NOVEL
CRITIC'S CHOICE
The year is 1962, and the McCarthys, a Canadian military family stationed at a quiet air force base in Ontario, are a happy brood. Jack and Mimi have a storybook marriage and two perfect children. "Life is beautiful," Jack muses. Uh-oh.
Jack gets involved in a secret Cold War mission that goes awry. Meanwhile, his daughter Madeleine, a precocious 8-year-old whose conscience speaks to her in the voice of Bugs Bunny, doesn't tell anyone she is being abused by a child molester. When another local girl's murder hits close to home, Jack and Madeleine must decide whether to reveal their secrets.
This extraordinary follow-up to MacDonald's debut novel, the million-selling Oprah's Book Club selection Fall on Your Knees, is a both a head-spinning murder mystery and an absorbing exploration of morality, innocence lost and the lengths to which parents and children will go to protect one another. Astonishing in its depth and breadth, it artfully weaves one family's struggles into the fabric of the Cold War.
By Clyde Edgerton
NOVEL
Dishwater is enthralling compared with Carl Turnage. Middle-aged, single and squeaky-voiced, the North Carolina part-time construction overseer has no friends except his Aunt Lil, who has just entered a nursing home. But that sad turn of events does wonders for Carl's social life, giving him a group of pixilated seniors to hang out with, not to mention that nice divorced mom who works in the office. It's almost too much excitement for Carl to handle.
Edgerton gently serves up the shortcomings of his characters—did we mention that Carl is vertically challenged?—with generous dollops of comic sympathy. The ladies at the home yearn for nothing so much as a drive to the mall by themselves, and the scene where their wish comes true is rich with humor, suspense and sadness. Details matter to Edgerton, and he uses them to create a vivid and affecting portrait of the way many of us struggle—and, when possible, take comfort—in the real world.
By Bill O'Reilly
NONFICTION
After I unfavorably reviewed the FOX News Channel star's last book, I turned on the TV to find I was O'Reilly's "Most Ridiculous Item of the Day." The big guy said on The O'Reilly Factor, "Review the book, not me." Then he called me a "pinhead."
Consistency isn't his best feature. In this grab-bag of essays O'Reilly claims he belongs at "Burger King," then whines about not being given "first-class airline travel and a decent publicist" in those rough early years. Separating him from his writing would require sandblasting. The words "I," "me" and "my" appear more than 165 times—in the first 30 pages alone. The lessons of this bilious little book—you can sense him gasping and wheezing to make it to 212 padded, double-spaced pages—morph into tetchy personal stories. (He brags about how he ended a friendship over a parking lot fee.) His insights range from mastery of the obvious—"To have a friend, you have to be a friend"—to lots of his hero-martyr schtick: "No matter what, I will not surrender to the witch-hunters and the demagogues." After he compares the Koran to Mein Kampf he complains, "The next day, a number of Muslim Web sites wrote that I compared the Koran to Mein Kampf, the usual vile propaganda some of these sites spew out."
This review isn't personal, Bill. As you put it, "People like to think that if you disagree with someone's opinion you are attacking them. That is just dumb." Here's a scandal for you: Millionaire Harvard-educated titan of Manhattan media elite bilks ordinary folks out of $24.95.
By Maxine Hong Kingston
MEMOIR/NOVEL
Kingston returned from her father's funeral in 1991 to discover that fires ravaging Northern California had destroyed both her cottage and her novel-in-progress, The Fourth Book of Peace. Starting over, she rewrote part of the novel, which she includes here—it's a rambling, didactic tale about draft dodger Wittman Ah Sing in Hawaii during the Vietnam War—and added three nonfiction sections telling how she developed and then turned her peace theories into action. Like Kingston's The Woman Warrior, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976, Peace defies categorization. Fueled by its author's curiosity about three volumes of Chinese philosophy, The Books of Peace, this daunting 400-page work blends myth, fact and memory with varying degrees of success. Now she's criticizing the U.S. war in Iraq; now she's leading a writing workshop in which she explores the recollections of Vietnam vets. It takes some time for it all to cohere, but when it does, Peace becomes a passionate plea that draws on U.S. history and Buddhist wisdom to argue for an all-inclusive and peaceful world where individuals, histories and civilizations are "crammed and juxtaposed and superimposed" on each other.
Jamie Kennedy
Jamie Kennedy has found fame as the star of The WB's JKX: The Jamie Kennedy Experiment. But as the actor, 33, tells in Wannabe: A Hollywood Experiment, the road to success was long—and paved with odd jobs.
ON HIS PRE-FAME DARK DAYS: "My [L.A. apartment] had cockroaches even though I didn't have any food. And I didn't have an agent or a career or any ideas how to get [either one]."
ON AN EARLY BRUSH WITH CELEBRITY: "In the '80s I worked at Red Lobster as a busboy, then as a host. Arsenio Hall used to come in."
ON ENTERING HOLLYWOOD'S INNER SANCTUMS: "I was working at this maid service, and I was Janeane Garofalo's maid. She was cool but a little messy."
NO GETTING AHEAD IN MOTION PICTURES: "I met a casting director for a really low-budget movie. He had me meet him at a bus stop and help him carry his groceries home. I remember thinking, 'Would Robert Duvall have to do this?'"
ON HIS BIG BREAK: "After [trying for] about six years, I got a personal-injury commercial. I was a guy in a car that got hit and had an injured neck."
ON HIS LITERARY ROLE MODELS: "Charles Grodin's It Would Be So Nice If You Weren't Here, Joan Rivers's Enter Talking and Dean Martin's bio Dino. They helped me go, 'Okay, all these people had no idea how they were going to make it.'"
ON THE MESSAGE OF HIS BOOK: "It's all about hanging in there. I did stand-up and bombed. I went to auditions and never got anything. You might say I bombed my way to the top."
- Contributors:
- Michelle Vellucci,
- Ron Givens,
- Kyle Smith,
- V.R. Peterson.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
