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 2010 MiamiHerald.com Books 60 Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:39:22 EST http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss McClatchy Interactive's PubSys miamifeedback@miamiherald.com http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1469049.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1469049.html Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:00 EST Florida's crime writers are never shy about chronicling our state's inherent craziness. You might say it's much of the reason some of them are driven to write in the first place. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1469059.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1469059.html Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:00 EST Funny animals? Ugh. Though Walt Kelly, Carl Barks and even Jack ''King'' Kirby embraced and elevated the genre, it mostly left me cold -- until now. Talbot's tightly plotted political thriller posits an alternate universe where France conquered England in the Napoleonic Wars, and the world is ruled by anthropomorphic animals, with a few hairless apes as servants and lackeys. Following his tour de force Alice in Sunderland, the grand master of British comics' recent projects have been a bit odd. Grandville is no exception, but this wildly heady blend of mystery, heroics, politics, religion and romance is more reminiscent of his classic Luther Arkwright series than anything he's done since. If you can get past -- or embrace -- his archetypical menagerie of well-drawn faux-bipeds, the story, with allegorical echoes of 9/11, is further evidence that Talbot blazes his own path and is always worth following. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1469050.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1469050.html Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:00 EST In this series of monologues, Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, imagines the voices of teenage girls from around the world. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1469063.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1469063.html Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:00 EST ''I just finished The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. It's a chilling ghost story and examination of the British class system post-World War II. Is Hundreds Hall haunted or are its inbred owners suffering from psychotic delusions? Waters twists the tension tighter with each chapter, until I was left breathless with suspense, gripped by the story and shocked by the destructive nature of desire.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1469053.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1469053.html Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:00 EST TUESDAY Michael Gross and ''Rogues' Gallery.'' 7:30 p.m. Books & Books, 9700 Collins Ave., Bal Harbour Shops. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1464945.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1464945.html Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:00 EST In her fiction, Louise Erdrich has always taken the wide-angle view. Her novels are littered with a tangled, astonishingly large cast of Native American (and German and French) families spread over the course of decades, loving and fighting, living and dying with a great deal of bravado (if not much material wealth or -- often -- good sense). http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1464937.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1464937.html Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:00 EST Theater can be a transformative experience, particularly for those who choose it as a career.<p/>The American Theatre Wing has compiled the remembrances of 19 playwrights talking about where their adoration of live performance began and what influenced their careers as writers. The book radiates an affection for the stage, celebrating the memories and inspiration that are left after the curtain has come down. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1464953.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1464953.html Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:00 EST Paul Theroux's contribution to the revival of contemporary travel writing is so seminal that casual readers may be inclined to forget that most of his rather astonishingly prodigious output has been literary fiction. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1464950.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1464950.html Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:00 EST J.D. Salinger supposedly spent the latter half of his life writing for his own pleasure, composing each day in a pine house in the hills that overlooked towering maple trees, plowed hay fields and the neighboring mountains of Vermont. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1457828.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1457828.html Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:00 EST F. Scott Fitzgerald was right: The very rich really are different from you and me. For one thing, they tend to get treated shabbily in our modern literature. The nouveau riche in particular. When they're not caricatures of rapaciousness, they're Cautionary Tales, leading lives of quiet desperation behind the wheels of their Maseratis. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1457838.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1457838.html Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:00 EST The shooting of a young black male doesn't make the front page. It's most likely to appear inside the Metro section -- that is, if the victim dies. Even then, he's unlikely to receive more than a couple of inches of print. After all, it's the same old story: young black men killing other young black men. The shooter and the victim are assumed to be drug dealers or gang-bangers doing their thing in a part of town where people of means and good sense would never venture. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1457820.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1457820.html Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:00 EST School lunches don't exactly have a great reputation. The daily smorgasbord of pizza, Tater Tots, soda and other fattening fare has come under fire as obesity continues to be a national health crisis. In Free for All, sociology professor Poppendieck explains how nutrition-deficient meals came to dominate America's school cafeterias and outlines a slew of problems in the national school lunch and breakfast programs. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1457831.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1457831.html Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:00 EST James W. Hall ranks at the top echelon of Florida mystery writers. Whether he's exploring another entry in his ongoing series about Thorn, Key Largo's most reluctant amateur sleuth, or writing a standalone novel, the writer's solid plotting, affinity for characters and concern for Florida's ecology never fail to make for an exciting story. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1457837.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1457837.html Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:00 EST ''I've been reading Ralph Ellison's book titled Three Days Before the Shooting, a very unfinished 1,100-page collection of what Ellison had produced toward writing a second novel. There's a story there, but it's almost like a build-your-own-novel kit. There's so much wonderful writing in there. I would recommend that anybody go and poke around in it.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1457822.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1457822.html Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:00 EST TUESDAY David Eigen and ''Women: The Goddesses of Wisdom.'' 8 p.m. Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1452986.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1452986.html Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:00 EST The capricious nature of memory fascinates Malcolm Jones. What we remember of our past is a vital question to a memoirist bent on exploring life when he was growing up in North Carolina in the 1950s and '60s. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1452983.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1452983.html Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:00 EST The intersection between the savage and the civilized, the semi-permeable membrane between animals and humans, fascinates T.C. Boyle. His writing style, too, is a raw mix of the terrifying and the titillating. Think Christopher Walken as an angelic serial killer. Think Kokopelli. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1452990.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1452990.html Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Before E!, TMZ.com, Perez Hilton and assorted sources with the depth of Mario Lopez's dimples, there was Confidential magazine, which set the curb-high standard for celebrity coverage. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1452984.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1452984.html Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Joshua Ferris' intriguing new novel moves along, sure-footed and inexorable as its protagonist Tim Farnsworth, a Manhattan lawyer who seems to have everything we'd ever want: a high-paying, satisfying career; a rock-solid, 20-year marriage; a gorgeous house; plans for an African safari. Not even a recalcitrant teenage daughter can mitigate the peaks of Tim's success. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1445309.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1445309.html Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Edgar-winner Steve Hamilton's work gets better with each of his seven novels. But the unconventional The Lock Artist surpasses even Hamilton's high standards as the author examines the aftermath of a young boy's trauma. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1445307.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1445307.html Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Peter Biskind's biography of Warren Beatty begins with an off-putting string of caveats and apologies. Biskind tells us he is not interested in his subject's parents, forebears or childhood. He promises he won't discuss Beatty's personal life after his marriage to actress Annette Bening in 1992. He says he doesn't believe in analyzing his subject's psychology or in Freudianism as a biographical tool but simply wants to describe Beatty, not explain him. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1445310.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1445310.html Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Tracy Chevalier's new novel depicts people who believe that God created human beings just a few thousand years ago. But instead of setting Remarkable Creatures during the 2008 Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., Chevalier digs back to the English town of Lyme Regis in the early 19th century. You know this quiet resort village from Jane Austen's Persuasion. Two hundred miles north, a toddler named Charles Darwin will someday evolve into the world's most controversial scientist, but for now most everybody agrees that Earth was created on the night before Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1445308.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1445308.html Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Kate Braestrup thinks people are crazy to get married. After all, as she tells the engaged couples she counsels as a minister, 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, but all marriages end, period. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1445315.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1445315.html Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:00 EST ''J.M. Coetzee's Summertime. It is such a remarkably honest and very funny book, a sort of faux-memoir which at the same time contains a great deal of truth. Coetzee writes of himself in the third person (he is supposed to be dead in this book), and a biographer interviews five people, four of them women who tell him about the writer, Coetzee. Their comments are often remarkably unflattering but contain, we sense, in a wonderfully playful and imaginative way some truth.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1445306.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1445306.html Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:00 EST TUESDAY Jeffrey Fekete and ''Making the Big Game: Tales of an Accidental Spectator.'' 6:30 p.m. Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1439964.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1439964.html Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:00 EST When you blog about relationships for Psychology Today, you aren't surprised when people you barely know start asking for advice. The questions come even faster once the story gets out that you've written a book on the popular subject of how and why people fall in and out of love. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1439970.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1439970.html Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:00 EST In 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decreed that the generals and admirals in charge of the unified combatant commands could no longer refer to themselves as commanders in chief. Only the president would thereafter hold the title. But in his new book, Gary Wills cautions us to refrain from regarding the president as everybody's commander in chief. In that capacity, he has no authority over the civilian citizenry. Nonetheless, since World War II, occupants of the White House have leveraged this circumscribed function to intimidate Congress and the Supreme Court into allowing them to run roughshod over the principle of checks and balances. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1439968.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1439968.html Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Elizabeth Gilbert traversed continents in her one-year quest of self-discovery. A.J. Jacobs followed the laws of the Bible. Julie Powell cooked. With nods to all of the above, Gretchen Rubin embarked on her journey by looking for happiness in her back yard, without any cutesy gimmicks or made-for-the-movies twists. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1439977.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1439977.html Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Renowned painter Robert Oliver pulls a knife and attacks a painting in the Impressionist collection at the National Gallery of Art. He tells psychiatrist Andrew Marlow, ''I did it for her,'' and then falls silent for almost a year. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1439972.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1439972.html Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:00 EST A mysterious visitor who left roses and cognac at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe each year on the writer's birthday failed to show early Tuesday, breaking with a ritual that began more than 60 years ago. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1432305.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1432305.html Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Anyone who's a fan of serious crime fiction knows the work of Robert Crais. And if you know the work, then you know Elvis Cole, a classic Corvette-driving L.A. gumshoe with more than a little Marlowe in his DNA. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1432307.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1432307.html Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Upper lips don't come much stiffer than Major Hal Treherne's. The major is the living embodiment of an honorable soldier in post-World War II England -- an era of hats, gloves and enduring if battered beliefs in country, service and civilization. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1432308.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1432308.html Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:00 EST This book, a son's oral history of his late father that's not exactly an oral history, is the movie Citizen Kane by way of oral historian Studs Terkel. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1432313.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1432313.html Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:00 EST ''I just read a book called Bought by Anna David. It's a really fun book about call girls. It's fiction. It sucked me in immediately. I could see how easily a person could become a call girl. . . . When you really get into it, it's just like any job, which I thought she did a good job of expressing. It's well-written and captivating.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1432310.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1432310.html Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:00 EST TUESDAY Beth Hoffman and ''Saving CeeCee Honeycutt.'' Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1427182.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1427182.html Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Reduce The Farmer's Daughter to its basic elements, and the title novella in Jim Harrison's latest collection might be called a revenge story: A young girl plots vengeance against the country music fiddler who had slipped a horse tranquilizer into her drink on the night that changed everything. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1427185.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1427185.html Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:00 EST If you thought the 2008 election was a triumph in the cause of getting a woman closer to the White House, political reporter Anne E. Kornblut begs to differ. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1427180.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1427180.html Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:00 EST ''No one owns the past, at least not until it is written,'' Fidel Castro shrewdly observes at the start of his faux ''autobiography'' -- the deliciously wicked construct devised by Norberto Fuentes. ''I've learned something else,'' Castro adds: ''the Revolution is always creating the past.'' http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1422120.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1422120.html Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Smart trend-watchers might look at the two biggest publishing phenomenon of the past decade -- the Harry Potter series and the Twilight books -- and conclude that the next can't-miss blockbuster would take place at a boarding school that trains vampires to use magic. http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1419660.html http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/arts/books/story/1419660.html Tue, 12 Jan 2010 01:00 EST Want to be green? Dump the cul-de-sac. Ban the mall. Leave the Prius at home. The best thing you can do for the environment is to push for dense, compact, attractive and walkable urban neighborhoods that mix homes, shops and offices, just like we used to.