Fiction
Battle royal
The sequel to ‘Wolf Hall’ revisits the contentious, complicated life of Thomas Cromwell.
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Books
Book pairs literature with readers’ favorite recipes
Food and books are a natural pairing. Just ask any book club member.
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Nutrition
Getting fresh with
The first African-American basketball player in the University of Miami history is sprouting a nationwide movement encouraging residents in low-income communities to reverse their health issues through urban farming.
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Fiction
Toni Morrison confronts America’s ugly history
Toni Morrison examines America’s racist history through the eyes of a Korean War veteran.
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Biography
Birdseye’s startling views
Clarence Birdseye might not seem at first to be an interesting subject for a biography. He invented a way to freeze food, making that bag of peas that’s been sitting in the back of the freezer for months edible. Pretty quotidian stuff, and not exactly a breakthrough that will solve problems like global warming or make peas actually taste good.
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Fiction
Putting everything aside for love
Penny Vincenzi writes enormous, fast-paced novels with plots and subplots so deftly manipulated that you can’t start reading one and still lead a productive life. More Than You Know is the latest threat to industry, and though not as potent as An Absolute Scandal, about the Lloyd’s Names disaster, it still wiped out three days of my life.
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What are you reading now?
“Robert Morgan’s Lions of the West; it’s history, about Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston and Jim Bowie. And it’s history written by a man who’s a good poet so it’s beautifully written, but it’s really interesting, too.”
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ABC correspondent celebrates her (and our) passion for swimming
ABC correspondent Lynn Sherr celebrates her — and our — passion for swimming.
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Generation ‘Me’ or ‘We’?
Academics disagree whether Gen Xers and Millennials are selfish and money-grubbing or confident and group-oriented.
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Memoir
Gregg Allman’s memoir brims with road stories and family pain
Any one of Gregg Allman’s stories about his life could lure a reader into his new memoir, but the 64-year-old Allman begins My Cross to Bear with his biggest moment of shame, the induction of the Allman Brothers Band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.
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Judge dismisses ‘Three Cups of Tea’ lawsuit
A federal judge on Monday dismissed a civil lawsuit against author Greg Mortenson, calling claims “flimsy and speculative” that the humanitarian and his publisher lied in his best-selling Three Cups of Tea and Stones Into Schools books to boost sales.
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Author! Author!
Dead treat: A chat with Charlaine Harris
You could start a holy war by attempting to proclaim any one author the “queen” of vampire fiction. Yet whether they like their vampires cute and sparkly, suave and French or with a genteel Southern drawl, few fans of fangdom would contest that Charlaine Harris is on the shortlist of heiresses to the throne.
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History
Power struggle
Repetitive but compelling fourth volume on the life of Lyndon Johnson opens as 1960 looms.
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Fiction
From the mouth of a babe, the voice of God
According to her website, author Grace McCleen grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household in Britain. Encouraged by teachers on a path she had not set her sights on, a university education, she attended Oxford, only to lose her faith and fragile sense of self. Judging by her semiautobiographical first novel, she has been saved by writing, if not restored to salvation.
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What are you reading now?
“I just finished Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. It was — to use one of Jobs’ favorite expressions for things he loved — ‘insanely great.’ It was a fascinating portrait of a complex, mercurial, and monumentally important figure over the last third of a century. But it’s also the story of the personal computer … and the iPod … and the iPhone … and the iPad … and Pixar. I learned a ton about the design and internal workings of a lot of products I’ve always taken for granted. And, of course, there is the strangely timely Jobs quote about ebook pricing that would become a part of the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five publishers. Earlier this month I read Adam Johnson’s wry, haunting, and sometimes terrifying novel about North Korea, The Orphan Master’s Son. In some scenes, the horror and the humor were so deftly mixed that I honestly wasn’t sure whether to shudder or smile. As a novelist, the book gave me a monumental inferiority complex. But as a reader? A real treat.”
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Nonfiction
The case of the obsessive gardener
Some 400 years ago, in a time of fraught international politics and a sharp division between the haves and have-nots in Holland, a beautiful flowering plant named Semper augustus took Dutch society by storm. Only a dozen-odd specimens of the exotic thing had arrived in the country by way of the spice trade, and the wealthy Amsterdam merchant who owned them quickly found an avid market, selling each one for twice the price that Rembrandt would earn for his contemporary painting The Night Watch.
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Fiction
Comic mystery makes quite an impression
The popular account of Vincent van Gogh’s suicide claims the troubled painter wandered into a field, shot himself with a revolver and then limped home to seek treatment. But that makes “no sense” to comic writer Christopher Moore. So he kicks off his bawdy new novel with a characteristically zany version of his own.
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Books
Nothing’s black and white with mommy porn
Amid a frenzy for her S&M-laced romance, ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ author E.L. James kicks off her book tour in Miami.
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Stories
Walk on the wild side
Connecting with the natural world doesn’t always work smoothly for the restless women in these thoughtful, piercing stories.
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La vida local
‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ author adds a second Miami appearance this weekend
Fans of Shades of Grey have a second chance to meet the author when she visits Miami this weekend.
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Author! Author!
The gold miner from Appalachia
Call Ron Rash a pessimist if you want: He won’t deny that his books tend to reveal unsavory truths about the darker side of human nature. But there’s a good reason he puts his characters in and through hell.
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Memoir
Recovering addict finds a new life
We hear only from the survivors. Addiction is a lethal business, and we often forget, reading a survivor’s account, the frequent mortal cost of drug use. Bill Clegg doesn’t forget that the addict’s will to live must be committed to each day. His memoir of crack use and recovery is written to fellow users no longer around, the disappeared and soon-to-be-gone, as well as to those who have re-emerged with him, eyes open wide with guilt and apology.
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Movies
Cheerful enough, though a bit thin
Making-of movie books work best when they look back at those relatively few films that become ingrained in the culture. And almost 35 years after college students first chanted “To-ga! To-ga!” the raucous comedy Animal House is certainly that.
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Science
Giving biology a bit of life
Richard Fortey can be deadly serious while slaying you with great wit.
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What are you reading now?
“I recently finished reading two forthcoming novels: Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins. … Billy Lynn is about a group of U.S. soldiers who return home after a heroic firefight in Iraq; Billy quickly discovers that his war experience doesn’t jive with what the folks back home perceive of the war. Beautiful Ruins is a hilarious and heartfelt story of a young Italian man whose brush with a 1960s Hollywood actress sets off a chain of events that spans decades and lives. In both books, there are poignant scenes that will make your heart ache and lines that will make you laugh out loud. What more could you ask a book to do?”
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Fiction
The long goodbye
A grieving husband comes to terms with the truth about his marriage in Anne Tyler’s latest novel.
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Memoir
A past that wasn’t always perfect
Novelist takes a generous look back at her Northern industrial town upbringing.
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Book news
J.K. Rowling’s new book ‘The Casual Vacancy’ a comedy
It may lack wizards, but J.K. Rowling and her publisher are hoping her first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, will have the magic touch.
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Fiction
Grisham fable takes on morals, baseball
John Grisham takes a break from crime with a sweet tale about two men whose lives are thrown together.
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What are you reading now?
“I love fiction when it includes complex story lines and characters. I recently finished debut novelist Sere Prince Halverson’s The Underside of Joy. It overtly pulled on my heartstrings, but when it is that well-written one doesn’t mind.”
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Kids books
Hiaasen bites on reality TV
If you think Carl Hiaasen would not be caught dead watching reality television, you’d be wrong. Very wrong.
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‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ author coming to Miami
E.L. James, the author of the erotic sensation Fifty Shades of Grey, is coming to the United States for a book tour — and her first stop is Miami.
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Kids’ books
Heroes for our kids
Political-thriller writer Brad Meltzer pens a book for his 6-year-old daughter about ordinary people who change the world.
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Nonfiction
Being human
Biologist tackles the big questions in his latest work on evolution and altruism.
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Fiction
When Irish eyes aren’t smiling
A futuristic gang war is about to begin, and the boss isn’t happy.
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