http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/index.html http://media.miamiherald.com/images/logos/rss_sitelogo.gif http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/index.html 140 25 News, sports and entertainment from MiamiHerald.com en-us Copyright 2008 MiamiHerald.com Books 60 Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:31:34 EDT http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss McClatchy Interactive's PubSys miamifeedback@miamiherald.com http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/720107.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/720107.html Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:01 EDT Decades before Mitchell Gold became a famous furniture mogul, he considered ways to kill himself. ''I debated how to do it. An overdose of sleeping pills seemed somewhat painless,'' Gold writes in his new book, Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay in America. ``I considered other tactics -- driving a car off a cliff, running in front of a train, jumping off a building -- but I knew I didn't have the guts.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/715585.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/715585.html Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:01 EDT LIBERTY: A Lake Wobegon Novel. Garrison Keillor. Viking. 267 pages. $25.95. It's a few weeks before Lake Wobegon's Fourth of July parade, and, as usual, 60-year-old Clint Bunsen, who's been chairman of the event for six years now, is running into trouble with the same old group of naysayers. Clint loves the parade; he has since he was 10. It may be that his passion for this pageant has turned into obsession; he may even have been getting too high-handed with his fellow committee members. But Clint... http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/715609.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/715609.html Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:01 EDT THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. Stieg Larsson. Translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland. Knopf. 465 pages. $24.95. A Swedish industrialist named Henrik Vanger, on his 82nd birthday, receives a pressed flower in the mail, as he has for each of the 36 years since his beloved 16-year-old grand-niece Harriet vanished. This flower, like all the others, comes with no note, no return address and no fingerprints. After decades of futile investigations, Henrik has painfully concluded that Harriet is dead... http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/715596.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/715596.html Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:01 EDT AN EXACT REPLICA OF A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION: A Memoir. Elizabeth McCracken. Little, Brown. 184 pages. $19.99. Some friends and I used to call ourselves ''The Dead Babies Club.'' We would meet for brunch and talk about our losses -- miscarriages, stillbirths, terminations after amnios revealed acute abnormalities. We may have been a grief-stricken lot, but we weren't going to be a silent one: We wanted to be seen, to be acknowledged, to mark these events that didn't exactly make us mothers, but... http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/715619.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/715619.html Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:01 EDT With British publication in doubt for Sherry Jones' The Jewel of Medina, the U.S. publisher of her controversial novel about the Prophet Muhammad has moved up the release date from Oct. 15. The book is available in stores now. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/715607.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/715607.html Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:01 EDT ``Pharmakon by Dirk Wittenborn. With Dirk's book I'm relieving the '60s exploration of a new consciousness as an Amazonian herb is discovered to instill happiness. Timothy Leary meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in this brilliant novel with characters that you somehow have met somewhere in one of your many lifetimes. Everyone I know from composers to Marines are reading this book.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/715593.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/715593.html Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:01 EDT TUESDAY Eva Ritvo and The Beauty Prescription. 7:30 p.m. Books & Books, 9700 Collins Ave., Bal Harbour Shops. WEDNESDAY Joaquin Roy and The European Union: What Americans Should Know. 8 p.m. Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/711919.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/711919.html Sun, 05 Oct 2008 03:01 EDT THE GIVEN DAY. Dennis Lehane. Morrow. 704 pages. $27.95. Dennis Lehane is the preeminent contemporary chronicler of Boston and the Boston Irish specifically. He follows in the tradition of Edwin O'Connor (The Last Hurrah, The Edge of Sadness) and George V. Higgins (The Friends of Eddie Coyle), though very much in his own street-wise, implacably honest style. Because many of his previous books have featured the private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, he often is pigeonholed as a ''genre... http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/711926.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/711926.html Sun, 05 Oct 2008 03:01 EDT THE WORDY SHIPMATES. Sarah Vowell. Riverhead. 272 pages. $25.95. The Wordy Shipmates is the latest leg of Sarah Vowell's idiosyncratic tour of U.S. history. Part scholar, part standup comic, Vowell had enlivened such dour subjects as presidential assassinations and the mistreatment of Native Americans with a mix of wisecracks, pop culture references, and self-deprecating anecdotes. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/711931.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/711931.html Sun, 05 Oct 2008 03:01 EDT EPILOGUE: A MEMOIR. Anne Roiphe. HarperCollins. 214 pages. $24.95. Anne Roiphe's exquisitely painful memoir about the dark time that followed her husband's death shows how completely the acclaimed author relied on her mate. To him she ceded even the power to unlock the front door: ``I found keys (so subject to loss, so hard sometimes to turn, was it right or left that it should go?) a man's responsibility.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/708312.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/708312.html Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:01 EDT When you see Alonzo Mourning whizzing around the court, it's hard to grasp what the Miami Heat center's been through: namely a kidney transplant in 2003. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/707515.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/707515.html Tue, 30 Sep 2008 11:43 EDT Two Hollywood veterans will oversee the next Academy Awards telecast. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Wednesday that producer Laurence Mark will produce the Feb. 22 show, while writer-director Bill Condon will be executive producer. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/706133.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/706133.html Tue, 30 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT CITY OF REFUGE. Tom Piazza. Harper. 403 pages. $24.95. Understanding the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has obsessed New Orleans writers for three years, since the levees failed, and the city struggled back to life like a dowager after a stroke. Tom Piazza wrote one of the most immediate (and still one of the best) responses to the disaster, the nonfiction book Why New Orleans Matters. Now, he continues to explain the pull of his adopted home with City of Refuge, a novel about the experiences of... http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/706108.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/706108.html Tue, 30 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT BLUE GENES: A Memoir of Loss and Survival. Christopher Lukas. Doubleday. 248 pages. $24.95. THE SUICIDE INDEX: Putting My Father's Death in Order. Joan Wickersham. Harcourt. 316 pages. $25. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/706129.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/706129.html Tue, 30 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT THE WHITE MARY. Kira Salak. Holt. 351 pages. $25. ''Traveling is the ruin of all happiness!'' wrote the 18th century novelist Fanny Burney. It's a conclusion we might draw from Kira Salak's harrowing first novel, an account of a young woman's plunge into her own heart of darkness during a journey across Papua New Guinea. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/706114.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/706114.html Tue, 30 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND? ``That Night by Alice McDermott. It's a such a good book. It's such a tiny book you can read it in a couple of hours. It's a seemingly small story about teenagers in love, but by the end it feels like this huge story. I think that's a fabulous book.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/706120.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/706120.html Tue, 30 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT TUESDAY Stuart Woods and Hot Mahogany. 7 p.m. Murder on the Beach, 273 NE Second Ave., Delray Beach. Florence Shu-Acquaye and Women, The Law and HIV/AIDS in Africa. 8 p.m. Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/703347.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/703347.html Mon, 29 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT Worried your man might cheat? A Miami Beach rabbi who is a regular on the talk-show circuit (he's been on Oprah nine times, twice this month), says you need to greet him at the door dolled up and ready with a kiss and a smile and some genuine interest in how his day went. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/702855.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/702855.html Sun, 28 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT Artist Philip Smith knows that details of his unconventional upbringing give rise to double takes, skepticism and disbelief. ''If your father was Tony Soprano, and he was in the waste-management business, you'd just accept it,'' Smith says. ``So I just accepted it. I knew the outside world didn't like it and didn't want any part of it.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/702939.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/702939.html Sun, 28 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT TITANIC'S LAST SECRETS. Brad Matsen. Twelve. 311 pages. $27.99. DIVING INTO DARKNESS. Phillip Finch. St. Martin's. 320 pages. $25.95. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/702935.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/702935.html Sun, 28 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT THE HOLOCAUST BY BULLETS. Patrick Desbois. Palgrave MacMillan. 272 pages. $26.95. When a young French priest named Patrick Desbois set off on a routine goodwill trip to Ukraine in 2002, he never expected that his inquiries about the Holocaust would be met with denials, defiance and ignorance. After all, Ukraine, which lacked the large-scale industrial death camps of Germany and Poland, was the scene of the ''Holocaust by bullets,'' the house-to-house, village-by-village murder of roughly one-fourth... http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/702936.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/702936.html Sun, 28 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS? Kate Atkinson. Little, Brown. 320 pages. $24.99. The title of Kate Atkinson's latest thriller provides a pertinent question for the unlucky, fascinating characters in this often bleak but gripping novel. Atkinson poses the query with the mastery and brio that made her Case Histories one of the best mysteries of the past decade. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/700725.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/700725.html Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT All Christopher Paolini, 24, did last weekend was sell half a million books on Saturday. The wunderkind author of the Eragon series broke all records for his publisher with the release of the third volume, Brisingr (Knopf, $27.50, ages 10-up) which sold 550,000 copies the day it went on sale. This week, Paolini will be in Miami, part of a month-long, 10-city tour. Not bad for somebody who started writing because he was bored after earning his high school diploma as a homeschooler at age 15. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/697891.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/697891.html Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:51 EDT GOLDENGROVE. Francine Prose. Harper. 288 pages. $24.95. Laying waste to pretension is a skill Francine Prose has perfected in her satiric novels, poking riotous fun at academic pomposity in the National Book Award finalist Blue Angel and at philanthropic cynicism in A Changed Man. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/697072.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/697072.html Tue, 23 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT EXPLAINERS: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-66). Jules Feiffer. Fantagraphics. 546 pages. $28.99. When Feiffer started drawing a weekly comic strip for The Village Voice in 1956, its title -- Sick, Sick, Sick -- suggested he was way out on the fringes. By the time he finished, 44 years later, he'd helped to shape modern satire. Feiffer, as it quickly became known, didn't look much like a conventional strip or political cartoon: It barely bothered to have a recurring cast, and while Feiffer's... http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/697063.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/697063.html Tue, 23 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT The poster for Miami Book Fair International's 25th anniversary was created by artist Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus and one of the more than 260 authors who will appear at the fair that runs Nov. 9-16 at Miami Dade College's Wolfson Campus, 300 NE Second Ave. in downtown Miami. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/697076.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/697076.html Tue, 23 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT THE WAR WITHIN: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008. Bob Woodward. Simon & Schuster. 487 pages. $32. The Washington Post's Bob Woodward specializes in reporting how the sausage gets made in the nation's capital, and as you might guess, it's not a pretty picture. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/697065.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/697065.html Tue, 23 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT TUESDAY Alan Alda and Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself. 7:30 p.m. Temple Judea, 5500 Granada Blvd., Coral Gables. For Books & Books. Tickets are $5 at any Books & Books location. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/697081.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/697081.html Tue, 23 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT ``Doreen Orion's nonfiction Queen of the Road was hilarious to me. In it two psychiatrists renovate a bus and hit the road, and she is a princess, so this is not her chosen path. [Her husband] forced her on the bus. They go across the country and wind up at a nudist camp. It was the book I read right after House of Sand and Fog, and I needed to laugh.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/693304.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/693304.html Sun, 21 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT Alan Alda has starred in a hit TV series. He virtually grew up on the stage and has produced, directed and starred in movies. In 2004 and 2005, he earned nominations for an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony, and his first book climbed the bestseller list. He has hosted a long-running PBS science show, traveled the world and is the father of three and grandfather of seven. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/693473.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/693473.html Sun, 21 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT THE FOREVER WAR. Dexter Filkins. Knopf. 384 pages. $25. books living In Joe Haldeman's 1974 science fiction novel The Forever War, Earth wages a millennium-long conflict with an alien species. The phenomenon of time dilation enables star-spanning soldiers to fight through the centuries, but each time they return home they encounter a profoundly changed world. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/695337.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/695337.html Sun, 21 Sep 2008 10:17 EDT Barney Rosset, the publisher and First Amendment defender whose battles on behalf of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and other explicit works helped overturn U.S. censorship laws, has won an honorary National Book Award for ``Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/693474.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/693474.html Sun, 21 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT AMERICAN WIFE. Curtis Sittenfeld. Random. 576 pages. $26. The trappings of American Wife will sound familiar quickly -- the ''impishly self-effacing'' president descended from political royalty; his school librarian wife; a contested election and an unpopular war. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/693475.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/693475.html Sun, 21 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT GOLDENGROVE. Francine Prose. Harper. 288 pages. $24.95. Laying waste to pretension is a skill Francine Prose has perfected in her satiric novels, poking riotous fun at academic pomposity in the National Book Award finalist Blue Angel and at philanthropic cynicism in A Changed Man. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/689362.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/689362.html Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT Kathleen Norris' volumes are fixtures in the Religion & Spirituality sections of bookstores. Her 1997 bestseller The Cloister Walk distilled her 10 years of life as a lay associate of a Benedictine monastery into the diary of one liturgical year -- the calendar in some Christian churches that includes Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter and ``Ordinary Time.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/687617.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/687617.html Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT HOT, FLAT, AND CROWDED: Why We Need a Green Revolution -- And How It Can Renew America. Thomas L. Friedman. Farrar Straus Giroux. 438 pages. $27.95. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/687599.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/687599.html Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT THE 19TH WIFE. David Ebershoff. Random. 514 pages. $26. After weathering the scrutiny and debates kicked up by Mitt Romney's run for the White House and Warren Jeffs' polygamous sect in Texas, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints probably deserves the rest of the year off. But here comes an engrossing new novel that resurrects one of the Mormons' most destructive opponents: Ann Eliza Young, a beautiful, articulate woman who once shared Brigham Young's bed and then devoted her life to destroying... http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/687607.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/687607.html Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT Reclaiming Paris. Fabiola Santiago. Atria. 304 pages. $24.95. ''Men are like perfumes,'' says the narrator as this novel opens. ``In an instant, with nothing but a whiff of judgment, I either love them or discard them.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/687594.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/687594.html Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT ``I just read Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman. He wrote essays, but this is his first novel. I don't get really teary-eyed with books, but this one really moved me. It's a love story and very sad. It's beautiful. The whole book is like a love letter.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/687593.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/687593.html Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:01 EDT TUESDAY Oscar Hijuelos and Dark Dude. 7 p.m. Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. Live webcast with Philip Roth and Indignation. 8 p.m. Books & Books, 9700 Collins Ave., Bal Harbour Shops.