The Cyberlibrarian Reads

The Obamas

2012-02-29T14:11:00.003-05:00

By Jodi Kantor

New York, Little, Brown, 2012

360 pages Nonfiction

It is hard to write a book about a presidential administration while the president is still in office. Harder yet to read a book about a presidential administration under the same circumstances. But The Obamas is more about the marriage of the Obamas and their working relationship than it is about the policy workings of the administration—except it is primarily about how their marriage intersects with the workings.

Jodi Kantor only had one interview with the Obamas and it wasn’t for this book. It was for an article in the New York Times, but she became fascinated with the couple and their bond. She particularly became fascinated about how Michelle relates to Barack and how her influence permeates the White House.

Most of the book is free from gossip; it is rather straightforward journalism. Kantor interviewed present and past staff members to get the information she used. Apparently Michelle thought that Kantor was too hard on her and complained about it when the book was published, but my feeling is that Michelle comes across as an remarkable woman—strong, sensible, idealistic, and a firm supporter of her husband and his policies. Whether she wanted to be a politician or not is another whole matter and the subject of much of the book.

Although the Obamas thought that the White House would be a hard place for their family to live, it way outpaced their expectations as to how miserable it would be for finding places for their children to play and ways of fulfilling other tasks about being a young family. Kantor writes about Sasha and Malia easily without descending into gossip. You’ve gotta feel for those kids; how do you go trick-or-treating when you are the President’s children. As one reviewer notes: “Hope is easier to embrace than reality.”

The most poignant moment in the book came as the Obamas react to the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. This is Kantor’s writing at its best. As she relates the speech Obama gave to the nation following the tragedy, Kantor says: “He wasn’t imposing his own agenda this time: he had correctly read, for once in a long time, what the country wanted and needed from him. The speech stood outside politics, but in a way that was good politics. Republicans congratulated him on his generous, reasonable, civil, unifying address. The expression on Michelle’s face was one of deep satisfaction. He had given the kind of speech she knew he could give. The look on her face said: this is the president I wanted you to be.”

Obama was elected to lead “a rational, post-racial, moderate country that is looking for sensible progress,” a White House official told Kantor. “Except, oops, it’s an enraged, moralistic, harsh, desperate country. It’s a disconnect he can’t bridge.” The reviewer in the Los Angeles Times sums it up: "The question at his inauguration was whether Barack Obama would oversee a historic, transformative administration that could overcome partisan politics; the question now is whether he will survive his re-election campaign.”

I have to say that I like Barack and Michelle Obama and it was interesting to read about their lives in the White House. I was trying to finish The Obamas last night while the returns from the Michigan Republican primary were coming in. Engrossed in thought about the Obama administration, I was thrust back to reality by Mitt Romney’s diatribe against him. And, I kept thinking…who would want this? Who would want this?

A couple more things—my son and his family live about four blocks away from the Obama’s Hyde Park, Chicago house. My first inkling about the neighborhood came in the spring of 2008 when I went to pick up Chinese food the day my son’s family was moving into their condo. Proudly displayed in the little carryout restaurant was a picture of Barack Obama with his arm around the restaurant owner. You can imagine the pride the neighborhood experienced when he was elected. There was a street celebration complete with fireworks on the corner, and my son and his wife as well as my daughter and her boyfriend made their way downtown to the giant celebration in Grant Park. I watched it all on television desperately wishing that I were there.

Then the neighborhood went into lockdown. My daughter-in-law never knew what streets she could go down to and from work. The downstairs neighbors, who had a daughter in Sasha’s class, had to have ID to get their children to school. And when the Obamas tried to return for a weekend in February after the inauguration, my son’s car almost got towed as the streets were cleared so that the family could get to their house.

The other thing I wanted to share is that I have been a fan of Michelle Obama’s wonderful sense of style as presented in a charming blog, Mrs.O. It has been fun to see what she is wearing, and how many times she wears the same outfit. Although I don’t know much about designers, the blog has been a delight. Check it out.

There is a very long review of The Obamas in the New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/01/16/120116crbo_books_remnick

The Los Angeles Times Review: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/11/entertainment/la-et-book-20120111

Jodi Kantor's website: http://jodikantor.net

Into the Beautiful North

2012-02-20T16:15:00.001-05:00

By Luis Alberto Urrea

New York, Back Bay Books, 2009

338 pages Fiction

All the men are gone from the small fishing village village of Tres Camarones in Sinaloa Mexico—gone to Los Yunaites (The United States). Nayeli and the other young women in the town acutely realize that there are no young men for them, and after watching the Western, The Magnificent Seven several times in the village’s movie theatre, Nayeli decides to make a romantic quest to the United States to bring back seven strong Mexican men to marry the young women and protect their town from the drug traffickers who are moving in. Perhaps she will even be able to bring home her father, who has gone to Kankakee Illinois. Encouraged by her aunt Tia Irma, the village’s new mayor, she embarks on her journey, accompanied by two girlfriends and the young gay owner of the taco stand where she works.

The first half of Into the Beautiful North takes the travelers as far as Tijuana. The second half gets them to Kankakee and home again. Along the way, they experience humiliation, deprivation, and severe complications. But at the same time, they have moments of hope and inspiration. One of my favorite aspects of the book is that the travelers can depend on “the kindness of strangers.” Two beggars in Tijuana house them. Atomiko, one of modern literature’s truly great characters, becomes their defender. A fisherman gives Nayeli a sweatshirt to warm her and a truck driver offers her a fresh mango. A former missionary houses them in San Diego. The kindnesses are accepted with the same sense of inevitability as the misfortunes.

The book is filled with so many funny characters and so many funny situations and so many funny sentences that my attempt to catalog them for this review totally failed. There was too much that was laugh out loud funny. One of my favorite passages is a poignant look at the homeland by an immigrant who has lived in the United States too long. “He realized there was no one in Los Yunaites who could transport him so easily to Tres Camarones, the Camarones that throbbed in his mind every night, the old world that would not let him sleep, that would not allow him to read a book or watch a movie. . .In Camarones, he had been a fire on two legs, he had been a human waltz and a walking tango, he had brought music and cologne into the plazuela on each humid mysterious love-scented Saturday night.“

I particularly liked the character of Nayeli. She is strong and vibrant, committed to her mission to bring her father and seven other men home to her village. She is not about to get distracted from her quest. That gives her a unique voice, and she becomes a terrific foil for the other more ridiculous characters. That is not to say that she is shallow; she is the glue that holds the entire enterprise together.

If this were a movie, it would be a quest or road trip movie with the usual set of unlikely companions. But Urrea weaves much more into the story—the despair of small Mexican towns; the bravado of men and women who have seen too many old movies; the desperate situation at the border for people on both sides and the American anger over the constant influx of Mexicans. Add to that the remarkable set of fully-realized characters and you have an incredibly readable and rollicking romp through the eyes of a Quixote-like young woman. One reviewer says, “There are misfortunes, but this is a comedy and the suspense, adventure, and resolved hardships are in service of an exuberant escape and a happy ending.”

Into the Beautiful North is the 2012 Reading Together book sponsored by the Kalamazoo Public Library. It is an interesting choice because while it is a book about immigration, it is not overtly so, and usually the book the community chooses to read is a message book of some sort. This one is just too funny. Among the activities being planned is a screening of The Magnificent Seven with Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner. One of the running jokes in the book is whether or not Yul Brynner is Mexican. It should probably be followed by one of my favorite movies, The Three Amigos with Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short.

Luis Urrea is a professor at The University of Illinois, Chicago and will be in Kalamazoo to speak on March 6. My book club read Into the Beautiful North and will be at the lecture. The publisher has sent me Urrea’s newest book Queen of America, which I will be reviewing next week.

A Great Review: http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2009_05_014530.php

Urrea’s website: www.luisurrea.com

Much Ado About Loving: What Our Favorite Novels Can Teach You About Date Expectations, Not-So-Great Gatsbys, and Love in the Time of Internet Personals

2012-02-14T20:42:00.000-05:00

By Jack Murnigham and Maura Kelly

New York, Free Press, 2012

202 pages Non-Fiction

The Shortlist

Here’s a clever premise for a book: Advice for the lovelorn from the pages of classic literature. Through many short chapters in Much Ado About Loving, Jack Murnigham and Maura Kelly discuss the failings and the graces (but mostly the failings) of main characters in novels that most of us have read.

Frankly, I am ashamed to say that I have not read many of the classic novels; never spent a month reading War and Peace, and outside of A Christmas Carol, I haven’t read any Charles Dickens. I won’t tell you that I have read no Bronte or Tolstoy. Lucky for me, Murnigham and Kelly discuss a bunch of books I have read, like The Bell Jar, Revolutionary Road, A Farewell to Arms, and The Great Gatsby.

Much Ado About Loving is a very witty book. The chapter titles are perhaps the most clever part of the entire project, but the advice is sound if you are a person who is on the hunt for your true love and you aren’t having any luck. As Murnigham says, “It is a uniquely human gift to see reality for something that it isn’t, to take the life in front of us and perceive it instead into a shape we want it to be.”

Murnigham and Kelly tell stories from their own life experiences to illustrate the dilemmas posited by the literary characters. When I was trying to decide who might benefit from this book, I realized that it might be good not only for the lovelorn, but also for college students having to pick an angle to write a term project about in their English Lit classes. There’s an essay about Darcy just waiting to be written or the “not so great” Gatsby.

This is a fun read, not so much for the love advice, but for the reminders of the classic books we once read or didn’t read. Clever, clever, clever!

A brief review in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/books/review/inside-the-list.html?_r=1

An interview with Maura Kelly in the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/teddy-wayne/interview-with-maura-kell_b_1179656.html

Today's Salon.com (Feb. 14) has some clever advice to the lovelorn by Murnigham and Kelly: http://www.salon.com/writer/jack_murnighan/

The Hunger Games

2012-02-14T12:53:00.000-05:00

By Suzanne Collins

New York, Scholastic, 2008

374 pages, Fiction

What? Not another blogger writing about Hunger Games! Yeah—I know, but…I had to get it read before the movie comes out or I wasn’t going to be invited to the Hunger Games party a friend is having.

Suzanne Collins is a genius, I think. She has taken the concept of the dystopian novel and married it to reality television with spectacular results. What I think I will focus on in this posting is not the dystopia, or the fighting and killing, the parallels with reality television, or the United States, or any of the stuff other people have talked about. What I would like to focus on is the concept of altruism and how Collins toys with the better natures of the characters and confuses us as well.

In a future United States called Panem, Katniss Everdeen is a smart girl who has to take over as the breadwinner when her father is killed in a mine accident in District 12. Her mother ceases to function well after the accident and someone has to take care of her little sister, Prim. Katniss uses the hunting, fishing, and scavenging skills that her father has taught her to support her family, and partners up with Gale, a neighborhood boy, to keep both families fed.

So, we feel good about the character Katniss from the very beginning. She has used her intelligence and survival skills to her best advantage and has the makings of the classic altruistic heroine. We also see a glimmer of altruism in the opening pages of the book in the character of Peeta. He is the baker’s son and gives a loaf of bread to Katniss one day when she is very tired and hungry. Much later we learn that Peeta has had a crush on Katniss for a long time, or so he says.

The first major altruistic moment in the book comes when names are being drawn for The Hunger Games, the sadistic annual event run by the “Capital” in which two teenagers from each of the 12 districts of the country much fight each other to the death for the televised amusement of the entire country. Fatefully, Prim’s name is called, and shockingly, Katniss rushes to the stage to take her sister’s place. This is something that never happens; no one volunteers for the Hunger Games! Katniss knows that her sister would never survive the games, and that she might have a fighting chance. Peeta, the baker’s son, is chosen as well, and for better or worse, the fates of Katniss and Peeta are forever connected.

It is at this point Collins begins to play with the concept of altruism. We believe that Katniss has made an altruistic decision in defending her sister, but can we trust her future decisions? After all, she is fighting for her life, and in effect, fighting for the future of her family. Things become complicated when we are reintroduced to Peeta, the boy from the district, who in the early interviews, tells everyone that he has a crush on Katniss, and that he has felt that way since the age of 5 or 6. When he makes a couple of defensive moves to protect Katniss, the country believes that he truly does love her and wants to keep her alive. The manipulators of the game decide it is to their advantage to keep them both alive, and now they have to function as a team.

Katniss doesn’t quite trust this turn of events, but because the love story is playing out well on television, she decides to go along with it as a way of maintaining her social capital and her television fans. Later, when she saves Peeta’s life, we believe again in her altruism—for the moment. At the end of the book, we are left confused as to whether she really does care for Peeta, or if she did everything she did for the sake of her own survival. We are even ambivalent when she attempts one last lifesaving ploy for both Peeta and herself after the Capital has in effect betrayed them. Did she do that for altruistic reasons, or did she attempt it as a way of thumbing her nose at the Capital?

Our skeptical natures believe that Katniss knows how to play the game; after all she has watched it every year of her life. We know that she is very smart and savvy, skilled with a bow and arrow, and has a lot of survival skills. This is what we have been shown. Is she also capable of being a true heroine, able to save herself and others?

I was as captivated by this book as my 12-year-old grandson and my son-in-law. Its themes are universal. One reviewer says: “Collins sometimes fails to exploit the rich allegorical potential here in favor of crisp plotting, but it’s hard to fault a novel for being too engrossing.” I have yet to read the other two books in the series, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, but I can’t wait for the movie to arrive. How will the movie handle Katniss’s altruistic motives and heroic nature?

Here is a review in The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Green-t.html

I will leave it to you to find all the online hype about the movie.

The Preacher

2012-02-10T23:16:00.000-05:00

by Camilla Lackberg
New York, The Free Press, 2011
401 pages Fiction

There is a tremendous sense of place in the mysteries of Camilla Lackberg. Fjӓllbacka is a small fishing village in northern Sweden where nothing ever happens…or so it seems. The Preacher is the second installment of the series; the first being The Ice Princess, which I read last winter. Violence continues to happen to women in Fjӓllbacka; this time a young German tourist is found murdered and when they rescue her body from the cliffs overlooking the sea, they find the skeletons of two other young women who disappeared 20 years before. The three bodies bear similar wounds.

The tourist season is in full swing in Fjӓllbacka, and as Patrik and Erica are getting ready for their first baby, the relatives are descending on them enmass. It’s hot, the relatives are obnoxious, Erica has had enough, and Patrik is happy enough to escape to the police station, where he is the detective in charge of the murder investigation.

The main suspects seem to be the Hult family, influential in the community for three generations, the grandfather having been a free-church evangelist. The rest of the family has been influenced profoundly by his spirit. It takes until the end of the book to find exactly how powerful his influence has been.

Lackberg’s writing style takes a bit of getting used to. She writes the book in segments, varying the characters with the action; one reviewer suggested making a list of the characters and groups so you don’t lose track of who belongs where. Because I read the book in two plane rides, I didn’t have the problem of figuring out the cast of characters, but the list is probably a good idea if you are having trouble or are reading in spurts.

Although mystery series are fun to read in order, it isn’t necessary to read The Ice Princess to know what is going on in The Preacher. The Ice Princess takes place in the winter and The Preacher in the summer, and while the community and the characters are the same, the plot stands alone. Patrik and Erica are in very different places in their lives; happily living together expecting their first baby, and the reader is able to jump into the storyline without any confusion about the main characters.

The immense pleasure in The Preacher comes from not knowing too early whodunit. I was kept guessing until near the end. And by then, I was reading as fast as I could to try to keep up with the plot. The characters keep you entertained as well; some of Patrik’s fellow police officers are great bumblers, Patrik has a wonderfully idiosyncratic personality, and the police chief, who played a large role in the first book, has taken a lesser role in this episode but is as funny and annoyingly endearing.

The Preacher deals with the concepts of good and evil, family rivalry and family ties, and divine destiny. The shock in the book comes not from finding out the killer but why he is the killer. For quite a while, I wondered why the book was called The Preacher, when the preacher character has been dead for many years, but then I realized that his spirit permeated every pore of the Hult family and every action they took over a 20 year period. Every secret they kept was because of him.

Two other things to mention: first, Lackberg can hold her own as a writer. She doesn’t have to constantly be compared to Steig Larson of Dragon Tattoo fame. They are two very different writers. Lackberg is not concerned with political corruption, only the corruption of the soul. It would be like comparing American writers just because they are both Americans. The second thing to mention is that the book is skillfully translated by Steven Murray (who also translated Steig Larson’s books). He is such a skillful translator that I completely forgot that I was reading a translated book.

I look forward to the next mystery in Fjӓllbacka. And just where is Fjӓllbacka? Here is the description from Lackberg’s website:

"Camilla’s books are set in Fjällbacka, the coastal village where Camilla was born and raised. In northern Bohuslän, about 140 km north of Göteborg, lies the little community of Fjällbacka. Already a fishing village in the 17th century, Fjällbacka is now an idyll that’s steeped in history. Its name derives from the imposing rocky outcrop that the village encircles. Thousands of tourists visit Fjällbacka in the summer. For the rest of the year, there’s about 1,000 permanent residents. Fjällbacka might be small, but there are still hotels, cafés and shops. The best way to get to Fjällbacka without a car is by train to Uddevalla. You can also take a train to Dingle and from there take a bus to Fjällbacka, or alternatively fly to Trollhättan and make your way from there."

The review in the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-the-preacher-by-camilla-lackberg/2011/03/14/AGB3i3RH_story.html

Camilla Lackberg’s website: http://www.camillalackberg.com/

When Will There Be Good News?

2012-02-01T22:10:00.000-05:00

by Kate Atkinson

Boston, Little, Brown, 2008

400 pages Fiction

There was never a more appropriate book title than When Will There Be Good News?, and I don’t believe that I have ever read a book that began with more bad news.

Kate Atkinson creates murder mysteries with remarkable female protagonists, resilient, funny, strong and fated. She has also created an idiosyncratic detective, Jackson Brodie, although Jackson doesn’t appear until at least 100 pages into this particular mystery.

Joanna Hunter is a Scottish doctor with a horrific past—a tale that is recounted in the very first chapter of the book. Her siblings, mother, and dog are all killed in a random act of violence. Married now and with a young baby, her world seems to be tipping upside down because the killer has just been released on parole. Reggie is Joanna’s babysitter, sixteen years old, with a horrific history of her own. Louise is a police detective who is trying to warn Joanna about the release of the killer at the same time she is working on a case of domestic abuse and murder and trying to work her way out of a difficult marriage.

Jackson Brodie has his own problems. On his way home from Edinburgh, he is involved in a fatal train wreck, an event which brings all these disparate events crashing together. As in all Atkinson novels, there is no hidden killer; all the details of the murder and mayhem are in plain sight. Brodie doesn’t come in at the last moment and explain everything. We know all the details from the very beginning, although in this book, there are some surprises left for the ending.

What Atkinson wants to explore is what is in the hearts of the actors; why do they respond in the way that they do to what is happening to them. In When Will There Be Good News? she is also exploring coincidence. As Jackson Brodie says, “A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.” One reviewer says that “what seems of most interest to Atkinson isn’t the solving of crimes, but the solving of the problem of being alive. What happens to those left behind, the ones held hostage by sorrow and disappointment? How do we pull ourselves out of the rubble of grief? How do we cope with the death of a loved one, transcend a childhood worthy of Dickens, survive the accident of having married the wrong person? How do we get what we need?”

The women characters are particularly strong in When Will There Be Good News? Reggie, the teenager, is delightfully spunky, and it is a fulfilling to read about her tenacity and the remarkable way in which she views the world. She is a girl you would love to know. The way in which Joanna Hunter solves her particular problem, although gory, is just the way you hope you would act if you were in her desperate situation. I really liked Louise, the detective, because she is a character with a biting personality; a person you might enjoy hating.

This is such a literary book; in the world of sound bites and 400 character tweets, it is nice to know that there are some people who know literature and poetry and can (wonder of wonders) recite verse. Atkinson’s style is not the usual detective novel style, and as I entered her universe with Case Histories, I was a bit put off because I was expecting all plot and not literary brilliance. I quickly warmed to her novels and remain a huge advocate of her brilliance.

I highly recommend When Will There Be Good News, but I would suggest that you begin with Case Histories and then One Good Turn. The fourth book in the series, Started Early, Took My Dog came out in 2011. As I noted in a previous review, the BBC has a television series called Case Histories which is now available on DVD.

Review in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/books/review/Schappell-t.html

Kate Atkinson’s website: http://www.kateatkinson.co.uk/

Anti-Aging Cures: Life Changing Secrets to Reverse the Effects of Aging

2012-01-30T14:16:00.000-05:00

By Dr. James Forsythe

New York, Vanguard Press, 2011

283 pages Non-Fiction

The Shortlist

No one welcomes the aging process; hardly anyone knows what to do about it. Dr. James Forsythe has become an expert in the use of human growth hormone (HGH) for those who would like to age without the aches, pains, and diseases often linked to growing older. His book, Anti-Aging Cures focuses on the use of several variations of HGH including oral biostimulators as well as injectable HGH.

The book is divided into four parts: Create Your Anti-Aging Lifestyle; Use an Anti-Aging Silver Bullet; Enjoy your Anti-Aging Benefits; and Protect Your Anti-Aging Rights. There is a lot of good general advice in each section, but in each section, he returns to the subject of HGH—its use and benefits. Sometimes, the book preaches; the term miraculous and revolutionary appears multiple times in the text, but the argument for the use of HGH appears compelling and gives an older person fodder for discussion the next time he/she goes to the doctor.

Forsythe presents a well-researched, well-conceived plan for homeopathic anti-aging treatment. The documentation at the end of the book is extensive; he also presents his thesis that the dispensation of HGH has been thwarted by the FDA and linked unfairly with steroids and other uses of HGH for physical enhancement.

My husband has been doing a lot of research on HGH and really wants to try it. The cost of the injections is prohibitive at this point for people on fixed incomes. However, when he checked with Medicare and his physician, he learned that the biostimulator, Secretrophin, does fall under Medicare and is available with a prescription. He also learned that his doctor has prescribed Secretrophin for his own father who has been taking it for a couple of years. I believe that my husband is going to give it a try; I am reserving judgment because I am a reluctant pill taker of any sort.

I received this book from the publicist and would recommend it to those who are interested in knowing more about HGH. The book is very readable and convincing.

Website for Dr. James Forsythe: www.drforsythe.com

Below you will find an article by Dr. Forsythe about organic superfoods.

Nutrition Helps to Keep You Youthful
By Dr. James Forsythe,
Author of Anti-Aging Cures: Life Changing Secrets to Reverse the Effects of Aging

Remember that as we mature, our ability to appear and feel young involves more than human growth hormone replacement therapy, though that can certainly be an essential key. Exercise, proper sleep, food selections, minerals and vitamins all combine in a synergy to play integral roles in this process. People who employ a balance of these factors position themselves for healthy, quality-filled aging -- while lessening the possibility of chronic degenerative diseases like cancer.
Whether you are young or advanced in age, a nutritious diet is indispensable to maintaining exceptional health and a longer life, with or without the use of injectable HGH and its natural precursors.
That's why I put so much emphasis on your absorption of healthy nutrients. Nutrition literally defines what you are made of because it is the foundation for every living cell and organ in your body. Nutrition in the blood supplies the body with the very fuel for existence. It supplies strength, energy and vitality, while empowering the body to fight disease and illness.
Hunger is more than just a reason to consume food. This vital craving serves as your body's essential communication, conveying a basic need for important nutrients. When you consume natural, nutrient-dense foods, you satisfy your body's need for high quality fuel and that empowers your immune system to combat illness and disease.
Want to know more about the most nutrient rich foods on earth? Here is a list of Nature's Superfoods:
Nine Groups of Organic Superfoods You Need In Your Diet

Super Greens such as kale, spinach, broccoli, beet tops and all dark green leafy vegetables in both whole and juice form; also nopal cactus, nettle leaf, and cabbages.
Maca root from the Andes and maca root juice.
Mushrooms, in particular these: reishi, cordyceps, maitake, chaga, mesima, lion's mane, turkey tail, shitake.
Spirulina and chlorella: these include Klamath Lake Blue-Green Algae.
Herbs and spices like garlic, dandelion leaf, nettle and parsley: the most potent spice is curcumin from the turmeric plant, a staple in Indian cuisine.
Bee pollen and royal jelly.
Dark red and purple fruits and berries: these include blueberries and raspberries. Also, goji berry juice and hawthorne berry.
Kelp and sea plants
Taro root, orange tomatoes, carrots, and orange vegetables

Other additions to the Superfoods list include: cacao (raw chocolate), sweet mesquite pod, and sprouted flax.
I also urge our patients to consume healthy smoothies that they prepare at home on a regular basis. Most of these recipes include soy milk, non-fat yogurt, berries such as blueberries, blackberries or strawberries, bananas and a raw egg, plus a couple tablespoons of flaxseed oil and whey protein. Many patients consider such smoothies delicious, and they're also good for digestion.
Two Reasons to Always Eat ORGANIC Superfoods

Wise consumers will want to avoid the residues of pesticides, herbicides and other synthetic chemicals applied to plants and fruits. Washing the produce with water will not remove all of the residues. These chemicals can cause health problems in humans, including neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's disease.

2. Organically (non-chemically) grown Superfoods contain higher levels of phytochemicals. These nutrients have been documented in thousands of medical science studies as being important to good health and a long life. Phytochemicals are produced by plants in response to stress and to protect against insects and disease. When pesticides and other chemicals are applied during the growing process, plants produce lower levels of these important phytochemical nutrients.

Make Your Food Selections a First Level of Defense
Adopting a proper food selection or diet program should be your primary first step in any serious anti-aging program.
While maintaining a trim, ideal weight might sound merely vane or narcissistic, various medical studies through the years strongly indicate that excessive or unnecessary weight contributes to cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes mellitus. Maintaining an ideal body weight can go a long way toward preventing or at least lowering the probability of such negative health factors.
Read more about what foods to avoid and ones that prevent cancer in my book;, "Anti-Aging Cures".
Copyright © 2012 Dr. James Forsythe, author of Anti-Aging Cures: Life Changing Secrets to Reverse the Effects of Aging

Rambam's Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity and Why It Is Necessary to Give

2012-01-21T09:50:00.000-05:00

By Julie Salamon

New York, Workman, 2003

183 pages Spiritual

Maimonides was a twelfth-century rabbi, physician, philosopher, and scholar, who in the words of author Julie Salamon tried to reconcile faith and reason. He is often known as Rambam. He wrote about charity a great deal and developed an eight step plan for charitable giving. Salaman has created a meditation on each step or rung on this ladder of giving in her eloquent little book, Rambam’s Ladder.

This is what she says of the steps:

“I call the first of the eight steps on the ladder Reluctance: To give begrudgingly. At this level Maimonides says the person gives with a frowning countenance.

The second step is Proportion: To give less to the poor than is proper, but to do so cheerfully.

The third step is Solicitation: To hand money to the poor after being asked.

The fourth is Shame: To hand money to the poor before being asked, but risk making the recipient feel shame.

The fifth is Boundaries: To give to someone you don't know, but allow your name to be known.

The sixth is Corruption: To give to someone you know, but who doesn't know from whom he is receiving help.

The seventh is Anonymity: To give to someone you don't know, and to do so anonymously.

And the eighth and final step is Responsibility: The gift of self-reliance. To hand someone a gift or a loan, or to enter into a partnership with him, or to find work for him, so that he will never have to beg again.”

Salamon talks about how charity and philanthropy intertwine and are personalized by the individuals doing the giving. “You could say that charity addresses an immediate need and philanthropy addresses the problem that causes the need.”

Throughout Rambam’s Ladder, we are reminded again and again of the paradoxes that guide our giving and our receiving. She says that this ladder of giving is “subtle and complicated—like goodness itself.” I was intrigued by research she identified that studied the giving habits of a group of people. The subjects were asked to keep track of every act of giving they did over a span of a year. The researchers called it “caring behavior.” It included all the usual things, gifts to religious organizations and other causes. But it also went far beyond common financial giving; it included giving help to family and friends, donating blood, participating in walk-a-thons, volunteering, helping a neighbor. The expanded notion of giving also included emotional support offered to family, friends, and others in need. It included things like walking a neighbor's dog or taking in their mail. The researchers concluded that “far from being a negligent society, America is an intensely caring commonwealth.” If you look at your personal giving from that expanded perspective, the amount of giving is phenomenal.

At the same time, she cites occasions when she personally felt ambiguous about giving, or when those around her expressed reluctance about giving, or put parameters around their giving. Woven throughout her discussion are her reflections on her relationship with a homeless man who spends his time in her neighborhood. Her developing relationship with him mirrors her personal feelings about helping him. As she discusses each step on the ladder of giving, readers can find where their giving fits, what moves them to give, and why they sometimes choose not to give, even if they are able.

The book was written shortly after the World Trade Center attacks, and examples of giving that came as an outgrowth of that horrific event are interspersed throughout the book. Salamon says: “If I’d learned anything from my excursion up and down Rambam’s Ladder, it was that empathy couldn’t be mandated, and that charity shouldn’t be thought of as a sacrifice. Goodness can’t be willed into being. . .But it can be instilled.”

The two women who clean my house call upon me for help on occasion; they take small loans from me against future work. I am happy to do this for them because I know that they have very little and a $20 advance will make their lives much better. Carl, who lives with them, has never borrowed money from me, but last week, he called me and said that he had some trouble and could he borrow $20 until he got his social security. I said, “Of course,” and he walked over to our house to get the money. Yesterday when I delivered the women home after cleaning my house, he came out of their apartment to return my money. By allowing him to pay me back, I was fulfilling one of the steps of Rambam’s Ladder, the maintenance of dignity.

At Christmas time, I was amused and touched when they brought me a gift of onions and potatoes—food that they had received at a holiday food giveaway. I am sure that my receiving that gift was not in the plans of the charity who handed out the food, but I knew it was important to my friends that I receive a gift from them. I accepted it graciously. They also brought a hand-knit cap and a pair of mittens from another charity give-away. It was a gift for my baby granddaughter. Charity is a two-way street. We give and we receive.

In the Beautitudes (Matthew 5: 3-12) it says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” Rambam’s Ladder expands upon that notion of mercy and helps the reader discern at what rung on the ladder of mercy they find their greatest satisfaction. It also explains why sometimes our charitable nature takes us to the top, and why other times we are on the bottom rung.

An interview with Julie Salamon: http://www.foundationcenter.org/pnd/newsmakers/nwsmkr.jhtml?id=59300008

Bossypants

2012-01-17T18:25:00.000-05:00

By Tina Fey

New York, Little, Brown, 2011

277 pages Memoir

My husband thinks that the best part of the Sarah Palin nomination as Vice President was Tina Fey’s portrayal of her on Saturday Night Live. If you, like he, had no idea who Tina Fey was before those sketches, you certainly knew who she was afterwards. As I was reading Bossypants, Fey’s memoir, he kept asking me if I had gotten to the part about Sarah Palin yet.

Bossypants is a very funny book, but it is also very human, filled with self-deprecating humor. You have got to like Tina Fey. She is a woman who has risen through the ranks of comedy—admittedly a male-dominated business and succeeded beyond even her wildest expectations.

Tina was a good girl who grew up in a nice suburban home. She makes no bones about her physical attributes and how they compare with what society expects. She writes about her social awkwardness as a kid and how theatre saved her. I found myself nodding all the way through the section about the community theatre she worked at in the summers she was at college. My daughter had similar experiences. Fey says, “We should all strive to make our society more like Summer Showtime: Mostly a meritocracy, despite some vicious backstabbing. Everyone gets a spot in the chorus. Bring white shorts from home.”

Following college she toured with Second City, met and married her husband Jeff before moving to New York to write for Saturday Night Live, eventually becoming head writer. After several years, she became writer, producer and actor in her own series, 30 Rock which is in its 6^th season. By all means, she is a tough lady, but mostly in Bossypants she comes across as a stressed-out mother, wife, and executive just trying to get through the days. She admits that doing all these things are hard work and she probably couldn’t do it without her supportive husband and the nanny. (She has a hard time calling her the nanny. It seems too upper-class for her.) The chapter about the introduction of the Sarah Palin character is counterbalanced by shooting an episode of 30 Rock with Oprah Winfrey and buying napkins and plates for her daughter’s third birthday party.

Laced throughout the book are discussions about modern womanhood—breastfeeding, maxipads, being skinny as opposed to being overweight, and being intimidated by the babysitter (oops—nanny). One reviewer says that Tina Fey “has carved out a rare position as a satirical authority on contemporary ladyhood.”

The best part of Tina Fey is that she doesn’t take herself too seriously. Life is funny; life is ironic; life is better with Photoshop. The reader only has to look at the endorsements on the back cover, including “Totally worth it.”—Trees” and “I Hope that’s not really the cover. That’s really going to hurt sales.”—Don Fey, Father of Tina Fey.”

Additionally, she doesn’t work too hard to relate with her reader—the relationship just comes naturally. Nearly everything is light, enjoyable and fun because Tina Fey is very real and very much like the rest of us—only funnier. My favorite chapter is about her daughter Alice bringing home a library book about My Working Mom, in which the Mom is a witch. “I told her that I didn’t like it that the mommy in the book was a witch. That it hurt my feelings. And she looked at me matter-of-factly and said, ‘Mommy, I can’t read. I thought it was a Halloween book.’” It is easy to see why Bossypants was at the top of the best seller lists: Every working mother in America can read that and relate.

The book’s title was Fey’s husband’ s idea. “At first it was just ‘Bossy’ with an exclamation mark, because of my musical theater background,” he says. She fleshed out the phrase ‘bossypants.’ “You wanted to own it,” he says, turning to her and adding: “Bossy! It’s a good thing.”

Here are a couple of good reviews:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/04/books/bossypants-by-tina-fey-review.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/arts/television/17fey.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&ref=books&adxnnlx=1326834360-oUJsLjhyhFkSrLgvvXl2Sw

The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

2012-01-13T13:12:00.000-05:00

By Candice Millard

New York, Doubleday, 2011

352 pages Non-Fiction

James Garfield was the last president to be born in a log cabin, and the president to serve the second shortest term in office, only 200 days. (The shortest term in office having been served by William Henry Harrison, who only served 31 days.) He was one of the only presidents to go directly from the House of Representatives to the presidency, and probably the only president who didn’t seek nomination nor did he want to be president.

In The Destiny of the Republic,Candice Millard recounts Garfield’s unlikely rise to the presidency from a farm in Ohio to his death in September of 1881, at the hand of an assassin. Garfield was a brilliant man, a college president at the age of 26, and a congressman from Ohio for 9 terms. At the contentious 1880 Republican convention in Chicago, he rose to nominate another politician, and the delegates suddenly latched onto him as a potential candidate. He begged to have his name removed from consideration, but the delegates would have none of it and he was nominated on the thirty-sixth ballot.

President James Garfield

Garfield was a good man and likely a good choice. His place in history, however, is primarily marked by his assassination. He worked hard to eliminate cronyism from federal office, fought for equal rights for freed slaves, and created opportunities for the restoration of the South. In the days before personal safety precautions for Presidents, Garfield had open office hours and spent what he felt was an inordinate amount of time interviewing office seekers. One of the people he saw frequently among the office seekers turned out to be his assassin, Charles Guiteau.

Charles Guiteau

Millard also tells the story of Guiteau and his quest to become the Counsel General to France, a job he felt he was owed because he had made a speech in support of Garfield during the election campaign. His story is equally as fascinating as Garfield’s, and Millard paints a picture of a man who probably was bright enough but had no sense of reality and never took responsibility for the act that caused the President’s death. A reviewer recapitulates this part of the narrative: “Guiteau, whose story has also been much overlooked, made no secret of his plotting. In a letter explaining his plans to the American people, he reasoned: ‘It will be no worse for Mrs. Garfield, to part with her husband this way, than by natural death. He is liable to go at any time anyway.’ He scouted jails, deciding where he wanted to be incarcerated. He left instructions (“please order out your troops”) for Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who would be marshalling troops for Guiteau. They protected the assassin from being killed by a mob before he could go to trial.”

Guiteau’s story is bizarre, to say the least. I happened to be reading the chapters about how he plotted the assassination while the US was commemorating the one year anniversary of the attempt on Congresswoman Gifford’s life. When you look at that would-be assassin’s face, you get a feel for how Guiteau must have looked and acted. I remember reading about Guiteau in Sarah Vowell’s delightfully ironic book, Assassination Vacation. He also plays a prominent role in Steven Sondheim’s musical Assassins.

The two most tragic aspects of Garfield’s assassination, both described vividly in The Destiny of the Republic are: 1) that Garfield did not die from the attempt but by medical malpractice, and 2) that the death accomplished nothing. Millard writes: “In no man’s mind save the assassin’s had the shooting achieved anything. It had not been carried out in the name of personal or political freedom, national unity, or even war. It had addressed no wrong, been the consequence of no injustice.”

The description of the day of the assassination is particularly compelling. Millard plots the day like a battle scene, each character moving forward until the fatal moment. I couldn’t put the book down. The scenes at the White House as Garfield lay in pain, slowly dying, attended by a totally incompetent and ego maniacal physician make the reader want to scream, “Wash your hands!!! Don’t you know you are killing him?”

Equally fascinating is the description of Alexander Graham Bell attempting to invent a metal detector to find the bullet lodged in Garfield’s body. And then—the reader’s heart breaks as Garfield is transported by special train to the beach, so that he can die gazing at the sea.

This book is a gripping look at a little-remembered part of American history. I wondered about what Garfield’s impact might have been on the national psyche if he had lived and had continued to work for equal rights and against political chicanery.

Millard is also the author of a book about a forgotten moment in Theodore Roosevelt’s life, The River of Doubt. I am so enthralled with this wonderful new way of writing non-fiction in a narrative fashion, bringing in all the historical elements at play. The Destiny of the Republic is an excellent example of the genre. I highly recommend it. The book has also been recommended on many lists of the best non-fiction books of 2011.

Two excellent reviews in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/books/destiny-of-the-republic-on-garfield-by-candice-millard-review.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/books/review/destiny-of-the-republic-by-candice-millard-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

Candice Millard’s website: http://www.candicemillard.com/

Get Married This Year: 365 Days to "I Do"

2012-01-06T21:14:00.000-05:00

By Janet Blair Page PhD

Boston, Avon Media, 2011

265 pages Non-Fiction

The Shortlist

Your To-Do List This Year:

Today: Get to know yourself.
Next Month: Figure out what you really want from your man.
Month 3: Learn how to get out of your own way.
Month 6: Take the field and find the right guy.
Month 10: Make the big decision.
Month 12: Get Married!

Dr. Janet Page teaches a popular class at Emory University in Atlanta on dating and marriage. She is a well-known relationship expert. This book is a distillation of her classes and lectures and is a book clearly aimed at women. She says at the outset of Get Married This Year that she can teach you “everything you need to know to become happy with yourself, to get your life ready for a lasting relationship, and to find, court, and keep a man. You’ll learn how to meet eligible, commitment worthy people who are both desirable and available, and you’ll work to define what eligible and commitment worthy actually mean to you. You’ll also understand how to market yourself, become a smart ‘shopper,’ develop your action plan, and feel confident that you’ll stay with your partner for the long run.”

This is a tall order, but one that Dr. Page has been doing for many years. She says that the goal of the book is not to simply get “married off” but to marry well. Through stories, worksheets, and pithy little “love notes,” she lays out a plan of self-improvement, careful choices and brave decision making that will lead to a worthy relationship.

I really liked what she had to say about choosing the perfect man. She advises women to look way beyond the outside veneer of available men and into their hearts, souls, and character. Sometimes a man who looks good on the outside is no-good on the inside. Your best match may not be the “cutest.” I have been watching with interest a young couple who are in my Tai Chi class. One evening, they walked into class and announced that they had just gotten married that day. Would I ever have matched them by looks alone? Not by a long shot. She is very attractive; tall and thin. He is overweight, and rather Midwest dumpy looking. But they are so happy together. A perfect match!

Today’s Wall Street Journal had an article about a new breed of matchmaker for men and women who are having trouble finding mates. Called “wingmen” or “wingwomen,” these cupids-for-hire go to parties and gatherings with less-confident and shy men and women, helping to ease them into conversations and making introductions.

Dr. Page’s sound and practical advice will go a long way to help those women who are ready to marry get prepared to meet the man who will be just right for them. This could be the year!

Dr. Page’s website: http://drjanetpage.com/

Full-Filled

2012-01-06T20:09:00.000-05:00

By Reneé Stephens and Samantha Rose

New York, Free Press, 2011

298 pages Non-Fiction

The Shortlist

When I received Full-Filled from the publisher, I began paging through the book looking for the menus and eating plans so common in most weight loss books. Much to my surprise, there were none. This is a weight loss book unlike the plethora of diet books that come out about this time every year.

Full-Filled is a holistic approach to getting control of weight, cravings, and the bad eating habits that keep most people from finding and maintaining their ideal weight. Stephens combines meditation, journaling, counseling, and peer groups to help the reader—who has picked this book up with purpose—lose weight and gain control over their bodies and their self-image.

I found it easy to read. The advice was solid. The techniques were useful. Stephens advises the reader/dieter to stop beating themselves up over past failures or momentary lapses. She suggests that the reader find a partner to work through the chapters, the journaling, the exercising, and the dieting with—someone who will help the reader be accountable. She even offers an online support group to aid the dieter in achieving his/her goals.

According to Stephens, much of the dieter’s dilemma has to do with self-image, and the intent of Full-Filled is to assure the reader that food is only part of the problem and only part of the solution. Mindfulness, stress-relief, and emotional support all will help the reader change their relationship to the food he/she eats.

Renee Stephens is a renowned behavioral weight loss expert. She knows what she is talking about having had a difficult relationship with food in her life. She has many online and ITunes podcasts which she uses to connect with the people who are following her plan, which she calls a "weight release plan." I like that thought.

Last year I read Women, Food, and God by Geneen Roth. I would suggest that it would be a supportive book in combination with Full-Filled. Both will help people change the way they look at food and the way they look at themselves.

An Article about Renee Stephens: http://personallifemedia.com/hosts/208-renee-stephens

The Best of 2011

2011-12-31T13:05:00.000-05:00

According to the Cyberlibrarian, that is!

I had an amazing year of reading in 2011 capped off by the gift of a Kindle, just so I can have several more books going at one time. (Oops, I just heard on the radio that “amazing” is the most overused word of 2011, so let me change my first sentence.) I had an enlightening year of reading in 2011. In all, I read 78 books including 17 memoirs, 13 non-fiction books, 11 religious or spiritual books, 31 fiction books, 1 book of short stories, and 3 books of humor. Here are my favorites.

Fiction

1) Little Bee by Chris Cleave

2) Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell

3) Long Shining Water by Danielle Sosin

4) An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy

5) One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

Nonfiction

1) The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

2) In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

3) Our America by LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman

4) Zeitoun by Dave Eggars

5) A Thousand Lives by Julia Scheeres

Religious/Spiritual

1) A Hidden Wholeness by Parker Palmer

2) Longing for Enough in a Culture of More by Paul Escamilla

3) In the Land of Believers by Gina Welch

4) Fall to Grace by Jay Bakker

Memoir/Biography

1) Just Kids by Patti Smith

2) Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

3) Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo

4) Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

5) Little Princes by Conor Grennan

Most Popular Blog Postings

1) Zeitoun by Dave Eggars

2) Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

3) Carrots N’Cake by Tina Haupert

4) Fall to Grace by Jay Bakker

5) The Long Shining Water by Danielle Sosin

The Last Testament: A Memoir by God

2011-12-31T11:42:00.000-05:00

With David Javerbaum

New York, Simon & Schuster, 2011

365 pages Humor

Aziz, our Muslim Saudi student renter, looked at The Last Testament sitting on the kitchen table, pointed at the picture on the cover and asked, “What is this?” What was I to say? “Ah," I said, “it’s a humorous book by someone pretending to be God.” He took another look and turned away. I don’t think I scored very many points with Aziz that day.

David Javerbaum, who has taken irreverent looks at lots of things, first as a writer for Jon Stewart and lately as a songwriter and author, has really done it this time…The Last Testament is the ultimate irreverence. This is not a book for the faint-of-heart or the fundamentally religious, nor is a book for people who know nothing about the Bible or religion in general. It is very funny, but there are some passages in which you say, “OMG, I can’t believe I just read that!”

The book itself looks like a Bible, with books, and chapters and verses. There is an Old Testament and a life of Jesus--Jesus being “the classic middle son” with an older brother Zach, called H.G. or Holy Ghost for short, and a younger sister, Kathy. You will find chapters about God’s favorite things, a chapter of “Godlibs,” a chapter of recipes, including one for Junior’s Fishwish Miracle, in which the ingredients are five loaves and two fishes.

My favorite book is called “Pleader” in which God discusses his views on prayer and the answering of prayer. God says that children should not be praying “And if I die before I wake, I pray thee, Lord my soul to take.” He continues “Even I consider it bizarre, that the last words on children’s lips before they go to sleep would address the prospect of their own premature death. They are children. They should be asking me for ponies.”

Everything religious gets skewered—Jews, Muslims, Scientologists, Hindus and particularly Buddhists. Some verses are laugh-out-loud funny; some are pretty dumb; and some are so obscure that the reader (at least the readers in our household) has no idea what’s going on. On the whole, the book is erudite and sophisticated, although occasionally it tends toward the crass.

My husband and I read it aloud together every morning over the past couple of months; it was great to have a good laugh every morning.We remarked several times about how knowledgeable the author is about scripture and religion (Javerbaum, not God). Anyone who can so skillfully satirize God must know a lot about our religious idiosyncrasies.

A review of The Last Testament in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/books/the-last-testament-a-memoir-by-god-review.html

An interview with David Javerbaum:

http://clatl.com/culturesurfing/archives/2011/11/11/holy-ghost-writer-david-javerbaum-works-on-gods-memoir

Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life

2011-12-30T20:24:00.000-05:00

By Michael Moore

New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2011

427 pages Memoir

The Shortlist

You either love Michael Moore, or you hate him. Apparently there is no middle ground. Personally, I rather like the audacity of his point of view and the enthusiasm with which he expresses it in his documentaries. They definitely have a point of view.

His memoir Here Comes Trouble tells stories about his childhood, his career, and his family. Some of the stories are touching, some are humbling, some give a glimpse of the contrarian filmmaker he became; most show him to be a person of character and good humor. Most of all, they show him to be a product of a good family and a product of Michigan. (It should be noted here that Moore and his family still live in the Traverse City area, where one of his current projects is to run the Traverse City Film Festival.)

Luckily, Here Comes Trouble is not a sequential memoir. These are stories; the kind you might tell at a family gathering when everyone is sitting around and the adults are talking and the kids are pretending not to listen. One story tells of a neighbor boy who jumped into the Hudson River rather than let people know he was gay. Another tells about a favorite teacher who disappeared from school when her husband went missing in Vietnam. One tells about going to a night game at the Tiger Stadium shortly after the riots of the 60s when the radiator hose broke on the family car, and a black man helped get the car running again. Another tells about people clapping when they heard the news that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. All the stories show how this boy—the son of an auto worker from a loving home with a Catholic education—became the passionate documentary filmmaker who has influenced American thought for the past 25 years.

The reviewer in the New York Times says of the book: “To remark that “Here Comes Trouble” is by far Mr. Moore’s best book isn’t extravagant praise. He’s more concise as a documentarian; like all of his books this one is shaggy and overfilled. It’s a cabbage rather than a rose, a tangy ring of bologna rather than a sirloin. Side effects may include heartburn.”

Besides—how could you not love that little cutie on the cover in a pint-sized baseball cap on a blue and white tricycle!

You can find the New York Times review at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/books/here-comes-trouble-by-michael-moore-book-review.html

Michael Moore’s website: http://www.michaelmoore.com/

Hurt Machine

2011-12-30T16:07:00.004-05:00

by Reed Farrel Coleman

Cincinnati, Tyrus Books, 2011

309 pages Fiction

Moe Prager is a wounded hero. We are told in the first paragraph of Hurt Machine by Reed Farrel Coleman that Moe has a tumor in his stomach and he is hurting, both physically and psychically. He muses: “Humans are like hurt machines. No matter how hard we try not to do it, we seem to inflict hurt on one another as naturally as we breathe.”

Moe has been a private investigator for many years, and the first case he takes on after his devastating diagnosis is an attempt to make amends with an ex-wife--to appease the hurt that Moe feels he has caused her. Her sister has been murdered under very suspicious circumstances, and as he works to solve the murder, he opens up a world of hurt that extends way beyond the case at hand. Moe feels that solving this case is his last chance for redemption. “As atheists go, I was a dreadful disappointment.”

There are so many remarkable elements at work in Hurt Machine, not the least of which is the aging protagonist, Moe Prager. He is a philosopher in the guise of a private investigator. Like most mysteries, much of the action happens in the last few chapters, but Moe is so full of quotable thoughts that the reader doesn’t try to solve the crime too early for fear of missing some meandering consideration or pithy aside. Here are some of my favorites:

· “Time to think is life’s Petri dish. It’s the medium in which a random twinge of anxiety morphs into debilitating self-doubt, where a passing regret grows into paralytic guilt.

· “Only in the hearts and minds of those closest to them do victims remain themselves.”

·         “These days my exhaustion was profound as a Russian novel.”
·         “What if the face of God was a sneering one and he was the type to say I told you so? What if he was just a universal hurt machine?”
·         “If there was any persuasive argument for the existence of God, it wasn’t in the biology of things, but in emotion, in feelings. I couldn’t quite see how guilt and forgiveness had evolved from the primordial stew.”

This is a man you just gotta like. The New York Times reviewer calls him “a stubborn old shamus.”

Another element that makes for a credible novel is a detailed setting. In this case, the setting is New York City, primarily Brooklyn, and most specifically Coney Island. Author Coleman really knows this city, including all the places that policemen, firemen, and mobsters hang out. Moe’s ex-wife suggests to him that he might as well be buried at Coney Island. “When you die, they should just bury you right here, under the boardwalk.” This is not the NYC of the tourist; it is the New York of a person who has eaten at the Gelato Grotto many times—for its not-so-good pizza as well as for its excellent gelato.

The third element that pleased me about Hurt Machine is the cliffhanger plot. It is impossible to figure out exactly what happened to Moe’s sister-in-law until the very last chapter; in my mind the very most important aspect of a great mystery novel. I truly thought that the book was going to end without a denouement, but then it appeared. Aah—closure. I am not sure, however, that it means closure for Moe Prager, who still is going to have to deal with his cancer after the crime is solved.

I even learned a new word when reading Hurt Machine. mishega—Yiddish for craziness.

Hurt Machine is such a good novel that I am convinced that I must go back and read the six prior novels about Moe Prager by Reed Farrel Coleman; perhaps back to the days before Moe was sick and waxing poetic—or perhaps he has always been philosophical and hurting. He’s just that kind of a guy. I particularly liked what the Kirkus reviewer had to say about him: “Though once or twice he crosses that tricky line between Weltschmerz and cry-baby, Moe Prager remains basically irresistible.”

I received Hurt Machine from the publicist; the book is now available and I can highly recommend it.

The New York Times review: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/books/review/last-exits-in-brooklyn.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3

The Kirkus review: http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/reed-farrel-coleman/hurt-machine/#review

Reed Coleman’s website: http://www.reedcoleman.com On this website, there are videos of the Brooklyn that Coleman ( and Moe Prager) knows well.

An Opportunity for a Free Book

2011-12-20T14:53:00.000-05:00

Hi Friends,
I just received an opportunity for my friends to enjoy a free ebook. Hurt Machine by Reed Farrell Coleman will be available free from Amazon and Barnes and Noble between now and Dec. 24. The New York Times is featuring it in this Sunday's paper, and it has been named one of the best books of 2011 by Publisher's Weekly. Why don't you download it and join me in reading it this week.
Miriam

The Paris Wife

2011-12-19T17:26:00.000-05:00

By Paula McLain

New York, Ballantine Books, 2011

336 pages Fiction

Read on my Kindle

Like many of the literati of their generation, Ernest Hemingway and his new bride, Hadley, took off for Paris in 1921 to begin their lives together. They lived on a small inheritance from her family until Hemingway got on his feet as a writer; they traveled to Spain and Austria, had a baby son, met up with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Archibald McLeish, Gertrude Stein and all the famous authors and poets of the day. But the marriage was not to last, and they were divorced within five years. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain is the novelized version of their marriage.

The story is told by Hadley, who was a virtual “spinster” of 28 when she married the younger Hemingway. He brought her to life, transporting her to a much more exciting and rewarding life than she would have had if she had remained in St. Louis. She was his sounding board and his stability, and according to his memoir, A Movable Feast, the love of his life, although he was married three more times. Of her he says, “I wished I had died before I loved anyone but her.”

It is difficult to know where the facts end and the fiction begins. Because The Paris Wife reads like a memoir, the reader has to keep reminding herself that this is fiction. I found Hadley, at least according to McLain, to be a very interesting character primarily because Ernest takes a back seat in this novel. This is the opposite of everything we know about Hemingway, who was a “larger than life” character in his own life story. The Hadley of The Paris Wife is complex and a keen observer of the lives of the expatriates the Hemingway’s encounter during those Paris years. She was much more down-to-earth and practical than most of the other wives and lovers. Although she seems able to party with the best of them, she remains true and supportive of Hemingway until the bitter end of their marriage.

Hadley seems to understand that the life she experienced as the wife of Ernest Hemingway was a far more stimulating life than any other life she could have had, and that living among the rich and famous in the Paris of the 1920s was at once magical and destructive. She says, “We called Paris the great good place, then, and it was. We invented it after all. We made it with smoke and smart and savage conversation and we dared anyone to say it wasn’t ours. Together we made everything and then we busted it apart again.”

In an article in the Chicago Tribune, Hadley’s biographer Gioia Diliberto discusses how she found source material for her biography in some audio tapes supplied her by Hadley’s long-time friend. She says, “I expected Hadley, who died in 1979, to be bitter toward Hemingway; instead, on the tapes she is full of gratitude to him for giving her "the key to the world." She suggests that Ernest “was the first person to see deeply into her true nature, and in a rueful irony, he helped her find the strong sense of self that sustained her through their break-up.”

I think I can understand that. My first husband, who died at a young age, was an exciting and colorful person, full of humor and love for people. I, on the other hand, took myself far too seriously and was a bit self-righteous and straight-laced. Lee gave me “the key to the world” and opened me up to experience life in ways I never would have if I hadn’t met him and learned from him.

One of the New York Times reviewers pretty much skewered the book, from the cover which looked way more 1950s than 1920s to the slow first third of the novel, to what the reviewer calls “clumsy foreshadowing,” to the blaze of righteous indignation the reader feels when Hadley gets dumped for the stylish Pauline. While I understood what the reviewer was saying, I felt differently about Hadley and The Paris Wife. I thought that McLain created Hadley to be a person who evolved into a strong and interesting person, one who could withstand the dangers of the Paris scene of the 1920s even as she was the backbone for the great writer Ernest Hemingway was to become.

The nasty review in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/books/28book.html

The biography by Gioia Diliberto: Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife, Harper Perennial, 2011. Her article in the Chicago Tribune: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-07-12/news/0907090333_1_hadley-richardson-ernest-hemingway-moveable-feast

An interview with Paula McLain at the Hemingway Project.com: http://www.thehemingwayproject.com/2010/04/interview-with-paula-mclain-author-of.html

The Last Blind Date

2011-12-14T12:37:00.000-05:00

by Linda Yellin
New York, Gallery Books, 2011
318 pages Memoir

Finally! A happy memoir! No abuse, no dysfunctional parents, no rising above adversity!

Linda Yellin tells the story of loss, love and life in her amusing, but thoughtful memoir, The Last Blind Date. This is a book for any woman looking for love in middle age or looking for love following death or divorce. This is a book for anyone needing a good laugh. This is for anyone looking for an uplifting story. This is for anyone.

Although she was divorced from her first husband, she stayed with him as he was dying from cancer. Following his death, Yellin fell into a funk, which included a disastrous, but very funny dating scene. She outlines briefly the major failings of the men she was meeting and dating; the fixups, the blind dates, the “Bozos!” Then,she was introduced, via telephone, to recently divorced Randy, who lived in New York City, while she lived in Chicago. They began a slow courtship that included weekend trips, visits to parents, introductions to Randy’s two young children, and protestations from Randy that getting married was not part of his 5-year-plan.

More than half of the book occurs following their marriage. Yellin would not move to New York without being married. When she tells a Chicago cab driver that she is flying home to New York, early in the marriage, he asks her how long she has lived there. (We already know that she sounds like a Midwesterner because of a very funny section on trying to lose a Midwestern accent.) She tells him that she has lived there for two months because she got married. He looks her over and remarks, “And you couldn’t find a guy in Chicago?”

She tells of the difficulty of adapting to work in New York, following a successful Chicago advertising career; adapting to marriage again; adapting to life in New York City; and adapting to being the step-mother to two children. She calls them the “stepfruit-of-my-loins as she overthinks every aspect of her relationship with them. Luckily, Randy is a laid-back husband and father, and life smoothes out over time.

The best part of Linda Yellin’s memoir writing style is that she doesn’t take herself too seriously. She looks at the things that happen to her with both understanding and humor. It doesn’t hurt at all that Randy approaches life with the same strengths. Additionally, the humor comes naturally. There is nothing forced; she doesn't have to keep telling herself, "I need to add a zinger right here." The power of her humor comes from the way in which she views life, with a healthy respect for the irony present in most situations.

One of my favorite chapters is about a trip to get her eyebrows waxed by a stylist, which is going to “change her life.” When she returns home after this amazing experience, she approaches Randy in a totally New York outfit with totally New York eyebrows. He is hard at work fixing a small appliance. She says, “Honey, do I look different?” He hardly looks up and responds, “You look great!” “Regular great or different great?” “Always great! Do you mind stepping out of the way? You’re standing in my light.” Yellin’s thoughts at that moment: “My life hadn’t changed because of reshaped brows…and it hadn’t changed thanks to new clothes. My life changed when I married a man who looked at me, really looked at me, and still considered me beautiful.”

One blog reviewer mentioned that The Last Blind Date restored her faith in memoirs. “I have found only a very few authors who have been able to write with enough objectivity while maintaining their own humanity that I have become a believer in some memoirs. This is one of them. (The other is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls).” I too loved The Glass Castle. But I could also recommend Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen and Working It Out by Abby Rike, although Working it Out is a much darker memoir. When you consider The Last Blind Date, think Sleepless in Seattle.

I met my husband when I was in my mid-fifties. Frankly, I had given up on dating—it was just too depressing. This was a blind date set up by a mutual friend. My New York daughter-in-law dressed me for the experience; I was so nervous I thought I was going to die, because somehow I knew that this time it was going to be different. As I approached the restaurant, I called my Mommy for support. She said, “Miriam, you’re a lovely person. He is going to like you. Everything will be fine.” And it was.

My step-daughter is involved in a London-Boston romance with a man with two children. She is leaving for the holidays to be with him in London. He visited her in Boston last month. This book is definitely for her to let her know that all things are possible.

A good blog review http://amusingreviews.blogspot.com/2011/10/last-blind-date-by-linda-yellin.html

An interview on Chicago TV station, WGN: http://www.wgntv.com/videogallery/65543237/News/Author-Linda-Yellin-The-Last-Blind-Date

Linda Yellin’s website: http://lindayellin.com

Unclean Spirit: The Black Sun's Daughter Series

2011-12-10T10:27:00.000-05:00

By M.L.N. Hanover

New York, Pocket Books, 2009

400 pages Fiction

The Shortlist

Today, I introduce my son-in-law Isa Ford as a guest blogger. When I was sent the Black Sun’s Daughter series, (4 books currently—the fifth book is forthcoming), I was at a bit of a loss. I was committed to reading another fantasy series, and I am a bit of a novice with the concept of urban fantasy (Does it qualify that I saw the movie, Sin City?), so I passed this series on to Isa, who reads a lot of fantasy. Here is his take on book one of the series: Unclean Spirit.

Jayné Heller is the heir of a massive fortune that she never knew about, which was left to her by an uncle that she thought she knew. She is thrown together with a group of over protective men to find her uncle’s killer. She is told that her uncle was killed by a demon possessed man and that monsters and magic are real. If she wants revenge, she must expect that the world is bigger than she ever imagined. The only way to kill a monster is with magic. So her only option is to start believing in magic or die.

Unclean Spirit is a good introduction into a world that has a unique way of looking at the supernatural, while having the basic concepts expected in this genre. There were some slow points and it was a little predictable when it came to the interpersonal relationships of all the characters. The main character is written in a way that makes me want to follow her as she progresses into the role of urban hero.

Now back to me. M.L.N. Hanover is the pen name for the fantasist Daniel Abraham, the author of the Long Price Quartet Series. On his website, Abraham defines urban fantasy as a combination of horror, mystery, romance, and science fiction. “Urban Fantasy doesn’t take its power from having roots in other genres. It didn’t bloom into one of the most important areas in publishing because it was horror or romance or mystery. It took root because the story it’s telling matters to us, and it’s a story that wasn’t getting told elsewhere. So, in fact, urban fantasy exists as a genre because it’s not horror and not romance and not mystery. It gives us something else, and it’s something we as a culture are hungry for.” Reviewers commented that the Black Sun's Daughter series is so very different from Abraham's other writings, that his signature style is barely identifiable--thus the pen name.

The four books currently out in the Black Sun’s Daughter series include: Unclean Spirits, Darker Angels, Vicious Grace, and Killing Rites. Book 5 comes out in the summer. Some reviewers complained that the introductory book was just that—introductory. But now that the series has four books, reviewers recommended moving right on to the second book where the action picks up.

Daniel Abraham’s website: http://www.danielabraham.com

An interview with Daniel Abraham: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/12/interview-daniel-abraham/

Lethal

2011-12-03T13:04:00.000-05:00

By Sandra Brown

New York, Grand Central, 2011

472 pages Fiction

Sandra Brown has written over 60 novels, romances, mysteries, and thrillers. The Denver Post calls Lethal, her latest book “romantic suspense.” They also say that it is a “Hitchcockian thriller that reads like a bullet.”

Honor Gillette and her young daughter Emily have been living a quiet life in the country near Tambour, Louisiana. Her husband, Eddie, a police officer, was killed in a car accident two years before. Honor and Emily’s lives are shattered when they meet up with Lee Coburn, a deeply undercover FBI agent. Accused of killing 7 people in a warehouse massacre, he is on the run, and Honor and Emily become his unwilling accomplices. Coburn is trying to find “The Bookkeeper” who orchestrated the massacre, and Honor is trying to figure out how to protect the reputation of her husband, whose car accident may not have been accidental.

Lethal is suspense writing at its very best. The set-up is chilling; the collateral damage is spectacular, and the plot deceptive and clever. The characters are all believable with Coburn and Honor being the most developed. The tension between them is palpable, but the romance takes a back seat to the pressure of the plot. Just when you think you have something figured out, Brown throws a curve ball or a cliff-hanger, and the reader is left gasping. Nothing is as it seems.

My favorite spot in a mystery or suspense novel is when you can’t stop reading; whether it is 10 in the morning or midnight. I reached that point in Lethal last evening about 11:30. I forced myself to go to sleep only to toss and turn all night. When I got up this morning, I said to my husband that I couldn’t do anything else until I finished this book. Early in my reading this morning, I figured out who the Bookkeeper was, but I still had to wade through several more murders and plot twists until my suspicions are confirmed. AHA, I thought, I knew it all along, but truthfully, I wasn’t sure. Don’t you just love books like that!

I particularly like the character development of Coburn and Honor. Frequently in mysteries or suspense novels, character development gets lost in plot development, and we end up knowing very little about the characters. In Lethal, we actually get to see the characters change and make decisions based on emotional growth rather than the machinations of the plot developer. Kudos to Brown for that.

It is amazing and fun to see the role that cell phones play in the plot. They are crucial to the outcome of the novel. In her blog, Brown mentions the difficulties she had in using cell phones as plot devices—the technology was changing faster than she could write. She says, “. . .just when I think I’ve got it figured out, someone on “CSI” or “Castle” says something about the bad guy’s “burner” and I’ve got to go look that up. (For you equally untutored, a burner is a disposable phone that can be bought at several outlets, including your local supermarket. In my store, the display is between produce and paper products. And, yes, I bought one for “research” — and felt like a drug dealer.) There was a time when a cell phone couldn’t be tracked unless it was turned on. Which seems like the good old days, except that it was only about a month ago. Now, my phone guru tells me that “If I have the phone number, even if the phone is turned off, so long as there’s a battery in it, I can track it, tap into it, and gain total access.” If he weren’t such a good guy, I’d be very worried. The point is, the technology is there for your cell phone – your life – to be an open book (No pun intended.) It’s scary… And it’s HELL on a fiction writer.”

It is with some chagrin that I have to mention that it is been a very long time since I have read a Sandra Brown novel…several years as a matter of fact. I used to only read mysteries and suspense novels; there was even a time that I only read English parlor murder mysteries. I had to teach myself to read literary fiction. It was great fun to return to this genre. I have three more mysteries on my “to read” shelf. I will have to force myself to move on to the other genres.

I want to thank the publicists for sending Lethal to me. I will pass it on to my sister, who loves suspense novels.

Here is the review in the Denver Post: http://www.denverpost.com/books/ci_18931131

Sandra Brown’s very colorful website: http://sandrabrown.net/