Man, I don't understand the English. Apparently, two of England's biggest newspapers (the left-wing Guardian and the right-wing Daily Mail) are all up in arms over Pippa Middleton's plans to publish a book on event planning. Now, I don't really follow the coverage of Britain's royal family, but... isn't this woman an event planner? So why is the idea of her writing a book about event planning—not a tell-all about, say, the Queen's secret predilection for Ugg boots and Starbucks Frappuccinos—so horrifying? I get the claims of nepotism and all, but I totally fail to see what sacred law of Good Taste this woman's book is breaking.
If money is no object when it comes to books for your coffee table, check out The Impossible Collection of Fashion. This 144-page-long book is priced at a jaw-dropping $650, and features one hundred of the "most iconic" dresses of the 20th century, as chosen by Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
NPR's "All Tech Considered" blog has an article up featuring a handful of parenting tips about girls and social media from Rachel Simmons, author of the best-selling nonfiction title Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. I'm not sure what makes the tips gender-specific (they seem 100% applicable for boys, too), but they're all solid suggestions.
When publisher Little, Brown & Company e-mailed booksellers a list of their upcoming books last week, there was a November 14th release that excited quite a bit of curiosity: Untitled, by Anonymous. Tantalizingly, the publisher described the book as "the inside story of life with one of the most controversial figures of our time" and promised a huge media roll-out, but that was all the detail they offered. After a few days of speculation, the Times is now reporting that the co-author of Untitled is Catherine Hooper, the fiancée of Andrew Madoff, son of jailed Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff.
If, as now seems likely, this ends up being a tell-all memoir about life with the Madoff family, it shouldn't be confused with this... the other upcoming tell-all memoir about the Madoffs, this one written by Stephanie Madoff-Mack, the widow of Bernard's son Mark.
(And I know this is a minor point, but what do they mean by calling Madoff "controversial"? Where's the controversy? Don't we all basically agree he's a skeezebucket?)
The trailer's out for the film adaptation of Michael Lewis's 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Behold:
I have zero interest in baseball, but I support anything that requires Brad Pitt to shave off his creepy drug dealer facial hair, so... go see this movie, people!
My mother was absolutely fascinated by the Bernie Madoff scandal, but she's determined to wait until she is 100% certain she's found the most informative and in-depth book about his situation before she shells out any cash for it. I doubt this will be the book in question, but less insanely finicky readers may be interested: Stephanie Madoff-Mack (daughter-in-law of Bernie and widow of Bernie's son Mark) has sold a memoir to Penguin for release this December. The publisher promises this as-yet-untitled book will be the "first genuine inside account...of one of the great public scandals and private tragedies of our time".
NPR aired a news story yesterday about an honorary doctorate of public service from Morgan State University posthumously awarded to Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose cancer cells have been used to create an "immortal cell line" for medical research. Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951 at the age of 31. She never knew that her cells had been taken (nor did she give permission for their use), but her unwitting "donation" has lead to breakthroughs in treating diseases like polio, AIDS, and cancer. Ms. Lacks's story was told in Rebecca Skloot's best-selling 2010 nonfiction book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which is being developed as a film produced by Oprah Winfrey and HBO.
According to the Times, former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson has signed a book deal with Penguin to co-write (with mystery author Sarah Lovett) a series of "international suspense" novels. The books will feature a fictional operative named Vanessa Pearson and be based upon Plame Wilson's own experiences, although I'm guessing her heroine's cover won't be blown by a political columnist.
In the ten years of its existence, Wikipedia has posted more than 3.5 million articles in English, but a recent New York Times article pointed out that barely 13 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women. The executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but in the meanwhile traditionally female-oriented subjects (like friendship bracelets) will probably continue to get short shrift, while traditionally male-oriented subjects (like baseball cards) will feature more useless facts than one can shake a stick at.
The Hollywood Reporter has announced that Anthony Hopkins is in talks to star in a film adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Stephen Rebello's 1998 non-fiction book. I'm having some trouble picturing the newly svelte, dapper Hopkins as the rotund director, but here's hoping he'll enjoy the experience of filling out Hitchcock's famous silhouette.
Wordcandy's Wedding-Book Review Extravaganza Part II: Bridal Nonfiction
Do not give Rebecca Mead's 2007 book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding to anyone who has recently had a wedding*. Trust me, it will only depress them, and who wants to embark on married life glumly conscious of the fact that nearly every element of their wedding celebration was an artificial construct designed by a bunch of clever ad writers?
Ms. Mead, a staff writer at The New Yorker, spent three years researching the American bridal industry, and her book takes an in-depth look at the backgrounds of a number of wedding-related sacred cows. She interviewed dozens of wedding professionals, traveled to China to see how wedding dresses are made, and visited “destination wedding” hot spots ranging from the vulgarity of Las Vegas to the schmaltz of Walt Disney World to the manufactured folksiness of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The result is a depressing-but-informative account of a booming and utterly shameless industry.
Few of the "traditions" Ms. Mead investigates go back further than the mid-20th century: white wedding dresses weren't commonplace until after the end of World War II, diamond engagement rings were popularized by the 1947 ad campaign "A Diamond is Forever", and the first wedding registry was established by Marshall Field & Company in 1924. However, the wedding industry relies upon treating these trappings (as well as an ever-increasing list of new ones) as prerequisites for marriage—and they have gotten extraordinarily good at suggesting that if you don't have a wedding videographer or hand-beaded dress or keepsake "heirloom" ornament for your flower girl, your marriage is doomed.
Don't get me wrong: the desire to have a big wedding is perfectly understandable. At what other time in your life is it going to be socially acceptable to spend fourteen to sixteen months—the length of the average American engagement—and nearly $28,000—the average cost of getting married in 2006—planning a day that is All About You? But while I sympathize** with the desire to spit in the eye of financial reality by spending seven months' salary on a one-day event, it's probably best that prospective brides and grooms decide which elements of their wedding are actually meaningful to them. That's why I'm recommending Rebecca Mead's One Perfect Day as an engagement gift—the newly married may have already lost out, but there's no reason for the fresh blood to suffer.
*Unless it was the wedding of someone you dislike. In that case, hey, Christmas gift!
Creepy real estate doesn't bring in the cash that it used to, apparently.
The house that inspired Jay Anson's "nonfiction" book The Amityville Horror: A True Story has once again been sold, this time for $200,000 less than its asking price of 1.15 million dollars. I'm not sure why anyone would be leaping to buy this horror icon (which, admittedly, now looks a lot like any other upscale Colonial) but maybe the constant gawking and the ghost-hunting geeks lurking in the bushes won't upset the new owners.
Salon.com has a fascinating interview up with science journalist Jennifer Ackerman, author of Ah-Choo! The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold. I had no idea I'd find the subject so interesting, but in addition to providing an easy-to-follow explanation of the science behind colds, Ackerman also points out some previously-unconsidered silver linings: you catch fewer colds as you get older, having a cold allows you time for uninterrupted reading (how Wordcandy-friendly!), and there is some very early, controversial science suggesting that having a cold might actually keep the 'flu at bay.
Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee
I cannot stand TV shows about hoarding. I am fascinated by the subject, but my limited experience with hoarders has convinced me that hoarding is an incredibly persistent condition that is difficult to manage and nearly impossible to “cure”. Watching a team of professional organizers descend on a hoarder's house, toss their possessions, and wave color-coded storage boxes around strikes me as the equivalent of punching a schizophrenic in the face and screaming at them to face reality—both pointless and cruel. So when I heard about Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, the first comprehensive book about compulsive hoarding, I was practically giddy. Finally, an exploration of one of my pet interests that wouldn't make me cringe...
Stuff is the result of nearly two decades of hoarding research done by Dr. Gail Steketee and Dr. Randy Frost. The book consists of a series of case studies of various types of hoarders, including people terrified of wasting anything, “animal hoarders”, and children reacting to trauma by refusing to throw things away. The authors are refreshingly honest about the limitations of their research, but their succinct, well-written book does a superb job of establishing that A) hoarding is a real medical condition, B) we still don't know much about what causes it or how to treat it, and C) while there is a difference between being a garden-variety pack rat and a full-blown hoarder, an increasing number of people seem to be struggling to contain and control their material possessions.
I did some organizing work for a cleaning company when I was in college, and once—and only once!—attempted to help a pair of hoarders. The clients in question (married, middle-aged professionals with no children) had requested help with their kitchen, which they described as “cluttered”. I worked for hours, stacking hundreds of plates, sorting through at least five complete sets of silverware, and arranging countless decorative items. The floorspace was limited to a couple of “goat paths” between the sink, stove, and exit. Nothing was allowed to be thrown away, but by the end of the day I had cleared a couple of square feet on one countertop—enough space to, say, prepare a meal. When I returned a week later, I discovered that the clients had been so upset by the “emptiness” of the kitchen that they had rushed out to the Goodwill and bought nearly a dozen odds and ends to fill the space. I was too frustrated to visit the house again.
The grosser sections in Frost and Steketee's book (see: the revolting true story of Langley and Homer Collyer) were a painful reminder of the afternoon I wasted on that stupid kitchen, but many of the case studies in Stuff were simultaneously less horrific and more insidious. Lots of us know someone—and some of us are that someone—whose home has become a container for things rather than people. If that's you, Frost and Steketee end the book with some helpful resources for hoarders (and their families). The rest of us can just sit back and enjoy the experience of reading about a particular brand of crazy that has, thankfully, passed us by.
NPR has a great interview up with Stephen Fried, author of the recently-published book Appetite for America, a nonfiction account of the life of entrepreneur Fred Harvey. Harvey created the Harvey House chain of lunch rooms, restaurants, souvenir shops, and hotels, all of which served rail passengers heading into the American West. The NPR story includes a link to an excerpt from Fried's book and copies of two Harvey House recipes: "How to Make Coffee" and (much to my delight) something called "BULL FROGS SAUTE PROVENCAL".
Never Tell Our Business to Strangers: A Memoir, by Jennifer Mascia
When Jennifer Mascia was five years old, her father was taken away by the FBI. It was the first sign that there was something different about her family—a difference that Mascia only dimly understood during her childhood, despite years of mysterious name changes, financial instability, and her father's unexplained absences. Despite a few eyebrow-raising moments as a teenager, it wasn't until Mascia was in her early twenties that she finally began looking into her family's past. A Internet search revealed the details of her father's criminal history, and further questioning of her mother lead to a veritable torrent of terrifying family secrets, including adultery, drug dealing, and murder.
Never Tell Our Business to Strangers is both a straight-up memoir of an unconventional childhood and Mascia's attempt to understand how her loving-if-flawed parents justified their unjustifiable actions. The book is successful on the first front but fails on the second—despite recording the nuanced memories of her parents' friends and relatives (and the professional opinions of psychologists), Mascia's father still comes across as monstrous, and her willfully deluded mother doesn't fare much better.
Mascia has spent the past few years working as the nightside news assistant for The New York Times, and her book reflects her journalistic training—i.e., even at its creepiest, it's still quite easy to read. One has to wonder, however, what catharsis Mascia achieved by writing it, apart from what was hopefully a large enough advance to cover decades of therapy. Is this the way she wants her parents to be remembered? What about her half-siblings from her father's first marriage? How do they feel? Is this truly what she wants to be known for? It's tough to imagine what it must have been like to grow up with parents like the people Mascia describes, but it's even tougher to imagine that writing a take-out-every-skeleton-in-the-closet tell-all like Never Tell Our Business to Strangers could be anything but a very mixed blessing.
Christopher Hart's Superheroes and Beyond: How to Draw The Leading and Supporting Characters of Today's Comics promises to provide "the knowledge necessary to create great comic book characters... for beginners as well as more experienced artists". The book covers topics ranging from superheroes and heroines to action poses to light and shadow effects, with stops along the way to discuss specific comic "types" like the Female Reporter (props include microphone and briefcase!), the Mecha Bad Guy (typically a bearded dude, the opposite of the clean-cut superhero), or the super-sexy Evil Warrior Queen (think extra-long, extra-muscular legs... but lady muscles, not, like, gross bodybuilder muscles).
Hart's instructions are clear, detailed, and surprisingly funny—Superheroes and Beyond is full of affectionate little digs at comic book clichés, including characters like the Tabloid Publisher and his tips for drawing female characters ("for women, more, well, more of everything"). Sadly, there is always a difference between theoretical and practical knowledge when it comes to how-to books, so this title might not actually have you churning out professional-quality comic book illustrations at the drop of a hat—but, hey, at least you'll have plenty of fun trying!
Huh. It turns out Lori Gottlieb's Marry Him: The Case for Settling For Mr. Good Enough isn't a joke. It's a real book (due out next week!), not just fodder for AustenBlog's "It worked so well for Charlotte Lucas" joke.
...actually, I would totally read a romance guide if the author wrote the entire thing in Charlotte Lucas's voice. That would be awesome.
Man, I don't understand the English. Apparently, two of England's biggest newspapers (the left-wing Guardian and the right-wing Daily Mail) are all up in arms over Pippa Middleton's plans to publish a book on event planning. Now, I don't really follow the coverage of Britain's royal family, but... isn't this woman an event planner? So why is the idea of her writing a book about event planning—not a tell-all about, say, the Queen's secret predilection for Ugg boots and Starbucks Frappuccinos—so horrifying? I get the claims of nepotism and all, but I totally fail to see what sacred law of Good Taste this woman's book is breaking.
