Best books of 2012 -- Houston Chronicle

One title among the Houston Chronicle's best books of 2012:

The Snow Child
Eowyn Ivey

There are many books out there about childless couples, but Eowyn Ivey's is one of the more unique ones we've come across. Mabel and Jack have no children, and though they're older than most homesteaders, they've decided to start over in Alaska in 1918. Things are tough, and they're doing everything they can just to get by. When they build a child of snow in a rare fit of joy, Mabel and Jack have no idea that everything will change for them.

Read about another book to make the grade.

Learn more about the book and author at Eowyn Ivey's website and blog.

Writers Read: Eowyn Ivey.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fiona Deans Halloran's "Thomas Nast," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons by Fiona Deans Halloran.

The entry begins:

Because this book treats Thomas Nast’s life – not just his work or an episode in his era – it requires someone whose acting exhibits the same sense of dislocation, the same observant and socially jaundiced wit, and the same tendency to mulish obstinacy in the face of opposition.

To be honest – I think first of John Leguizamo.

Hear me out.

Leguizamo played Toulouse-Lautrec in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. In that role, Leguizamo appeared as a short, hot-tempered, rather bizarre artist. You begin to see why I thought of him. But add to that Leguizamo’s comedy, his interest in politics, especially the politics of immigration and culture. Add his awesome capacity for...[read on]

Learn more about Thomas Nast at The University of North Carolina Press website.

My Book, The Movie: Thomas Nast.

--Marshal Zeringue

Three notable books on faith in the U.S.

Ayad Akhtar is the author of the novel American Dervish. One of three books on faith in the U.S. that he tagged for NPR:

Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America by Michael Muhammad Knight

People don't think of Islam as something native to American soil. But Blue-Eyed Devil reveals a more complex picture. In his second book — part memoir, part travelogue, part detective story — Michael Muhammad Knight, a white American convert to Islam at 16, scours the nation, first in his Buick Skylark and later in a Greyhound bus, trying to solve the mysterious disappearance of Fard Muhammad, the legendary founder of the Nation of Islam. In the process, Knight uncovers Islam's surprising, fascinating history in this country, and meets a bevy of nubile Muslim ladies along the way. At once gonzo journalist, punk poet and questing mystic, Knight's personal journey from Malcolm X's mosque in Harlem to a mysterious grave in Southern California is, after all is said and done, a heartfelt search for self.

Read about a novel Akhtar selected for NPR.

Visit Ayad Akhtar's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Jennifer Saul's "Lying, Misleading, and What is Said"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Lying, Misleading, and What is Said: An Exploration in Philosophy of Language and in Ethics by Jennifer Mather Saul.

About the book, from the publisher:

Many people (both philosophers and not) find it very natural to think that deceiving someone in a way that avoids lying--by merely misleading--is morally preferable to simply lying. Others think that this preference is deeply misguided. But all sides agree that there is a distinction. In Lying, Misleading, and What is Said, Jennifer Saul undertakes a close examination of the lying/misleading distinction. Saul begins by using this very intuitive distinction to shed new light on entrenched debates in philosophy of language over notions like what is said. Next, she tackles the puzzling but widespread moral preference for misleading over lying, and arrives at a new view regarding the moral significance of the distinction. Finally, Saul draws her conclusions together to examine a range of historically important and interesting cases, from a consideration of modern politicians to the early Jesuits.

Learn more about Lying, Misleading, and What is Said at the Oxford University Press website.

Writers Read: Jennifer Mather Saul.

The Page 99 Test: Lying, Misleading, and What is Said.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Lisa O'Donnell reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Lisa O'Donnell, author of The Death of Bees.

Her entry begins:

I’m reading The Light Between Oceans but I can’t give too much away without clanging about with spoilers. Needless to say the writing is beautiful.

I’m also reading...[read on]

About The Death of Bees, from the publisher:

Today is Christmas Eve.
Today is my birthday.
Today I am fifteen.
Today I buried my parents in the backyard.
Neither of them were beloved.

Marnie and her little sister, Nelly, are on their own now. Only they know what happened to their parents, Izzy and Gene, and they aren't telling. While life in Glasgow's Maryhill housing estate isn't grand, the girls do have each other. Besides, it's only a year until Marnie will be considered an adult and can legally take care of them both.

As the New Year comes and goes, Lennie, the old man next door, realizes that his young neighbors are alone and need his help. Or does he need theirs? Lennie takes them in—feeds them, clothes them, protects them—and something like a family forms. But soon enough, the sisters' friends, their teachers, and the authorities start asking tougher questions. As one lie leads to another, dark secrets about the girls' family surface, creating complications that threaten to tear them apart.

Written with fierce sympathy and beautiful precision, told in alternating voices, The Death of Bees is an enchanting, grimly comic tale of three lost souls who, unable to answer for themselves, can answer only for one another.

Learn more about the book and author at Lisa O'Donnell's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Death of Bees.

Writers Read: Lisa O'Donnell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five notable books on secret agents

William Stevenson was trained in aerial espionage as a British naval fighter pilot during World War II. A distinguished journalist and war correspondent, he is the author of sixteen books, including A Man Called Intrepid, Intrepid’s Last Case, Ninety Minutes at Entebbe, and, most recently, Past to Present: A Reporter's Story of War, Spies, People, and Politics.

For the Wall Street Journal, he named a five best list of books about secret agents, including:

Family of Spies
by Pete Earley (1988)

An old-fashioned Washington reporter brings his superb investigative skills to this gripping narrative about U.S. naval warrant officer John Walker, who, from 1967 to 1985, compromised American security with unprecedented sweep. Among millions of secrets he handed to the Russians were details of U.S. troop movements during the Vietnam War and some of the actual authentication codes needed to launch U.S. nuclear strikes. The story of how Walker recruited family and friends to do his dirty work for 20 years, and then discarded them as "misfits and weaklings" who brought him down, makes better reading than most novels. Since it is all based on Earley's interviews and astute analysis, it is also an education. No other book I know of exposes the banality that drives unscrupulous spies like Walker, a quality Earley describes as "moral weightlessness." Money was the primary incentive for this biggest of U.S. traitors in recent times. Almost equally important was ego. When Walker was arrested, he firmly believed that the government wouldn't be "so stupid" as to prosecute him. "I was too important as a [potential] double agent," he told Earley later.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Sofka Zinovieff's "The House on Paradise Street"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The House on Paradise Street by Sofka Zinovieff.

About the book, from the publisher:

In 2008 Antigone Perifanis returns to her old family home in Athens after 60 years in exile. She has come to attend the funeral of her only son, Nikitas, who was born in prison, and whom she has not seen since she left him as a baby.

At the same time, Nikitas’s English widow Maud – disturbed by her husband’s strange behaviour in the days before his death – starts to investigate his complicated past. She soon finds herself reigniting a bitter family feud, and discovers a heartbreaking story of a young mother caught up in the political tides of the Greek Civil War, forced to make a terrible decision that will blight not only her life but that of future generations...

Learn more about the book and author at Sofka Zinovieff's website.

The Page 69 Test: The House on Paradise Street.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mary Jane Clark's "Footprints in the Sand," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Footprints in the Sand by Mary Jane Clark.

The entry begins:

How thrilling it would be if Footprints in the Sand were made into a movie! And while I’d be thrilled to sit in a movie theatre and watch Piper Donovan played by any in an array of wonderful young actresses, the biggest kick would be to see...[read on]

Learn more about Footprints in the Sand at Mary Jane Clark's website and Facebook page.

Mary Jane Clark's other novels include the KEY News media thriller series and two previous titles in the Wedding Cake mystery series. A veteran writer and producer for CBS News, Clark worked for almost three decades at the network’s New York City headquarters. Her books are published in twenty-three languages.

My Book, The Movie: Footprints in the Sand.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top road trip books

One title on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of five top books on road trips:

On the Road
by Jack Kerouac

"The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great, that I thought I was in a dream." Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty -- fictional stand-ins for Kerouac and his friend Neal Cassady -- roam America's wide open spaces on a visionary quest for experience and enlightenment. This fictionalized rendering of their restless journeys became a touchstone for the Beat sensibility, and an almost sacred icon for an emerging youth culture. (And in a legendary meeting of the Beat and Hippie generations, Cassady would later emerge as the driver of Ken Kesey's LSD-fueled "Furthur" bus, immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test).

Read about another book on the list.

On the Road is one of Ted Conover's six favorite road books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Maria Wyke's "Caesar in the USA"

This weekend's feature at the Page 99 Test: Caesar in the USA by Maria Wyke.

About the book, from the publisher:

The figure of Julius Caesar has loomed large in the United States since its very beginning, admired and evoked as a gateway to knowledge of politics, war, and even national life. In this lively and perceptive book, the first to examine Caesar's place in modern American culture, Maria Wyke investigates how his use has intensified in periods of political crisis, when the occurrence of assassination, war, dictatorship, totalitarianism or empire appears to give him fresh relevance. Her fascinating discussion shows how—from the Latin classroom to the Shakespearean stage, from cinema, television and the comic book to the internet—Caesar is mobilized in the U.S. as a resource for acculturation into the American present, as a prediction of America’s future, or as a mode of commercial profit and great entertainment.

Read Chapter 1 of Caesar in the USA, and learn more about the book at the University of California Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Maria Wyke's Caesar: A Life in Western Culture.

The Page 99 Test: Caesar in the USA.

--Marshal Zeringue

Publishers Weekly's 12 best mystery/thrillers of 2012

Publishers Weekly named its twelve best mystery/thrillers of 2012.

One title on the list:

The Gods of Gotham
Lyndsay Faye (Putnam/Amy Einhorn)

Set in 1845, this first in a new series introduces Timothy Wilde, a former bartender and member of New York City's newly formed police force, whose investigation into the murder of a 12-year-old Irish boy leads him deep into the heart of human darkness.

Read about another book on the list.

Learn more about the book and author at Lyndsay Faye's website.

Writers Read: Lyndsay Faye (April 2012).

The Page 69 Test: The Gods of Gotham.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, author of Science on American Television: A History.

Her entry begins:

Familiar feelings: Tired, anxious to return home, in need of one more stretch before boarding a plane. Expectations low, I strolled through the airport bookstore and scanned the shelves. Then I spied two familiar names and a novel I had missed when it first appeared. Purchase made. Electronic reading device stowed. Comfort located within two paper covers.

Thank you Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Your Gideon's Corpse sustained, entertained, and informed me all the way home, just as your other novels (beginning with Relic) have done through the years. The air-hours dwindled as your physicist-hero careened through whitewater and cadged his way into secure government facilities, attempting to derail a terrorist plot. When there was...[read on]

About Science on American Television, from the publisher:

As television emerged as a major cultural and economic force, many imagined that the medium would enhance civic education for topics like science. And, indeed, television soon offered a breathtaking banquet of scientific images and ideas—both factual and fictional. Mr. Wizard performed experiments with milk bottles. Viewers watched live coverage of solar eclipses and atomic bomb blasts. Television cameras followed astronauts to the moon, Carl Sagan through the Cosmos, and Jane Goodall into the jungle. Via electrons and embryos, blood testing and blasting caps, fictional Frankensteins and chatty Nobel laureates, television opened windows onto the world of science.

But what promised to be a wonderful way of presenting science to huge audiences turned out to be a disappointment, argues historian Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette in Science on American Television. LaFollette narrates the history of science on television, from the 1940s to the turn of the twenty-first century, to demonstrate how disagreements between scientists and television executives inhibited the medium’s potential to engage in meaningful science education. In addition to examining the content of shows, she also explores audience and advertiser responses, the role of news in engaging the public in science, and the making of scientific celebrities.

Lively and provocative, Science on American Television establishes a new approach to grappling with the popularization of science in the television age, when the medium’s ubiquity and influence shaped how science was presented and the scientific community had increasingly less control over what appeared on the air.

Learn more about Science on American Television at the University of Chicago Press website.

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette is an independent historian based in Washington, DC.

Writers Read: Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 slipstream books

From Wikipedia:

Slipstream is a kind of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, and mainstream literary fiction.

The term slipstream was coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye #5, in July 1989. He wrote: "...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility." Slipstream fiction has consequently been referred to as "the fiction of strangeness," which is as clear a definition as any of the others in wide use.

In 2003 Arthur C. Clarke award-winning author Christopher Priest named his top 10 slipstream books for the Guardian.  One title on the list:

The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz

Schulz was a Polish writer, murdered in an almost offhand way by the Gestapo during the second world war. His canvas was small: few of his stories ventured outside the setting of his parents' house or the provincial town in which he lived, but his scope was cosmic. One story, The Comet, achieves a Wellsian grandeur, a Kafkaesque intrigue when the author's father, who figures in most of the stories, emerges as a hero of science.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Carola Dunn's "The Valley of the Shadow"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Valley of the Shadow: A Cornish Mystery by Carola Dunn.

About the book, from the publisher:

A cryptic message spurs Eleanor, Megan, and Nick Gresham on a frantic search for a refugee's missing family

While out on a walk, Eleanor Trewynn, her niece Megan, and her neighbor Nick spot a young, half-drowned Indian man floating in the water. Delirious and concussed, he utters a cryptic message about his family being trapped in a cave and his mother dying. The young man, unconscious and unable to help, is whisked away to a hospital while a desperate effort is mounted find the missing family in time.

The local police inspector presumes that they are refugees from East Africa, abandoned by the smugglers who brought them in, so while the countryside is being scoured for the family, Eleanor herself descends into a dangerous den of smugglers in a desperate search to find the man responsible while there is still time.

Learn more about the book and author at Carola Dunn's website and blog.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Carola Dunn and Trillian.

The Page 69 Test: Manna from Hades (the 1st Cornish Mystery).

The Page 69 Test: A Colourful Death (the 2d Cornish Mystery).

The Page 69 Test: The Valley of the Shadow.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top crime fiction debuts, 2012 -- Miami Herald

At the Miami Herald, Oline H. Cogdill named her picks of the best of 2012’s crime fiction debuts.

One title on the list:

A Land More Kind Than Home, Wiley Cash:

Crime fiction melds with Southern gothic for an emotional, lyrical story about two brothers that explores the power of forgiveness, the strength of family bonds and how religion can be misused.

Read about another title to make the grade.

Learn more about the book and author at Wiley Cash's website.

Writers Read: Wiley Cash.

My Book, The Movie: A Land More Kind Than Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gil Troy's "Moynihan's Moment," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Moynihan's Moment: America's Fight Against Zionism as Racism by Gil Troy.

The entry begins:

Funny you should ask about my book the movie, because from the start I have been convinced this book has Broadway and Hollywood potential. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a larger than life character. He viewed every letter he wrote, every interaction he had, every move he made, as a performance. To bring this performance artist back to life would be a great public service – especially at this time, when we need a Moynihan to inspire us, to stir us, to stand for great ideals.

Smart money would say cast Daniel Day Lewis, so he can keep himself busy for another two years studying a character with fascinating verbal tics and a love of language – but my first thought, even though it is an act of ethnic cross-dressing, is Al Pacino, because his manic energy could be channeled and become Moynihanesque.

One of my fantasies is a two-man Frost-Nixon type Broadway show, capturing the elaborate dance between Henry Kissinger – played by Anthony Hopkins or Jeremy...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Gil Troy's website and blog.

Writers Read: Gil Troy.

The Page 99 Test: Moynihan's Moment.

My Book, The Movie: Moynihan's Moment.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten best dog books of 2012

Dorri Olds is a New York-based writer and web designer, ably assisted by her purebred Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Buddy James.

At Petside.com, she named ten of the best dog books of 2012, including:

The Dog Lived (and So Will I) by Teresa Rhyne

This is a memoir about a Beagle named Seamus who was found roaming the streets in Moreno Valley, California. Seamus was picked up by Animal Control and taken to the County Animal Shelter where, despite his microchip, was never claimed. Enter the Mary S. Roberts Pet Adoption Center, who came to his rescue. Rhyne falls in love with the abandoned dog and willingly takes on his Dennis the Menace style of trouble-making. It’s worth reading this book just to learn Seamus’s full name: Seamus Luxury Leisure Danger Trouble Hunger Cuteness Rhyne-Kern (the Famous). Alas, Seamus gets cancer. So does Rhyne. But the book is still hilarious—and poignant, sorrowful, affecting, inspirational and a winner.

Read about another book on the list.

Visit Teresa Rhyne's website and The Dog Lived (and so Will I) blog.

See--Coffee with a Canine: Teresa Rhyne & Seamus.

Writers Read: Teresa Rhyne.

My Book, The Movie: The Dog Lived (and So Will I).

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Patricia Fara's "Erasmus Darwin"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Science and Serendipity by Patricia Fara.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dr Erasmus Darwin seemed an innocuous Midlands physician, a respectable stalwart of eighteenth-century society. But there was another side to him.

Botanist, inventor, Lunar inventor and popular poet, Darwin was internationally renowned for breathtakingly long poems explaining his theories about sex and science. Yet he become a target for the political classes, the victim of a sustained and vitriolic character assassination by London's most savage satirists.

Intrigued, prize-winning historian Patricia Fara set out to investigate why Darwin had provoked such fierce intellectual and political reaction. Inviting her readers to accompany her, she embarked on what turned out to be a circuitous and serendipitous journey.

Her research led her to discover a man who possessed, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'perhaps a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe.' His evolutionary ideas influenced his grandson Charles, were banned by the Vatican, and scandalized his reactionary critics. But for modern readers, he shines out as an impassioned Enlightenment reformer who championed the abolition of slavery, the education of women, and the optimistic ideals of the French Revolution.

As she tracks down her quarry, Patricia Fara uncovers a ferment of dangerous ideas that terrified the establishment, inspired the Romantics, and laid the ground for Victorian battles between faith and science.

Read more about Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Science and Serendipity at the Oxford University Press website.

Writers Read: Patricia Fara.

The Page 99 Test: Erasmus Darwin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Publishers Weekly's top nonfiction books of 2012

One of Publishers Weekly's top nonfiction books of 2012:

How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance
Marilyn Yalom (Harper Perennial)

Yalom's witty and enchanting tour of French literature—from Abélard and Héloïse in the 12th century to Marguerite Duras in the 20th and Philippe Sollers in the 21st—asks how the French manage their romances, marriages, affairs, and obsession with love and sex, and will send readers in search of these classic texts.

Read about another book on the list.

Visit Marilyn Yalom's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Sarah Conly reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Sarah Conly, author of Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism.

Her entry begins:

David Hume, The History of England, Volume V, LibertyClassics, (based on the 1778 edition.)

Want to see a vivid display of flawed personalities locked in a bitter struggle for political power? Want to see one where at the end of the book the leader of the losing party gets his head chopped off? I’m reading David Hume’s history of the English Civil War, the one where the Royalists and the Roundheads go at it, where Charles I is ignominiously beheaded. This is Volume V of Hume’s History of England, and no, I did not first read the preceding four volumes. But this is a lively, action-filled book, replete with descriptions that would make a contemporary columnist green with...[read on]

About the book, from the publisher:

Since Mill's seminal work On Liberty, philosophers and political theorists have accepted that we should respect the decisions of individual agents when those decisions affect no one other than themselves. Indeed, to respect autonomy is often understood to be the chief way to bear witness to the intrinsic value of persons. In this book, Sarah Conly rejects the idea of autonomy as inviolable. Drawing on sources from behavioural economics and social psychology, she argues that we are so often irrational in making our decisions that our autonomous choices often undercut the achievement of our own goals. Thus in many cases it would advance our goals more effectively if government were to prevent us from acting in accordance with our decisions. Her argument challenges widely held views of moral agency, democratic values and the public/private distinction, and will interest readers in ethics, political philosophy, political theory and philosophy of law.

Read an excerpt from Against Autonomy, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

Sarah Conly is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bowdoin College.

The Page 99 Test: Against Autonomy.

Writers Read: Sarah Conly.

--Marshal Zeringue

Beth Raymer's 6 favorite books

Beth Raymer is the author of the gambling memoir Lay the Favorite.

One of her six favorite books, as told to The Week magazine:

Billy Phelan's Greatest Game by William Kennedy

An ode to fatherless men and champion drinkers living by night in the Downtown Health and Amusement Club. If you've never read William Kennedy, you should. He's the master of simile. Example: "Screwing your wife is like striking out the pitcher."

Read about another book on the list.

Raymer's Lay the Favorite is one of Matthew O'Brien's five notable books on Las Vegas.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Lisa O'Donnell's "The Death of Bees"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: The Death of Bees by Lisa O'Donnell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Today is Christmas Eve.
Today is my birthday.
Today I am fifteen.
Today I buried my parents in the backyard.
Neither of them were beloved.

Marnie and her little sister, Nelly, are on their own now. Only they know what happened to their parents, Izzy and Gene, and they aren't telling. While life in Glasgow's Maryhill housing estate isn't grand, the girls do have each other. Besides, it's only a year until Marnie will be considered an adult and can legally take care of them both.

As the New Year comes and goes, Lennie, the old man next door, realizes that his young neighbors are alone and need his help. Or does he need theirs? Lennie takes them in—feeds them, clothes them, protects them—and something like a family forms. But soon enough, the sisters' friends, their teachers, and the authorities start asking tougher questions. As one lie leads to another, dark secrets about the girls' family surface, creating complications that threaten to tear them apart.

Written with fierce sympathy and beautiful precision, told in alternating voices, The Death of Bees is an enchanting, grimly comic tale of three lost souls who, unable to answer for themselves, can answer only for one another.

Learn more about the book and author at Lisa O'Donnell's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Death of Bees.

--Marshal Zeringue

The best fiction of 2012 -- Reluctant Habits

One title from Edward Champion's list of the best fiction of 2012:

Paula Bomer, 9 Months:

Ayelet Waldman may have kickstarted the conversation about bad mothers a few years ago, but Bomer actually has the courage to chase maternal judgment through the pain and hilarity of its truths rather than attention-seeking pronouncements. 9 Months follows Sonia, a pregnant mother who boldly leaves her husband and even goes so far to have carnal relations with a Colin Farrell-like trucker. You could call 9 Months a Gaitskillian picaresque tale, but this doesn’t do justice to Bomer’s fierce and funny insights into how motherhood’s perceptions change from region to region, how judgment has a way of stifling a pregnant woman’s career track, and the casual cruelty of solipsistic singles who can’t understand these finer distinctions.

Read about another book on the list.

Read more about Nine Months, and visit Paula Bomer's blog.

Writers Read: Paula Bomer.

--Marshal Zeringue

Magnus Flyte's "City of Dark Magic," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: City of Dark Magic by Magnus Flyte.

The entry begins:

Q. Magnus, whom do you see in the role of Sarah, who is unashamed to take pleasure in both sex and history?

A. In another era, it would have been Barbara Stanwyck. But I do like that Emma Stone. You would believe her as a woman who knows how to get herself in – and out – of trouble.

Q. And what about Max, the California-born prince who has inherited more than he can handle?

A. Since I don’t spend much time fixating on young heartthrobs, I leave that one up to my literary executrixes, who say they fancy Ben...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Magnus Flyte's website.

The Page 69 Test: City of Dark Magic.

My Book, The Movie: City of Dark Magic.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adrian Scarborough's 6 favorite books

The English actor Adrian Scarborough has appeared on film in The King’s Speech, Gosford Park, and this year's Les Misérables.

One of his six best books, as told to the Daily Express:

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
by Ray Bradbury

A theatre company came to my school and did a workshop production of this and the story totally gripped me. A carnival comes to town and there are strange disappearances: there’s a father in search of his heart’s desire too. I read it to my son and now he’s a fan as well.

Read about another book on Scarborough's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Gil Troy's "Moynihan's Moment"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Moynihan's Moment: America's Fight Against Zionism as Racism by Gil Troy.

About the book, from the publisher:

On November 10, 1975, the General Assembly of United Nations passed Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism a form of racism. Afterward, a tall man with long, graying hair, horned-rim glasses, and a bowtie stood to speak. He pronounced his words with the rounded tones of a Harvard academic, but his voice shook with outrage: "The United States rises to declare, before the General Assembly of the United Nations, and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act."

This speech made Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a celebrity, but as Gil Troy demonstrates in this compelling new book, it also marked the rise of neo-conservatism in American politics--the start of a more confrontational, national-interest-driven foreign policy that turned away from Kissinger's détente-driven approach to the Soviet Union--which was behind Resolution 3379. Moynihan recognized the resolution for what it was: an attack on Israel and a totalitarian assault against democracy, motivated by anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. While Washington distanced itself from Moynihan, the public responded enthusiastically: American Jews rallied in support of Israel. Civil rights leaders cheered. The speech cost Moynihan his job--but soon won him a U.S. Senate seat. Troy examines the events leading up to the resolution, vividly recounts Moynihan's speech, and traces its impact in intellectual circles, policy making, international relations, and electoral politics in the ensuing decades.

The mid-1970s represent a low-water mark of American self-confidence, as the country, mired in an economic slump, struggled with the legacy of Watergate and the humiliation of Vietnam. Moynihan's Moment captures a turning point, when the rhetoric began to change and a more muscular foreign policy began to find expression, a policy that continues to shape international relations to this day.

Learn more about the book and author at Gil Troy's website and blog.

Writers Read: Gil Troy.

The Page 99 Test: Moynihan's Moment.

--Marshal Zeringue

The best of crime fiction, 2012 -- Miami Herald

At the Miami Herald, Oline H. Cogdill named her picks of the best of 2012’s crime fiction.

One title on the list:

A Killing in the Hills by Julia Keller.

An insightful look at the ennui of a community paralyzed by poverty and despair and the pride of people who refuse to succumb to the insidiousness of drugs.

Read about another novel on the list.

Learn more about the book and author at Julia Keller's website.

Writers Read: Julia Keller.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Dan Lainer-Vos reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Dan Lainer-Vos, author of Sinews of the Nation: Constructing Irish and Zionist Bonds in the United States.

His entry begins:

A good friend, nonacademic, gave me a copy of Yuval Noah Harari’s From Animals into Gods: A Brief History of Humankind describing it as one of the best books he ever read. Being I guess a bit of an academic snob, I thought “what can be so good about a book that purports to tell the history of mankind.” But when another friend also recommended it, I decided to give the book a try and it was well worth it. The book is not quite what it sounds like. Harari is not really trying to tell a history of humanity but instead focuses on...[read on]

About Sinews of the Nation, from the publisher:

Fundraising may not seem like an obvious lens through which to examine the process of nation-building, but in this highly original book Lainer-Vos shows that fundraising mechanisms - ranging from complex transnational gift-giving systems to sophisticated national bonds - are organizational tools that can be used to bind dispersed groups to the nation.

Sinews of the Nation treats nation-building as a practical organizational accomplishment and examines how the Irish republicans and the Zionist movement secured financial support in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Comparing the Irish and Jewish experiences, whose trajectories of homeland-diaspora relations were very different, provides a unique perspective for examining how national movements use economic transactions to attach disparate groups to the national project.

By focusing on fundraising, Lainer-Vos challenges the common view of nation-building as only a matter of forging communities by imagining away internal differences: he shows that nation-building also involves organizing relationships so as to allow heterogeneous groups to maintain their difference and yet contribute to the national cause. Nation-building is about much more than creating unifying symbols: it is also about creating mechanisms that bind heterogeneous groups to the nation despite and through their differences.

Learn more about Sinews of the Nation at the John Wiley & Sons website.

Writers Read: Dan Lainer-Vos.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 10 best Christmas lunches

At the Observer, Tim Lewis came up with the ten best Christmas lunches from stage, screen, and literature, including:

Little Women (1868)

Louisa May Alcott’s novel, an advocation of virtue over wealth, has a cockle-warming Christmas message. The girls wake up early, but instead of stuffed stockings, find different-coloured books under their pillows. Their mother then tells them about a poor woman with six hungry children and no fire – will they sacrifice their breakfasts? Of course they will, and they pack up their muffins and cream. After putting on a play, the girls are surprised to find a feast has been laid on, courtesy of old Mr Laurence. There is pink and white ice cream, cake, fruit and “distracting French bonbons”.

Read about another entry on the list.

Little Women also appears on the Observer's list of the ten best fictional mothers, Eleanor Birne's top ten list of books on motherhood, Erin Blakemore's list of five gutsy heroines to channel on an off day, Kate Saunders' critic's chart of mothers and daughters in literature, and Zoë Heller's list of five memorable portraits of sisters. It is a book that disappointed Geraldine Brooks on re-reading.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Aaron Elkins's "Dying on the Vine"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Dying on the Vine by Aaron Elkins.

About the book, from the publisher:

It was the unwavering custom of Pietro Cubbiddu, patriarch of Tuscany’s Villa Antica wine empire, to take a solitary month-long sabbatical at the end of the early grape harvest, leaving the winery in the trusted hands of his three sons. His wife, Nola, would drive him to an isolated mountain cabin in the Apennines and return for him a month later, bringing him back to his family and business.

So it went for almost a decade—until the year came when neither of them returned. Months later, a hiker in the Apennines stumbles on their skeletal remains. The carabinieri investigate and release their findings: they are dealing with a murder-suicide. The evidence makes it clear that Pietro Cubbiddu shot and killed his wife and then himself. The likely motive: his discovery that Nola had been having an affair.

Not long afterwards, Gideon Oliver and his wife, Julie, are in Tuscany visiting their friends, the Cubbiddu offspring. The renowned Skeleton Detective is asked to reexamine the bones. When he does, he reluctantly concludes that the carabinieri, competent though they may be, have gotten almost everything wrong. Whatever it was that happened in the mountains, a murder-suicide it was not.

Soon Gideon finds himself in a morass of family antipathies, conflicts, and mistrust, to say nothing of the local carabinieri’s resentment. And when yet another Cubbiddu relation meets an unlikely end, it becomes bone-chillingly clear that the killer is far from finished…

Learn more about the book and author at Aaron J. Elkins's website.

My Book, The Movie: Aaron Elkins' "Gideon Oliver" novels.

Writers Read: Aaron Elkins.

The Page 69 Test: Dying on the Vine.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top Christmas romance novels

Anne Browning Walker is the author of the contemporary romance novel, The Booby Trap.

She named her ten best Christmas romance novels for Publishers Weekly. One title on the list:

Holiday in Death by JD Robb

Some readers may know JD Robb better as Nora Roberts, the wildly successful author of many romances. Roberts also writes a series (In Death) under the pen name JD Robb, which takes place more than 40 years in the future, featuring murder cop Eve Dallas and con-turned-billionaire Roarke. Holiday in Death revolves around a serial killer and his use of the “12 Days of Christmas” imagery. Another departure from traditional Christmas fare, this novel kept me turning the page to watch Eve Dallas catch the bad guy, all while grumping about holiday shopping for too many friends. Solving a murder and finding thoughtful gifts? That’s inspirational!

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keija Parssinen's "The Ruins of Us," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen.

The entry begins:

Because he’s the character I started with when I began writing The Ruins of Us, sad-sack expat divorcé Dan Coleman is who I’ll cast first. Though my mother-in-law called a few days after the book’s release to suggest Brad Pitt (!), nothing about Mr. Pitt seems very sad-sack, even when he tries his hand at hobo chic by sporting that Unibomber beard with beads braided into it. No, for the role of Dan, who spends the lonely hours on his one-horse residential compound in Saudi Arabia pining for his ex-wife, Carolyn, and getting drunk off contraband booze, I see Mr. Pitt’s good buddy, George Clooney, stepping in. Not the fast-talking alpha Clooney of Ocean’s 11, with his well-cut suits and million dollar face, but the rather more bearish Syriana iteration of him. And his performance as the downtrodden cuckold in The Descendents proved to me that he can mute his good looks and charisma enough to make him a believable Dan.

But Dan isn’t the book’s central character; that title belongs to Rosalie, the flame-haired American wife of Saudi billionaire Abdullah Baylani who discovers after 25 years of marriage that her husband has taken a second bride, beautiful Palestinian Isra. At first, I...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Keija Parssinen's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Ruins of Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four overlooked literary gems of 2012

Swapna Krishna tagged four overlooked literary gems of 2012, including:

The Snow Child
Eowyn Ivey

There are many books out there about childless couples, but Eowyn Ivey's is one of the more unique ones we've come across. Mabel and Jack have no children, and though they're older than most homesteaders, they've decided to start over in Alaska in 1918. Things are tough, and they're doing everything they can just to get by. When they build a child of snow in a rare fit of joy, Mabel and Jack have no idea that everything will change for them.

Read about another book Krishna tagged, and visit her website.

Learn more about the book and author at Eowyn Ivey's website and blog.

Writers Read: Eowyn Ivey.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Sarah Conly's "Against Autonomy"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism by Sarah Conly.

About the book, from the publisher:

Since Mill's seminal work On Liberty, philosophers and political theorists have accepted that we should respect the decisions of individual agents when those decisions affect no one other than themselves. Indeed, to respect autonomy is often understood to be the chief way to bear witness to the intrinsic value of persons. In this book, Sarah Conly rejects the idea of autonomy as inviolable. Drawing on sources from behavioural economics and social psychology, she argues that we are so often irrational in making our decisions that our autonomous choices often undercut the achievement of our own goals. Thus in many cases it would advance our goals more effectively if government were to prevent us from acting in accordance with our decisions. Her argument challenges widely held views of moral agency, democratic values and the public/private distinction, and will interest readers in ethics, political philosophy, political theory and philosophy of law.

Read an excerpt from Against Autonomy, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.

Sarah Conly is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bowdoin College.

The Page 99 Test: Against Autonomy.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Victoria Emma Pagán reading?

This weekend's featured contributor at Writers Read: Victoria Emma Pagán, author of Conspiracy Theory in Latin Literature.

Her entry begins:

The University of Florida Honors College sponsors an “Uncommon Reading” program, in which faculty can propose to read a book with interested students. I recently re-read Anna Karenina with a group of nineteen women; we finished just in time for a field trip to see the new movie starring Kiera Knightly. After twenty years, I still find the novel compelling and morally baffling. This time, at least, Oblonsky was my favorite character because he is so consistently true to himself. Not a duplicitous bone in his body: he’s worthless and he knows it. Would that all worthless louts were so...[read on]

About the book, from the publisher:

Conspiracy theory as a theoretical framework has emerged only in the last twenty years; commentators are finding it a productive way to explain the actions and thoughts of individuals and societies. In this compelling exploration of Latin literature, Pagán uses conspiracy theory to illuminate the ways that elite Romans invoked conspiracy as they navigated the hierarchies, divisions, and inequalities in their society. By seeming to uncover conspiracy everywhere, Romans could find the need to crush slave revolts, punish rivals with death or exile, dismiss women, denigrate foreigners, or view their emperors with deep suspicion. Expanding on her earlier Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History, Pagán here interprets the works of poets, satirists, historians, and orators—Juvenal, Tacitus, Suetonius, Terence, and Cicero, among others—to reveal how each writer gave voice to fictional or real actors who were engaged in intrigue and motivated by a calculating worldview.

Delving into multiple genres, Pagán offers a powerful critique of how conspiracy and conspiracy theory can take hold and thrive when rumor, fear, and secrecy become routine methods of interpreting (and often distorting) past and current events. In Roman society, where knowledge about others was often lacking and stereotypes dominated, conspiracy theory explained how the world worked. The persistence of conspiracy theory, from antiquity to the present day, attests to its potency as a mechanism for confronting the frailties of the human condition.

Learn more about Conspiracy Theory in Latin Literature at the University of Texas Press website.

Victoria Emma Pagán is Professor of Classics at the University of Florida. Her books include A Sallust Reader, Rome and the Literature of Gardens, and Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History. She also edited the Companion to Tacitus.

Writers Read: Victoria Emma Pagán.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books on life and travels in the Arctic

M. J. (Melanie) McGrath is a journalist and an author of several books of nonfiction, including The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic. She was awarded the John Llewlyn-Rhys/Mail on Sunday Award for best British author under thirty-five. She lives and works in London. The recently released The Boy in the Snow is her second novel featuring half-Caucasian, half-Inuit Edie Kiglatuk.

For the Wall Street Journal, McGrath named a five best list of books on life and travels in the Arctic. One title on the list:

Give Me My Father's Body
by Kenn Harper (1986)

An object lesson in the law of unintended consequences, this poignant and humbling book follows the story of the Inuit boy Minik, who, along with others, was brought in 1897 from his home in northwest Greenland to New York City by explorer Robert Peary. Peary's controversial claim to be first at the North Pole in 1909 has been well documented, but the human fallout from his earlier adventures is less familiar and no less interesting. Minik and the other Inuit were eager to see the city, partly because they had no idea what they were in for and partly because Peary never explained that he had no intention of transporting them back home. Most, including Minik's father, quickly succumbed to diseases for which they had no immunity. But Minik survived and was taken in by the head of the Museum of Natural History, who treated him kindly. Minik cleaved to his adoptive parents, until one day, running into his biological father's skeleton on display at the museum, he realized that he and his father were mere objects in a cabinet of curiosities. His determined campaign to retrieve his father's body for proper burial and then return home make up the bittersweet heart of the story.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Jesse Bullington's "The Folly of the World"

This weekend's feature at the Page 69 Test: The Folly of the World by Jesse Bullington.

About the book, from the publisher:

On a stormy night in 1421, the North Sea delivers a devastating blow to Holland: the Saint Elizabeth Flood, a deluge of biblical proportions that drowns hundreds of towns, thousands of people, and forever alters the geography of the Low Countries. Where the factions of the noble Hooks and the merchant Cods waged a literal class war but weeks before, there is now only a nigh-endless expanse of grey water, a desolate inland sea with moldering church spires jutting up like sunken tombstones. For a land already beleaguered by generations of civil war, a worse disaster could scarce be imagined.

Yet even disaster can be profitable, for the right sort of individual, and into this flooded realm sail three conspirators: a deranged thug at the edge of madness, a ruthless conman on the cusp of fortune, and a half-feral girl balanced between them. If they work together they may find reward beyond reckoning, but such promise is no guarantee against betrayals born of greed, rage, and lust.

In a topsy-turvey world where peasants feast while noblemen starve, these three uneasy confederates will learn that theft, fraud, and even murder are simply part of politics as usual in the island-city of Dordrecht, and even if their scheme succeeds they may not live long enough to enjoy it...

Learn more about the book and author at Jesse Bullington's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart.

The Page 69 Test: The Enterprise of Death.

Writers Read: Jesse Bullington.

My Book, The Movie: The Enterprise of Death.

The Page 69 Test: The Folly of the World.

--Marshal Zeringue

The best literary quotes ever tattooed

At Flavorwire, Emily Temple came up with best literary quotes ever tattooed...and she's included photos of the ink.

One entry on the list:

"on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux"
(It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.)
--From Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Check out another tattooed quote.

The Little Prince is among Simon Callow's six best books, Sita Brahmachari's top 10 books that take you travelling, Maria Popova's seven essential books on optimism, and Dalia Sofer's most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David Hochfelder's "The Telegraph in America"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 by David Hochfelder.

About The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920, from the publisher:

Telegraphy in the nineteenth century approximated the internet in our own day. Historian and electrical engineer David Hochfelder offers readers a comprehensive history of this groundbreaking technology, which employs breaks in an electrical current to send code along miles of wire. The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920, examines the correlation between technological innovation and social change and shows how this transformative relationship helps us to understand and perhaps define modernity.

The telegraph revolutionized the spread of information—speeding personal messages, news of public events, and details of stock fluctuations. During the Civil War, telegraphed intelligence and high-level directives gave the Union war effort a critical advantage. Afterward, the telegraph helped build and break fortunes and, along with the railroad, altered the way Americans thought about time and space. Hochfelder thus supplies us with an introduction to the early stirrings of the information age.

Learn more about The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920 at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

Writers Read: David Hochfelder.

The Page 99 Test: The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920.

--Marshal Zeringue