Authors Books - Page 13

Running in the Family

Michael Ondaatje

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Pictures of yesterday 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Considering that this is in fact an autobiograpy, one can not judge it's contents. After all, you can not judge ones life, either you like it or not in a sense of discussing literature. But, what you can discuss is the manner in which that biography is written. Ondaatje present's life of his family trough generations who lived on Ceilon (Shri Lanka), in a series of random images, which are more like picture, than prose. Many times he stops to grasp certain individual and present his little history, his life, which than influenced the rest of the family in some perverse way. When reading this book, experienced reader will find such compositions that corresponds in that what crtics call 'modern', others will find interesting and compelling story, which never grows in boredom, with fluent narrative style that keeps ones eyes fixed on pages long after the lights went out.
Comparing the Ondaatje with other authors of the modern world,
Ondaatje lacks the one thing that he "must" have when presenting himself in a way he does. By focusing himself merely on a problems of his own, of a personal character in every (which, of course, includes this one)book, he voluntarily forgets that there is other life, other world going around him. When tending to write intelectual prose, one should, at least in one way, give some focus on that matter too.
But, when all this comes to conclusion, if you like (auto)biograhies - buy this one, if you don't, skip it. It's simple as that...

Editorial Review:

In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India," Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

Jane Austen For Dummies (For Dummies)

Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Jane AAusten for Dummies 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Interesting background. More indept than I thought as it included societal and economic restraints

easy, accessible, full of great info. must read! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

A fantastic, light, accessible, engaging, and easy-to-read guide to Jane Austen, her life, her world, her novels, and her impact on our world. I have read all of Jane's books and some of her biographies, but this book still provided new information for me, explaining things I only had a vague idea about (concerning her characters and the world/manners). Whether traveling through Gregorian England or contemporary England, this book is a real help. My only complaint is that the author does do some interpretation of Jane that I might disagree with (i.e. characters, etc.) without making it clear that it was interpretation. Otherwise, a great read, for both the seasoned reader and the reader just beginning to dabble in Jane. I definitely will be recommending this one to friends. Grade: A-

Editorial Review:

Explains Austen's methods, motivations, and morals

The fun and easy way(r) to understand and enjoy Jane Austen

Want to know more about Jane Austen? This friendly guide gives the scoop on her life, works, and lasting impact on our culture. It chronicles the events of her brief life, examines each of her novels, and looks at why her stories - of women and marriage, class and money, scandal and hypocrisy, emotion and satire - still have meaning for us today.

Discover
* Why Austen is so popular
* The impact on manners, courtships, and dating
* Love and life in Austen's world
* Her life and key influences
* Her most memorable characters

Buffalo Gal

Laura Pedersen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Growing up in the snowblower society of Buffalo, New York, Laura Pedersen s first words were most likely turn the wheel into a skid. Like many families subsisting in the frigid North during the energy crisis, the Pedersens feared rising prices at the gas pump, argued about the thermostat, fought over the dog to stay warm at night, and often slept in their clothes. While her parents were preoccupied with surviving separation and stagflation, daughter Laura became the neighborhood wild child, skipping school, playing poker, betting on the horses, and trading stocks. Learning how to beat the odds, by high school graduation Pedersen was well prepared to seek her fortune on Wall Street, becoming the youngest person to have a seat on the American Stock Exchange and a millionaire by age 21. Combining laugh-out-loud humor with a slice of social history her hometown was a flash point for race riots, antiwar protests, and abortion rallies, not to mention bingo, bowling, and Friday night fish fries Pedersen paints a vivid portrait of an era.

The Diary of Anais Nin: Vol. 1 (1931-1934)

Anais Nin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A great read 4 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

I recomend reading Anais Nin's diary. The book is such poetic prose. Some sentences really took my breath away, the way she can captivate something so beautiful and human in simple words. Since it is a diary, its main focus is her life, but its not selfish, infact she mentions herself very little. The main focus is Henry (Miller) and June, his wife. When Ananis Nin falls inlove with someone, so does the reader. Her descriptive skills gave me goosebumps, you really can see it in your minds eye, hear the music or feel the softness of skin. I highly recomend this to anyone thinking about reading this book, you will come away with a slice of life from 1930's France.

Wonderfully delicate and erotic 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 10 people found this review helpful.

This is one of the most profound works of literature I have ever read. Nin leads you directly into her life, the nature of the people around her, her feelings and internal conflicts. She writes delicately and powerfully and womanly. Everyone should have a chance to read this.

Editorial Review:

This celebrated volume begins when Nin is about to publish her first book and ends when she leaves Paris for New York. Edited and with a Preface by Gunther tuhlmann; Index.

Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes

Maya Angelou

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Throughout Maya Angelou’s life, from her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, to her world travels as a bestselling writer, good food has played a central role. Preparing and enjoying homemade meals provides a sense of purpose and calm, accomplishment and connection. Now in Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, Angelou shares memories pithy and poignant–and the recipes that helped to make them both indelible and irreplaceable.

Angelou tells us about the time she was expelled from school for being afraid to speak–and her mother baked a delicious maple cake to brighten her spirits. She gives us her recipe for short ribs along with a story about a job she had as a cook at a Creole restaurant (never mind that she didn’t know how to cook and had no idea what Creole food might entail). There was the time in London when she attended a wretched dinner party full of wretched people; but all wasn’t lost–she did experience her initial taste of a savory onion tart. She recounts her very first night in her new home in Sonoma, California, when she invited M. F. K. Fisher over for cassoulet, and the evening Deca Mitford roasted a chicken when she was beyond tipsy–and created Chicken Drunkard Style. And then there was the hearty brunch Angelou made for a homesick Southerner, a meal that earned her both a job offer and a prophetic compliment: “If you can write half as good as you can cook, you are going to be famous.”

Maya Angelou is renowned in her wide and generous circle of friends as a marvelous chef. Her kitchen is a social center. From fried meat pies, chicken livers, and beef Wellington to caramel cake, bread pudding, and chocolate éclairs, the one hundred-plus recipes included here are all tried and true, and come from Angelou’s heart and her home. Hallelujah! The Welcome Table is a stunning collaboration between the two things Angelou loves best: writing and cooking.

The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen

Jacques Pepin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The sparkling personality, sense of humor, and charm familiar to Jacques Pépin's television audiences carries over to the page in the superstar chef's humbly titled memoir, The Apprentice.

A clever, mischievous, and very likable boy, Pépin's earliest food memories are hungry ones from his childhood in war-torn France. After World War II, his first restaurant job was peeling potatoes for his mother at her restaurant, and he became an apprentice in a hotel kitchen at age 13. In this delightful tale he works hard, plays fair, is kind to others and good to his family, and his efforts take him to Paris, and then New York. Except for the terrible car accident that required him to reinvent himself as a teacher and television personality, he seems to have always been in the right place at the right time. He cooked for Prime Minister Gaillard and then General Charles de Gaulle, met Pierre Franey, Craig Claiborne, and Julia Child, and turned down a job cooking for JFK to accept one with Howard Johnson. But just as entertaining and enjoyable to read about are his tender memories and thoughts about his relationships with his parents and brothers, and with his wife and daughter.

We all wish we could cook like Pepin (and every chapter ends with one of Pépin's favorite recipes), but this enchanting tale will make you wish you knew him. The clear, simple way he expresses himself and the honesty with which he tells his story will bring you to tears, and make you laugh out loud. --Leora Y. Bloom

Running to the Mountain: A Midlife Adventure

Jon Katz

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 82 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Jon Katz couldn't afford a country house--his wife didn't want him to buy it; his career looked like it was going off track; and his daughter was about to leave home for college. But when he saw the view from a decrepit little cabin in the mountains, near Cambridge, New York, he knew he had to have the place. So, against all rational impulses, he bought the cabin and used it as a summer retreat. He read Thomas Merton, helped his best friend prepare to be a father, deepened his relationship with his dog, and wrote a book about the spiritual wisdom that came to him in everyday life. Running to the Mountain: A Journey of Faith and Change includes some particularly elegant and urgent readings of Merton, whose central concerns Katz summarizes as well as anyone has:

Merton was obsessed with a central issue for our time--figuring out how to live, trying to forge a life of balance, purpose and meaning. I've grown to share his obsession, his belief that life demands a lot of tinkering, and requires people to give birth to themselves not just once, but over and over.

--Michael Joseph Gross

The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant

Dan Savage

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Total reviews: 124 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Best known for his syndicated sexual advice column, "Savage Love," Dan Savage shares his own story in The Kid, a hilarious account of his efforts--along with his partner--to adopt a child. (Whoops, make that his boyfriend; Savage can't stand the "genderless" P-word: "Straight people and press organs that want to acknowledge gay relationships while at the same time pushing the two-penises stuff as far out of their minds as possible love 'partner.' I hated it.") Savage doesn't give an inch on the sexuality issue; it's hard to imagine that a homophobic reader would even pick up The Kid, but if it happened, Savage's unapologetic presentation of his life would quickly scare that reader off. Which isn't to say that he paints a rosy picture of homosexual cohabitation: the very first scene finds Dan's boyfriend, Terry, locking himself in the bathroom after a fight over the music on the car stereo. The misadventures continue through each step of the open-adoption process, in which Dan and Terry get to know their baby's birth mother, and the first few weeks of parenthood. The Kid is a wonderful, charming account of real "family values" that proves love knows no limits.

A Small Place

Jamaica Kincaid

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

The lovely tourists 1 out of 5 stars.
12 of 34 people found this review helpful.

I had to read this book for a Multicultural Literature class at my Uni, and, far from being informative, all it did was fill with me a contempt of my own. I am not a racist by any means, but when confronted with such a bitter, snide voice as the one Kincaid displays, I find myself unconsciously getting defensive. When she says, "you are a tourist; you are ugly," I find myself saying, "Fine, I'll keep my money and let you trade with seashells and beads." Kincaid is a master of the self-fulfilling prophecy: she says Antiguans are so oppressed and so downtrodden and so angry, and rather than doing anything to help it, she's exacerbating it by using such a bitter, over-the-top voice.

Other reviewers have stated that the vision of Antigua portrayed is a warped and extremely limited one, biased by Kincaid's apparent small mindedness, and I must confess that I'm glad to hear that. To think that the entire island is solely occupied by bitter people who imagine themselves to be ex-slaves would make me steer clear of the area any time I go on vacation.

Because, yes, I am a tourist. And no, being a tourist does not automatically make anyone ugly, despite what Kincaid's bitter rant might say.

Editorial Review:

A brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua--by the author of Annie John

"If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him--why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen . . ."

So begins Jamaica Kincaid's expansive essay, which shows us what we have not yet seen of the ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies where she grew up.

Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

Stephen Greenblatt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"So engrossing, clearheaded, and lucid that its arrival is not just welcome but cause for celebration."—Dan Cryer, Newsday

Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life—full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger—could have become the world's greatest playwright.

Bringing together little-known historical facts and little-noticed elements of Shakespeare's plays, Greenblatt makes inspired connections between the life and the works and delivers "a dazzling and subtle biography" (Richard Lacayo, Time). Readers will experience Shakespeare's vital plays again as if for the first time, but with greater understanding and appreciation of their extraordinary depth and humanity.

A best book of the year: The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2004 • Time magazine's #1 Best Nonfiction Book • A Washington Post Book World Rave • An Economist Best Book • A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book • A Christian Science Monitor Best Book • A Chicago Tribune Best Book • A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book • NPR's Maureen Corrigan's Best