Metal Meredith

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After trying out her adult wings in California, Melinda LeBlanc has come home to work for her cousin arranging flowers. Out of place and outdated, she befriends Libby, who designs strange dresses in the shop next door, and Dennis Vaughan, a native son and very attractive black man who owns the hip Brookhoppers, a fly fisherman’s paradise. Libby aims to marry Dennis. Melinda tries to keep her dignity as an un-degreed lonely woman in a college town. And Dennis wants--what? Lipman is a modern-day Jane Austen and her characters crackle with wit and intelligence.

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From Publishers Weekly
These often hilarious, sometimes contrived essays put the “me” in “confessional memoir” front and center. Burroughs recounts scenes from the floridly dysfunctional childhood chronicled in his bestselling Running with Scissors, along with vignettes from various bad jobs, including his travails at an ad agency, and his life as a famous writer. His theme is himself: his struggles with alcoholism, a voracious Nicorette habit, compulsive Web surfing, slovenliness, social isolation, unfitness for employment, gross bodily emissions and general embarrassment at being alive. The thin story lines—a visit from the tooth fairy, a trip to the doctor, house-training a puppy—suggest that Burroughs’s well-mined vein of life experience may be played out. He fattens up the material—a (Frey-inspired?) disclaimer warns some events have been “expanded and changed"—in ways that sometimes ring false, especially in his childhood reminiscences, which are improbably detailed and infused with an adult sense of camp. Often, though, the only thing animating the writing is the author’s perverse imagination. Fortunately, Burroughs has superb comic sensibility, throwing off sparkling riffs on everyday humiliations in a voice that’s alternately caustic and warm, bitchy and self-deprecating. His self-involvement can get claustrophobic, but when he steps outside his head no one is funnier or more perceptive.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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I love this author and it is truthfully one of the very, very few that I will pre-order the book instead of waiting until I can get a cheap, used paperback. 

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From The Washington Post’s Book World/washingtonpost.com
Elinor Lipman is a far more serious novelist than she pretends to be or is allowed to be by reviewers. (I learned a long time ago that to be taken seriously you need to cut back on the funny lines. I once all but won the Booker Prize for a novel from which, on Kingsley Amis’s advice, I had removed anything remotely mirthful. Alas, it was still “all but,” so I reverted to my old ways.) Lipman, declining to learn this worldly wisdom, goes on making jokes and therefore tends to get described with adjectives that are good for sales but bad for literary reputations: “oddball,” “hilarious,” “over-the-top,” “quirky,” “beguiling” or, worst of all, “summer reading.” The prose slips down too easily and pleasantly to allow her to rise into the literary top division, where the adjectives become “piercing,” “important,” “profound,” “significant,” “lyrical,” “innovative” and so on. Dull, in fact.

But up there at the top is where this enchanting, infinitely witty yet serious, exceptionally intelligent, wholly original and Austen-like stylist belongs. Delicately, she travels the line where reality and fiction meet. Reality being more oddball, quirky and chaotic than fiction can ever be, Lipman inures us to the truth about the way we live by making it up as she goes along, cracking jokes and pretending it’s all fiction.

This is Lipman’s campus novel. (She wanders in and out of genres. The Dearly Departed was a mystery featuring dead bodies and policemen—or “Summer reading at its best,” as the Atlantic Monthly damned it. The Pursuit of Alice Thrift was her doctors-and-nurses novel, elegant and baneful.) Being a Lipman creation, the heroine of My Latest Grievance is no conventional academic but the precocious 16-year-old Frederica, child of two kindly, solemn professors, PC before their time. (The novel is set in the ‘70s.) Her father is the union grievance chairperson; her mother lectures on social stratification, murder and penology. Frederica’s father turns out to have had a first wife, the egregious Laura Lee. Claiming stepmotherly status, Laura Lee appears out of nowhere to become a campus house mother, seduce the dean, nearly get the parson excommunicated, drive drunk and claim pregnancy, leaving Frederica to deal with the fall-out. Lipman takes this kind of thing for granted. So do I. Real life is fuller of outrage than fiction ever is.

See Frederica now, eating in the college canteen. Because her highly developed community spirit suggests that she always choose a seat next to the lonely and neglected, she sits next to the ostracized Laura Lee. Frederica’s mother joins them: “My mother put her tray down next to mine. Her plate held only the evening’s carrots, baked potato, and raw cauliflower florets from the salad bar. She looked her dowdiest, her gray hair bushing out from two mismatched barrettes of mine, her reading glasses dangling over a faded brown turtleneck, torn along one shoulder seam.”

“ ‘Are you a vegetarian?’ asked Laura Lee.”

Laura Lee’s subtext: Trust the ex-husband to choose a non-meat-eater for a second wife. And on the novel blithely goes. Lipman would not dream of belaboring a point, underlining a joke for our benefit. She side-swipes them, leaving a gap between her sentences, a jump in reasoning that both diverts and requires attention and leaves you laughing aloud.

Frederica is aggrieved. She has reason to be: She had no childhood; she has no home other than the college dorm; her diet since infancy has been the college canteen. “I wanted to be cool,” she thinks. “I wanted my father to drive a car and wear a suit to work. I wanted my mother to read Vogue, color and straighten her gray hair, wear high heels, cut the crusts off sandwiches. I knew from television that families were supposed to live in houses, to sleep uninterrupted by fire drills or homesick freshmen, and eat by themselves in dining rooms that didn’t seat a thousand.” No such luck.

Frederica’s fate is to end up in the college where she began, as vice chancellor in charge of administration of all things financial. Eventually, she creates the Laura Lee French prize, to be awarded to the student who most emulates that respected creature, now deceased. “When the winner is announced—always a famously kooky but popular pain in the ass—the crowd goes wild.” It does not matter if I’ve told you how the book ends; the delights of the journey are everything. Elinor Lipman seems to find difficulty in taking herself seriously, but I think this is superstition—the better to turn away the wrath of the Gods of Literature, who might strike her down in envy if she catches their eye.

Reviewed by Fay Weldon
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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From The Washington Post’s Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reviewed by Kathleen Matthews

Breaking news: Barbara Walters wears fake eyelashes, is afraid to drive, gave up her black married lover to save her career (while his went down the tubes).

These and other true confessions provide the tabloid interest through 600 pages of the network diva’s new memoir, Audition. But it’s her heartfelt candor that lifts this book above mere titillation. Finally we learn why Walters is so relentless. It’s a question I’ve often pondered watching her on television after beginning my own TV news career 30 years ago. In this engaging and chatty look back at a life largely lived in public view, Walters provides the answer.

As Walters explains it, relentlessness is what comes from a nomadic youth spent following her father’s roller-coaster show business career from Boston to New York and Miami. Lou Walters’s night club, the Latin Quarter, made him a Broadway legend, but he died in a Florida nursing home, leaving his wife and developmentally disabled adult daughter to be supported by Barbara, who was a single mom. Seeing her own career through the lens of show business, living “just one bad review from closing,” Walters admits she always feared her hard-fought success would be taken away. Hence, for all her stellar achievements, we understand her compulsion to prove herself in a never-ending audition.

But blended with this personal drama is a delightful tale of the golden age of television, including the stomach-churning contract negotiations and network rivalries. Through 50-plus chapters, you feel as though you’ve enjoyed a year of weekly lunches with Walters at Café des Artistes, the famed New York hangout for ABC stars. She regales you with juicy behind-the-scenes details of the celebrities she’s interviewed, mixed in with stories of her own trials and tribulations. In the end, you envy her a little less and admire her more.

There are moments when you’re tempted to groan—she has a sycophantic weakness for royalty and at times writes about herself as she would about the Hollywood celebs she relentlessly profiles—but she quickly corrects course with unexpected candor that is completely disarming. When I opened the chapter “Special Men in My Life,” I was tempted to say, “Spare me, please.” But, honestly, who can resist hearing what it was like to have “a long and rocky affair” with the elegant, married African American senator Edward Brooke or date the future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan ("a very nice dancer") and John Warner, the Southern senator once married to Elizabeth Taylor?

By the time you finish reading Audition, Walters has won you over, and you suspect she might be pleasantly surprised, like Sally Field winning her Oscar: “You like me. . . . You like me!”

What you don’t expect, after watching Walters’s sometimes cloying interview style and well-crafted TV personality for so many years, is her self-reflection and self-effacement. You also don’t expect such breezy and clear writing. If Walters really wrote this memoir—and I suspect she did—I’m impressed.

Her career began in the 1950s, when she worked behind the scenes at the NBC TV affiliate in New York. She met other people who eventually became media legends: ABC News chief Roone Arledge, CBS’s Andy Rooney and New York Times columnist Bill Safire. We watch Walters’s ascent from glorified tea pourer to “Today Show” co-host. Recalling relentless public criticism from the critics and her male colleagues, she notes with a chuckle an early Newsweek review of her interviewing style as “dumdum bullets swaddled in angora.”

More hurtful was the critique from legendary “60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt, who once told her, “You don’t have the right looks. And besides, you don’t pronounce your r’s right.” Walters’s speech impediment was immortalized in 1976 on “Saturday Night Live” when Gilda Radner proclaimed, “Hewwo! This is Baba Wawa.” What really stung was not Radner’s caricature, but Time magazine noting that Walters was being paid $100 for each minute of her “weadily wecognizable delivewy” as the million-dollar co-anchor of ABC News. (She admits to trouble with her r’s but not her l’s and says she went to a speech specialist early in her career but couldn’t shed the remnants of what she describes as a Boston accent.) As for Radner’s impersonation, Walters admits it was dead-on and she was glad to have a chance to compliment the comedian later.

Her years on the “Today Show” with Hugh Downs and Joe Garagiola were among her best in television. But what followed was perhaps her worst. NBC management paired her with Frank McGee and dictated that she jump in only on the fourth question for big news interviews after he’d asked the first three. Soured, she left to become the first woman network news co-anchor for ABC, but this provided little relief as she faced the big chill from co-anchor Harry Reasoner. She eventually found her oasis in the “Barbara Walters Specials” and later “20/20” where her tenacity to score the big interview was rewarded. Always the overachiever, she created her own TV show, “The View,” and, now in her 70s, she continues her Academy Award and “10 Most Fascinating People” specials.

The best part of Audition is that Walters takes us with her on all the big interviews. It’s a bit like walking through her office or New York apartment and hearing the stories behind the photos (many included here) that showcase her with the biggest names from the past 50 years of politics and entertainment: Judy Garland, Princess Grace, the Shah of Iran, Golda Meir, Richard Nixon, Fidel Castro, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, the Dalai Lama, Cher. She shares the struggle of getting a good interview with Warren Beatty and Mel Gibson. She admits her regret that she never interviewed Jackie Kennedy, Princess Di, Queen Elizabeth or the current and past popes.

Perhaps so many years of prying into the personal lives of others and probing for vulnerabilities compel Walters to pull away the scabs of the insults and injuries she’s endured. Quite matter-of-factly, she re-lives the heartbreak of three unsuccessful marriages. More poignantly, she recalls the disappointments of several failed pregnancies and the ecstasy of adopting Jackie, whom she named after her disabled sister. “The Hardest Chapter to Write” describes her daughter’s rebellious teen years, when Jackie was derailed by drug use and ran away from home. Walters shares these confidences with the blessing of her now happy adult daughter to “give hope to other parents who are struggling with their own adolescents’ hard-to-understand emotions and rebellion.” For someone who lived her life on television, sharing these most painful years, “which, in truth,” she says, “I would rather not remember,” is perhaps the best therapy.

This, we now understand, is what Walters means when she tells aspiring young people that if they want to pursue a career like hers, “Then you have to take the whole package.” I must admit, I was one of those young women who cheekily wrote Walters a letter asking for advice after college. I also rejected her well-known admonition that women “can’t have it all—a great marriage, successful career, and well-adjusted children—at least not at the same time.” In Audition, Walters shows us the challenges she faced as a trailblazing, mostly single, working mom. But she also inspires and entertains us with a life of accomplishment.

Rose Kennedy once told her in an interview, “I know not age or weariness of defeat,” which aptly captures Walters’s own sentiments as she faces retirement. And that leads me to my last question: After writing this book, has Walters done her last audition? Somehow, I think not. 

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From Publishers Weekly
Harrison was 29 when she came to the New York Post through an exchange program with a London newspaper. After breaking up with her English boyfriend, her initial four-month stint turned into a permanent position, and soon the metro reporter acquired a Sunday column detailing her dating mishaps—all the while nurturing a crush on one of her editors. The abrupt shifts in tone—Harrison’s typical day involves racing from the scene of a child murder to a dinner date with a matchmaker—are jarring but manageable, thanks to Harrison’s engaging voice, and the urban newspaper setting is a zippy backdrop for the real-life chick lit drama. It’s particularly amusing when Harrison and her crush start dating, and she attempts to write about their relationship in the column by changing his vital information, failing to fool anyone at the Post. However, other scenes drag, and the saga limps on for more than 100 pages after Harrison’s interoffice romance grinds to a halt. Harrison’s misadventures will inevitably draw comparisons to those of the other Bridget (Jones), but with a little more practice, this young Brit could remove all confusion.

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From Publishers Weekly
Kennedy, a McSweeney’s contributor, offers an entertaining explanation of how, after years of stumbling through adulthood, he landed an improbable gig writing and producing ads for Atlantic Records. For a kid who grew up dressing like Gene Simmons each Halloween in the 1970s, this should be a dream job—hobnobbing with rock stars and industry legends while making more money than he ever had before. The trouble is that, by the early 21st century, he finds that Atlantic is more corporate than rock. Kennedy’s run-ins with rock stars involve helping Jewel sell razors and mistaking Duran Duran’s manager for a member of the band. When he’s not inadvertently insulting aging rockers, Kennedy worries incessantly about office politics—whether he’s made a permanent enemy of a co-worker by asking what kind of muffin she’s eating, which executives to greet in the hallway and which to ignore. Kennedy’s style—hilarious, paranoid and vulnerable—captures wonderfully the absurdity of the corporate music industry. Readers will appreciate the many lists that pepper the book, including Inappropriate Greetings and Salutations for Middle-Aged White Record Executives to Exchange: #1. Hello, Dawg.

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Actor and comedian Billy Crystal has forged a highly successful career by portraying other people in movies like When Harry Met Sally… and City Slickers. But in 700 Sundays, a memoir based on his one-man Broadway play of the same name, Crystal tells his own story, dissecting an often complex relationship with his father and how that relationship resonated in other aspects of his life. His father, Jack Crystal was an influential jazz concert promoter and operated an influential jazz record label, affording his son an opportunity to tell stories of being taken to his first movie by Billie Holliday and seeing his grandmother suggest that Louis Armstrong simply “try coughing it up.” But Jack died when his son was fifteen years old, soon after a forever-unresolved argument between the two, leaving Billy to cope with crushing grief while simultaneously and perhaps ironically trying to launch a career in comedy. This lends 700 Sundays much needed gravity in a volume that is packed with zingy one-liners and whimsical observations that serve to illustrate the comedy career Crystal forged, while also providing some decent laughs. Interestingly, there is very little reference to the better known accomplishments of Crystal’s Hollywood career as the author chooses to focus instead on the seemingly mundane but highly entertaining aspects of his Long Island roots. Though 700 Sundays (the name comes from Crystal’s estimation of how many Sundays he got to spend with his father) is packaged here in book form, it reads like a piece of theater and, more specifically, like a selection of memories about a father, lovingly and touchingly re-told by his loving son. --John Moe

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I just loved this book. From the author of “Prep”, I find that she is right on target with her voice for the female characters. I can’t wait for another!

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Review:
It’s best to know this from the start: Augusten Burroughs is mean. Augusten Burroughs is also outrageously X-rated. If you can get past those two things, Burroughs might just be the most refreshing voice in American books today, and his collection of acerbic essays will have you laughing out loud even while cringing in your seat. Whether he is stepping on the fingers of little children or giving you the blow-by-blow on a very unholy act, Burroughs manages to do it in a way that fills conflicted fans with both horror and glee.

Spanning from the surprisingly Machiavellian portrayal of his role in a Tang commercial at age seven to his more recent foray into dog ownership, Burroughs has what seems to be an endless supply of offbeat life experiences. Much like earlier David Sedaris collections (Barrel Fever or Naked), there are occasional fits and starts in the flow of the writing, but ultimately, Magical Thinking is worth reading (and re-reading). If you’re familiar with Burroughs’s memoirs, Running with Scissors, and Dry, you may find parts of Magical Thinking repetitive, since these essays bounce around in time between the other two. In fact, in an ideal world, this collection would have come first, as it offers an excellent introduction to Burroughs’s fascinating life. 

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From Publishers Weekly
There’s one joke that Soloway, writer and co-executive producer of Six Feet Under, keeps coming back to, about a little girl who tells her mom a boy has paid her to climb a telephone pole. Her mom keeps telling her he just wants to see her panties… so the girl says she’s “fooled” him, by taking them off. It’s an apt metaphor for Soloway’s view of women’s situation today, which, she says, is ruled by the “Porno-ization of America,” with younger women wanting breast implants and white boys thinking pimps are the height of cool. Soloway’s rants are right-on and entertaining, too, probably because she includes herself among the occasionally deluded. She recounts her own 1970s upbringing as a liberated child who thought she might become president, only by seventh grade she’d “forgotten what Bella Abzug looked like” and gotten her “Ophelia card stamped.” Fortunately, she recovered to become a delightfully sex-positive “Jewess” ("a word invented by others to conjure someone bossy… that I have reappropriated as prideful") who can joke about her cute “Jewish bush,” her fun lesbian sister and her own unaccountable attraction to “Toolbelts” (hunky construction worker kind of guys). Soloway’s book is an amusing work of feminist humor.

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Book Description

From the acclaimed bestselling author of Sushi for Beginners and Angels comes a collection of personal essays on shopping, writing, moviemaking, motherhood and all the assorted calamities involved in being a savvy woman in the new millennium.

Her novels are read and adored by millions around the world, and with Under the Duvet, Marian Keyes tackles the world of nonfiction. These are her collected pieces: regular bulletins from the woman writing under the covers.

Marian loves shoes and her LTFs (Long-Term Friends), hates realtors and lost luggage, and she once had a Christmas office party that involved roasting two sheep on a spit, Moroccan-style. She’s just like you and me ...

Featuring a wide compilation of Marian’s journalism from magazines and newspapers, plus some exclusive, previously unpublished material, Under the Duvet is bursting with funny stories: observations on life, in-laws, weight loss, parties and driving lessons that will keep you utterly gripped—either wincing with recognition or roaring with laughter.

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I totally have a crush on him now (or again, depending on if I will fully admit I have had one for a while).

From Amazon:
At age 10, Steve Martin got a job selling guidebooks at the newly opened Disneyland. In the decade that followed, he worked in Disney’s magic shop, print shop, and theater, and developed his own magic/comedy act. By age 20, studying poetry and philosophy on the side, he was performing a dozen times a week, most often at the Disney rival, Knott’s Berry Farm. Obsession is a substitute for talent, he has said, and Steve Martin’s focus and daring--his sheer tenacity--are truly stunning. He writes about making the very tough decision to sacrifice everything not original in his act, and about lucking into a job writing for The Smothers Brothers Show. He writes about mentors, girlfriends, his complex relationship with his parents and sister, and about some of his great peers in comedy--Dan Ackroyd, Lorne Michaels, Carl Reiner, Johnny Carson. He writes about fear, anxiety and loneliness. And he writes about how he figured out what worked on stage.

This book is a memoir, but it is also an illuminating guidebook to stand-up from one of our two or three greatest comedians. Though Martin is reticent about his personal life, he is also stunningly deft, and manages to give readers a feeling of intimacy and candor. Illustrated throughout with black and white photographs collected by Martin, this book is instantly compelling visually and a spectacularly good read. 

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A collection of stories for anyone who shuddered at the idea of senior prom, REVENGE OF THE PASTE EATERS is about the way the experiences of childhood stay with us and shape us into adults. Cheryl Peck applies her signature wit to more personal stories and reflections about hurting people and getting hurt, about discovering who you are and who you want to be, about feeling not good enough, and about being bigger physically and mentally than many of the people surrounding you. This is a wickedly funny view of what its like to be a middle-aged woman in middle-America, and what really happened to the kids who were different.

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Really, really, really good book! It kept me from killing myself when I was sick and holed up in bed.

From Publishers Weekly
In this funny and engrossing sendup of cheesy rock ‘n’ roll memoir, Spitz (How Soon Is Never?) presents alcohol-soaked drummer Sandy James, formerly of ‘90s could-have-beens the Jane Ashers, who chronicles the Ohio band’s rise to fame and abrupt collapse through the story of front man Harry Vance. As aimless 20-somethings in the early Clinton era, the Jane Ashers make three years’ worth of unsung garage band magic before they have one big hit—and Harry quits to be a dad. Thirteen years later, Sandy is living on a worker’s comp settlement and putting his free time toward reuniting the band. Harry reluctantly agrees to rejoin in the hopes it will impress his petulant teenage son. The son’s girlfriend hypes them on her improbably well-trafficked music blog, and before you can say “label rep” these over-the-hill rockers are selling out a stadium tour, and Harry is transforming from reasonably happy family man to self-destructive coke fiend. Spitz, a senior writer at Spin, knows his business and pitches his wealth of rock knowledge and insider wisdom perfectly, keeping the mix of the cliché, the fantastic and the tragic bright and exact. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Curtis Sittenfeld’s poignant and occassionally angst-ridden debut novel Prep is the story of Lee Fiora, a South Bend, Indiana, teenager who wins a scholarship to the prestigious Ault school, an East Coast institution where “money was everywhere on campus, but it was usually invisible.” As we follow Lee through boarding school, we witness firsthand the triumphs and tragedies that shape our heroine’s coming-of-age. Yet while Sittenfeld may be a skilled storyteller, her real gift lies in her ability to expertly give voice to what is often described as the most alienating period in a young person’s life: high school.

True to its genre, Prep is filled with boarding school stereotypes--from the alienated gay student to the picture perfect blond girl; the achingly earnest first-year English teacher and the dreamy star basketball player who never mentions the fact that he’s Jewish. Lee’s status as an outsider is further affirmed after her parents drive 18 hours in their beat-up Datsun to attend Parent’s Weekend, where most of the kids “got trashed and ended up skinny-dipping in the indoor pool” at their parents’ fancy hotel. Yet even as the weekend deteriorates into disaster and ends with a heartbreaking slap across the face, Sittenfeld never blames or excuses anyone; rather, she simply incorporates the experience into Lee’s sense of self. ("How was I supposed to understand, when I applied at the age of thirteen, that you have your whole life to leave your family?")

By the time Lee graduates from Ault, some readers may tire of her constant worrying and self-doubting obsessions. However, every time we feel close to giving up on her, Sittenfeld reels us back in and makes us root for Lee. In doing so, perhaps we are rooting for every high school student who’s ever wanted nothing more than to belong. --Gisele Toueg

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It makes my head hurt but I am reading it anyway.

Amazon.com
With a title like this, it’s no surprise that authors Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish had a monster bestseller on their hands when the book first appeared in 1988. From the subsequent deluge of readers’ stories, questions, and issues, they have created nearly 50 pages of new material for this, the 10th anniversary edition. The central message remains the same, and sounds almost too simple: avoid comparisons. But parents know that’s easier said than done. The value of Faber and Mazlish’s discussions is precisely that they talk you through umpteen different situations and outcomes to help you teach your brawling offspring a new set of responses. The highly informative text is punctuated with helpful summary/reminder boxes and cartoons illustrating key points. It’s a must-read for parents with (or planning on) multiple children. But parents of young children who get along fine (so far) should read it too--as the authors make very clear, rivalry is inevitable. The only question is how to manage the rivalry with intelligence and compassion, and on that subject they offer a wealth of good advice. --Richard Farr

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From Amazon:
Jim Lindberg is a Punk Rock Dad. When he drives his kids to school in the morning, they listen to the Ramones, the Clash, or the Descendents—and that’s it. They can listen to Britney and Justin on their own time. Jim goes to soccer games, dance rehearsals, and piano recitals like all the other dads, but when he feels the need, he also goes to punk shows, runs into the slam pit, and comes home bruised and beaten . . . but somehow feeling strangely better. While the other dads dye their hair brown to cover the gray, Jim occasionally dyes his blue or green. He makes his daughters’ lunches, kisses their boo-boos, and tucks them in at night—and then goes into the garage and plays Black Flag and Minor Threat songs at a criminal volume. He pays his taxes, votes in all the presidential and gubernatorial elections, serves on jury duty, and reserves the right to believe that there is a vast Right Wing Conspiracy—and that the head of the P.T.A. is possibly in on it. He is a Punk Rock Dad.

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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Robison’s thoughtful and thoroughly memorable account of living with Asperger’s syndrome is assured of media attention (and sales) due in part to his brother Augusten Burroughs’s brief but fascinating description of Robison in Running with Scissors. But Robison’s story is much more fully detailed in this moving memoir, beginning with his painful childhood, his abusive alcoholic father and his mentally disturbed mother. Robison describes how from nursery school on he could not communicate effectively with others, something his brain is not wired to do, since kids with Asperger’s don’t recognize common social cues and body language or facial expressions. Failing in junior high, Robison was encouraged by some audiovisual teachers to fix their broken equipment, and he discovered a more comfortable world of machines and circuits, of muted colors, soft light, and mechanical perfection. This led to jobs (and many hilarious events) in worlds where strange behavior is seen as normal: developing intricate rocket-shooting guitars for the rock band Kiss and computerized toys for the Milton Bradley company. Finally, at age 40, while Robison was running a successful business repairing high-end cars, a therapist correctly diagnosed him as having Asperger’s. In the end, Robison succeeds in his goal of helping those who are struggling to grow up or live with Asperger’s to see how it is not a disease but a way of being that needs no cure except understanding and encouragement from others.

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From Publishers Weekly
After actor Alda (Never Have Your Dog Stuffed) recovered from a nearly fatal intestinal obstruction, he decided to live as if he’d been given a second life. To make his new life as meaningful as possible, he wanted to remember those rare moments when a special stillness had come over him, the kind that hits you when you hear something that goes to the core of who you think you are. These were moments when he’d had some understanding about the meaning of his life, his reason for living—the central questions that Alda grapples with, as he looks back over his life. While poking good-natured fun at some of his earlier rhetoric (the ravings of a naïve Hollywood liberal) he shares highlights of the various commencement speeches and keynote addresses he’s given to future doctors and physicists, or even to the odd group of Jefferson scholars. He phrases it differently for each audience, but the message is consistent: It’s not what you do in life, but how you do it. Notice everything. Always be open to new ideas, new experiences. Alda is chatty, easygoing and humble, rather like a Mr. Rogers for grownups. His words of inspiration would be a perfect gift for a college grad or for anyone facing major life changes.

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Amazon.com’s Best of 2001
On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry’s drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America’s diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so good (with a visit to the world’s largest flavor company) and “what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns.” Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is--literally--feces in your meat.

Schlosser’s investigation reaches its frightening peak in the meatpacking plants as he reveals the almost complete lack of federal oversight of a seemingly lawless industry. His searing portrayal of the industry is disturbingly similar to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, written in 1906: nightmare working conditions, union busting, and unsanitary practices that introduce E. coli and other pathogens into restaurants, public schools, and homes. Almost as disturbing is his description of how the industry “both feeds and feeds off the young,” insinuating itself into all aspects of children’s lives, even the pages of their school books, while leaving them prone to obesity and disease. Fortunately, Schlosser offers some eminently practical remedies. “Eating in the United States should no longer be a form of high-risk behavior,” he writes. Where to begin? Ask yourself, is the true cost of having it “your way” really worth it? 

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From Library Journal
In this eclectic addition to the autobiographical literary genre, Vowell (Radio On: A Listener’s Diary) explains her journey from natural-born liberal to understanding the differences between herself and her conservative family. Her father is a gunsmith and partial to the Second Amendment. The best anecdotes in this book have been pilfered from her family, and she graciously acknowledges the debt. Her liberal use of pop culture serves as a touchstone throughout the collection. The most memorable essay, “What I See When I Look at the Face on the $20 Bill,” recounts a cross-country trip with her fraternal twin sister. They followed the Trail of Tears searching for their heritage and discovered their own constantly conflicting emotions. Many of these pieces were written for radio and lack depth, but Take the Cannoli is still a satisfying read.

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British actor Rupert Everett (ANOTHER COUNTRY) has lived both a typical and atypical life among Hollywood stars. He’s familiar with the politics and gossip, but his status as an openly gay man in Hollywood sets him apart. From his beginning years in the industry to his most recent films, Everett reveals some of the outrageous as well as the sober sides of life in front of the lens. His acting experience makes him an obvious choice as a narrator. Everett delivers his memoir in a soft and sinewy voice that encourages listeners to believe they’re getting an insider’s view. With ease, he sets aside his English accent in order to make clear transitions between his narrative and character voices. L.E. © AudioFile 2007

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From my friend Deb.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Journalist Scheeres offers a frank and compelling portrait of growing up as a white girl with two adopted black brothers in 1970s rural Indiana, and of her later stay with one of them at a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. The book takes its title from a homemade sign that Scheeres and the brother closest to her in age and temperament, David, spot one day on a road in the Hoosier countryside, proclaiming, “This here is: JESUS LAND.” And while religion is omnipresent both at their school and in the home of their devout parents, the two rarely find themselves the beneficiaries of anything resembling Christian love. One of the elements that make Scheeres’s book so successful is her distanced, uncritical tone in relaying deeply personal and clearly painful events from her life. She powerfully renders episodes like her attempted rape at the hands of three boys, the harsh beatings administered to David by her father and the ceaseless racial taunting by schoolmates; her lack of perceivable malice or vindictiveness prevents readers from feeling coerced into sympathy. The same can be said for Scheeres’s description of their Dominican school, where humiliation and physical punishment are meant to redeem the allegedly misguided pupils. Tinged with sadness yet pervaded by a sense of triumph, Scheeres’s book is a crisply written and earnest examination of the meaning of family and Christian values, and announces the author as a writer to watch.

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Oh, how my nightly reading has changed.

I tried to follow it up with the “No Cry Sleep Solution”, just to have an arsenal of information for sleep disturbances if and when they arise. After reading the first 10 pages and skimming a bunch more, I felt as if the whole thing was saying “I am judging you. Judgy Judgerson, You are wrong wrong wrong, Heathen!!!” So, I tossed it.

This book is much better, allowing you to not feel badly for making the right choice, even if it isn’t the easy one. What a good thing to get into the practice of, eh?

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She was just writing a story.

When Anna Koval decides to creatively kill time at her library job in Austin by teaching herself HTML and posting partially fabricated stories about her life on the Internet, she hardly imagines anyone besides her friend Dale is going to read them. He’s been bugging her to start writing again since her breakup with Ian over a year ago. And so what if the “Anna K” persona in Anna’s online journal has a fabulous boyfriend named Ian? It’s not like the real Ian will ever find out about it.

The story started writing itself.

Almost instantly Anna K starts getting e-mail from adoring fans that read her daily postings religiously. One devotee, Tess, seems intent on becoming Anna K’s real-life best friend and another, a male admirer who goes by the name of “Ldobler,” sounds like he’d want to date Anna K if she didn’t already have a boyfriend. Meanwhile, the real Anna can’t help but wonder if her newfound fans like her or the alter ego she’s created. It’s only a matter of time before fact and fiction collide and force Anna to decide not only who she wants to be with, but who she wants to be. 

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From Publishers Weekly
In this zesty memoir, NPR commentator and flight attendant Gillespie riffs on everything from her work as a “bad German translator” to her belief that a lesbian ghost is haunting her house. Gillespie, a hard-living bleached blonde who yearns to own a house, is as charming as a friendly drunk who says one funny, impossible sentence after another. She chronicles her life in diminutive essays, with an appreciation for absurd, seemingly minor moments. The book’s title comes from the curses yelled by a man who was taking an “asshole stroll” across the road, ambling along with the speed of a diseased bovine, Gillespie notes, when she almost hit him because she wasn’t paying attention. She suspects the neighborhood denizens will be unhappy that someone like her is looking for a house in the area: “[The crack dealers] shake their heads dejectedly, knowing it’s a bad day for the neighborhood when bleachy-haired honky bitches can’t brake to accommodate a good asshole stroll.” Among these bright moments of detail, Gillespie manages to tell the story of her family, and like any family worth examining, it has an unusually large number of oddballs. Her mother, who wanted to become a cosmetologist but was terrible at it, ended up as a weapons designer after falling into a job at IBM. Her usually jobless father excelled at charming people into buying him drinks and wearing designer shoes. Sometimes tender, but mostly just wry and a bit wild, Gillespie’s writing is like the best radio commentary, leaving fans hungry for more. Photos.

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Wonderful Book!!!

From Publishers Weekly
Carlip’s fresh, funny memoir of growing up at celebrity’s edge in Hollywood, accompanied by photos and highlights of current events from the 1960s through 2004, is at once hilarious and heartbreaking. Even before her childhood appearance on Art Linkletter’s TV program House Party, Carlip had been bitten by the showbiz bug. With shameless determination, in her teens she pursued friendships with celebrities such as Carly Simon and Carole King, and created her own minor celebrity as a juggler on The Gong Show, an extra in films like Xanadu, and the star of her own rock band. Carlip also turns the lens on her love life and the experience of growing up gay in Los Angeles. Ending the book with an anticlimactic flashback to her appearance on Oprah for her collection of writings by teenage girls, 1995’s Girl Power, the author takes a step back from her continuing pursuit of fame to realize that by feeling like she’s never “enough,” she has been forced to “welcome limitless possibilities by doing everything unaccording to plan.” (Apr. 25)

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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Cupcake Brown (that’s her real name) was 11 in 1976 when her mother died. Custody of Brown and her brother was given to a stranger—their birth father—who only wanted their social security checks. He then left them with an abusive foster mother who encouraged her nephew to rape Brown repeatedly. Brown got better and better at running away. A prostitute taught her to drink, smoke marijuana and charge for sex. Her next foster father traded her LSD and cocaine for oral sex. Eventually she went to live with a great-aunt in South Central L.A., where she joined a gang. Almost 16, having barely survived a shooting, she decided to quit gangbanging. Drugs were her new best friends. A boyfriend taught her to freebase, but then there was crack, which was easier. Before long she was a “trash-can junkie,” taking anything and everything. It wasn’t until she woke up behind a Dumpster one morning, half-dressed and more than half-dead, that she admitted she needed help. Brown conveys this all in gritty detail, and her struggle to come clean and develop her potential—she’s now an attorney with a leading California firm and a motivational speaker—ends her story on a high note. Booksellers, watch out—Cupcake’s gonna sell like hotcakes.

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Thus far, I am unable to put this book down long enough to get some much needed sleep.

From Publishers Weekly
In this nomadic, at times humbling memoir, former RIP magazine editor Friend recalls a quarter-century spent as a ringleader in the music industry circus. From the early 1980s to the late ‘90s, Friend enjoyed an insiders’ perch for some of rock’s greatest moments—he worked as a DJ, a rock journalist, editor of heavy metal’s most popular magazine and had a segment on MTV. In energetic prose he invites readers along on bonding experiences like golf dates with Alice Cooper and riding in private jets with Kiss, as well as exposing moments of professional soul-searching at the hands of Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and Pearl Jam. Remarkably, Friend’s narrative maintains an even keel, whether he’s being ignored by Kurt Cobain or wooed by Gene Simmons, and he candidly portrays the compromised, often confusing role of the rock journalist, constantly teetering between friend and patsy. The most enlightening part of the book is Friend’s brief, failed stint as an A&R man, when the journalist who made a career on megabands staked his A&R career on the Bogmen, a quirky but brilliant New York outfit, and even made a run at Eels. Through success, excess and failure, music fans will enjoy Friend’s anecdotes and his clear-eyed, hardly jaded view of the industry. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 

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Publisher Comments:
Ayun Halliday may not make for the most sensible travel companion, but she is certainly one of the zaniest, with a knack for inserting herself (and her unwitting cohorts) into bizarre situations around the globe.

Curator of kitsch and unabashed aficionada of pop culture, Halliday offers bemused, self-deprecating narration of events from guerilla theater in Romania to drug-induced Apocalypse Now reenactments in Vietnam to a perhaps more surreal collagen-implant demonstration at a Paris fashion show emceed by Lauren Bacall. From taming the wild dog packs of Bali to requiring the services of a bonesetter in Sumatra, Ayun Halliday offers up the best of her itinerant foibles as examples of how not to travel abroad. For instance, on layover in Amsterdam, Halliday finds unlikely trouble in the red-light district — eliciting the ire of a tiny, violent madam — and is forced to explain tampons, which she admits, “might have looked like white cotton bullets lined up in their box,” to soldiers in Kashmir — “They?re for ladies. Bleeding ladies.”

A self-admittedly bumbling vacationer, Halliday shares?with razorsharp wit and to hilarious effect — the travel stories most are too self-conscious to tell.

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From Publishers Weekly
It’s a clich‚ to say that a good memoir reads like a well-crafted work of fiction, but Kimmel’s smooth, impeccably humorous prose evokes her childhood as vividly as any novel. Born in 1965, she grew up in Mooreland, Ind., a place that by some “mysterious and powerful mathematical principle” perpetually retains a population of 300, a place where there’s no point learning the street names because it’s just as easy to say, “We live at the four-way stop sign.” Hers is less a formal autobiography than a collection of vignettes comprising the things a small child would remember: sick birds, a new bike, reading comics at the drugstore, the mean old lady down the street. The truths of childhood are rendered in lush yet simple prose; here’s Zippy describing a friend who hates wearing girls’ clothes: “Julie in a dress was like the rest of us in quicksand.” Over and over, we encounter pearls of third-grade wisdom revealed in a child’s assured voice: “There are a finite number of times one can safely climb the same tree in a single day”; or, regarding Jesus, “Everyone around me was flat-out in love with him, and who wouldn’t be? He was good with animals, he loved his mother, and he wasn’t afraid of blind people.” (Mar.)Forecast: Dreamy and comforting, spiced with flashes of wit, this book seems a natural for readers of the Oprah school of women’s fiction (e.g., Elizabeth Berg, Janet Fitch). The startling baby photograph on the cover should catch browsers’ eyes.

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Although this doesn’t tickle my fancy as much as Laurie Notaro‘s humor, this was still a great collection of stories from another sassy female writer.

From Publishers Weekly
NPR commentator Gillespie follows her debut collection of autobiographical essays (Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch) with more tales from Atlanta’s dark side. This latest installment of entertaining but uneven pieces uses as fodder Gillespie’s friends, family, work as a flight attendant and neighborhood of “drug addicts, whores, and crack dealers.” The author’s straightforward writing style does not limit her subject matter, and she finds humor in the bleakest subjects, like her mother’s death from liver cancer or her neighbor’s house being set on fire. The pieces range from lighthearted to downright depressing, and as a collection can feel repetitive, as Gillespie retells her family’s history whenever she writes about them. Her strongest writing appears when she’s talking about her young daughter, Milly (e.g., in “The Dead Guy,” she relates trying to distract Milly as they drive by a dead person on the side of the road—which is evidently not an uncommon occurrence in her neighborhood). Gillespie’s work may appeal to readers in the Atlanta area and fans of her NPR commentaries and previous book, but might be too grim for a wider audience. (July)

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I have been a fan of Klosterman since reading Fargo Rock City in 2001. His other books have been hit or miss, so I am unsure if this will be a better alternative. However, in reading just the first few sections, I realized that I have never read his interviews, just his books. This is a refreshing change of material for me.

From Publishers Weekly
Fans of Klosterman’s Ritalin-paced pop culture criticism (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) will eagerly devour this collection of previously published essays. Whether investigating Latino fans of British pop icon Morrissey, interviewing female tribute bands like Lez Zeppelin and AC/DShe or eating nothing but Chicken McNuggets for a week, Klosterman is always entertaining and often insightful. But other than a sympathetic profile of Billy Joel, Klosterman rarely strays from his favorite topics: heavy metal music, television, sports and sex. Perhaps this career overview is his way of recycling old themes into some kind of new “defining endeavor,” as he describes the title inspired by Led Zeppelin IV (as it is unofficially called). This would make perfect sense given his work so far: Fargo Rock City was an original and confident debut (like Led Zeppelin I); his newest book definitely has kick, but overall it’s a mixed bag of collected essays—strong and not-so-strong performances—its parts are greater than the whole.

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I managed to devour this book while sick in the past 4 days. I already have a soft spot for 1. autobiographies of rock stars, 2. drug addict rock stars and last but not least, 3. men with giant back tattoos. I couldn’t go wrong with this book and was so silly excited to find it in the store.

From Publishers Weekly
For a musician who has spent the better half of his life either intoxicated or on a drug high, Kiedis, the lead singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, has produced a surprisingly detailed account of his life. Raised in the 1960s and ‘70s by a drug dealer father who first introduced his preteen son to drugs by mashing them into bananas, the high school delinquent and UCLA dropout seemed destined for a life of rabble-rousing until his high school band—cofounded by close friends Michael “Flea” Balzary and Hillel Slovak—took off and became one of the most popular groups of the 1990s. Though he peppers his book with little known facts (for instance, the author narrowly missed being named Clark Gable Kiedis), the punk-funk rocker dedicates too few pages to his introspective music-writing process and too many to his incessant drug use and revolving door of girlfriends (which included actress Ione Skye, singer Sinéad O’Connor and director Sofia Coppola). But while Kiedis fails to scratch beneath the surface of his fast-lane life, his frankness is moving, especially toward the end of the book, when his mea culpa turns into a full-blown account of recovery and redemption. (Kiedis has been sober for almost four years.) Though not generally as articulate as Marilyn Manson’s similar autobiography, Kiedis’s story of childhood drug use, adolescent fame and hard-won maturity will strike a chord with fans of Drew Barrymore’s Little Girl Lost. 

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Phil bought me this for my birthday. He apparently thinks I am very much more brainy than I am.

Amazon.com
When the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary put out a call during the late 19th century pleading for “men of letters” to provide help with their mammoth undertaking, hundreds of responses came forth. Some helpers, like Dr. W.C. Minor, provided literally thousands of entries to the editors. But Minor, an American expatriate in England and a Civil War veteran, was actually a certified lunatic who turned in his dictionary entries from the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Simon Winchester has produced a mesmerizing coda to the deeply troubled Minor’s life, a life that in one sense began with the senseless murder of an innocent British brewery worker that the deluded Minor believed was an assassin sent by one of his numerous “enemies.”

Winchester also paints a rich portrait of the OED’s leading light, Professor James Murray, who spent more than 40 years of his life on a project he would not see completed in his lifetime. Winchester traces the origins of the drive to create a “Big Dictionary” down through Murray and far back into the past; the result is a fascinating compact history of the English language (albeit admittedly more interesting to linguistics enthusiasts than historians or true crime buffs). That Murray and Minor, whose lives took such wildly disparate turns yet were united in their fierce love of language, were able to view one another as peers and foster a warm friendship is just one of the delicately turned subplots of this compelling book. --Tjames Madison

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It is a little over the top annoying, but an easy and fast read.

From Publishers Weekly
They’re ravenous. They’re ruthless. They live in a strictly hierarchical, alpha-dog, eat-or-be-eaten world. No, it’s not a rerun of Wild America; it’s the world of dressed-to-the-nines Park Avenue heiresses, aka Bergdorf Blondes, botoxed to within an inch of their barely-into-the-third-decade lives. Our unnamed London-born heroine is New York’s favorite “champagne-bubble-about-town” and just as effervescent and exhilarating as a fine bottle of Dom Perignon. Blissfully self-interested and flush with the cheeriness that comes from being, well, flush, Miss Disposable Income 2004 sashays her way through New York society in search of the perfect P.H. (Potential Husband)-"Have you any idea how awesome your skin looks if you are engaged?"-and the perfect butt-shaping pair of Chloe jeans. Despair occasionally strikes when her latest prince turns into yet another toad, but it’s nothing an invitation to an uber-exclusive Hermes sale and a gallon or so of Bellinis can’t fix. She’s got the crème de la crème along with her for the ride, including her best friend, the fabulously wealthy heiress Julie Bergdorf, who is tres supportive of her nervous breakdown=You’ll be able to dine out on how crazy you went in Paris for months-and a posse of chattering, Harry Winston-bedecked clones with whom to limo around New York. Tacky? Absolutely. But it’s impossible not to be massively entertained by a woman who refers euphemistically to oral sex as “going to Rio” in memory of the first man who suggested she get a Brazilian bikini wax, considers vodka a food group and who holds up glamour as the first of the commandments. This is a savvy and viciously funny trip into a glittery, glitzy world we sure wouldn’t want to live in-but by which we’re more than happy to be vicariously consumed for the length of a book.

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I needed some light reading to blow through this week. So far, it has been nothing short of amusing. If you liked the Shopaholic series, then you will see the same pattern in her writing.

From Publishers Weekly
Things are suddenly starting to look up for the hapless but optimistic Emma Corrigan. She has kept her job at Panther Cola for nearly a year, has the perfect boyfriend and hopes for a promotion to marketing executive should her first opportunity to strut her stuff and land a business deal be successful. Unfortunately, things don’t go quite as planned, and on her unusually turbulent return flight from a disappointing client meeting, in a terrified state, she confesses her innermost secrets to the good-looking stranger sitting beside her. When she shows up at work the next morning, she is horrified to discover that her mystery man is none other than the revered and brilliant Jack Harper, American CEO of Panther Cola, on a weeklong visit to the company’s U.K. branch. Thus begins a series of chaotic, emotionally exhausting and funny episodes that thrust Emma, with her workaholic best friend, Lissy, and their awful flatmate Jemima, into a world of fairy tales, secrets and deceit. Venturing beyond Saks and Barney’s, the bestselling author of Confessions of a Shopaholic and Shopaholic Ties the Knot entertains readers with backstabbing office shenanigans, competition, scandal, love and sex. The plot is gossamer thin (Jack is keeping secrets of his own) and the lopsided romance not entirely believable, but Kinsella’s down-to-earth protagonist is sure to have readers sympathizing and doubled over in laughter.

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