Heads up, mystery lovers. There's a new crime writer in town, and her name is Marta Stephens.
Stephens' debut novel, Silenced Cry, is supremely addictive, propelling readers into the action from page one and corkscrewing through a wild ride of corruption, abuse, and villainy.
When Detective Sam Harper's partner, Frank Gillies, gets a peculiar tip about a drug-related suspect holed up in a local bar, they hurry to apprehend him. The bust goes terribly wrong, and in one heart-pounding moment awash with bizarre twists, the suspect and Gillies end up dead in a rain-soaked alley.
Riddled with guilt and facing an increasing number of unanswered questions about Gillies' past, Sam tries to move forward, but becomes exasperated when he's placed with a new partner who hails from a corrupt precinct. In spite of their rocky start, Harper and Mann learn to tolerate each other. Their first case calls them to a construction site to investigate remains found in a sealed up wall. Horrified, they discover the remains belong to that of a baby girl killed when she was only days old.
The cold case consumes Harper, who digs into the past with persistence and unparalleled drive. Strange connections with his and Gillies' past pop up. Walt Harper, Sam's father and an ex-cop familiar with the suspects, grows distant and secretive.
What is Walt hiding from his son? And could it possibly relate to Sam's partner's death? The answers lie embedded in a complex maze that will shock and satisfy the most assiduous crime mystery buff.
Stephens writes with a consummate skill. She's serious about her craft, and it shows. Tight suspense, perfectly chosen verbs, natural and innovative beats, and authentic dialog propel this work to a level far beyond those works commonly found on the best sellers list. Stephens' writing soars with focused intensity and her characters are real they hurt, they fall in love, they suffer angst and explode with anger.
Stephen's second book in the Sam Harper series promises thrills and intrigue matched only by Silenced Cry. This reviewer will be first in line for his much-anticipated copy.
Winds of Fortune
Radclyffe
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
430 Herrington Road, Johnsonville, NY 12094
9781933110936 $15.95
Cheri Rosenberg
Reviewer
If it's more than sizzling sex that you're after; more than getting intimate with three dynamic couples you'll absolutely love and admire; more than pure escapism just for the joy of it; more than character journeys that help make sense of the world; and more than a truly engaging story that makes you feel like you're home; then Winds of Fortune by Radclyffe is the book that will fuel your desire like a bonfire.
Provincetown sheriff Reese Conlon is back from serving as a marine in the War on Terror and is a little more than shell-shocked. Her partner, Dr. Tory King, is grateful to have her back even if they both have to figure out how to cope in the aftermath of Reese's tour of duty. Police Officer Bri Parker and her partner Carolyn are as tight and adorable together as ever. And the new kids on the block, Tory's new associate, Dr. Nita Burgoyne and construction company owner Deo Camara will blow you away.
Deo is a player who can have any woman she wants except Nita. Watching them dance around courtship as each woman discards her baggage one layer at a time before hopefully making the ultimate sacrifice, is truly something to see, and is more than reason enough to read Winds of Fortune. But for me, the real reason to read anything written by Radclyffe is way deeper than girl gets girl. I marvel at how deeply devoted these women are to each other; how much they care; and how truly protective and supportive they are for their chosen family. It would make anyone, gay or straight, long for such profound love and commitment in their life. Radclyffe shows how one's gender has nothing to do with it, and that being human and needing love to survive does.
Winds of Fortune is the fifth novel in the Provincetown series and it's a wonder how Radclyffe can write so many sex scenes, so many novels in each of her series, and still keep it hot, fresh and so alive that the scenes radiate off the page and you can't wait for the next date. Find out how Reese, Tory, Bri, Carolyn, Deo and Nita weather the storm. Do not miss Winds of Fortune to catch up with some of your favorite characters, who feel more like friends than fiction. Experience women who love women in every sense of the word in an affirming and uplifting manor that will warm your heart. Radclyffe delivers this and more. For a fast-paced, erotic romance that will stimulate every nerve in your body, then Winds of Fortune is for you.
Evacuation Plan: A Novel from the Hospice
Joe M. O'Connell
Dalton Publishing
P.O. Box 242, Austin, Texas 78767
9780974070384 $13.95
Dawn M. Papuga
Reviewer
Death isn't usually the focus of contemporary novels. It's dark, it's uncomfortable, and it doesn't typically inspire the warm and fuzzy feeling that mass market readers seem to require for beach reading selections. Death forces readers to confront their own shortcomings, failures, and emotions. But while death may be a topic most authors avoid directly, it plays a major role in most story lines. There are no murder mysteries without death. Some of the most beloved romances include characters forced to endure the world once the love of their life passes on. Epic journeys are often instigated by the death of a revered individual. What, then, frightens authors and audiences so much about dealing with death directly?
Joe M. O'Connell tackles the culture of death in his debut novel Evacuation Plan: A Novel from the Hospice. Matt, a wayward filmmaker determined to find the fodder for his screenplay, spends time with the patients, staff and family members of a local hospice and gets more than he bargained for. Through each character's revelations, Matt inches his way closer to the issue that drove him to write the screenplay in the first place - his unresolved issues with his father's death, and his abandonment by his mother. Ultimately, Matt realizes that the examination of death requires the examination of life as well. With the passing of his favorite patient, Mr. Wright, Matt comes to understand that forgiveness is as life changing as any cure.
O'Connell's approach to story telling is reminiscent of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or Boccaccio's Decameron. While Matt plays the host, the stories that each individual shares provide snapshots of different cultures and socioeconomic classes, and illustrates how death effects everyone regardless of wealth, gender, education, or age. In an age where voyeuristic appetites are catered to with Reality TV, O'Connell shares a glimpse of how tragedy effects everyone, and how dealing with death is as important for the grieving as it is for the dying.
Each vignette has a unique flavor and is written in that specific character's voice, leaving no question that each story is distinctly one character's experience. Matt's own journey throughout the book, however, creeps through the supporting narrative until the inklings that astute readers develop in chapter one about Matt's true motivations come to fruition. The most impressive accomplishment of Evacuation Plan is that the structure of the novel and O'Connell's vivid imagery encourage readers to visualize the entire narrative as a film even as Matt is scrounging to develop his own screen play.
Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good
Rosanne Klass
Odyssey
9789622177864 $19.95
Phyllis Chesler
Reviewer
The history of Afghanistan, once known as the "crossroads of the world," is riven with brutal invasions and world abandonment. Barbarism, slavery, ruthlessness, and disease existed side by side with the country's enormous physical beauty and the elaborate, formalized hospitality of its people. Conquerors razed Afghanistan's extraordinary ancient cities and exquisite court palaces - Herat, Ghazni, and Balkh. Genghis Khan, and later Tamerlane, slaughtered significant portions of the Afghan population and returned to the country to conduct raids on the survivors, leaving precious little in the way of art or architecture. Alexander the Great also conquered Afghanistan on his way to India, though his soldiers tended to leave behind descendants rather than smoldering ruins.
Most Afghan kings were brutal to their own people, who were, after all, a permanently armed male population, always ready to fight for village, tribe, or warlord against central governments, including those of native kings and would-be conquerors. Even the Victorian-era British learned that Afghanistan could not be tamed; so, too, did the Soviet Union. America's intervention in Afghanistan, though based not on colonialism or aggression but rather on justified political goals, has failed in its own ways.
Yet despite the continued dangers of terrorism and political chaos, the land continues to attract Western traders, travelers, teachers, and do-gooders, with its real and imagined nobility, its charming hospitality, and its wondrous geographical beauty. It has also attracted its share of writers. Rudyard Kipling conveys the indigenous nature of Afghan barbarism (along with the indigenous foolishness of Westerners in search of gold and glory) in his story "The Man Who Would Be King." In 2002, an intrepid Scotsman, Rory Stewart, published an account of his extraordinary walking trip through Afghanistan, The Places in Between. The next year saw the appearance of Norwegian author Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul, which describes her life with an Afghan family after the fall of the Taliban. And in 2007, Deborah Rodriguez published Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil, her memoir of teaching Afghan women the art of hairdressing.
Now comes a reissued edition of an extraordinary gem of a book: Rosanne Klass's Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good. Klass first published the book in 1964, and she has added a new afterword. Hers is a world-class travel memoir that conjures all of the heart-stopping beauty that called out to me when I first traveled to Afghanistan in the early 1960s. Klass went there with her American husband in the 1950s to teach English in a school for men and boys from remote villages. It was the first school of its kind, and Klass was the first woman to teach male students in the country. As an "uncovered" woman - that is, one not wearing a burka - she handled the men's inevitable fear and hostility with patience and grace. Ultimately, she befriended both her students and the recalcitrant mullahs who also taught at the school.
Klass returned to Afghanistan in the 1960s as a journalist. Later, after the Soviet invasion, she founded the Afghanistan Relief Committee, which provided medical and other humanitarian aid to victims inside the war-torn country. Her home in New York City became a first stop for her many Afghan friends and former students who were now ambassadors, cabinet ministers, or in exile. In the 1980s, Klass directed the Afghanistan Information Center at Freedom House, a major source of human-rights information for the American and international media.
The beauty of Klass's writing recreates a shimmering and more hopeful time. Klass preserves for us in words, and with reverence, the Afghan people's history and customs (the arts of long conversations and of reciting poetry by heart, for instance), as well as holidays, palaces, fortresses, precious artifacts, and the non-Muslim religious wonders - like the great Buddhas of Bamyan, destroyed by the Taliban - that have almost all disappeared from this seemingly cursed land. Such epic destruction has happened here before. Through Klass, I can once again see the kuchi nomads "impassively" passing through Kabul, with their long line of "shaggy Bactrian camels . . . the women walked proudly besides them - unveiled, vivid, dressed in black and scarlet, and decked with silver bangles. In the city, where purdah sent local women fluttering shyly from attention, the proud indifference of these handsome Kuchi women seemed imperious."
Klass also renders the country's geography: the towering mountains, the steep, winding roads, the torrential rivers, the Edenic valleys and forests - as well as the incredible flowers and brilliant gardens that were so much a part of the terrain, at least back then. She understands the hold that this landscape can exert upon a human being.
Klass's descriptions also bring back to life the din and smells of the Kabul bazaars, fraught with clutter and exquisite finds. Through her, I can reenter the neighborhoods where I once lived or visited - Jaidi Maiwand, Shari-Nau, Carta Kia - and the nearby winter and summer villas and gardens in Jalalabad, Itstalif, and Paghman. She describes Da Afghanan, a lesser bazaar, as "an old Curiosity Shop of the world" in which "these heaps of battered necessities were crowned with wild, gaudy jewels: a gilded French telephone or a sheaf of lacquered Uzbeck spoons; a volume of Sir Walter Scott, an exquisitely molded Greek coin turned up by some plow. . . . Once I found an old mortarboard cap from Oxford University and could only wonder what disillusion had banished it to lie amid a scattering of old crockery in a dark corner. It seemed as though, from the Universe of Objects, the crippled, the lame, the halt and the blind had all found their way here to await the day when someone might possibly look upon them again and find them good."
The Land of the High Flags is many books: it is a thumbnail history of Afghanistan; a psychological and political analysis of its most powerful kings (Abdur Rahman, Habibullah, Amanullah); a list of its most important native literary sons; a travel guide to its cities, villages, and countryside, replete with personal and professional photos; an almost satirical analysis of the social pecking order; and the story of a country trying to enter the modern era while being brutally beaten down. Above all, it is a story about Klass's relationship with individual Afghans and with the Afghan people as a whole. She renders a particularly touching portrait of Gul Baz Khan, her colonial-era "house-man" - something like a personal concierge or butler. Often inscrutable, comically manipulative, industrious, and proud, he ruled Klass's heart and household with consummate deference and skill.
A few quibbles. Klass cannot tell us very much about Afghan women. Their absence haunts her pages, where they appear only briefly, just turning a corner, heard on the other side of a high wall, shrouded in burkas or chadaris. The portrait she paints of her male Afghan students, therefore, is also incomplete. She portrays them as bashful, innocent, noble, and good-hearted, people who, even when treated sadistically by tyrannical teachers and laid low by poverty, illness, and early death, remain stoic and uncomplaining. Yet many of these seemingly charming, tender boys are likely cruel toward their wives - and they probably have more than one, as revealed in books like Edward Hunter's The Past Present, and confirmed by my own acquaintance, in Kabul, with women living in purdah and in polygamous marriages. However open-minded the boys may be about foreign women, their views about their "own" women are more subject to tradition. Even nearly half a century later, in The Bookseller of Kabul, author Seierstad describes being befriended by and invited to live with a bookseller, a man with a Western intellectual background who nevertheless was a brutal tyrant to the women of his family. Seierstad's depiction of his behavior has led to a lawsuit as well as a published rebuttal.
These gaps notwithstanding, the beauty of Klass's book both uplifts and consoles. I will leave the last word to her, as she describes a long trip outside Kabul: "You must live in a dry land to know what a garden is. The very word paradise comes from the Persian word for 'garden,' and Eden must have been much like the valley of Panjsher: an island of sunlit greenness and coolness and flowing water; that is what Genesis says: that Eden had trees and a river. It is a definition. Those who described this must have known waterless plains . . . where there is no sustenance but what can be wrenched from the earth by endless labor and unrelenting struggle. They knew what . . . I could here begin to comprehend: the terror of Adam and Eve, driven from such a world as this green valley out onto the sun-blanched rocky earth which they had hardly glimpsed, and never heeded, beyond the leafy edges of their paradise; and forbidden to return."
Phyllis Chesler is Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at the City University of New York. She has lived in Kabul, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, and is the author of 13 books, including Women and Madness, The Death of Feminism, and The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It.
What, a rabbi with a family more dysfunctional than her congregation? This is definitely a fiction story.
Meet bird watcher Aviva Cohen. She is a twice divorced, mid-50 year old rabbi who gave up a cushy job as an assistant rabbi in a large suburban Philadelphia synagogue for a pulpit in a small congregation located in the fictional southern New Jersey town of Walford, which is located somewhere near the real upscale communities of Cherry Hill, Moorestown, and Medford.
Rabbi Cohen leads a crazy life. In addition to her rabbinic duties, she must cope with her much older sister's constant complaining about their mother's unwillingness to move from Boston to Florida, and her daughter, Trudy's, lesbian relationship with Sherry. Trudy and Sherry share supervision for Sherry's son, Josh, who suffers from ADHD, Asperger's syndrome, hyperlexia, PDD, "and who knows what else." Her life is further complicated when one of her ex-husbands, lawyer Steve Goldfarb, comes back into her life with his resent appointment to the position of temporary Director of Public Safety of Walford.
Rabbi Cohen's adventure begins the week before Chanukah, which happens to fall early that year (the night of November 29th). The Phillips family asks her to officiate at the funeral of the elderly "self-made millionaire, builder, and land rapist," William Phillips, a man she never met, and whose only possible connection to her is the fact that he donated the land on which her synagogue stands. She discovers that he is despised by everyone she consults, including her rabbinical colleagues, and his ex-wives.
The day following the funeral, Madison Phillips, one of William's daughters, reveals to the rabbi that he did not die of a heart attack, but rather, she is the cause of her father's death. She alludes to her involvement in a robbery at the order of an undisclosed party and a subsequent attempt to extort money from her father. Madison is too scared to reveal more and leaves in a dreadful state. The next day, before the rabbi is able to follow up, Madison is found dead, and the local police rule the death a suicide.
Rabbi Aviva narrates a first person account of how she reinvents herself as a detective (could the reason be the rumored malpractice suit against her by the Phillips family over Madison's death), and how she spends the eight days of Chanukah sleuthing around Madison's college, interviewing her Wiccan friends, and reviewing closed circuit video tapes in order to convince the police that the two deaths are actually murders. In the process she becomes a target herself. Though there is evidence that supports many possible suspects, the true perpetrator is made known in a surprise ending.
In Chanukah Guilt, Schneider succeeds in blending the complex life of a congregational spiritual leader with that of first-rate detective, family member, confidant, friend, human being and even yenta (nosy busybody).
Albert Einstein: The Persistent Illusion of Transience
Edited By Ze'ev Rosenkranz & Barbara Wolff
The Hebrew University Magnes Press
P.O. Box 39099, Jerusalem, 91030, Israel
9789654933254 $61.00 www.magnespress.co.il +972-2-658-6660
S.J. Gates, Jr.
Reviewer
Ze'ev Rosenkranz is Editor at The Einstein Papers Project at The California Institute of Technology. Historian and author of numerous scholarly and popular publications on Albert Einstein. Past Curator at the Albert Einstein Archives in Jerusalem.
Since the middle of the 1990's Barbara Wolff has worked for the Albert Einstein Archives.
During the summer of 2005, "Uncle'' Albert Einstein Einstein accompanied me around the world and then some in about thirty-four days.
The year 2005 was declared the Einstein World Year of Physics. Though I had first learned of this the previous year while in South Africa, I had thought it would have little connection to me. I was completely wrong. Shortly after I gave the final plenary address to the 2005 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science I realized this. By the end of the year, I had given thirty-six presentations on "Uncle Albert'' on six continents. To make these, I had acquired and read a dozen books on Albert Einstein.
That summer, I circumnavigated the globe in a single trip for the first time.
By a quirk of fate, I had acquired a draft copy of "Einstein: His Life and Universe'' by Walter Isaacson since I had agreed to review it, looking for issues in science (Walter though not a scientist did an amazing job) and other aspects of the book in preparation. So the manuscript was my constant companion on many long hours of riding in various airplanes and on the ground in several cities (perhaps most memorably Casablanca and Singapore) around the globe. This is how my comment came to be included on the dust cover of Walter's book.
Thus, when I read of "Albert Einstein: The Persistent Illusion of Transience,'' I had a wealth of memories from other works that were in the background.
It is my opinion that "Illusion'' possesses the quality of a far, far more intimate presentation of the remarkable life of one of the most iconic individuals of the twentieth century. Where other books 'feel' like those written by a close and extremely knowledgeable neighbor of Albert Einstein, this book 'feels' as though it could have been written by his life-long butler (had such an individual existed).
The numerous photographs, some familiar to me and others not, add a dimension to making Dr. Einstein almost a corporal presence as I read the book. Though most of the stories were previously known to me, the presence of his image sprinkled throughout the book - showing him as he progressed through his life - lend direct evidence of his having been a living, breathing person and a continuing messenger causing us to reflect on our own aspirations, foibles and humanity. Many of the previous works I have read bring the reader closer to the facts of his life.
However, the more or less constant stream of his images in this book quite heightens one's engagement with him, his life and ideas. Many of the pictures are simply arresting while forcing the reader to stop and look upon Einstein's face or those of the many companions seen around him. For example, I had never before taken notice of the very slight resemblance between Einstein's mother, Pauline, and his first wife, Mileva.
Another feature for which I was unprepared was to feel the impact of seeing letters written by him which bring with them an added level of intimacy not ordinarily encountered in a book. As a theoretical physicist, there was a particular thrill to seeing equations, I know so well, written as he presented them. As I have often commented to the public in many addresses, "mathematics is a sensory organ for the theoretical physicist,'' and the presentation of his particular set of visions as handwritten (not the usual type-set seen in textbooks) brings home powerfully the titanic struggle whose triumph these represent. A complete menu of his scientific life is presented for the reader.
The presence of his handwritten notes, whether in German or English, will, I believe, for many readers add to the enjoyment of this book. Of course, these written elements are not restricted solely to mathematical "scores'' that for physicists are as moving as any to a great musical composer.
There are many letters, notes and documents that describe the arc of his life outside of his scientific pursuits.
One of the most impressive things to me about Albert Einstein was his absolute commitment to use his preternatural fame to do good in the world as he judged himself able to do. This, as many have noted, sharply contrasts with his distant personal relations, though by all accounts he was loving father - but a wayward husband.
For anyone familiar with Albert Einstein, one of the most affecting parts of his life was the evolution of his engagement of his Jewish heritage and identity. This is all on display. The persecution of Jewish citizens by the forces of Nazism is rendered with a stark immediacy when one sees the urgent appeal Einstein makes to save a single life. His emotional and intellectual transformation under the impact of the Holocaust is here for the reader to see. Of course, the familiar story of how he determined not to become the person to lead an infant state of Israel is accompanied by a picture with the leader, David Ben- Gurion. Finally, the special place he held for the Hebrew University can be seen illustrated for any engaged reader.
The section on Einstein in America has all the lights of a Hollywood-produced jazz-accompanied spectacular. We see the world traveller and astute side of him as he becomes if not an ordinary American, certainly an American. We ride along with him as he experiences what would be the first of many an "Einstein Craze." His travels from east to west and back can be found. The famous "sockless picture" contrasts with a copy of his certificate of naturalization to become a U.S. citizen. And of course, we see his initial participation that launches the Manhattan Project and his determined effort to contain the terrible progeny of a new generation of weapons of mass destruction - nuclear bombs - that emerges as the result.
As an African-American I was particularly affected by seeing the section of the book that highlights Albert Einstein's engagement with people of color in his adopted homeland as they strove to fight what he called America's "worst disease'' - racism. This is an aspect of his life that has largely been overlooked, though recently, in "Einstein On Race & Racism'' " by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, one can perhaps begin to see the lifting of the veil over this part of Albert Einstein's activities. This book includes a picture of Einstein with Horace Mann Bond (father of civil rights leader Julian Bond) on the occasion of the former's visit to Lincoln University in 1946. This happened during a period Einstein when rarely accepted invitations to speak on college and university campuses.
Einstein's engagement with music, children and indeed life itself is vividly illustrated in words and pictures. It is perhaps most fitting that the penultimate image of Einstein within the pages we see in this book is a very famous one - Einstein with his tongue stuck out and bright eyes sharing with us all the joy of a life well, but not perfectly spent. The final picture shows my "uncle'' with what I believe is a slight smile of satisfaction and daring us all to embrace our common humanity as did he.
I highly recommend this book. It has become an extremely prized part of my personal 'Einstein library.'
Coyota
Martha Egan
Papalote Press
P.O. Box 32058, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87594
9780975588130 $11.95 888-229-7109
Connie Gotsch
Reviewer
Looking for a thriller to read on a plane, or in a warm room on a winter day? Check out Coyota by Santa Fe, New Mexico author Martha Egan, published by Paplote Press. An importer of goods from South America, Ms. Egan uses her professional experience to populate this piece of crime fiction with hunters and hunted a bit different than the normal hapless women pursued by serial killers and ignored by hard-boiled cops.
Egan offers a cast of well-rounded, policemen, crooks, friends, lovers, and bystanders with believable feelings. Her heroine Nena Hererra-Casey, called Coyota by her family, is smart, quick-witted and able to take care of herself, drawing on support from relatives from Albuquerque to Mexico, and an Apache grandmother who taught her to watch, observe, and react fast, like the coyote.
When Nena overhears a nasty conversation in a U.S. Customs Office, one of her students dies in mysterious plane crash, and slimy characters start harassing her, she pulls together the strength of her roots and branches to cope.
The result is a lively adventure that sends her jogging down country roads, selling imported sweaters in a street market, and driving freeways in Mexico with a terrified Ugly American boyfriend beside her. A horrible dream that almost turns real ends the tale in gunfire.
The author paces Coyota's action with vivid descriptions of Mexican New Year, pretty little resort towns, the landscape around Albuquerque, and Hispanic family traditions.
For comic relief, she lets Nena's boyfriend complain because Mexico doesn't work like the United States. Nena deals with that in a manner sure to set you laughing.
Coyota is definitely a lively and quirky read. Egan's clear, simple style keeps the story moving. The characters and adventures she offers keep the story from becoming just another suspense novel about a woman who knows too much for some crook's taste, so he plans her demise.
Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France
Lucy Moore
HarperCollins
10 E. 53rd St., New York, NY 10022
9780060825263 $27.95 www.harpercollins.com 212-207-7000
Rose Rankin
Reviewer
As one of the pivotal events in modern history, the French Revolution has been studied and interpreted in myriad ways. Lucy Moore explores how the revolutionary period affected women - tracing the stories of six women from vastly different backgrounds through their experiences searching for freedom and equality. The result is a vibrant and moving contribution to the fields of French and women's history.
Liberty consists of rotating biographical snapshots from the outbreak of the revolution in 1789 to Napoleon's consolidation of power as emperor in 1804. The protagonists originated in all social classes: Germaine de Stael, Theresia Cabarrus, and Juliette Recamier were born into wealth and nobility; Manon Roland came from a solidly middle-class background; and Pauline Leon and Theroigne de Mericourt were lower-class women from the poor masses of society. Moore follows these women from the heady, excited days of the early revolution, through the fear and horror of the Reign of Terror, to the cynical hedonism of the Directory period, as they struggled to contribute to France's re-creation and enjoy the rights their male counterparts so passionately demanded.
This book captures in exquisite detail the political activities, machinations, and aspirations of the six women and any public reaction to them, which ranged from slander and humiliation, in the case of Theroigne de Mericourt, to adulation and fame, for Theresia Cabarrus. While some of these women crossed paths or were friends, the differences in their experiences showed the range of impacts the revolution had upon women. Germaine de Stael ran a famous salon and was eventually exiled for her influential "meddling;" Pauline Leon rioted in the streets with other Parisian market women until their exclusion from political activity, when she disappeared into the anonymity of housewifery. Manon Roland guided her weak husband through his time as a government minister and eventually lost her life to her political enemies in the Terror, while Theresia Cabarrus used her influence with Jean-Lambert Tallien to save victims from the guillotine and bring Robespierre's murderous purges to an end. Former courtesan Theroigne de Mericourt searched for France's and her own personal rebirth through the revolution, and she was driven to madness when it failed to bring her the rights for which she ardently campaigned. Only Juliette Recamier remained out of the revolutionary limelight until the late Directory period, when she replaced Theresia Cabarrus as the most popular woman in France. Her modesty and virtue represented the qualities France had lost after the ghastly pain and then self-indulgence that characterized the revolutionary period. Her story is an apotheosis of the goodness that an exhausted nation hoped to find, after so much turmoil, as it allowed an emperor to reverse the quest for liberty.
One of the great ironies of the French Revolution was that women were instrumental in its creation, but their removal from the public sphere was one of its central goals. Moore explains, "The revolution became a crusading instead of a destructive force: it would replace the unnatural world of boudoir politics with virtue - a government by men alone, whose intrinsic qualities (so the argument went) made them the natural leaders of society." Eventually this desire to rid the political world of women led to their marginalization, regardless of their class, education, or contributions. The only way in which women were treated equally was in death, as so many women, including Manon Roland, were imprisoned and executed for the same "crimes" as men during the Terror.
Although Moore's conclusion that the revolution did little to bring liberty to women is an unhappy reality, this book is not an invective or shrill condemnation. Rather, it is a vividly detailed account of a tumultuous and often confusing episode in European history, based on solid research and balanced ideas. The social cross-section represented by these six women provides the reader with a deepened understanding of the revolution's effect on women across social and economic boundaries. Too often lower-class women are left out of historical analyses because they left few writings behind. But Moore's exhaustive research of men's accounts of the market women permits a glimpse into the lives of this group that is usually difficult to document. Overall, her explorations of these six women's hopes and aspirations, and the results they found at the end of their revolutionary journeys, lends a touching realism to the French Revolution while thoroughly educating the reader in the motivations, events, and consequences of this epic historical moment for the women who lived through it.
Pariah Tales
Jack Phillips Lowe
Onzo Imprints
Box 39, Addison, IL, 60101
No ISBN $3.00, 76 pp.
Asst. Prof. Mark Spitzer, Reviewer
www.sptzr.net
Jack Phillips Lowe's Pariah Tales is a ten-story collection based on the theme of being a loner and/or being lonely. Whereas some of the characters lean more toward pariahtude than others, though, what interested me the most were the stories that involved threads of the supernatural. For example, "The Buried Moon" is about a not very likeable tomb-raiding professor who busts into the treasure chamber of a pyramid only to get laughed at and called names by a long gone ruler of Egypt . This was an ending I didn't expect, and another thing I didn't expect was a stark-naked Bo Derek perched on the hood of car cruising down the highway in a story called "The Wisher," in which this guy picks up a hitchhiker with the power of making the impossible possible. A strange exchange takes place and the story continues after it quits in a semi-Twilight Zone kind of way.
Lowe is an innovator and he isn't afraid to experiment with new forms of fiction. One story is told totally in an answering machine monologue (complete with dates and times and subliminal info gleaned from extrapolation) and another is a semi-absurd footnoted translation from a time capsule in which people in the future are advised to basically thaw out a guy named Spazz (who used to be "a high school dropout" and "beer sponge"), then
Get together a group of your smartest young people, guys and girls, of all races. Sit Spazz down in front of them, and have them ask him a bunch of questions about our time. The questions should be about stuff like education and morality, gender and race relations, children and family, and war and peace. If he starts to babble on about how great a wide receiver he was in high school or about the time he almost met Seka, smack him. Otherwise, you'll be bored as hell.
Readers are then advised to take careful not of Spazz's responses, then "smash in his head with big rocks," and do the exact opposite of everything he ever said.
Then there's the story of Jim Neuland, who isn't as much of a pariah as he is forsaken by society, or, perhaps, such a loser he can't even find asylum in church. He goes home (when everyone knows you can't go home), gets run off of sacred ground by a crotchety old nun, then gets the door slammed in his face by an oldster he thought would remember him. Because this guy is a nobody! Yep, a suicide waiting to happen.
Somehow, however, we keep reading on, rather than slitting our wrists. And when we do identify with a character, some bitch throws tea in our face. But then we meet a pissy curmudgeon with a stupid wife to whom he admits his infidelity while they are stalled in traffic, and she calls him on his years of bullshit just in time for sabotage to kick in because the geezer shorted two Mexican kids for washing his car. In the end, poetic justice is served. But that doesn't mean that all the stories in this collection end so satisfactorily - which is one of the charming features of this work. Especially in an age when people are tired of the crowd-pleasing coda. Because let's face it, darkness is also in demand.
Anyway, the stories are colorful and imaginative, sometimes realistic but sometimes more along the lines of psilocybin. As a narrator, Lowe still has a lot of energy and he engages his audience, sometimes even slaps us up. And we like it. We want more - from one extreme to the other! Because we all have a bit of pariah in us - a glimmer glizzened by our author, who plays on our weaknesses just as much as our strengths. The weakness, however, are always a lot easier to see, and much more fun to read about. Especially when the subject is us, but reflected in the mirror of somebody else.
To order a copy, send a check for $3 payable to J.P. Lowe at Box 39, Addison, IL, 60101.
Afrika's Bookshelf
Ethnic Scrapbooking
Lisa Sanford
LJS Publishing, LLC
9780978661001 $24.99 www.ethincscrapbooking.com
ETHNIC SCRAPBOOKING is the first culturally inspired book that offers ways to live a lifestyle of cultural awareness and preservation. This thick and juicy book contains over 100 full color images along with just as many "out of the box" tips, tricks and techniques to help scrapbookers of all skill levels put a new perspective into their layouts. This collection of ideas covers over 40 countries and cultures including the United States.
Each Chapter shows readers how to make cultural connections to their photographs, memories and activities. ETHNIC SCRAPBOOKING describes the process of creating unique layouts and memory albums with cultural flair using all types of scrapbooking supplies and tools. The book features Lisa's guiding philosophies on ETHNIC SCRAPBOOKING and offers a fresh new perspective on cultural nuances and traditions that make it an invaluable addition to any family photo historian's library. ETHNIC SCRAPBOOKING is an innovative approach to preserving memories and is a rich source of ideas.
Ethnic Scrapbooking is an excellent book and model for all scrapbookers. The layout and cover were both outstanding. I was totally impressed with contents within ETHNIC SCRAPBOOKING. I believe that Ms. Sanford has done an outstanding job putting together such a wonderful dedication for her sister, Candace, and I also think that it demonstrates how proud Ms. Sanford is of her ancestry, values and beliefs. All of this is clearly displayed in her book, ETHNIC SCRPABOOKING. This is a book that indeed will inspire and motivate all scrapbookers or aspiring visual artists/fine artists, or even professional artists.
I only wish that there were more contents for her book, ETHNIC SCRAPBOOKING. All in all, Ms. Sanford has compelled a remarkable journey and book!! Congratulations, Ms. Sanford.
Rock & Fire: Love Poetry from the Core
Marc Lacy
AVO Publishing
9780974971285 $14.00 www.marclacy.com
Rock and Fire - Love Poetry from the Core offers mature, realistic, fantasy, blunt, and hard-line scribes dealing with love in all shapes, forms, and fashions. This edgy, comprehensive lyrical package (for grown folks only) covers the spiritual, emotional, romantic, physical, and mental aspects of love. As human beings, during our nonstop effort to evolve toward a higher degree of existing, we all go through several phases where we expose ourselves to different elements. In our valiant attempt to achieve, realize, and deliver this thing called love ; love itself breaks us down and often has us indirectly touching the outer limits of every facet of the subject as they pertain to happiness, anger, arousal, and despair. Love is real. It sometimes prompts us to engage in real things whether good, bad, or ugly. In order to grow, we have to acknowledge each event as it materializes into its fullest effect. Whether we want to attest to it or not, every situation encountered dealing with love gives all the signs and/or symbols we need in order to grow. Love, or what we think is love, can enter us into challenging situations in which we have no business being, but we still have to use the experience as a learning tool in order to advance in life. Some of us confuse love with lust.
Many of us strongly know the difference and still allow the lusting to run its course. After our mind becomes clear again, we tend to ask for forgiveness and assume that our contrition in asking for it will yield coverage until of course the next spell of temptation prompts lusting again. In encountering love issues, it matters not whether we re saved, lost, found, anointed, or appointed...as long as we live, love will expose itself and expose us at one point in time or another. But, spiritual connectivity is the ultimate factor in coping with love s perils. As love rubs, punches, bites, and stimulates, it has a track record of mastering us as we attempt to master it. Our saving grace is us having faith to hold on as God works, continuously displaying mercy upon us as we progress. Rock and Fire promises to cast the reader deeply into compromising situations, revealing obvious and in some cases cavalier hints and clues as to the true direction of each poem. Nonetheless, pleasure, pain, happiness, and sadness are just a few of the feelings realized when rocked with the fire of the sizzling words contained within this book! Again, grown folks only!
ROCK & FIRE: Love Poetry from the Core Review
ROCK & FIRE: Love Poetry from the Core consists of 223 pages and was written by Marc Lacy. ROCK & FIRE: Love Poetry from the Core, published by AVO Publishing, is designed for grown folks and broken into five chapters which include
Chapter One The Rock;
Chapter Two The Aggregate;
Chapter Three The Concrete;
Chapter Four The Spark; and
Chapter Five The Fire
I think both the title and cover are very eye-catching and I was completely impressed with the layout. Furthermore, Marc's writing style and presentation is very unique and I applaud Marc for composing and creating a dynamic book of poetry. The poems touch on various subjects and emotions that grown folks can relate to in dealing with relationships, love or life.
Congratulations on a job well done! Five Stars Rating.
Wisdom for the Soul of Black Folk
Various Artists
Gnosophia Publishers
9780977339150 $19.95 www.wisdomforthesoul.org
An anthology of quotations by Black authors from Africa and the diaspora, organized in over 200 subject categories and in chronological order from Khemetic times to the present. The selections focus on increasing awareness, empowerment and motivation. Sources include Ptahotep, Tertullian, Ignatius Sancho, Zora Neale Hurston, Wole Soyinka, Herbie Hancock, Iyanla Vanzant, Malcolm Gladwell and reggae philosopher Bob Marley.
Wisdom for the Soul of Black Folk is an anthology that was recently released by Gnosophia Publishers. The anthology provides an excellent collection of quotations from various authors throughout the Diaspora. My personal favorites for the quotations that are within the context of the anthology are listed under the following titles where the quotations are inserted include: Imagination, Humor/Laughter, Identity, Idea/Opinion, Journey/Path, Learning, Legacy, Liberation/Liberty/Freedom, Listening, Meaning, Means, Meditation, Memory, Mind, Oneness/Unity/Wholeness, Opportunity, Partnership/Marriage, Passion, Patience, Perspective, Power, Reality, Relationship, Respect, Skill/Talent/Resource, Spirituality, Strength, Success, Value/Worth, Wealth/Prosperity, and Wisdom.
Based on all of the quotations that are provided with the context of the anthology, Wisdom for the Soul of Black Folk, it clearly shows the readers that there was a lot of research conducted. However there was only slight typo, but other than that the anthology was very well thought out.
Congratulations! Four Stars Rating.
Afrika Midnight Asha Abney
Reviewer
Bethany's Bookshelf
Fighting For Equality
Ray E. Boomhower
Indiana Historical Society
450 West Ohio Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202
9780871952530, $17.95 www.indianahistory.org
Strongly recommended for both academic and community library American History and American Biography collections, "Fighting For Equality: A Life Of May Wright Sewall" by author and historian Ray E. Boomhower is the fascinating story of a pioneer advocate for women's rights. May Wright Sewall was an accomplished educator and peace activist who worked tirelessly on behalf of rights for women in the United States and around the world. She advocated national suffrage along with her late 19th and early 20th century contemporaries such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. May Wright Sewall additionally brought national and international attention to the women's rights movement through her involvement with the American national Council of Women and the International Council of Women. She also helped establish the Girls' Classical School in Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Woman's Club, the Contemporary Club, the Art Association of Indianapolis (which was to evolve into the Indianapolis Museum of Art), and the Indianapolis Propylaium. She served as a delegate on automaker Henry Ford's failed Peace Trip in 1915, shocked her friends by releasing "Neither Dead nor Sleeping" in which she revealed her communications with her deceased husband. The book was published a few months before her death in 1920. "Fighting For Equality" is a compelling read, a welcome contribution to the growing library of information on and about the women's suffrage movement, and a fitting memorial to a complex and accomplished woman of her times.
The Great American Afghan
Elaine Rowley & Rick Mondragon
XRX Books
PO Box 1525, Sioux Falls, SD 57101
1933064129, $12.95 www.knittinguniverse.com 1-800-722-2558
Collaboratively compiled and co-edited by needlecraft experts Elaine Rowley and Rick Mondragon, "The Great American Afghan" is an instructional compilation of innovative and 'user friendly' knitting techniques involved in the making of an afghan blanket. Featuring 25 unique squares created by 25 accomplished designers, "The Great American Afghan" covers such techniques as the entrelac, cables, bobbies, applique, lace, and more. Whether a novice afghan knitter or a seasoned, experienced afghan creator, "The Great American Afghan" will prove an inspired and inspiring source of information and example. Also very highly recommended as additions to personal, professional, and community library Needlecraft instructional resource collections are three more titles in the XRX Books 'Great American Afghan Series': Great North American Afghan; Great American ran Afghan; and Great American Kids Afghan.
In "Ireland's Comfort Food & Touring Attractions", author Viki Pidegon has compiled an impressive and very nicely illustrated collection of do-it-yourself recipes for soups, stews, chowders and casseroles that she has collected from Irish chefs from Kylemore Abby, to Beleek Pottery, to the Guinness Storehouse, with informative descriptions of a variety of Ireland's tourist attractions, pubs, hotels, and castles -- each of which has some direct relevance to the culinary theme of this unique compendium of Irish culinary traditions. From Grandma Murphy's Broccoli & Blue Cheese Soup; Spicy Guinness Lamb Stew; and Seafood Chowder - Smugglers Style; to Michael & Mary's Pot Roast Pheasant; Ham & Cheese Bread Pudding; and Connemara Braised Lamb Shanks, "Ireland's Comfort Food & Touring Attractions" is a very highly recommended addition to personal and community library ethnic cookbook collections -- as well as being an inspiring supplemental resource for planning the itinerary of a trip to Ireland!
Unbreak Your Health
Alan E. Smith
Loving Healing Press
5145 Pontiac Trail, Ann Arbor, MI 48105
9781932690361, $19.95 www.loveinghealing.com
As the babyboom generation ages (as well as generations X, Y & Z, for that matter), personal health and physical fitness have become more than just fashionable -- they are recognized as fundamental to being able to enjoy life, pursue goals, and live longer. The rise in the popularity of what is described as Alternative Medicine has also taken place because of the shortcomings of traditional medicine to insure continued good health and/or speedy recovery from illness or injury. In "Unbreak Your Health: The Complete Guide To Complementary & Alternative Therapies", Alan E. Smith has compiled more than 300 entries on more than 135 alternative health subjects, providing both students of alternative medicine and non-specialist general readers with an interest in supplements and alternatives to what traditional medicine has to offer them with respect to basic health concepts. Impressively organized and presented with an alphabetized roster of therapies for the body, a section devoted to therapies for the mind; and an entire chapter of therapies applicable to the human 'spirt' or 'energy', "Unbreak Your Health" is thoroughly 'reader friendly' and accessible. Of special note are the chapters on Insurance, Alan Smith's conclusions, his recommendations, the resources list, bibliography for further reading, and a comprehensive index. "Unbreak Your Health" is very strongly recommended and fundamentally useful reading for students of Alternative Medicine, and would proof a popular addition to community library Health & Medicine reference collections.
Susan Bethany
Reviewer
Bob's Bookshelf
The Encyclopedia of Tidepools and Rocky Shores
Edited by Mark Deny and Steven Gaines
University of California Press
2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA. 94704-1012
9780520251182 $95.00 (510) 642-4562 www.ucpress.edu
"The Encyclopedia of Tidepools and Rocky Shores" is a bit pricey, but you won't find a better or more thorough guide to the Central Coast's shoreline ecosystems and their marine inhabitants.
This comprehensive 735 page volume features 512 color illustrations, 202 line drawings and 22 tables. A one-stop reference for anyone interested in the biology and ecology of the fascinating world of tidepools, there are nearly 200 wide-ranging entries written in clear language by scientists from around the world.
From abalones, barnacles and climate change through seagrasses, tides and wind, the in-depth articles in this book discuss the animals and plants that live in tidepools, the physics and chemistry of the rocky shore environment, the ecological principles of tidepools and many other interdisciplinary topics.
A one-of-a-kind guide for both laymen and professionals, "The Encyclopedia of Tidepools and Rocky Shores" is a book you'll spend hours mulling over. Julie Packard, Executive Director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, calls it, "A wonderful introduction to the hidden and fascinating world of rocky tidepools. Grab a copy and head out with your kids or students for an outdoor experience that's sure to get them hooked. From remarkable adaptations of marine algae to weird animal histories, tidepools hold amazing stories to tell. "
Trees of the California Landscape
Charles R. Hatch
University of California Press
2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94704-1012
9780520251243 $60 (510) 642-4562 www.ucpress.edu
"Trees of the California Landscape" is a brilliant photographic manual of native and ornamental trees found throughout the state. From the iconic lone cypress in Pebble Beach to the palm trees of the southland and the soaring redwoods of the north coast, trees are a defining element of California's spectacular and exceptionally diverse landscape.
This abundantly illustrated, beautifully produced, easy-to-use volume is a one-stop guide to the Golden State's trees. An essential resource for gardeners, homeowners, landscape design professionals, and anyone interested in the state's abundant flora, it provides a comprehensive photographic compendium of 107 native and 311 ornamental species.
If you need help with picking trees for an outdoor project, your questions about tree selection, planting, and design are addressed here. Pay close attention to the photos provided of each tree's mature shape, foliage and bark. There's also important information on habitat ranges, water requirements, growth rates, mature sizes and suitability for specific landscapes, so you'll wish to consult this book before heading for the tree or plant nursery.
John Muir Trail: An Essential Guide to Hiking America's Most Famous Trail
Elizabeth Wenk with Kathy Morey
Wilderness Press
1200 5th Street, Berkeley, CA 94710-1306
9780899974361 $17.95 (510) 558-1666
"John Muir Trail" is an essential guide to hiking one of America's most famous trails. Stretching 212 miles from Mt. Whitney to Yosemite Valley, the trail passes through some of the most dramatic scenery in the West.
This new 4th edition of the classic trail guide meticulously describes the entire trail from the Whitney Portal to Happy Isles in the Valley. From GPS coordinates for every trail junction, camp site, and mountain pass, to information on what you can expect to see along the trail, Wenk and Morey have covered all the essentials.
Besides maps, elevation charts and detailed trail/camp site information, this update includes side trips you can take to 17 notable peaks along the trail.
If you plan to tackle the John Muir Trail next year, it's not too early to start planning your trip. The first step is to purchase a copy of this book and read it from cover to cover!
Bob Walch
Reviewer
Buhle's Bookshelf
The Africa Books
Lonely Planet Publications
150 Linden Street, Oakland CA 94607
9781741046021, $40.00 www.lonelyplanet.com 1-800-275-8555
Very highly recommended for both school and community library reference collections, "The Africa Book: A Journey Through Every Country In The Continent" is an illustrated compendium of information about all the various countries that comprise the continent of Africa. Beginning with an informative foreword, "The Africa Book" goes on to provide an introduction to Africa, a Timeline, an 'Africa at a Glance' map, and a section on 'Great Journeys' (The Sahara, West Africa, North Africa, East Africa, Plymouth-Dakar Rally, Cape to Cairo). The individual countries are organized and presented by their geographical region: North Africa (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco); West Africa (Mauritania, Senegal, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote D'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon); Central Africa 9Equatorial Guinea, Sao tome & Principe, Gabon, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Chad, Sudan); East Africa (Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia & Somaliland, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Comoros & Mayotte, Seychelles, Madagascar, Reunion, Mauritius); Southern Africa (Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho). "The Africa Book" concludes with 'Themes of Africa' and an Index. Each individual country's entry includes statistical information on its population and size, identifies the official language, describes the landscape, provides a succinct historical summary, a description of the people, and a section called 'Marketplace'. Also very highly recommended is a similar title from Lonely Planet Publications, "The Asia Book: A Journey Through Every Country In The Continent" (9781741046014, $40.00).
Yellowstone Bears In The Wild
James C. Halfpenny
Riverbend Publishing
PO Box 5833, Helena, MT 59604
9781931832793, $29.95 www.riverbendpublishing.com 1-866-787-2363
Enhanced with a profusion of photographs taken by Michael H. Francis, "Yellowstone Bears In The Wild" is a collections of stories and information showcasing the bears whose habitat is the Yellowstone National Park. The life cycle of these fascinating creatures is covered in all aspects including the phenomena of hibernation, to hyperphagia. What these animals eat, how they mate and raise their cubs, their dealings with humans, how they relate to other animals of the Yellowstone country, the latest scientific information about grizzly bears and black bears, all this and so much more make "Yellowstone Bears In The Wild" as entertaining as it is informative -- and a very strongly recommended addition to school and community library Pets & Wildlife reference collections and supplemental reading lists.
Mapping In Michigan & The Great Lakes Region
David I. Macleod, editor
Michigan State University Press
Suite 25, Manly Miles Building
1405 South Harrison Road, East Lansing, MI 48823-5202
9780870138072, $69.95 www.msupress.msu.edu
Expertly compiled and deftly edited by David I. Macleod (Professor of History, Central Michigan University), "Mapping In Michigan & The Great Lakes Region" is a compilation of twelve studies that, taken together, illustrated the many different configurations taken by geographical, urban, and property maps of and around the Great Lakes and the state of Michigan, including changes within a single region. The sixteen learned and expert contributors reveal the history of the area's cartography and deal with such specifics as the peninsulas and freshwater seas, the history mapping this region, how the Europeans appropriated and settled these lands, social and political negotiations and conflicts, and more. Profusely illustrated throughout with reproductions of historic maps from the beginnings of regional exploration down to the present day, ""Mapping In Michigan & The Great Lakes Region" is a seminal work of meticulous and articulate scholarship which is very strongly recommended for academic library American History reference collections, as well as a personal library acquisition selection for cartography enthusiasts.
Basic Accounting: Volumes 1 & 2
Gregory R. Mostyn
Worthy & James Publishing
PO Box 362015, Milpitas, CA 95305
Vol. 1: 9780979149481, $31.95; Vol. 2: 9780979149498, $34.95 www.worthjames.com
A two volume set, "Basic Accounting: concepts, Principles, And Procedures" is a two volume set by certified public accountant Gregory R. Mostyn and designed as a complete course of instruction on all aspects and facets of accounting. Taken together, these two volumes comprise a complete academic-quality course in financial accounting. Volume 1 covers building the conceptual foundation for accounting principles and practices. Volume 2 focuses on the proper application of financial accounting principles and procedures. Impressively organized, offering a text that is thoroughly 'reader friendly', "Basic Accounting" is especially recommended as a textbook curriculum for college level Introductory Accounting courses, and would well serve the needs of business and accounting students requiring review and reinforcement of accounting basics. It is also quite appropriate and confidently recommended for non-accounting managers, small business owners, and corporate investors needing a basic familiarity with accounting principles and practices.
Willis M. Buhle
Reviewer
Burroughs' Bookshelf
Fishweirs
John M. Connaway
McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company
431-B East College Street, Granville, OH 43023
9780938896890, $74.95 www.mwpubco.com 1-800-233-8787
"Fishweirs: A World Perspective With Emphasis On The Fishweirs Of Mississippi" by John M. Connaway is a 564-page compendium of descriptive, archeological, and historical information on a form of trap used to catch fish. Called a 'Fishweir', these traps come in many forms and (accordingly to the archaeological record0 have been utilized in steams, rivers, lakes, and oceans for thousands of years. An impressive and seminal work of exhaustive, comprehensive scholarship, "Fishweirs" is organized into two main sections. 'Fishweirs in a Global and Regional Context' describes what fishweirs are, provides a global perspective into their uses and designs, and the development of fishweir law in North American waters. 'Fishweirs in Mississippi' draws a tighter focus into the use and design of fishweirs in the Mississippi from prehistory and in Native American cultures down to the present day. A third section is devoted to four appendices: an 'Annotated Bibliography: Worldwide Archaeological and Historical Source Material on Fishweirs'; 'Fishweirs Listed in or Being Nominated to the National Register of Historic Places'; 'Fishweir Questionnaire'; and 'Glossary of Selected Terms Related to Fishweirs and Mass Fish Procurement'. Enhanced further occasional illustrations and maps, as well as the inclusion of an extensive bibliography and a comprehensive index, "Fishweirs" is a unique and valued contribution that should be a part of professional and academic library reference collections.
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae
Patricia Curd, translator and essayist
University of Toronto Press
10 St. Mary Street, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4Y 2W8
9780802093257, $65.00 www.utppublishing.com 1-800-565-9523
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae: Fragments and Testimonia collects all the surviving fragments of the writings of the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (circa 500 B.C. - 428 B.C.), both in their original Greek text and modern English translation, supplemented with extensive annotation as well as five essays that ponder the philosophical and interpretive questions Anaxagoras raised. Anaxagoras himself was a friend of Pericles; his concepts would later be reflected in the works of Sophocles and Aristophanes. Among Anaxagoras' assertions were the concept that the Mind is the ordering principle of the cosmos; that everything is in everything; and that the possibilities of coming to be or passing away should be refuted. He explained solar eclipses and wrote at length about astronomical, meteorological, and biological phenomena. His philosophical doctrines led to his exile from Athens, for the transgression of impiety. A list of sources, bibliography, and general index round out this absolute "must-have" for classic Greek philosophy and college library shelves.
Churchill Goes To War
Brian Lavery
Naval Institute Press
291 Wood Road, Annapolis, MD 21402
9781591141037, $34.95 www.navalinstitute.org 1-800-233-8764
British historian Brian Lavery presents Churchill Goes To War: Winston's Wartime Journeys, an in-depth examination of not only Churchill's historic meetings with Roosevelt, Stalin, and other leaders during the course of World War II, but also the harrowing logistics and risks involved in transporting a prime minister through dangerous skies and across hostile oceans during an era of global war. Covering a time before the rise of the civilian airliner, Churchill Goes To War covers the prime minister's travels in a battleship at sea, to flights across enemy-occupied North Africa, to his crucial conferences at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945. A handful of vintage black-and-white photographs illustrate this engaging examination, accessible to lay readers and historians alike.
Reality Millionaire
Mike Peterson
Reality Media Inc.
9780976818519, $14.95 www.realitymillionaire.com 1-866-528-0560
Specifically written for the benefit of the non-specialist general reader who aspires to financial security and independence, "Reality Millionaire: Proven Tips To Retire Rich" is a particularly 'user friendly' guide providing practical strategies for getting out of debt and laying a solid fiscal foundation for retirement. Readers will learn how to stop living from paycheck to paycheck and begin to build in a financial safety net for them selves and their families. They will discover specific tactics for avoiding the financial drain of credit card interest payments. "Reality Millionaire" offers real-world tools for locating 'extra money' within current budgets. Best of all, readers will learn how to develop a wealth-building program that can be accomplished by anyone with an income. Accessible, articulate, informed and informative, "Reality Millionaire" is confidently recommended reading and will prove to be the basis for a solid program toward financial independence and security.
John Burroughs
Reviewer
Carson's Bookshelf
Ruby Rest
Tyler Oaks
Pemberton Mysteries
c/o SterlingHouse Publisher
7436 Washington Avenue, #200, Pittsburgh, PA 15218-2521
1563154021, $14.95 www.sterlinghousepublisher.com 1-888-542-2665
Tyler Oaks demonstrates a superbly gifted style as a storyteller in her debut novel "Ruby Rest", a mystery that compels the total attention of the reader from first page to last. Edda Taylor lost her lover who drowned under mysterious circumstances. This leads Edda to settle in the California community of Ruby Rest in a rundown cottage she inherited and intends to restore. The she encounters two men who seem interested in her. The first is Tace, hired to design her garden. The second is Shay who is her employer. When Edda turns her attention to exploring the history of Ruby Rest, she finds that there is a history of mysterious drownings -- and both these men had ties to the victims. Edda is confronted with having to decide if these deaths were accidental or homicidal. If the latter, is she to be the next victim! A riveting read, "Ruby Rest" is whole heartedly recommended to mystery buffs for its originality, it flair, and its suspense.
Nature Notes
Seema Chandru Keswani
Courtyard Publishing
1688 Meridan Avenue, 10th floor, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Spotlight Publicity (publicity)
610 East Delano Street, Suite 104 Tucson, AZ 85705
9780879526015, $19.95 www.awakeningintotruth.com
A London-based authority on scientific and healing disciplines, Seem Chandru Keswani has written "Nature Notes: Awakening Into Truth", the first volume of a series exploring through life experiences the fundamental laws of nature. Focusing on the human condition and how ordinary people in the course of their daily lives can become more spiritually enlightened as to their own true self, their own self worth, their own personal journey, their own personal truths. Of special note are the concluding chapters on relationships, on the 'Gift of Limitation', and on transcending duality. Articulate, learned, informed and informative, inspired and inspiring, "Nature Notes" is especially recommended and rewarding reading for students of metaphysics, spirituality, life's meaning, and the human condition.
The Cosmic War
Joseph P. Farrell
Adventures Unlimited Press
PO Box 74, Kempton, IL 60946
9781931882750, $18.95 www.adventuresunlimitedpress.com 1-815-253-6390
A fascinating and detailed study offering an iconoclastic commentary that rejects traditionally naturalist and materialist assumptions to account for the presence of the asteroid belt in our solar system, Joseph P. Farrell's "The Cosmic War: Interplanetary Warfare, Modern Physics and Ancient Texts" asserts that what is commonly attributed in the scientific community as the result of gravity driven accretions of material, the asteroid belt is in fact the remains of an exploded planet whose catastrophic demise was brought about by a Cosmic War. Drawing upon extraterrestrial artifacts, novel ideas in contemporary physics, and the texts of ancient myths, Farrell intriguingly postulates an ancient interplanetary war fought out within our solar system with weapons of horrific power and sophisticated military technology. "The Philosophy Of Rich" is a fascinating read and especially commended to the attention to alternative archeology students and non-specialist general readers with an interest in ancient legends and cosmology. Also very highly recommended and iconoclastic reading are Joseph Farrell's previous books: "The Giza Death Star"; "The Giza Death Star Deployed"; "The Giza Death Star Destroyed"; "Reich of the Black Sun; and "SS Brotherhood of the Bell".
Disciple's Guide To Ritual Magick
Frater Barrabbas
Megalithica Books Publications
c/o Immanion Press
3020 NE Couch Street, Portland, OR 97232
9781905713080, $22.50 www.immanion-press.com
In "Disciple's Guide To Ritual Magick: A Beginner's Introduction To The High Art", Frater Barrabbas draws upon his more than 35 years of experience and expertise in working and teaching new forms of magick to create the rituals compiled in this grimoire for aspiring magicians and students of metaphysics. Barrabbas expounds on the philosophy of Magick as a part of occult practices and rituals, as well as providing seven specific rituals that beginners can use to craft a complete magickal discipline for themselves. Enhanced with the inclusion of illustrations, tables, a bibliography, and end notes, the "Disciple's Guide To Ritual Magick" is informatively practical reading, especially recommended for anyone seeking to understand, master, and utilize the benefits of ritual magick.
Michael J. Carson
Reviewer
Clay's Bookshelf
April In Bloom
Annie Jones
Steeple Hill
225 Duncan Mill Rd Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9
9780373873616 $4.99 www.eharlequin.com
Sheriff Kurt Muldoon is running from his past, a past that April Shelnutt doesn't know about. A past with a hurt so deep that he keeps running instead of forgiving himself, but April feels he is running from her.
Kurt and April had dated in the recent past but Kurt wanted to hide their relationship from the meddling towns people of Wileyville, Kentucky. Especially the COCW- The Council of Christian Women, who feel it's their Christian duty to do their good deed of matching all the single men and women together. A group that includes Kurt's gossiping mother and April's sister who has taken on the "project" of getting Kurt and April married. Also April's best friend and the town's matriarch feisty Miss Cora Barrett ninety years young sees the young people together as well and tells them every chance she gets telling them they look cute together.
Kurt and April do love each other but both are to stubborn to admit it to anyone instead they continually lash out in anger at each other when they do see each other so it's easier to avoid each other as much as possible.
Kurt's plan is buying Miss Cora's father's compound, Ezra's Holler 15 miles outside of town and quit as sheriff and to just live out his life alone with his dog Miltilda. Who would have thought the first night he had begun to move his things in, April brings Miss Cora back to the house to get a few of her things and Miss Cora ends up injuring her back doing of all things climbing out of a window to trim the dogwood tree! Kurt feels he has no choice but to let them stay the 4 to 6 days needed for Miss Cora to heal per doctor's orders until she can return home, which entangles their lives together from which there is no return. Kurt even acts as though April planned all this just so they could stay at Kurt's.
So it becomes a rough few days that's topsy turvy with Miss Cora going from bad to worse which forces Kurt and April together even more. So the questions remain will Miss Cora make it? What is in Kurt's past that he can't let go of and will he ever let it go so he can love again? Will April still love him if and when he let's go?
You'll be surprised by this novel. You'll go in expecting a romance novel which it is but within its pages is a strong, clear teaching of love and forgiveness that only God, Himself could have placed in the heart of the author Annie Jones. See how the dogwood tree and planting a garden becomes a teaching of new beginnings and blossoming life.
This is actually the 3rd book about the characters of Wileyville, Kentucky. The other 2 books are "Sadie-In-Waiting" and "Mom Over Miami" written about April's sisters Sadie and Hannah. But don't think you have to read the whole series as "April In Bloom" does stand alone as a story unto itself but don't be surprised if after reading "April In Bloom" it will peak your curiosity to want to know more.
Be Still and Know That I Am God: Devotions for Every Day of the Year
Gus Keiser
Augsburg Books
P.O. Box 1209 Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209
9780806652306 $13.99 www.augsburgfortress.org
Come all men, women and teens alike and "Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him" Psalm 37:7 (NRSV)! In everyday trials and tribulations we are all this at some point of our lives. So enter in with the author, Gus Keiser as he takes us on the same spiritual journey that he took for 3 years. The outcome of his alone time being in God's presence is this one year devotional of scripture, reflection and prayer taken from his daily email journal that was shared with family and friends.
But you will find that it is more than just an ordinary devotional as the author takes you on an emotional journey that will have you reaching in and looking at your own life. You'll see by the reading of this book that it was time well spent by the author and it will be for the reader too. Read a page a day in your own alone time and ask the Lord to speak to you. The scriptures are taken from the New Revised Standard, the NIV, or the Message versions of the Bible. And this reviewer personally likes the added bonus of the section in the back of the book covering certain seasonal times such as New Year's, Christmas, Easter, Epiphany, Valentine's Day and even St. Patrick's Day.
The author does an amazing job of capturing the very essence of the scripture verse in applying it to today's life. But it's not preachy as a problem with most daily devotional books, it's the author's own reflections that will teach and inspire. It's more like being allowed to read someone's personal well written journal.
So enter in as I feel the author says it best in his invitation in the preface of the book "And now, I invite you to "be still" and listen for the voice of God. This time apart may just change your life. I expect it will". Or as it states on the back of the book "Life is a journey". So sit back, and "be still" and spend sometime alone with God and this devotional -----you'll be glad you did!
Deception
Randy Alcorn
WaterBrook Press
12265 Oracle Blvd. Suite 200 Colorado Springs, CO 80921
9781590526163 $19.99 www.randomhouse.com/waterbrook
Oliver Justice Chandler, Ollie for short, Portland Oregon detective. A modern day Sherlock Holmes, Mike Hammer, Sam Spade all rolled into one. Even calls his house the old brownstone referring to Sherlock Holmes, wears a trench coat and a fedora hat to match the classics. Someone who goes against the flow rubs people the wrong way but always follows the evidence to solve the crime.
Right now he's against his toughest. Professor William Palatine a philosopher nut, a reputation with his female students has been found murdered. Chandler and his partner Manny is the up team to take the call. His buddy Clarence Abernathy, a reporter from the Oregon Tribune is assigned to follow him and write about him. Everyone assumes he'll screw up and the press will be there. Luckily Clarence is his friend.
Strange thing is the evidence at the crime scene points to the murderer as being a cop. All the detectives in his division are suspect even Chandler himself as he's not sure where he was at the time of the murder the last thing he remembers is being at one of his favorite hangouts the bar. The Chief wants the investigation stopped as it looks bad on the department. But Chandler must find out who did this even if it was himself. He enlists the help of his buddies Jake Woods and Clarence who are always tag teaming to try to get Chandler saved. But Chandler can't believe a good God would allow murders to happen, the death of his wife and two year old son and the torn relationships with his daughters, one of which is missing.
But time is running out someone has been attempting to kill Chandler and even goes so far as to poison his best friend and bulldog Mike Hammer, Mulch for short who loves bacon and beer. Chandler rushing against time to solve the crime before the murderer gets him just as he's reconnected with one of his daughters, Kendra as they attempt to start a new relationship, who also has a connection to Palatine. Will Mulch survive? Will Chandler solve the murder and find God in the process? What if Chandler is the murderer or even one of his friends on the squad? See what happens as this thriller unfolds with all the twists and turns you'll be amazed at the outcome.
This book is absolutely amazing! It's Sam Spade and C.S. Lewis all rolled into one. Forget Christian fiction this book deserves to be on the best sellers list! It's as suspenseful as a John Grisham novel. The author Randy Alcorn who has written twenty five novels does an awesome job with this page turner. You'll laugh, you'll cry even get mad as you read you won't be able to put this one down! Actually this is the third novel in the line of mysteries Deadline and Dominion being the other two which have also received rave reviews.
This reviewer loved the Sherlock Holmes quotes before each chapter and you'll see heaven come alive as Chandler's friends and family that have passed on discuss Ollie with the Carpenter, Jesus. You'll cry as Carly, Jake's daughter dies and meets Jesus and really see Hell as Palatine finds himself there after his murder. A must read for any Christian but great for the unsaved as the questions unfold from Chandler as he questions God's existence. Even the discussion questions in the back of the book make it great for a book group or reaching the unsaved.
So as the saying goes taped on Ollie's refrigerator "Examine the evidence. Then follow wherever it leads." Don't miss this suspense thriller as it is a must, great read and one of the best of 2007 novels - Christian or not.
Quaker Summer
Lisa Sampson
Thomas Nelson
PO Box 141000 Nashville, TN 37214
9781595542076 $14.99 http://www.thomasnelson.com
Heather Curridge is going crazy; at least that is what her husband Jace, son Will and her friends seem to think. And at times Heather thinks so too.
On the outside Heather seems to have it all, a loving doctor husband, a great fifteen year old son, a house by the lake and things, possessions but all of a sudden Heather starts questioning why she puts her husband through all her spending, spending, spending. Up till now she's justified it well saying she likes to help people but really it's just a way to move up to more, more, and more and the big question as to why she needs so much.. Jace tries to work hard to pay for it all but he's wearing down and wants to go back to his life's dream which he feels he can't tell Heather about.
Than one night Heather crashes her big Suburban on the way home from yet another St Matthews' dinner for the private school she insisted Will attend, and makes her way to the home of Annie and Liza ninety some year old sisters. Heather finds being with them having a calming effect upon her as well as questioning her walk with God.
While Jace is out of town and Will stays with his grandparents Heather spends a few weeks with the ladies who are Quakers, and comes in close contact with an inner city nun and the people living there. Heather begins to come to terms with so many things her past, her dad, the possessions and the rat race of life.
Christy award winning author Lisa Samson does an amazing job with Quaker Summer, her first novel with WestBow but her nineteenth overall. A definite 5 plus wow factor as you'll find yourself within the pages of this page turner that you won't be able to put down. The story unwinds and is so real you'll think you are Heather or she's your best friend, an awesome character we all can relate to.
Voted 2007's Women of Faith's Novel of the Year tells you how amazing this book is (Women of Faith is an organization dedicated to encouraging women of all ages to grow in faith and spiritual maturity with Christ). There is even a reading group guide in the back of the book as this book would be perfect for reading groups. You'll love the mixture of everyday life with the Bible and how each section ties in with the Beatles such as "Fool on the Hill" and "the Long and Winding Road", even if you don't know who the Beatles are you'll catch the comparison. Actually the style of writing puts the reader in mind of the writings of Erma Bombeck, an awesome writer of the seventies. A must read for adult women, especially those who question life and God. So come on an amazing journey and give this book a chance, listen to God and your heart it will really set you free!
Cheri Clay
Reviewer
Debra's Bookshelf
Sundays with Vlad
Paul Bibeau
Three Rivers Press
0307352781 $13.95
In Sundays with Vlad, author Paul Bibeau takes a (mostly) light-hearted look at Count Dracula, both the historical figure and the vampire of legend. He is interested particularly in the relationship between the two, how Vlad the Wallachian prince--an ill-starred fellow who worked through his issues "by killing a whole mess of people"--became tied up with the blood-sucking fiend of creature features and cereal boxes. Bibeau explores the topic of vampirism from a number of different angles, some of them rather surprising. He writes, for example, about his trips to Romania, where he visited the remains of the historical Vlad's castle and traced the journey of Bram Stoker's character Jonathan Harker. No surprise there. But there are also chapters on an old attraction on the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey, Castle Dracula, which burned down in 2002. And Bibeau actually interviews the woman who came up with the names for General Mills's pair of monster cereals, Frankenberry and Count Chocula. (This, as it happens, is Laura Levine, the author of the Jaine Austen Mysteries.) Bibeau also explores the world of modern-day "vampires"--from Dungeons and Dragons-type roll players to consenting adults who really do suck one another's blood to people who've crossed the line from bizarre to really dangerous. In the end he ties it all up as a study in globalism: Westerners usurped the historical Vlad and turned him into a fictional character, after which he became an endlessly malleable, international cultural icon.
Sundays with Vlad begins very well, with stories of the genesis of the author's early interest in monsters and his honeymoon in Romania:
"As we moved deeper into eastern Europe, the buildings got flimsier and the toilet paper got harsher. In Prague, the toilet paper seemed like the utility-grade stuff you'd use in your college dorm, and most of the buildings of Prague seemed sturdy and well-kept. Hungary's offices and apartments seemed danker and more prone to collapse, but its TP was hardy and unrelenting as a Magyar horde. And nothing could prepare us for Romania."
Bibeau is frequently very funny, but not all of his humor works, and sometimes the narrative get a bit boring: the author is wont to follow tangents--on Wildwood, New Jersey, on Romanian beer--that don't always merit the telling. But Sundays with Vlad is on the whole an interesting read, and not a little disturbing: there are some very strange people out there doing some very strange things. It's almost enough to give vampires a bad name.
Confessions of a Teen Sleuth
Chelsea Cain
Bloomsbury
9781582345116 $15.95
Chelsea Cain's Confessions of a Teen Sleuth purports to be the posthumously published memoirs of teen sleuth Nancy Drew. Nancy wrote the book to correct some popular misconceptions about herself: it seems that Carolyn Keene, Nancy's college roommate- turned-unauthorized biographer, played fast and loose with the facts. Nancy records a different adventure from her life in each of the book's ten chapters. We watch her age--while remaining stylish-- against a backdrop of 20th-century history, from internment camps to the Red Scare to hippies and feminists. Along the way we learn some shocking information about Nancy's mother and about the Drew's long- time housekeeper Hannah Gruen, as well as about Nancy herself (hint: the book is dedicated to Frank Hardy, the elder Hardy boy).
Cain writes in the earnest style of the series, with endearingly outdated lingo. And her characters never just say anything: they cry gaily and explain mechanically and muse fretfully. Nancy, meanwhile, though no saint (her early parenting is more reminiscent of Britney Spears than June Cleaver) remains naive enough that her juxtaposition with the real world is amusingly jarring:
"When my plane landed in San Francisco, I collected my old blue suitcase and got in line for a shuttle bus. As you may be aware, at that time San Francisco was a great gathering place for young people from all over the country. These young people grew their hair long and wore untailored, unironed clothing. While I had briefly encountered bohemian types shoplifting at Burk's, I was looking forward to experiencing the counterculture firsthand. I had stood in line only a few minutes when I was approached by one of its representatives."
Nancy still loves a good mystery--maybe a little too much--and she is wont to incorporate a bit of excitement into her otherwise humdrum, post-teen-sleuthing life whenever she can:
"'It seems as if you're avoiding your husband. You don't enjoy cooking. Or cleaning. You barely garden.'"
"'Oh, Hannah,' I smiled. 'That's silly. You're talking about last weekend. I couldn't go to Ned's office party. I had to rescue Ned Junior from the old well in the backyard.'"
"'But how did he get in the well?'"
"'I lowered him. We were playing 'rescue from the old well.''"
Cain plays with the fictional/real-life divide not only by breathing life into Nancy and other literary characters--the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift all make appearances, for example. But she also makes Carolyn Keene, the fictional "author" of the Nancy Drew mysteries, a real but untrustworthy reporter. Nancy and Keene cross paths toward the end of the book, and in an interesting scene we see the line between fiction and fact further blurred.
You'd have to be well-steeped in Nancy Drew lore to appreciate all the in-jokes in Chelsea Cain's clever, charming parody. But even if you haven't read a Nancy Drew novel in decades--or at all--you'll enjoy the read.
Dead of the Day
Karen E. Olson
Obsidian (Penguin Group)
9780451222473 $6.99
Dead bodies seem to be popping up everywhere in Dead of the Day, the third installment in Karen Olson's series featuring Annie Seymour, a thirty-something crime reporter with the New Haven Herald. (The Herald is a fictional stand-in for the author's one-time employer, the New Haven Register. See my reviews of the first two books in the series, Sacred Cows and Secondhand Smoke.) This time around Annie needs to unravel a complex of crimes that are all somehow connected to New Haven's illegal immigrant population and to, of all things, bee research: the apparent murder of a Hispanic male whose bee-stung body is fished out of the harbor, a drive-by shooting targeting the city's chief of police, a break-in at Annie's mother's house, and so on. It's a complicated story, and Olson does a great job of tying all the threads together without losing readers in the process.
As in previous outings, Annie tries very often to wrangle information from her old boyfriend, Tom Behr, a police detective. And she is again abetted in her reportorial sleuthing by Sinatra-esque private investigator Vinnie DeLucia, whom she's been dating since she and Tom broke up. Vinnie's younger brother Rocco joins the cast of characters this time. He's a bestselling author interested in finding a new story, which gives him an excuse for tagging along with Annie and his big brother when they're out hunting for clues. The threesome form a sort of Scooby Gang, each of them interested in the case for their own reasons. I like the new dynamic.
Annie seems to be perpetually hungry in Olson's series. Her stomach is forever growling or otherwise demanding restaurant fare, so we're given a tour of New Haven's eating establishments while reading--from Sally's Pizza in Wooster Square to Louis' Lunch (home of the hamburger Nazis) to Clark's Dairy (where I used to work!). Olson doesn't concentrate too much on the food itself. There are no sensual descriptions of, say, mozzarella sliding off an oily slice of thin- crust pizza. But the restaurant mentions are part of what roots Olson's novels so very firmly in the New Haven area. Previous installments brought readers to Sleeping Giant State Park and into parts of the Yale campus, and the novels are centered on Wooster Square, Annie's neighborhood. But this time much of the action takes place in Fair Haven, a part of New Haven that lies between the Mill and Quinnipiac rivers. I mention that because I hadn't known it before Olson described Fair Haven in the book. I grew up and have lived most of my life in the New Haven area, yet reading Olson's novels I feel as if I've been skating thoughtlessly across the landscape on my trips to the grocery store and the local Barnes & Noble: Olson's protagonist is far more attuned to the area than I've ever been, both its businesses and its underlying features. Part of what I enjoy about the books is that they are so steeped in their setting.
In Olson's previous outing, the character of Annie was, I thought, a little too hard-boiled: burned out after years of reporting and intrinsically misanthropic to begin with, Annie was bordering on being unlikable with all her curmudgeonliness. It may be my imagination, but this time she seems to have softened up a bit. She's still not sweetness and light, but I'm not complaining anymore.
Here's hoping Olson has a lot more crime in store for New Haven.
The Unbinding
Walter Kirn
Anchor Books
9780307277411 $13.95
When we meet him, Kent Selkirk seems like a nice guy. He's a formerly lost soul who found himself, or at least a purpose, when he began working for AidSat. AidSat is a kind of όber-OnStar system, a company that monitors its subscribers' vital signs constantly via miked tiepins and bracelets, whose employees are always available to offer assistance of any kind--from product reviews to relationship advice to the dispatch of a police cruiser or ambulance. Kent is romantically interested in an AidSat subscriber, a certain Sabrina who happens to live in his complex, and he avails himself of AidSat's database and monitoring tools to gather information about her.
That's part of the story anyway. Or is it? And is Kent even a good guy? Selkirk's novel is told from multiple perspectives, largely through journal entries, email, and inter-agency memos. Kent, for example, offers his version of events in posts to an online journaling site. But it turns out that he is not necessarily a reliable reporter of events. Indeed, as far as I can tell no one in the book can be trusted, or at least, we don't know whom to trust. The various characters are purposely misleading one another--and us-- and one or more of them may be deluded. It's a difficult story, in short, to get one's head around.
The Unbinding was originally written in serial form for publication in real time on Slate.com. (The book retains "hyperlinks" of a sort-- text that appears here in bold was linked when the book was in digital form. One can go to the author's web site to follow the links, but it's not necessary.) It's genesis alone makes Kirn's book interesting. And I find AidSat a very appealing entity as well--an almost omniscient, presumably mostly benevolent near-deity, man-made, made up of innumerable components. Sort of like the internet. Big Brother 2.0. But I'm afraid the book itself, an exploration of the dangers of intrusive technology, was too cryptic for me to fully appreciate.
Mongo: Adventures in Trash
Ted Botha
Bloomsbury
9781582345673 $14.95
"Mongo" is a slang term--new to me--that refers to an object that has been reclaimed from the trash. According to The Cassell Dictionary of Slang, quoted at the beginning of Ted Botha's book, it's a term specific to New York, which is fitting because Botha's exploration of mongo is likewise based in New York. In each of his ten chapters Botha discusses different types of trash reclamation by profiling some of the "collectors" he's met. He writes about freegans and "canners" and artists who work with found objects, about "black baggers," about people who trade in discarded books. (I had no idea so many people were throwing away books.) He profiles a pair of friends who dig up old privies in search of antiques. He writes about men who sift through old landfill when it's dug up during construction. Unless you've thought about the subject matter before, you'll probably be very surprised by the variety of mongo that exists.
Botha's book is uneven. It includes a few too many passages in which the author rattles off long lists of items reclaimed from the trash. And it ends with an unfortunately dull chapter about a man who collects large chunks of demolished buildings. But the book is also fascinating in parts, particularly when Botha discusses the sociology of trash picking. He writes about the lifestyle of people who specialize in can collection, for example, and about the hierarchy among trash pickers. (Who knew there was a hierarchy? Who knew there was specialization?) But I would have liked more detail, both because the subject is interesting and because I was left with some questions. Botha writes, for example, that "black baggers" are on the lowest rung of the dumpster diving hierarchy. Apparently, opening up a black bag is an act of desperation, presumably because one can't be sure ahead of time what will be in it. But it's not as if most trash bags are transparent. Why are black bags singled out for demonization?
Botha's book isn't perfect, but it's worth the read. He's hit on one of those wonderful topics that's right at your feet but which only the blessedly curious think to explore. Kind of like mongo itself.
Come On Down!
Stan Bilts
Harper Entertainment
9780061350115 $15.95
Stan Bilts has worked on the The Price is Right for 28 years. He's the show's music director as well as a writer and contestant coordinator. The Price is Right, meanwhile, is the longest running network game show in history. It debuted in 1972, on the same day, we're told, that Joker's Wild and Gambit debuted. (Bill Cullen hosted an earlier incarnation of the show that aired from 1956 to 1965.) Bob Barker was the show's only host, from 1972 on, until he handed over the reins in October of this year to Drew Carey. This passing of the microphone makes the release of Bilts's behind-the-scenes look at the program particularly timely.
Bilts's book features a very brief--one paragraph--foreword contributed by Bob Barker, and an introduction in which the author discusses his own role on the show. There follow eighteen chapters that offer readers a look at what goes into getting the program on the air. Bilts discusses, for example, how the week's shows are planned, the nightmarish number of details that have to be seen to when it comes to the display and discussion of prizes, the lighting and sound, models and make-up, the games themselves, and the role of the show's announcer, who is also charged with warming up the audience before the curtain opens. (Legendary announcer Johnny Olson used to "run around, sitting in women's laps, rubbing his butt up against them, and making off-color jokes." Who knew?) The book's final chapter is a sort of challenge, in which the reader is invited to play along in a pretend game of The Price is Right, but it doesn't work very well as a self-scoring quiz.
Come on Down! is glossy and amply illustrated, so it may qualify as a coffee table book--one that's meant to be displayed and skimmed through rather than swallowed whole. There is indeed fluff in the narrative: Bilts is certainly not out to denigrate the show or anyone affiliated with it; all Price employees are hard-working and talented. That said, the book is well written and not entirely vanilla in tone. I laughed, for example, at Bilts's story about the thickly-accented contestant who mispronounced "Tidy Cat" on air (shorten the "i" sound). The most interesting part of the book for me was Bilts's chapter on his pre-show audience interviews. Audience members are all potential contestants, and prior to every show Bilts talks to them all, in groups of about twelve, interviewing 340 people in ninety minutes. The logistics of the process interested me, and some of the stories Bilts tells are gems. Here's a snippet from his conversation with a certain "Joanelle":
"'And what do you do?'
"'I'm involved with a church group that goes around the country promoting abstinence. Our motto is 'Have the romance, but keep your thingy in your pants!'' she says proudly.
"'That's pretty funny, Joanelle. Tell me, are you really concerned with what people are doing with their thingies?' I ask with slight bafflement.
"'You betcha, baby. We think you crazy men ought to control your big bad selves,' she says with hands on hips followed by a deep whooping hyena laugh.
"I look down at my crotch and realize that this woman is actually interested in controlling what's going on down there. And not just mine, but on a global scale. She's trying to reach out and not touch somebody. And there are millions like her."
On another occasion Bilts interviewed a couple moments after the wife found out that her husband had slept with her cousin. "Okay, Sy, why the hell would you be telling your wife on the line at The Price is Right that you slept with her cousin?" To his credit, Bilts considers the possibility that the couple was lying, but their body language when they weren't aware he was watching suggested that they were indeed headed for divorce court. Or perhaps Divorce Court.
If you're a fan of The Price is Right or interested in a light, behind-the-scenes look at a television institution, take a look at Come On Down! You'll leave the book with a greater appreciation of how complicated a business it is to produce a game show.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jean-Dominique Bauby
Vintage
9780375701214 $12.95
On December 8th, 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the forty-three-year-old editor-in-chief of the French Elle, suffered a massive stroke that damaged his brain stem and left him a quadriplegic. Bauby could no longer speak, but his intellect remained intact, trapped inside the "diving bell" of his body. He could shake his head and blink his left eye, and he was able to spell out complex thoughts by blinking when an interlocutor, running a finger across an alphabet board, pointed to the correct letter. During the summer of 1996 Bauby wrote a memoir of his incapacitation, "dictating" by eye blink, letter by letter, the prose he had composed mentally. Bauby writes about his life as a quadriplegic: the searing moment when he realized what everyone else around him already knew, that he wasn't going to regain his speech or mobility; his stints in physical therapy and speech therapy; the indignations of being helpless. He is not self-pitying, but very much aware of the horror of his situation and of what is going on around him.
"And then one afternoon...an unknown face interposed itself between us. Reflected in the glass I saw the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde. His mouth was twisted, his nose damaged, his hair tousled, his gaze full of fear. One eye was sewn shut, the other goggled like the doomed eye of Cain. For a moment I stared at that dilated pupil, before I realized it was only mine.
"Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter--when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke."
Bauby juxtaposes reminiscences from his previous life--much of it spent traveling the world--with descriptions of the hospital, Berck- sur-Mer, which has become his universe. And he describes the phone calls he receives from friends and family--his ninety-two year old father, whose voice quivers on the phone, his eight-year-old daughter telling him about her pony. He can't respond. Of course, it's his interactions with his two children that are most heart-breaking:
"As soon as we slow down, Celeste cradles my head in her bare arms, covers my forehead with noisy kisses, and says over and over, 'You're my dad, you're my dad,' as if in incantation."
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a short book which, for all its author's labors in dictating it, won't take you more than a couple hours to read. But it's a remarkable book.
Bauby died on March 8th, 1997, two days after the book's publication in France.
Debra Hamel
Reviewer
Gary's Bookshelf
The Android's Dream
John Scalzi
Tor
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
9780765348289 $6.99 www.tor.com
An author should grab a reader's interest from the first paragraph and take it all the way to the end. This book didn't do that at all. In fact it was in the first sentence I began to lose attention. As I read a little further I decided to stop after the third page. I found that the description of biological functions was just something I could do without. I have to say that the book piqued my curiosity with its title that I thought was influenced by author Philip K. Dick. I couldn't tell you if there is a connection because I put this authors book down and picked up something else that hooked me from the first page. I will put this author on my list of ones not to read.
The Fearful Fairy
Sheri Hood illustrated by M. Faith Shaheen
Stones Throw Publishing LLC
P. O Box 1898, Mount Dora, Florida 32756
9780979382307 $16.95 www.TheFearfulFairy.com
Dixie is a fairy with a problem. Her wings do not work properly. She, unlike her brethren fairies, can't gracefully fly through the air. Instead she falls out of the sky. She struggles with the fact that she is unlike other animals as well. She is hurt that they all seem to be perfect while she can't understand why she has such trouble. I like this story that is all about telling children we are all diverse and that we all have merit and worth. This book is for any person who has ever been laughed at or picked on because they are different from others.
I loved this hamster story where he abused food and found out what happens when you play with your bubble gum instead of chewing it. There are several lessons kids can take away from this story that has some beautiful artwork that enhances the story.
The Ocoosa County Burden
Arthur H. Heath
Virtualbookworm.com Publishing Inc
P.O. Box 9949, College Station TX 77842
9781602640061 $15.95 www.heathbooks.net www.virtualbookworm.com
This novel that reads a bit like Stuart Woods "Chiefs" is a very well done murder mystery. Loretta Carmichael a pediatric nurse from Atlanta, stumbles upon a set of deaths that date back to the Civil War. She becomes involved in a series of situations that could get her killed. The story is well written spanning so many years, while the characters are very well defined. From its opening murder in 1905 the tale moves along briskly until its surprising ending in which Loretta learns what the truth of the Ocoosa County burden is. The author captures the emotional trauma and feelings women have in the stressful situations they are under. This book also reads like an early Dean Koontz or Stephen King. I look forward to other works by this writer in the future.
Herbert the Tadpole in the Big Change
Michael Bodrogi Illustrated by Brian Laberee
Blue Note Books Florida
187839861X $15.95 www.sophrose.com
The artwork and the writing complement each other to tell the story of a tadpole who turns into a frog. I liked the way the story unfolded and that it has a lot to tell kids about the changes we all go through. This is a very positive book that is a lot of fun.
The Mysterious Creature
Randon T Eddy
Jungle House Publications
Sanibel Island, Florida
9780976933229 $15.95 www.junglehousepublications.com
Through the use of numerous animals like Tiny Mouse who makes up things and pretty panther who spreads what he's been told the author shows kids what happens when untrue statements are spread. How they can snowball into something so much bigger that can do so much damage.
Women and Other Sexes
Graal "Fritz" Braun
Sirena Press
c/o Murmaid Publishing
13799 Park Blvd # 162, Seminole, Fl 33776
No ISBN $6.00
The writer has written a very creative collection of poetry that has a lot to say about men, women, the world we live in and other keen observations. The pieces are witty, satirical, biting commentaries that are insightful, positive, and fun reading. This is a perfect gift for any occasion.
The Adventures of Lady the Big Storm
By Iris Pearson & Mike Merrill
Illustrated by Project Firefly Animation Studios
www.theadventuresoflady.com
9780978998400 $15.99
Lady is a squirrel who gets separated from her family after a storm. What happens to her begins a series of events that take her into a new direction. I do not want to give too much of the story away so that's about all I will say about the book. My reason is because the authors are trying to get kids to understand that even though something seems bad, good t can come out of it. There are other lessons that I will leave for readers to uncover for themselves. I hope to see other books about this character and her adventures.
The Adventures of Dino and Spike the Hospital Visit
Anne Sullivan
Author House
1663 Liberty Drive Bloomington, Indiana 47403
9781420839265 $16.49 www.authorhouse.comn
After the two gerbils Dino and Spike visit Grandma in the hospital, I can say is the place will never be the same. They find so many ways to get into trouble while having the adventure of their lives. I loved this charming story that had me laughing out loud at the antics of the two characters. They had fun riding around in a wheelchair, testing the x ray equipment, hanging around a supply closet, and just making a nuisance of themselves.
The Adventures of Dino and Spike Grandpa's Farm
Anne Sullivan
Author House
1663 Liberty Drive Bloomington Indiana47403
9781425938857 $16.49 www.authorhouse.comn
The two gerbils are back and this time the farm is their target. The boys are really good but with no parental supervision they get themselves into a lot of situations that are really fun. I again laughed at the two characters as they played around with the farm animals. The author has an acute eye for showing what happens when kids are left on their own.
Gary Roen
Reviewer
Gloria's Bookshelf
A Perfect Grave
Rick Mofina
Pinnacle Books
c/o Kensington Books, 850 Third Ave., NY, NY 10022
9780786018482 $6.99 212-407-1500 www.kensingtonbooks.com
A Perfect Grave is the third in the new series by Rick Mofina, whose previous books have been very well received and reviewed by many, including this reviewer. It brings back Jason Wade, rookie reporter working the night cop desk at The Seattle Mirror, doing the only thing he has ever wanted to do: be a crime reporter at a major metropolitan daily. His career took a major hit when, two months before this book opens, he was, through no fault of his own, involved in a major screw-up at the paper, and his every move is second-guessed and criticized by his editor. Reading this book makes one wonder why Jason, or indeed anyone, would subject himself or hers elf to a deadline-driven job such this, but one would assume the rewards make it worthwhile, and Jason certainly is up to the task.
Other players include Jason's father, a private investigator, ex-Seattle cop, and recovering alcoholic, whose past demons play a large part in the story, and Grace Garner, who thinks of herself as 'a pathetically lonely self-doubting cop,' with whom Jason was previously romantically involved.
This time around Jason is covering the story of a much loved Seattle nun who is brutally murdered. She had worked for years as a counselor in prisons and women's shelters as well as locally with the poor and homeless, and it is unfathomable that someone would have wanted to kill her she is dubbed after her death as 'an angel of mercy who eased pain,' and as the "Saint of Seattle," but as Jason looks into her life before she became a nun, there is no information to be found, other than suggestions that she had a dark past and was looking for absolution in her present life. There are ominous hints of a malignant presence, and a recurring image of a knife in a man's hand.
Among the nun's last words are "We can never erase the sins of our past," and this theme permeates the book as Jason and the police race against time to prevent another murder. The suspense, as is usual with this author's books, is relentless till the gripping conclusion. This is another strong entry in the series, and is recommended.
One-Way Ticket
William G. Tapply
St. Martin's Minotaur
175 Fifth Ave., NY, NY 10010, 646-307-5151
9780312358297 $23.95 www.stmartins.com
Brady Coyne is back in this new entry in the series by the prolific William G. Tapply. It is wonderful to again meet Mr. Coyne, his lady love Evie, and his no less beloved dog, Henry David Thoreau, his friend Gordie Cahill, the P.I. with the wonderfully awful puns, et al. The Boston attorney is called by Robert, son of Brady's old classmate from Yale Law and present-day client, Dalton Lancaster, when Dalt is on the receiving end of a brutal beating in a parking garage. He can think of no reason for the attack, but when Brady realizes that Robert himself was similarly beaten one week earlier, and that the boy had inherited his father's predilection for gambli ng and had gotten badly into debt with the local crime boss, the connection seems obvious. Dalt's mother, Robert's grandmother, is a respected Boston jurist whose wealth and/or position is apparently a target. Things only get uglier, and Brady finds himself squarely in the middle of the ensuing events.
At the same time, Brady is dealing with Evie's preoccupation of late her father, who is divorced from her mother, living now in California and with whom she has had a guilt-inducing relationship, is ill, the exact nature and severity of which illness is uncertain. Also uncertain is what effect this will have on their own relationship, one which Brady treasures dearly. There's a lot here about sons, and daughters, living up to the expectations of their fathers or not.
Mr. Tapply is a masterful story-teller, and can wax sentimental one moment while the next it's all gritty realism with intimations of violence. The book is immensely enjoyable, with suspense sustained throughout, the depictions of Boston and environs wonderfully recreated, and is highly recommended.
And now readers can also look forward to reading Third Strike, due out on December 1st and co-authored by Mr. Tapply and Philip R. Craig and bringing back Brady Coyne, who in this instance is teamed up with Mr. Craig's creation, J. W. Jackson I for one can't wait!
Second Shot
Zoe Sharp
Thomas Dunne Books
175 Fifth Ave., NY, NY 10010, 646-307-5151
9780312358952 $23.95 www.stmartins.com
The Second Shot of the title is the one that has, as this book opens, inflicted a nearly fatal wound to Charlotte ("Charlie") Fox, nee Foxcroft, former SAS Army and present-day bodyguard. Charlie is employed by her lover, Sean Meyer, who runs an exclusive 'close protection agency,' and her present assignment is to guard Simone Kearse, a recent winner of a little over $13,400,000 in lottery prize money, and her four-year-old daughter. The fear is that Simone's ex, the father of the little girl, is stalking her.
A second meaning of the title is about the chance for new beginnings.
We learn the aforementioned background after the first few [rather harrowing] pages, following which is a flashback that lasts for well over half the book [a bit disorienting initially when the flashback ends and we go back to real time]. Back in the present, a fairly low-risk job turns into anything but when, after the recent death of her mother, Simone decides to travel from England to the US to try to find her biological father, who disappeared when she was a young child. The tale then takes us to a New England winter, where a local investigator's search has found evidence that the man they are seeking can now be found. That is, until the investigator's dead body is found after his car apparently ran off the road. Then things start to get more complicated. Especially when after a few days they are approached by a man claiming to be Simone's father. Charlie doesn't know who is lying and who is telling the truth, nor does she know who to trust, and things inevitably lead to the incident described in the opening pages of the book, with Charlie being shot and seriously wounded and Simone dead, shot by the police.
Charlie's own backstory, of which we are given tantalizing bits and pieces, has to do with a scandal that forced her to leave the Army and an incident nearly a year earlier when she had her last assignment in the US, memories of which leave her spooked at the thought of returning there. Another thread has to do with her very cool relationship with her parents, who have thoroughly disapproved of the paths her life has taken, resulting in part in her changing her surname. She feels a need to prove to her father she "wasn't quite the psychopath" he feared she had become. Charlie is a quite fascinating and original protagonist, and has piqued this reader's interest enough that I will seek out First Drop, the first on this exciting new series, and look forward to the next one as well. [I understand that a number of this author's earlier books are available only in/through the UK.]
The Bone Man
Vicki Stiefel
Dorchester Publishing
200 Madison Ave., NY, NY 10016, 800-481-9191
9780843959376 $7.99 www.dorchesterpub.com
Tally Whyte, the protagonist in this series, of which this is the fourth entry, is a psychologist who headed MGAP, the Massachusetts Grief Assistance Program she'd founded. She left the program one year ago, after the death of her adored foster mother, Veda, who had been the Chief Medical Examiner for Massachusetts in Boston. Tally's inheritance has allowed her the luxury of traveling the country and the world and to attempt to recover from her own grief, with the help of her three-legged former Canine Corps dog, Penny, a German shepherd.
As the book opens, Tally is enjoying a late September in her New Hampshire home when her former associates entreat her to return to her former position. When a human skull is found inside an ancient clay pot, Tally is intrigued and anxious to see the facial reconstruction done by her friend, forensic anthropologist "Didi" Cravitz, she cannot believe her eyes: She is absolutely certain that it is the face of a friend, an art dealer. But how could a contemporary skull be inside of an artifact ostensibly nearly a thousand years old? When bodies start to pile up, all of them friends of Tally and all tied to the clay pot and the skull [which are soon stolen from the scene of the first of these murders], Tally determines to find who is responsible.
The trail leads to New Mexico, where Tally takes advantage of an offer by the local medical examiner's office to create a grief assistance program, going for the interview with her own agenda in mind. The tale turns on Native American carvings and lore, and lovingly describes not only the New England setting which is her home but the southwestern desert to which she travels to uncover the reason behind the killings and the identity of the murderer.
Tally places herself in danger, surviving several attempts on her life, while at the same time trying to figure out her relationship with her boyfriend, Sheriff Hank Cunningham, who she discovers has now apparently become a State homicide investigator [something he has failed to mention]. The story is engrossing, particularly after it travels to the New Mexico desert, where the danger and the suspense mount. But this reader found the plotting to be implausible--assassins popping up at every turn with no obvious - or even obscure--way for them to have known where to find Tally, and inflicting horrendous injuries which seem to be almost shrugged off with little effect. But then, maybe it was meant to be satire and my sense of humor was somehow not functioning during my reading of this book.
Not Dead Enough
Peter James
Macmillan
20 New Whart Rd., London N1 9RR, www.panmacmillan.com
9780330446129 6.99 BPS
[Note: This book is not yet available in the US, only available at the present time in/through the UK/Canada]
Reading the first few pages of Not Dead Enough, Peter James' terrific new novel, is like seeing again friends one has only met a couple of times before, briefly but memorably: Roy Grace, 39-year-old Detective Superintendent with the Sussex CID, his best mate Glen Branson, still having marital problems; Cleo, with whom a romance had just started to blossom in the last book; and the other inhabitants of Grace's world in and around Brighton and Hove, England.
The first two books in this series, Dead Simple and Looking Good Dead, were among the best this reviewer read in 2006, and this newest offering is a worthy third entry.
Katie Bishop, beautiful young socialite, is found dead in her home, brutally murdered. When the police find her husband, Brian, to notify him of his wife's murder, he is 60 miles away attending a golf tournament. His alibi seems to be valid, and his shock and grief at the news seem genuine. The police are stumped he could not have been in both places at once, could he? Is he lying? Is he being framed? DS Grace finds that the answers to these questions are elusive, yet all the evidence points to Brian as the murderer. In the midst of this, Grace suddenly finds his world tilted on its axis, as it appears that his beloved wife, Sandy, missing for over nine years with no clue as to how or why she disappeared, may still be alive and well.
The identity of the killer is a true puzzle, for the police and the reader, with tantalizing clues thrown at both. An at-first-improbable-seeming element arises, but the quality of the author's writing makes the willing suspension of disbelief on this point easier. While perhaps not as riveting as the first two books in the series, it is constantly engrossing, and the author soon ramps up the tale and the suspense to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion. [I knew I would love this book as soon as I saw that the author had dedicated it to his three dogs.]
American Gangster
Max Allan Collins
Tor/Forge
175 Fifth Ave., NY, NY 10010
9780765359018 $7.99 212-388-0100, www.tor-forge.com
If the title seems familiar, it is probably because this novel is based on the screenplay for the film currently playing throughout the US, which is a fictionalized take on events in the lives of Richard Roberts and Frank Lucas, respectively a detective with the Prosecutor's Office in New Jersey, and the man he chased and ultimately successfully prosecuted. It is stated that the novel takes further liberties with the fact-based story portrayed in the film. Much of what is depicted here is known to be true: Frank Lucas is a man who in the 70's and years to follow, controlled the heroin traffic on the streets of Harlem, once the exclusive province of the Mafia. As a black man, that was an astonishing enough accomplishment. But the way he did it, importing pure heroin directly from the Golden Triangle of the Far East, was completely innovative. Fact or fiction, this is an engrossing tale.
For his part, Richie Roberts is portrayed as an anomaly in the police force in those years: an honest cop who was held in contempt by most of his fellow officers for his refusal to take money or dope when it came his way.
Frank Lucas is depicted as a man who had his own code of honor: "Within his circle, in his private life and for that matter in his business dealings, Frank Lucas considered himself a moral man. Matters of right and wrong, in any larger sense social or religious were defined by the world he'd been born into, a white man's world. Dope being sold to black people was a reality that wasn't going anywhere; better another black man be in charge. Killing people who needed killing was strictly business those yellow people getting killed in Vietnam by boys both black and white made less sense to Frank than removing a business rival or a personal threat by violence. Frank hadn't invented the world where money ruled, but if he was going to live in it, by God, he was going to have at least his share."
The book is written with alternating p.o.v. of the two men, which was not at all a distraction. The world described was a violent one, and a fascinating one as well. The book is well-written and, though the outcome is a foregone conclusion, manages to be suspenseful nonetheless. A very enjoyable read, and recommended.
Gloria Feit
Reviewer
Gorden's Bookshelf
Break No Bones
Kathy Reichs
Scribner
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
9780743233491 $25.95
Break No Bones is possibly the best forensic detective mystery story of the year. Kathy Reichs has gotten comfortable with fictional writing and it shows in how smoothly the book reads. The story does
