Plenty of books have characters that come to life, but few literary creations leap off the page like Carter's two-dimensional wigglers. Open his latest pop-up book, and a colorful crawler unravels to tickle your nose. Make your way to the final page, and a bug mask—suitable for trick-or-treaters—hides inside an envelope. "It's a lot of fun building these little things," says Carter, 39, one of pop-updom's leading practitioners. "I make myself laugh all the time."
Mastering the art of paper engineering has turned Carter into the Steven Spielberg of ascending insects. Since 1988's How Many Bugs in a Box?, Carter has crafted 13 bug books with combined sales of more than 2 million copies—not to mention a colorful new line of sturdy vinyl bug stickers and whimsical finger puppets.
So what's with all the bugs? "When I was little I just loved bugs," says Carter, who grew up in Salt Lake City. As a fledgling graphic artist, he started doodling bees and ladybugs. He learned his craft (and met his wife, Noelle, 35, also a graphic artist) at Intervisual Communications, a Los Angeles design firm that specializes in pop-up books.
Today he toils in a 500 square-foot studio above the garage of his Auburn, Calif., home and tests his pop-up pests on daughters Molly, 7, and Emma, 3. But he still hasn't licked his biggest problem—pop-up parts that get ripped up by curious kids. "I watched my own children do it and tried to learn from it," says Carter. "But I also know it's going to happen." No problem: There's plenty of bugs where those popped-up from. (Little Simon, $14.95)
by Hugh Brewster
New regimes may rise and fall in the former Soviet Union, but our fascination with the last days of the Czar is apparently eternal. Anastasia 's Album, a photo scrapbook with drawings and text about the youngest Romanov princess, aims to enchant a new generation of young readers (and their parents) with the romantic details of this tragic story: The charismatic monk Rasputin, who' gained the royal family's confidence by claiming to heal the hemophiliac Crown Prince Alexei; the midnight massacre of the Czar, Czarina and their children by Bolshevik guards in the palace where they were hidden after the revolution dethroned them; the rumors that Anastasia might have survived the bloodbath.
The vintage photographs from the imperial family's albums in the State Archives in Moscow are haunting, mysterious and stunning. Here are the four breathtaking princesses in pearls and gossamer white dresses, or with their lovely heads shaved after a measles outbreak; here, the Czar's family vacation at the beach or on their yacht in the Baltic. The passages from Anastasia's letters are touchingly innocent.
But in its attempt to capture an audience of all ages, Hugh Brewster's simply worded text offers an absurdly facile summary of the 1917 Russian Revolution and an almost comical end run around the grislier aspects of Anastasia's story. Still, publication of the photos and letters offers a new occasion to acquaint our children with the fairy-tale-like historical characters who continue to resonate—and move us—even today. (Hyperion Madison Press, $17.95)
by Jill Ciment
Los Angeles is ablaze with brush-fires the day the Ciments arrive in the mid-'60s, a family itself on the verge of combustion. When the author's remote, angry father ceases functioning, save for obsessive gardening, and her dreamy mother evicts him, the teenage Jill finds herself living in poverty. Distributing flyers to earn a few dollars, she sneaks into cars and gazes in rear-view mirrors from plush seats, "hoping to catch a glimpse of myself against the luxurious fabric of a different destiny."
Moxie and a knack for subterfuge are required for some of her other income-producing ventures, which include composing phony questionnaire responses for the mesmerizingly creepy pollster Lenny and disrobing for photo-taking patrons of the Escapade Modeling Agency. Art school and an affair with a much older art teacher (whom she eventually weds) provide deliverance from her anomie-fueled existence, though she keeps her "heart in check" during rare sightings of her absentee father. Ciment's deadpan humor lends an almost picaresque quality to her experiences. In stark prose, this wrenching tale evokes exhilaration and terror. (Crown, $23)
by Dr. Joycelyn Elders and David Chanoff
Elders, the controversial former Surgeon General, turns to autobiography to set the record straight—to dispel the gossip that surrounded her confirmation hearings and, less than two years later, her dismissal after she allegedly suggested that masturbation be taught in the nation's schools. And what an impressive record it is. This Arkansas sharecropper's daughter (one of eight children) rose—through intelligence, determination and patience—from planting cotton and feeding hogs to the heights of academic medicine as a research fellow in pediatric endocrinology. She went on from there to run her state's health department for six successful years.
Elders and her coauthor, humanities scholar David Chanoff, have found a modest, straightforward tone in which to tell the story of how this brilliant woman overcame prejudice and poverty (a scholarship and menial jobs got her through college; the GI bill paid for medical school after a stint in the Army). She's frank about personal problems (her son's arrest and conviction for selling cocaine, her husband's clinical depression, the murder of a brother, her sister's death in a car wreck) but never self-pitying. Her nerve in the face of political opposition and her commonsense approach to health care may make readers wish that her voice was still audible in the Surgeon General's office and not merely in the pages of this inspiring memoir. (Morrow, $25.95)
by Paul Theroux
It's a striking conceit: The central character in Paul Theroux's latest novel is a novelist named Paul Theroux. And while the fictional Theroux shares the author's various addresses and literary achievements, his marital woes and his studiously dyspeptic personality, the adventures he describes—many of which involve familiar, living people—are purely imaginary.
This is "the story of a life I could have lived," Theroux writes, "had things been different." Thus, the 19 chapters of this imaginary memoir serve as a travelogue of roads not taken.
It's a gripping, often wonderful journey. In pages that take him from a sultry visit to an African leper colony to a chilling encounter with a manipulative London patron named Lady Max, from the agonizing dissolution of his marriage to a hilarious and oddly mystical encounter with the Queen, Theroux's imagined past is alternately comic and tragic, gentle and brutal. Liberated from the facts, he is free to explore deeper truths: the nature of creativity and the paradoxes that can make fantasy more honest than reality. "The man is fiction," Theroux writes of his alter ego. "But the mask is real." (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95)"
by Michael M. Thomas
Page-Turner of the Week
GIVING IT AN INTELLECTUAL TWIST, financial-thriller author Thomas (Hard Money) takes disgruntled-postal-worker syndrome to global proportions with a knowing verve. Because international competition is killing his family-owned earth-moving machinery business, H.A. Baker must sell, hoping a new owner will save the jobs of hundreds of his devoted workers. But, despite his assurances, buyer Jack Mannerman, head of multibillion-dollar GIA, has no such intentions. Within a year of the deal, Mannerman hacks the firm to pieces—and to death. Baker, raised on a diet of honor and fairness, snaps into revenge mode. Using the wiles he's learned as a big-game hunter and Special Forces officer in Vietnam, he hunts his corporate prey with a cunning intelligence. As good at explaining arbitrage as armaments, Thomas delivers a rousing tale, and a dispassionate blueprint of world business on a binge. (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $24)
>HALLOWEEN TREATS Here's a batch of books for young ones:
TRICK OR EEEK! by Katy Hall and Lisa Eisenberg, pictures by R. W. Alley What do you call a skeleton who won't get up? The answer (Lazy Bones) lurks beneath a coffin lid in this brightly illustrated parade of 22 silly riddles. (Harper Festival, $5.95)
MONSTER FACES STICKERS by Bob Censoni Gross yourself out designing ghouls with four pages of reusable warty noses and bloodshot eyeballs in this activity book, one of a consistently clever and smartly priced series. (Dover, $1)
CREEPY COOKIES by Tracy Curtis illustrated by Jean Pidgeon Ten easy recipes allow you to roll out the dough for sweet treats like Cocoa Bat Bites and shape it with any of five creepy cookie cutters. (Readers Digest, $7.99)
I SPY: SPOOKY NIGHT photos by Walter Wick, riddles by Jean Marzollo "I spy a saddle, six rabbits, a rose. A sea horse, a windmill and two dominoes." Hunt for camouflaged objects in and around a creaky old mansion on a misty, moonlit night in the seventh volume of this bewitching series. (Scholastic, $12.95)
THE WITCHES' SCARY HOUSE written and illustrated by Ian Honeybone, John Lupton and Mick Wells Open its oversize covers and watch the witches' digs unfold—10 rooms complete with swinging chandeliers, a trapdoor, a ghost bobbing under a staircase and newt soup bubbling on the fire. It's a howl. (St. Martin's, $19.95)
- Contributors:
- Kristin McMurran,
- Alex Tresniowski,
- Francine Prose,
- Marlene McCampbell,
- Peter Carlin,
- J.D. Reed.
CELINE’S INFERTILITY STRUGGLE: MY PRIVATE HEARTBREAK
Daily injections, painful tests and four failed IVF attempts: The singer, 41, reveal her dreams for a second baby. ‘I’ll try until it works’
