by Helene Cooper |
REVIEWED BY MICHELLE GREEN
MEMOIR
A diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times, Cooper documents the diversity and dramatic intensity of life in Africa in this affecting memoir about her childhood. Her parents were glamorous, descended from Liberia's first settlers: "We had a house in Spain, multiple houses and farms in Liberia, and our palace at Sugar Beach. We were Congo royalty," she writes. But the author also was fascinated with the variety of Liberian tribal cultures—with their superstitions and prejudices and their distinctive dialects. Her closest companion was Eunice Bull, a young Bassa girl who became her foster sister. The author sets sweet, funny stories about their coming-of-age against the darker canvas of the Coopers' divorce and a 1980 coup d'état during which their mother makes a stunning sacrifice for her daughters. Nearly three decades after fleeing Liberia, Cooper offers an indelible view of her homeland and makes palpable the pain that she felt when she lost it.
by Bridget Asher |
REVIEWED BY CLARISSA CRUZ
NOVEL
After finding out that her 18-years-older, irrepressibly charming husband, Artie, cheated on her with not one, not two, but three women during their four-year marriage, Lucy promptly leaves him. But then Artie becomes gravely ill, and Lucy, still struggling with her emotions, is forced to return and care for him. What follows seems like something out of a movie (and good thing, too, as the tale's already been optioned): Turns out Artie has had many, many "sweethearts"; armed with his exhaustive black book, Lucy invites them to visit her husband's deathbed to gain insight, and perhaps closure. Not quite the most believable scenario, but the improbable relationships Lucy forges with her erstwhile rivals is rendered with humor and heart.
by Anne Enright |
CRITIC'S CHOICE
REVIEWED BY VICK BOUGHTON
STORIES
After the first few stories in this superb collection, you may be tempted to polish off the book in one sitting. Don't. Read each piece slowly to savor this Irish writer's wry insights. In one poignant story a young woman copes with her newly widowed mother's grief; in another, an opera-house custodian learns what to do when granted three wishes—and, more important, what not to do. Enright, whose novel The Gathering won last year's Man Booker Prize, gives her characters emotional and psychological heft. Every last one is memorable.
by Matthew Quick |
REVIEWED BY ALLISON LYNN
NOVEL
Philadelphia Eagles fan and over-the-top optimist Pat Peoples has problems: He's newly released from a neural health hospital, living with his parents, can't grasp that he's been locked away for years (he thinks it's been months), and desperate to reconcile with his wife. Plus, he's being stalked by a lovestruck, and just as dysfunctional, widow. If that all sounds like a downer, this plucky debut novel is anything but. Quick fills the pages with so much absurd wit and true feeling that it's impossible not to cheer for his unlikely hero.
by Michael Greenberg
MEMOIR
Sally Greenberg is just 15 during the summer of '96 when, in the words of her father, Michael, she's "struck mad." She flies into traffic, "rushing oncoming cars"; in a psychiatric ward, she becomes a "feral, glitter-eyed" creature. This memoir of a family crisis captures the grief that transformed their lives that scorching summer, though it falls short in creating a vibrant portrait of Sally before her break. Still, readers come away with a sense of the intractable nature of psychosis and the courage it requires for patients like Sally, whose struggles continue, merely to live.
by Valerie Frankel
REVIEWED BY RENNIE DYBALL
MEMOIR
Thin may be the new happy, but it's also a great big can of worms. In her first memoir, novelist Frankel digs into a lifelong struggle with her body. It began with her fat-phobic mother (who, the author says, criticized her weight from the impressionable age of 11) and affected every area of her existence—sex, marriage and, she fears, her young daughters. Funny and brutally frank ("the smaller my pants, the bigger the number of men that got into them"), she depicts a life defined by the scale—until she embarks on the "Not-Diet": eating what she wants (in moderation), exercising and silencing her inner critic. A satiating account of the long road to self-acceptance.
In Coco Chanel: Three Weeks 1962, photographer Douglas Kirkland shares never-published images of the fashion colossus in and out of her Paris workshop—cutting fabric, schmoozing, gossiping and chain-smoking. She was 79; he was 27. But they bonded: "I wondered if she thought of me as the son she never had," he writes, "or some distant lover from her past."
BBC TV producer John Lloyd and coauthor John Mitchinson combed through "an untold thousand" sources to compile this book of animal fun facts, says Lloyd. A few of his favorites:
THE MASKED BANDIT
Some raccoons weigh in at 50-percent body fat. The fattest was called Bandit, who lived outside Ice Cream World in Pennsylvania feasting on peanut butter and blueberry slush puppies.
SLACK JAW
Turn a shark upside down, and it may well go into a trancelike state, called tonic immobility, for 15 minutes. No one knows what causes it.
NAUGHTY PENGUINS
When her partner's back is turned, a female Adélie penguin trades intimate contact with other males for stones to build her nest with.
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!
