Pg. 69: Laurie Graff's "The Shiksa Syndrome"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Laurie Graff's The Shiksa Syndrome.

About the book, from the publisher:

Manhattan publicist Aimee Albert knows a good spin, but she’s the one who winds up reeling when her gorgeous, goyishe boyfriend breaks up with her—on Christmas! For a stand-up comedian, you’d think he would have better timing. But Aimee’s not about to let a man who doesn’t even have a real job get her down. She dusts herself off and decides to seek companionship with a member of her own tribe. There’s just one problem: all the shiksas are snapping them up!

So when the very cute, Jewish, and gainfully employed Josh Hirsch catches Aimee’s eye at a kosher wine tasting and mistakes her for a shiksa, what’s a girl to do? Hey, her heart was broken, not her head! Unfortunately, the charade goes on longer than Aimee planned, and her life becomes more complicated than a Bergman film. To make matters worse, Josh and Aimee aren’t exactly on the same page as far as their attitudes toward Judaism go, creating tension in the relationship. But as Aimee begins to discover that her identity isn’t as easily traded as a pair of Jimmy Choos, she must decide if having the man of her dreams is worth the price of giving up so much of who she is.

Wry and witty, The Shiksa Syndrome is a by turns laugh-out-loud funny and disarmingly poignant.

Read an excerpt from The Shiksa Syndrome, and learn more about the author and her work at Laurie Graff's website and The Shiksa Syndrome on MySpace.

Laurie Graff is the author of the novels You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs and Looking for Mr. Goodfrog.

The Page 69 Test: The Shiksa Syndrome.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Andy Clark reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Andy Clark, Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and the author of several books including Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and The Future Of Human Intelligence, and the newly released Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension.

Among the fiction included in his entry:

Michael Chabon: Kavalier and Clay
Neal Stephenson: Interface
[read on]

Visit Andy Clark's University of Edinburgh webpage.

Writers Read: Andy Clark.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books on jazz

John Edward Hasse, curator of American Music at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, founder of national Jazz Appreciation Month, and author of Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington, named a five best list of books on jazz for the Wall Street Journal.

One title from his list:

Reading Jazz
Edited by Robert Gottlieb
Pantheon, 1996

Don't be put off by the massive size of this anthology. You can dip into its 1,068 pages one piece at a time. Robert Gottlieb, former editor of The New Yorker, has judiciously selected and excerpted 106 examples of the most memorable English-language writing on jazz, culled from books and magazines between 1919 and the 1990s. In the autobiographical entries, we learn about the thoughts and experiences of musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Anita O'Day and Miles Davis. In "Reading Jazz" we also encounter the work of gifted writers, including Ralph Ellison, Martin Williams, Nat Hentoff, Gary Giddins and Dan Morgenstern. Their essays and criticism further strengthen this cornerstone collection.

Read about Number One on Hasse's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: John Kane's "Between Virtue and Power"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: John Kane's Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma of U.S. Foreign Policy.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this survey of U.S. history, John Kane looks at the tensions between American virtue and power and how those tensions have influenced foreign policy. Americans have long been suspicious of power as a threat to individual liberty, Kane argues, and yet the growth of national power has been perceived as a natural byproduct of American virtue. This contradiction has posed a persistent crisis that has influenced the trajectory of American diplomacy and foreign relations for more than two hundred years.

Kane examines the various challenges, including emerging Nationalism, isolationism, and burgeoning American power, which have at times challenged not only foreign policy but American national identity. The events of September 11, 2001, rekindled Americans' sense of righteousness, the author observes, but the subsequent use of power in Iraq has raised questions about the nation’s virtue and, as in earlier days, cast a deep shadow over its purpose and direction.

Read an excerpt from Between Virtue and Power, and learn more about the book at the Yale University Press website.

Visit John Kane's faculty webpage.

The Page 99 Test: Between Virtue and Power.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Rachel Toor reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Rachel Toor, author of The Pig and I: How I Learned to Love Men (Almost) as Much as I Love My Pets, Admissions Confidential: An Insider’s Account of the Elite College Selection Process, and the newly released Personal Record: A Love Affair with Running.

Toor teaches writing at Eastern Washington University, is a columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and a senior writer for Running Times.

A couple of paragraphs from her entry:

By my bed I have towering stacks. During daylight hours, I'm only allowed to read nonfiction that is work-related. So I'm going through Nicholas Lemann's history of the SAT, The Big Test, and also Jerome Karabel's The Chosen, about the history of admissions at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. This is because I was asked to write a chapter for a three-volume history of the business of higher education.

Then, before I go to sleep, I always read from a mystery (or other genre-ish) novel. At this moment it's an older Lee Child, from his Jack Reacher series. [read on]

Visit Rachel Toor's website.

Writers Read: Rachel Toor.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lin Anderson's "Easy Kill," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Lin Anderson's Easy Kill.

Anderson's entry begins:

Easy Kill is the latest book in my crime thriller series starring forensic scientist Rhona MacLeod. Readers tend to stay with a series because they grow fond of the characters and want to know what happens to them next. The crime is important but essentially a crime book is about the character rather than the crime. Being asked to come up with someone to play Rhona is intriguing but fraught with difficulty. Let me tell you why. Nowhere in the books does it tell you what Rhona looks like. When I ask my audience at author events, everyone has their own Rhona MacLeod and they often argue with one another’s version. They’re all in agreement with her character traits but not what she looks like. That’s great, because if you give your readers room to put a bit of themselves in a character they make her their own.[read on]

Read more about the author and her work at Lin Anderson's website and the official Rhona MacLeod website.

The Page 69 Test: Dark Flight.

My Book, The Movie: Easy Kill.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Todd Hasak-Lowy's "Captives"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Captives by Todd Hasak-Lowy.

About the book, from the publisher:

Daniel Bloom will either fix our broken world in his imagination or destroy his real life trying.

A sniper is taking down suits and politicians—in Daniel Bloom’s head.

Bloom is the kind of guy who ends most social gatherings with an alternately raging and despairing conversation about The State of the World. And recently things have taken a turn for the worse. His marriage is on the rocks, his teenage son is becoming increasingly unknowable, and his sense of hopeless impotence has reached a stage of spiritual crisis that's no longer a matter of vapid dinner-party conversation.

So he decamps to his home office to work on his fifteenth screenplay, this time about a federal agent and a nameless assassin. The assassin is a sniper who targets the power elite: corporate chiefs who defraud their employees of billions of dollars in pensions, and political flacks who've rigged the system in their own favor. Only the federal agent isn't sure he wants to capture the sniper.

Soon Bloom realizes that his screenplay hits too close to home: He really does want these people dead, so much so that this revenge fantasy takes over his life, sending him in search of salvation in an outrageous mentor, a possibly dangerous foreign country, and, finally, his very own backyard.

Read an excerpt from Captives and learn more about the book at the publisher's website. Visit Todd Hasak-Lowy's faculty webpage.

Todd Hasak-Lowy received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from UC Berkeley, where he studied Hebrew, Arabic, and English literature. He is currently an assistant professor at the University of Florida, where he teaches Hebrew language and literature. He is the author of The Task of This Translator, a collection of stories.

The Page 69 Test: Captives.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Robert Buettner's "Orphan's Alliance"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Robert Buettner's Orphan's Alliance.

About the book, from the publisher:

Humans have been discovered on the Outworlds. And the Army decides to send emissaries. Emissaries like Jason Wander.

As intraplanetary conflicts rage around him, and the personal stakes get ever higher, Jason finds that playing planet-hopping politician can be harder than commanding armies.

When united mankind squares off to battle the Slugs for a precious interstellar crossroad, Jason will discover that the most dangerous enemy may be the one he least expects.

Learn more about the author and his work at Robert Buettner's website and blog.

Robert Buettner is a former Military Intelligence Officer, National Science Foundation Fellow in Paleontology, and has been published in the field of Natural Resources Law.

The Page 99 Test: Orphan's Alliance.

--Marshal Zeringue

Critic's chart: books on young leaders

Iain Finlayson, a biographer and a nonfiction reviewer for the (London) Times, named a critic's chart of "six books on young leaders" for his newspaper.

One title on the list:

My Early Life Winston Churchill

From unhappy childhood to happy years of derring-do as a young army officer.

Read about another title on Finlayson's chart.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Karen Maitland's "Company of Liars"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Company of Liars by Karen Maitland.

About the book, from the publisher:

In this extraordinary novel, Karen Maitland delivers a dazzling reinterpretation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—an ingenious alchemy of history, mystery, and powerful human drama.

The year is 1348. The Black Plague grips the country. In a world ruled by faith and fear, nine desperate strangers, brought together by chance, attempt to outrun the certain death that is running inexorably toward them.

Each member of this motley company has a story to tell. From Camelot, the relic-seller who will become the group’s leader, to Cygnus, the one-armed storyteller . . . from the strange, silent child called Narigorm to a painter and his pregnant wife, each has a secret. None is what they seem. And one among them conceals the darkest secret of all—propelling these liars to a destiny they never saw coming.

Magical, heart-quickening, and raw, Company of Liars is a work of vaulting imagination from a powerful new voice in historical fiction.

Read an excerpt from Company of Liars and listen to the Company of Liars podcast.

Karen Maitland has a doctorate in psycholinguistics. She has traveled and worked in many parts of the world, from the Arctic Circle to Africa, before finally settling in the medieval city of Lincoln in England. Her British debut novel, The White Room, was short-listed for the Authors’ Club of Great Britain Best First Novel Award.

Learn more about the author and her work at Karen Maitland's website.

The Page 69 Test: Company of Liars.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Susan Wise Bauer's "The Art of the Public Grovel"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Susan Wise Bauer's The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America.

About the book, from the publisher:

Whether you are a politician caught carrying on with an intern or a minister photographed with a prostitute, discovery does not necessarily spell the end of your public career. Admit your sins carefully, using the essential elements of an evangelical confession identified by Susan Wise Bauer in The Art of the Public Grovel, and you, like Bill Clinton, just might survive.

In this fascinating and important history of public confession in modern America, Bauer explains why and how a type of confession that first arose among nineteenth-century evangelicals has today become the required form for any successful public admission of wrongdoing--even when the wrongdoer has no connection with evangelicalism and the context is thoroughly secular. She shows how Protestant revivalism, group psychotherapy, and the advent of talk TV combined to turn evangelical-style confession into a mainstream secular rite. Those who master the form--Bill Clinton, Jimmy Swaggart, David Vitter, and Ted Haggard--have a chance of surviving and even thriving, while those who don't--Ted Kennedy, Jim Bakker, Cardinal Bernard Law, Mark Foley, and Eliot Spitzer--will never really recover.

Revealing the rhetoric, theology, and history that lie behind every successful public plea for forgiveness, The Art of the Public Grovel will interest anyone who has ever wondered why Clinton is still popular while Bakker fell out of public view, Ted Kennedy never got to be president, and Law moved to Rome.

Read an excerpt from The Art of the Public Grovel, and learn more about the book at the Princeton University Press website.

Susan Wise Bauer is the author of The History of the Ancient World, the first part of a four-volume history of the world. Her other books include The Well-Trained Mind and The Well-Educated Mind.

Visit Susan Wise Bauer's website and blog.

The Page 99 Test: The Art of the Public Grovel.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Nick Bostrom reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and a full professor in the Faculty of Philosophy.

His entry begins:

I happen at the moment to be reading A Primer on Decision Making: How Decisions Happen, by James G. March. Judging by the title and the cover, it looks like yet another one of those decision-theory-for-managers books that clog the business section in most bookstores (you know the ones typically produced by business consultants who feel that they must publish one book to establish their credibility, whether or not they have anything new to say). And the undistinguished prose also bears the hallmarks of something composed in great haste. So much greater, then, my delight in discovering that this is actually...[read on]

Nick Bostrom has more than 140 publications to his name, including the books Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (OUP, 2008), and Enhancing Humans (OUP, 2008).

Briefly, Bostrum's research credo:

I see philosophy and science as overlapping parts of a continuum. Many of the questions that I am interested in lie in the intersection. I tend to think in terms of probability distributions rather than dichotomous epistemic categories. I guess that in the far future the human condition will have changed profoundly (for better or worse). I think there is a non-trivial chance that this "far" future will be reached in this century, within the lifespan of some currently existing people. Regarding many big picture questions, I think there is a very real possibility that our views are very wrong. Improving the ways in which we reason, act, and prioritize under uncertainty would have wide relevance to many of our biggest challenges.

Visit Nick Bostrom's website.

Writers Read: Nick Bostrom.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Ad Hudler's "Man of the House"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Man of the House by Ad Hudler.

About the book, from the publisher:

For more than a decade, Linc Menner has raised the status of househusband to an art form....

While his wife, Jo, brings home the bacon, Linc Menner holds down the fort–his gourmet cooking is sublime, his cleaning unrivaled, and his devotion to his daughter, Violet, unparalleled.

But when the Menners relocate from upstate New York to the steamy beaches of Naples, Florida, life takes an unexpected turn. As the Menners renovate their new home Linc’s bliss turns into a war zone of contractors, dry wall dust, and chaos. And suddenly being surrounded by guys whose faces go blank as he expounds on the virtues of lump-free gravy makes Linc realize he has forgotten what it feels like to be a man.

So Linc trades his flip-flops for work boots, and his wild mop of hair for a barbershop buzz, and marches his flabby physique to the nearest gym–attracting the secret devotion of one of Violet’s teacher in the process. And his stunned family watches helplessly as they lose the man who keeps them all together. To make matters worse, it’s hurricane season and there’s a category 5 heading right for Naples. As life on the home front explodes into hilarity and catastrophe, Linc must chart his own delightfully crooked course to finally become the Man of the House.

Read an excerpt from Man of the House, and learn more about the author and his work at Ad Hudler's website and blog.

Ad Hudler is the author of All This Belongs To Me, Southern Living, and the best-selling Househusband.

The Page 69 Test: Man of the House.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ann Packer's five most important books

Ann Packer, author of The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Songs Without Words, listed her five most important books for Newsweek. And addressed a couple of related issues:

A book you always return to:

Alice Munro's "Friend of My Youth." Hard to pick any one Munro title. Her stories let me see people and begin to understand them.

A book you hope parents read to their children:

Dr. Seuss's "The Sneetches and Other Stories." Star-bellied or plain-bellied, doesn't matter.

Read about Packer's five most important books.

--Marshal Zeringue

What is Asali Solomon reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Asali Solomon, author of Get Down.

From her entry:

I'm reading for the classes I teach, but it turns out to be serious pleasure reading. I just re-read Toni Morrison's Love, which disguises itself as a sort of playful riff on some of Morrison's other books, but turns out to be the history of everything: women, men, girls, black people, America, love, food, pettiness, class, cruelty, snitching, sex, Eden, social movements. It sounds daunting but it goes down easy and has about the most amazing final sequence I've read in any book.[read on]

Asali Solomon was born and raised in Philadelphia and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Trinity College.

Get Down, her first book, earned her a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, was chosen as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” for 2007, and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.

Read an excerpt from Get Down, and learn more about the book and author at the publisher's website and the Asali Solomon AALBC webpage.

Writers Read: Asali Solomon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Alexander & Nicholas Humez's "On the Dot"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: On the Dot: The Speck That Changed the World by Alexander Humez and Nicholas Humez.

About the book, from the publisher:

Despite the humble origins of its name (Anglo Saxon for "the speck at the head of a boil"), the dot has been one of the most versatile players in the history of written communication, to the point that it has become virtually indispensable. Now, in On the Dot, Alexander and Nicholas Humez offer a wide ranging, entertaining account of this much overlooked and miniscule linguistic sign.

The Humez brothers shed light on the dot in all its various forms. As a mark of punctuation, they show, it plays many roles--as sentence stopper, a constituent of the colon (a clause stopper), and the ellipsis (dot dot dot). In musical notation, it denotes "and a half." In computerese, it has several different functions (as in dot com, the marker between a file name and its extension, and in some slightly more arcane uses in programming languages). The dot also plays a number of roles in mathematics, including the notation of world currency (such as dollars dot cents), in Morse code (dots and dashes), and in the raised dots of Braille. And as the authors connect all these dots, they take readers on an engaging tour of the highways and byways of language, ranging from the history of the question mark and its lesser known offshoots the point d'ironie and the interrobang, to acronyms and backronyms, power point bullets and asterisks, emoticons and the "at-sign."

Playful, wide-ranging, and delightfully informative, On the Dot reveals how thoroughly the dot is embedded in our everyday world of words and ideas, acquiring a power inversely proportional to its diminutive size.

Read an excerpt from On the Dot, and learn more about the book at the Oxford University Press website.

Alexander Humez has authored or co-authored ten trade and reference books, including collaborations with his brother such as Latin for People, Alpha to Omega, A B C Et Cetera, and Zero to Lazy Eight (also with J. Maguire). Nicholas Humez is a freelance writer and silversmith. In addition to the above collaborations, he is the author of Silversmithing: A Basic Manual, plus four poetry chapbooks.

The Page 99 Test: On the Dot.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Craig McDonald's "Toros & Torsos"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Craig McDonald's Toros & Torsos.

About the book, from the publisher:

Hector Lassiter is a legendary crime novelist who writes what he lives and lives what he writes. But Hector frequently goes a step beyond, drawing friends and lovers into the tawdry and turbulent territory of his fiction. Now, the large-living pulp author has at last met his match in the ultimate performance artist: a phantom killer committed to the art of murder… a blood-thirsty provocateur who leaves a string of macabre tableaus modeled on famous works of surrealist painting and photography…

Against the vivid backdrops of a killer hurricane that nearly destroyed the Florida Keys in 1935, the Spanish Civil War, post-war Hollywood and the first days of the Castro regime in Cuba, Hector engages in a decades-long duel against a cabal of killer artists…

As in its Edgar®-nominated predecessor Head Games, history and myth merge, drawing on recent scholarship pointing to the existence of a dark underground of artists, photographers and art collectors that flourished in Europe and United States through most of the Twentieth Century.

In a blood-limned haze of love, deception, murderous metaphor and devastating betrayal, nothing is what it seems and obsession and creativity collide in a wicked and unexpected climax that will shake the art world to its foundations…

Read an excerpt from Toros & Torsos, and learn more about the author and his work at Craig McDonald's website and his Crimespace page.

Craig McDonald is an award-winning journalist, editor and fiction writer. His short fiction has appeared in literary magazines, anthologies and several online crime fiction sites. His nonfiction books include Art in the Blood, a collection of interviews with 20 major crime authors, and Rogue Males: Conversations and Confrontations About the Writing Life, from Bleak House Books.

McDonald's debut novel, Head Games, was selected as a 2008 Edgar® nominee for Best First Novel by an American Author.

The Page 69 Test: Toros & Torsos.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best: books on financial meltdowns

For the Wall Street Journal, Martin Mayer, a guest scholar in economic studies at the Brookings Institution and the author of many books about banking and finance, named a five best list of book on financial meltdowns.

One title on his list:

Bailout
by Irvine H. Sprague
Basic Books, 1986

"Bailout" is a superbly honest first-person account of the big bank traumas of the 1980s, written by a long-term director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Irvine H. Sprague lived through it all -- the collapse of Commonwealth Bank of Detroit, First Pennsylvania of Philadelphia, Penn Square of Oklahoma City, Seafirst of Seattle, Continental of Chicago. He responded by closing some banks, sustaining some and arranging the acquisition of others. Sprague knows all the theories, but they are not his business here; he has some stories to tell. And judgments to make: "In First Pennsylvania we put money in the bank and saved the holding company. In Continental we put money in the holding company and saved the bank. Either way, the stockholders received an outright gift from FDIC." He wrote the book, he says, to show how banking regulators make decisions, and after reading "Bailout" we do in fact know more about how the sausage got to be sausage. He leaves us with a question: "Should megabanks continue to receive favored treatment?" The past few weeks have found the wrong answer to that one.

Read about Number One on Mayer's list.

Related: Critic's chart: books on cash crashes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric Stone's "Flight of the Hornbill," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Eric Stone's Flight of the Hornbill.

The entry begins:

I don’t expect a movie of any of my books to actually be much like my books. I’m not sure I’d want it to be. I want different things from movies and books. They’d be welcome to add action and plot elements if they wanted, so long as they stayed true to the characters, settings and basic ideas. So I’ve never given much thought as to who would play who, or who would direct.

Flight of the Hornbill is certainly no comedy, but I’d love to see it directed by Preston Sturges, my favorite comedy director of all time. He’d have a very nice feel for the social, cultural and political nuances of the books, as well as the way the characters interact with those elements. A modern director would be tougher. Maybe...[read on]

Read an excerpt from Flight of the Hornbill, and learn more about the book and author at Eric Stone's website.

Flight of the Hornbill is the third Ray Sharp novel. See the Page 69 Test for Grave Imports, the second book in the series.

My Book, The Movie: Flight of the Hornbill.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: S. Squire's "I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage by Susan Squire.

About the book, from the publisher:

A provocative survey of marriage and what it has meant for society, politics, religion, and the home.

For ten thousand years, marriage—and the idea of marriage—has been at the very foundation of human society. In this provocative and ambitious book, Susan Squire unravels the turbulent history and many implications of our most basic institution. Starting with the discovery, long before recorded time, that sex leads to paternity (and hence to couplehood), and leading up to the dawn of the modern “love marriage,” Squire delves into the many ways men and women have come together and what the state of their unions has meant for history, society, and politics — especially the politics of the home.

This book is the product of thirteen years of intense research, but even more than the intellectual scope, what sets it apart is Squire’s voice and contrarian boldness. Learned, acerbic, opinionated, and funny, she draws on everything from Sumerian mythology to Renaissance theater to Victorian housewives’ manuals (sometimes all at the same time) to create a vivid, kaleidoscopic view of the many things marriage has been and meant. The result is a book to provoke and fascinate readers of all ideological stripes: feminists, traditionalists, conservatives, and progressives alike.

Read an excerpt from I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage, and learn more about the author and her work at Susan Squire's website.

Susan Squire is the author of three books. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, New York, and The Washington Post, and in the best-selling essay collection, The Bitch in the House.

The Page 99 Test: I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage.

--Marshal Zeringue