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 2009 MiamiHerald.com Books 60 Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:28:02 EST http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss McClatchy Interactive's PubSys miamifeedback@miamiherald.com http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1324945.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1324945.html Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:00 EST There was a time when no one was allowed to laugh about breast cancer -- much less wax sarcastic or cynical, ironic or arch about it -- because breast cancer usually meant disfigurement and often meant death. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1325319.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1325319.html Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Barbara Kingsolver would like to thank you, Miami. As part of what she calls ''evangelizing for literature,'' the author of the beloved novels The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible told a full house Monday night at Miami Book Fair International that ''the real beating heart of democracy is the place people love books. I salute you for your love of reading.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1324940.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1324940.html Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:00 EST ``It's sort of like being the absent-minded professor times five,'' says Tim Page. After a lifetime of struggling to relate to fellow human beings, he received a diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome at age 45. Seven years later, Page, then the music critic for The Washington Post, revealed his condition in an essay in the New Yorker, which he has expanded into a new memoir, Parallel Play: Growing Up With Undiagnosed Asperger's (Doubleday, $26). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1324937.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1324937.html Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:00 EST After reading Madison Smartt Bell's new novel, one can see why Mrs. Gump named her slow-witted boy after Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Like the Haitian liberator Toussaint L'ouverture, another historical figure Bell has written about, Forrest was a self-taught military genius. Irregular tactics and hellish courage made him one of the most successful and colorful leaders of the Civil War. His casus belli was not only the noble-sounding notion of states' rights. A millionaire slave trader, he had literal skin in the game. Still, readers may have trouble disliking him. Bell has imbued this controversial hero with qualities that offset his sins. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1324962.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1324962.html Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:00 EST These days, when literature springs from mere experience and memoirs are justified by a change in eating habits, it seems fitting to remark on the heritage of Lydia Davis. Her father, Robert Gorham Davis, was a literary critic and author. He taught literature at Harvard (where he urged Norman Mailer to submit his first short story to Story magazine), Smith (where he taught Sylvia Plath) and Columbia. He died in 1998. Davis' mother was also a writer, an active feminist and communist. She died in 2004. Davis was married to Paul Auster. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1324963.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1324963.html Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:00 EST ''I have just read Francine Prose's Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife. This is an amazing book. It pulls together into one volume with great order and clarity much of what has been written about both Anne Frank and the publication of her diary over the years, but also (and most importantly, I think) focuses on Anne Frank as an accomplished writer who with great skill and talent edited herself in a way that makes clear her aspirations as someone who wanted her work to be published and read. As one of the many thousands upon millions of girls who was fixated on and obsessed with Anne Frank early in life -- finding in her work great inspiration as a writer and as a human, I was thrilled to find Prose's book. This is thorough, thoughtful, beautifully written.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1324942.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1324942.html Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:00 EST WEDNESDAY Abdella Taïa and ''Salvation Army.'' 6:30 p.m. Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1323762.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1323762.html Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Miami Book Fair International kicked off Sunday night at Miami Dade College with novelist Margaret Atwood, poet Elizabeth Alexander and a fingers-crossed hope that troublesome Topical Storm Ida keeps heading north. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1323763.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1323763.html Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Here are Monday's events at Miami Book Fair International at Miami Dade College, 300 NE Second Ave., Miami. Tickets for ``Evenings With . . .'' events can be downloaded at www.miamibookfair.com http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320493.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320493.html Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:00 EST ''God gave unto the Animals / A wisdom past our power to see,'' goes a hymn sung by God's Gardeners, the ecologically minded, deeply spiritual but eminently practical religious cult in Margaret Atwood's fire-breathing new novel, The Year of the Flood. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320062.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320062.html Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Al Gore's new work -- ``Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis'' (Rodale Books, $26.99) -- is a culmination of 30 ``solution summits'' that Gore convened around the world. Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his environmental advocacy. Beth Reinhard, political writer at The Miami Herald, spoke to him recently about this book. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320496.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320496.html Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Elizabeth Alexander's Praise Song for the Day, the inauguration poem that helped deliver Barack Obama into office, was in the making for almost half a century, surely for three generations: The grandmother who sang lullabies, poetry set to music. The parents who took their 1-year-old daughter to the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. The husband who emptied the house of the two boys, because, more than anything, Alexander needed hushed space to muster words and thoughts, then distill them into something beautiful, powerful, memorable. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320064.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320064.html Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Jay Weaver is The Herald's legal-affairs reporter. He asked these questions of Joan Biskupic, the author of ``American Original, The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia''. Biskupic, who obtained her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, has been USA Today's legal affairs correspondent since 2000. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1322564.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1322564.html Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Small booksellers are filling niches and emphasizing service as they fight to stay in business. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320509.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320509.html Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Every year, Miami Book Fair International generates high expectations among Spanish-language readers who enthusiastically greet authors from throughout the Hispanic world. But the fair also gives writers from the United States, Canada and Miami the opportunity to present their books in Spanish and to mingle with their English-language colleagues. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320905.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320905.html Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Wear comfortable shoes. Get a copy of the schedule beforehand. Sign up for tickets in advance. Bring a big bag for the books you'll buy, whether you plan to or not. Be sure to try some sessions utterly out of the blue. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320507.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320507.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Barbara Kingsolver jokes that whenever she publishes a novel she apparently turns into a railway station because, according to reviewers, ''I only do departures.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320503.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320503.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Journalists are never the story. They look instead to the world at large, interviewing, researching and seeking objective truth. Jeannette Walls knows this approach well, having worked for 20 years as a journalist in New York City -- including a stint as a gossip columnist -- before her first nonfiction book, The Glass Castle, was released in 2005. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320501.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320501.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Orhan Pamuk is a man in love. So is Kemal, the narrator of Pamuk's shimmering, brimming new novel The Museum of Innocence (Knopf, $28.95). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320498.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320498.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:00 EST If most biographers start out in love with their subjects and end up hating them, Brad Gooch did things backward as he researched his highly regarded biography of southern writer Flannery O'Connor. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320497.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320497.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:00 EST If President Bill Clinton hadn't challenged House Speaker Newt Gingrich's penny-pinching, tax-relieving budget proposals in 1995, allowing the federal government to shut down several times, there might have been no Monica Lewinsky scandal. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320502.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320502.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:00 EST You read the diary, you've seen the play and the movie. You toured the exhibit at the Holocaust Museum. You're pretty well Anne Frankified. Surely you don't need to read a new book about her or reread the diary. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320500.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320500.html Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Fundamentalists hallelujahed The Passion of the Christ, but Mel Gibson's blockbuster reduced the meaning of Jesus' life to the ritualized mayhem of his final hours. In her new book, Mary Gordon observes that the journey from Gethsemane to Golgotha takes up only a fraction of the canonical Gospels. There is more to the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John than the depiction of a Roman-enhanced interrogation technique. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1319567.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1319567.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Nearly three weeks after food-world royalty Ruth Reichl got the staggering news that Gourmet, the venerated culinary magazine she ushered into the 21st century, was shutting down after a 68-year run, she was still at a loss as to what she might do next. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1319556.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1319556.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST John Radanovich is obsessive about jazz, so much so that he moved from one great jazz town to another, just to immerse himself in it. Chicago. New York. New Orleans. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320658.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320658.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Trenton Daniel is a staff writer for The Miami Herald. He asked this of Tracy Kidder, whose most recent book is ``Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness'' (Random House, $26). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320701.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320701.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Curtis Morgan, the Herald's environmental affairs writer, asked this question of Jack E. Davis, author of ``An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century'' (University of Georgia Press, $34.95). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320704.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320704.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Sue Mullin is manager-editor of the Calendar department for The Miami Herald. She asked this of Sadia Shepard, who has written ``The Girl From Foreign: A Memoir'' (Penguin Books, $25.95 hardcover and $16 paperback). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320374.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320374.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Andrea Robinson, editor of The Miami Herald's Neighbors sections that appear in North-Central Miami-Dade and Northwest Miami-Dade, asked this of Lyah Beth LeFlore, the author of ``Wildflowers'' (Broadway Books, $13.99), a gripping tale about the strong black women in the Davis family that explores natural and spiritual bonds between mothers and daughters and the lengths they go to protect their name. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320107.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320107.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Olga Connor, who writes often for El Nuevo Herald about Cuban culture, interviewed Jaime Bayly, the well-known Peruvian writer and journalist whose latest book is ``El Cojo y el Loco'' (``The Mad and the Cripple'') (Alfaguara, $16.99). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320127.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320127.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Steve Rothaus covers gay issues for The Miami Herald. He asked these questions of Stuart E. Weisberg, who has written ``Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman'' (University of Massachusetts Press, $30 hardback). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320172.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320172.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Terence Shepherd is multimedia business editor for The Miami Herald. He asked this of Joyce Purnick, who has written ``Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics'' (PublicAffairs, $26.95). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320702.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320702.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Nirvi Shah is consumer affairs and personal finance reporter for The Miami Herald who previously covered education. She asked this of Roxanna Elden, who wrote See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers (2009; Kaplan, $19.95). Elden has been teaching for eight years, including the past six at Hialeah High. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320373.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320373.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Luisa Yanez is a higher-education reporter for The Miami Herald and a co-author of ``Miami's Criminal Past Uncovered'' (The History Press, 2007). She asked this of Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, who has written ``Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles'' (IG Publishing, $14.95): http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320718.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320718.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Sergio Bustos is The Herald's deputy city editor and a co-author of ``Miami's Criminal Past Uncovered'' (The History Press, 2007). He asked this of Ana Menendez, a former Herald columnist and the author of ``The Last War'' (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.99). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320108.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320108.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Tere Figueras Negrete is a an editor for the Miami Herald Neighbor's section. She asked this of Pulitzer Prize winner Liz Balmaseda, formerly of The Miami Herald and currently a columnist for The Palm Beach Post, whose new book is ``Sweet Mary'' (Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, $24.95). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320171.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320171.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Elinor Brecher, who writes obituaries for The Miami Herald, is the author of ``Schindler's Legacy: True Stories of the List Survivors (Penguin Group, 1994). She asked this of Francine Prose, author of ``Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife'' (Harper, $24.99). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320659.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320659.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Glenn Garvin, The Miami Herald's television critic, has also been a foreign correspondent for the paper. His books include ``Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras'' (Brassey's, 1992). He asked this of Sid Jacobson, co-author (with Ernie Colón) of the graphic novel ``Vlad The Impaler: The Man Who Was Dracula'' (Hudson Street Press, $25.95). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1319495.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1319495.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Mangroves flourish out back. Iguanas stalk the area. Monkeys sometimes stop by. Crocodiles, too. So it's no surprise that John Dufresne, author of novels, short stories, screenplays and a guide to writing fiction, finds inspiration in his own backyard. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320372.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1320372.html Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:00 EST Sarah Moreno is a reporter for the Galería section of El Nuevo Herald. She asked this question of Andrés Neuman, the Spanish-Argentine novelist and poet whose most recent work is ``El viajero del siglo'' (Traveler of the Century) (Santillana U.S.A., $19.99), which has won the prestigious Alfaguara Award. At present he has a column in the literary supplement of the daily national newspapers ABC (Spain) and Clarín (Argentina).