Kentucky-born U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens, who is transferred (demoted actually) from Miami back to his home county. Justified has turned into one of the channel's notable critical and popular successes thanks to a superb cast, smart writing, and the decision to script each season around a self-contained story—in this case, one that will be familiar to readers of Leonard's entertaining latest novel, Raylan. Here, Raylan is dropped into the middle of a complicated standoff involving a family syndicate running marijuana, meth, moonshine, and other vital interests in coal country. Margo Martindale won a well-deserved Emmy Award as Mags Bennett, the wily matriarch of the backwoods mafia, busy taking on a corporate mining concern while her less disciplined sons (notably Jeremy Davies as Dickie, a schemer with a grudge against Raylan) stir up trouble in their dope trade. Walton Goggins is Boyd Crowder, a former criminal (and one-time buddy to Raylan) who tries to go straight but finds himself drawn back to his strengths as the balance of power in the rural crime world shifts. Compiling all 13 episodes from the 2011 second season on DVD and Blu-ray, extras include two behind-the-scenes featurettes, deleted scenes and outtakes, and—exclusive to the Blu-ray release—a roundtable discussion with Leonard and the show's writers and producers. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)Copyright Video Librarian Reviews 2011.

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The physick book of Deliverance Dane - Katherine Howe

The physick book of Deliverance Dane - Howe, Katherine

Summary: While readying her grandmother's abandoned home for sale, Connie Goodwin discovers an ancient key in a seventeenth-century Bible with a scrap of parchment bearing the name Deliverance Dane. In her quest to discover who this woman was and seeking a rare artifact--a physick book--Connie begins to feel haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials and fears that she may be more tied to Salem's past than she could have imagined.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Harvard graduate student Connie Godwin is determination personified. She will get her doctorate and find success as a historian, whether her aura-reading mother understands her bookishness or not. But first she has to contend with her tweedy adviser's oddly urgent demands and her late grandmother's incredibly old, long-abandoned house in Marblehead, Massachusetts. The house is cloaked in vines and stuffed with dusty old bottles and books, but its clutter yields a tantalizing scrap of paper carrying the words "Deliverance Dane." Connie hasn't a clue, but the reader knows, thanks to alternating chapters set in the late-seventeenth century, that Deliverance was a good woman accused of being a witch during the infamous Salem witch hysteria. Soon Connie, admirably sensible in the face of mystifying, even terrifying occurrences, zealously searches archives and libraries for healer Deliverance's "shadow book," while struggling to understand her own weird, new powers. Historian Howe's spellbinding, vividly detailed, witty, and astutely plotted debut is deeply rooted in her family connection to accused seventeenth-century witches Elizabeth Howe and Elizabeth Proctor and propelled by an illuminating view of witchcraft. In all a keen and magical historical mystery laced with romance and sly digs at society's persistent underestimation of women. Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.

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Old school - Tobias Wolff

Old school: a novel - Wolff, Tobias

Summary: During his senior year at an elite New England prep school, a young man who had struggled to find it with his contemporaries finds his life unraveling thanks to the school's obsession with literary figures and their work during a visit from an author for whose blessing a young writer would do almost anything. By the author of This Boy's Life. A first novel. 40,000 first printing. - (Baker & Taylor)

Booklist Reviews
/*Starred Review*/ There are ways to lie without saying a word. It is 1960, and the narrator is beginning his final year at a private school of strong literary traditions. Aspiring writers edit the literary journal and compete to win private audiences with visiting luminaries of letters. This year, the guests are to be Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. The narrator is a scholarship student, and though his school prides itself on class blindness, his classmates are well versed in spotting the subtle indicators of economic background. Longing to fit in, he dissembles, cultivating an "easy disregard" by which he hopes to imply his own privilege. But this doubleness leads him toward an unexpected decision with far-reaching consequences for his future. While a main theme here is a writer's growth, the work's essential component, the forming of character, gives it a universal appeal. As our storyteller grows through his identification with and understanding of important books, and learns the importance of writing honestly, he also learns that to insist too adamantly on the truth may require the individual to stand apart from even the group he loves. Wolff, acclaimed for his short stories and memoirs, has written a marvelous novel with resonance for old and young alike. His storytelling is economical, his prose is elegant, and his meditations are utterly timeless. Some readers may wish to turn from the last page to the first and begin again. ((Reviewed September 1, 2003)) Copyright 2003 Booklist Reviews

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Spoiled - Caitlin Macy

Spoiled: stories - Macy, Caitlin

Summary: A collection of stories examines women in their thirties, educated and successful, who nevertheless struggle to keep their footing in lives for which their mothers never prepared them. - (Baker & Taylor)



Kirkus Reviews
Nine years after her winning debut novel (The Fundamentals of Play, 2000), Macy follows with an impressive, psychologically nuanced collection of stories on class and gender in New York.The stories profile a certain kind of American woman who is upwardly mobile, though not gauche enough to admit it, even to herself. "Christie" has an old-fashioned construction. It's a straightforward character study of a young woman who comes to Manhattan to make good. But soon it becomes clear that the narrator has a grudge against Christie—she is a phony, shallow gold digger. The narrator vows to prune Christie from her circle of acquaintances. That is until she sees her a few years later exiting the luxury building she and her husband have been denied an apartment in. Lunch ensues, the power has shifted and it soon becomes clear that the story's focus is not Christie at all but the narrator. In "Annabel's Mother," Liz becomes fascinated by the girl that plays in the private park across from her building. Annabel is polite and lovely and plays with Liz's toddler Sally, and while this goes on, Liz confides in Annabel's West Indian nanny, Marva. Liz is outraged that Annabel's mother won't loan Marva the money to bring her son to America, and so she offers a loan herself. This is the beginning of many Liz/Marva disappointments. Marva is not grateful enough for the loan, Marva has given Sally a nonorganic doughnut and, worst of all, Marva may like Annabel more than she likes Sally. In "The Red Coat," a newlywed steals the coat of her recently acquired housekeeper (a young, attractive Ukrainian cleaning her way through design school) to both diminish her and gain some of her power. In "Taroudant," a woman honeymooning in Morocco sets the tone for years of what will undoubtedly be an unhappy marriage—she is competitive, dissatisfied and yearning for the kind of unnamed excitement that courts tragedy.  Sophisticated and intelligent, Macy offers the kind of subtlety that turns the ordinary into the sublime.Author tour to Boston, New York, Washington, D.C. Copyright Kirkus 2009 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.


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Oracle bones - Peter Hessler

Oracle bones: a journey between China's past and present - Hessler, Peter


Summary: "[This book] tells the story of modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world as seen through the lives of a handful of ordinary people"--Dust jacket.



Booklist Reviews
Hessler, who has lived in China for the past nine years and is the Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker, has written a fascinating and frequently moving account of life in modern China as seen through the eyes of an eclectic group of people, including a minority Uighur, who operates on the fringe of legality, a factory worker, a teacher, a film director, and a scholar who was destroyed by the Cultural Revolution. All of them seem to function as outsiders as they struggle to cope with a nation that is undergoing monumental change. Hessler seamlessly interweaves their stories with the broader context of Chinese contemporary events, and he ties those events effectively with examinations of history, archaeological excavations, and the Chinese struggle to redefine national identity. This is an important and informative work offering a unique perspective on where China may be headed. ((Reviewed April 15, 2006)) Copyright 2006 Booklist Reviews.


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Maphead - Ken Jennings

Maphead: charting the wide weird world of geography wonks - Jennings, Ken

Summary: Traces the history of map making while offering insight into the role of cartography in human civilization and sharing anecdotes about the cultural arenas frequented by map enthusiasts. - (Baker & Taylor)


Booklist Reviews
Considering Jennings' calling card—he's the Jeopardy! multimillionaire—readers might expect a light, trivia-filled book. Well, that's half right. It's breezily written, but it's not trivial. In fact, it demonstrates that Jennings, a software engineer before his game-show triumph, could have a long career as a writer. There is some trivia in it (e.g., there's no evidence pirates ever used treasure maps), but mainly it's a serious and passionate look at the importance of geography and, by extension, the ability to use and understand maps—for students, historians, political leaders, pop-culture innovators, and, indeed, everyone. Jennings peppers the book with humorous comments and personal asides (he admits up front that he's "a bit of a geography wonk"), but his mission is to rescue geography from irrelevance, to make us realize that geographic illiteracy is not merely "comic shorthand for stupidity" but a real and pervasive problem. A fascinating book that blends humor, memoir, and serious analysis. Comparisons to Bill Bryson's magnificent A Really Short History of Nearly Everything (2009) are entirely apt. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

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All Souls - Michael Patrick MacDonald

All Souls: a family story from Southie - MacDonald, Michael Patrick

Summary: The author recounts growing up in a poor Irish neighborhood, and remembers the four brothers he lost to violence - (Baker & Taylor)




Kirkus Reviews
An incendiary, moving book that startles on nearly every page. The notorious anti-busing riots of 1974 forever altered the insular working-class Irish community of South Boston, branding it indelibly as a dangerous, racist enclave. Anti-violence activist MacDonald grew up there and lost four out of eight siblings to violence in those dark times; his debut assesses both his family history, and related secret tales of class strife, bigotry, corruption, and vanished lives. MacDonald utilizes the classically Irish viewpoint of the stoic child to re-create a harsh arena of a 1970s ghetto and urban poverty. His single Ma felt blessed when a local politician secured her entrance to the majority-Irish Old Colony project, the best place in the world''; once there, the MacDonalds had to prove their mettle against delinquents with shotguns, thus acquiring the patina of craziness necessary for survival. At first, the nuances of color seemed minor against a vividly rendered backdrop of economic difficulty and the depraved mainstreaming of hard drugs and street crime. Then came the riots; MacDonald s surefooted (neither hardened nor sentimental) narrative takes us through the years of malaise and violence that followed, as politically connected gangsters, such as the notorious Whitey Bulger, expanded the area s drug trade while violently enforcing a macho myth of silent Southie unity, itself built on the long-burnished notion that the white community was somehow different from such similarly working-class, embattled black areas as Roxbury. This explication of how such phenomena of white class-consciousness encouraged the wholesale deterioration of his neighborhood and contributed to the demise of some 250 young people is a devastating cultural indictment. MacDonald s nimble prose and detailed recall of grim times long past make for luminous reading; his hard-won conception of how ghettoized poverty spawns localized violence, and the dignity he brings to lives snuffed out in chaos, gives All Souls a moral urgency usually lacking in current memoir or crime prose. A remarkable work. (Author tour) Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews

Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's book of Greek myths - Ingri D'Aulaire

Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's book of Greek myths - D'Aulaire, Ingri

Summary: An introduction to the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. - (Baker & Taylor)




Reviews
"For any child fortunate enough to have this generous book...the kings and heroes of ancient legend will remain forever matter-of-fact; the pictures interpret the text literally and are full of detail and witty observation."--Horn Book.

"The drawings...are excellent and excitingly evocative."--The New York Times.


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Birds of America - Lorrie Moore

Birds of America - Moore, Lorrie

Summary: A long-awaited collection of stories--twelve in all--by one of the most exciting writers at work today, the acclaimed author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Self-Help. Stories remarkable in their range, emotional force, and dark laughter, and in the sheer beauty and power of their language.



Booklist Reviews
Moore's wit works its magic best in her short stories. Her novels, including Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), are tenderly ironic, but her stories are breathtakingly funny, acutely observant, and unexpectedly poignant. Take "Willing," for instance, a tale about Sidra, a self-described "minor movie star once nominated for a major award," who has left Hollywood to sulk in a Days Inn in Chicago. Very little happens. She visits her boring parents, refuses to let the maids in to clean, and has an affair with a thoroughly inappropriate man, but the Dorothy Parker^-like dialogue, Sidra's caustic self-analysis, and such evocative details as a plant "dried to a brown crunch" all coalesce into a richly empathic tale. Ardor and its absence often occupy Moore, and she is adept at cracking the code of difficult relationships. We're all strange birds, Moore--who reads like Ann Beattie's younger, midwestern sister--seems to be saying in these fresh, quirky, and honest stories, and that's fine, as long as you have a good heart. ((Reviewed August 1998)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews


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Haroun and the sea of stories - Salman Rushdie

Haroun and the sea of stories - Rushdie, Salman


Summary: Abandoned by his wife, professional storyteller Shah of Blah suffers further insult when he loses his gift for gab, and his courageous son sets out to restore his former talents - (Baker & Taylor)




Publishers Weekly Reviews
Following the unprecedented controversy generated by The Satanic Verses , Rushdie offers as eloquent a defense of art as any Renaissance treatise. Supposedly begun as a bedtime story for Rushdie's son, Haroun concerns a supremely talented storyteller named Rashid whose wife is lured away by the same saturnine neighbor who poisons Rashid's son Haroun's thoughts. ``What's the use of stories that aren't even true?'' Haroun demands, parroting the neighbor and thus unintentionally paralyzing Rashid's imagination. The clocks freeze: time literally stops when the ability to narrate its passing is lost. Repentant, Haroun quests through a fantastic realm in order to restore his father's gift for storytelling. Saturated with the hyperreal color of such classic fantasies as the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland , Rushdie's fabulous landscape operates by P2C2Es (Processes Too Complicated To Explain), features a court where all the attendant Pages are numbered, and unfurls a riotous display of verbal pranks (one defiant character chants ``You can chop suey, but / You can't chop me!''; elsewhere, from another character: `` `Gogogol,' he gurgled. `` `Kafkafka,' he coughed''). But although the pyrotechnics here are entertaining in and of themselves, the irresistible force of the novel rests in Rushdie's wholehearted embrace of the fable--its form as well as its significance. It's almost as if Rushdie has invented a new form, the meta-fable. Rather than retreating under the famous death threats, Rushdie reiterates the importance of literature, stressing not just the good of stories ``that aren't even true'' but persuading us that these stories convey the truth. As Haroun realizes, ``He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.'' (Jan.) Copyright 1990 Cahners Business Information.

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The spirit catches you and you fall down - Anne Fadiman

The spirit catches you and you fall down: a Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures - Fadiman, Anne

Summary: A study in the collision between Western medicine and the beliefs of a traditional culture focuses on a hospitalized child of Laotian immigrants, members of the Hmong tribe, whose belief that illness is a spiritual matter came into conflict with doctors' methods. - (Baker & Taylor)


Booklist Reviews
The Lee family had suffered much in Laos and Thailand before coming to the U.S. and settling in Merced, California, among an already large Hmong population. Fadiman explores relations between young Lia Lee, her parents, and various physicians. She brings Hmong culture vividly to life and shows how naturally misunderstandings arise when American health-care providers deal with Hmong patients and their families. For example, the Hmong feel that soul strings must be tied around parts of the body when the individual is endangered; American nurses understandably but insensitively cut off these dirty ties. Fadiman's brief history of the Hmong also explains Lia's parents' desire to be independent and in charge, in the process filling a gap in many a reader's knowledge. Her book has a scope much broader than that of a medical case history, and it could well spark discussion of such questions as whether an immigrant lacks intelligence if she cannot express herself quickly and clearly in English and whether a foreign culture is always inferior. ((Reviewed September 15, 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews

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Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery

Anne of Green Gables - Montgomery, L.M.


Summary: By mistake, Anne, an eleven-year-old orphan, is sent to live with a lonely, middle-aged brother and sister on a farm on Prince Edward Island and proceeds to make an indelible impression on everyone.



Review
When Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables, Prince Edward Island, send for a boy orphan to help them out at the farm, they are in no way prepared for the error that will change their lives. The mistake takes the shape of Anne Shirley, a redheaded 11-year-old girl who can talk anyone under the table. Fortunately, her sunny nature and quirky imagination quickly win over her reluctant foster parents. Anne's feisty spirit soon draws many friends--and much trouble--her way. Not a day goes by without some melodramatic new episode in the tragicomedy of her life. Early on, Anne declares her eternal antipathy for Gilbert Blythe, a classmate who commits the ultimate sin of mocking her hair color. Later, she accidentally dyes that same cursed hair green. Another time, in her haste to impress a new neighbor, she bakes a cake with liniment instead of vanilla. Lucy Maud Montgomery's series of books about Anne have remained classics since the early 20th century. Her portrayal of this feminine yet independent spirit has given generations of girls a strong female role model, while offering a taste of another, milder time in history. --Emilie Coulter

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