Customer Comments

A funny and revealingly honest book that gives hope (look! this boy overcame his circumstances, fears, etc. to live his life fully!) at the same time it fiercely crushes it (wow, are people really still so racist these days? ugh. And it's god-awful how rampant alcoholism is in the Native population but not at all surprising given the total loss of their lands and culture in return for internment camps and casinos). My pet peeve, as always, is that any book--let alone a NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER BY A WELL-RESPECTED AUTHOR/ARTIST--had four significant typos pop out a me unbidden. Hey, here's an idea: how about the editors, proof-readers, publishers, et al respect the trees that died so we could read their books and respect the expectations of readers by actually producing error-free works? All in favor, say 'Aye!'

Queen, goddess, rock star of chocolate desserts gives us her memoir and best recipes folded into a rich batter of lessons learned and full-color photographs that make you drool first and bake later. If you want to know about Alice Medrich's career, she'll tell you about it here in her own voice. If you want a recipe for the absolutely BEST chocolate cookies on this planet ("Bittersweet Decadence Cookies"), then do yourself the favor of getting this book now. It's a tome of Yum-and-Holy-Wow and, along with her "Cookies and Bars" book, deserves to be front-and-center on every chocoholic baker's altar!

Emily Carr, an early 20th century Canadian painter, was a spit-fire and Susan Vreeland really captures her spirit, spunk, compassion, devotion to her home land & expression of it in paintings, and her persistent self-doubt with a convincing and compelling novel of triumphs and tragedies. Her life as an artist was remarkable, especially since she persevered (mostly) in spite of pervasive sexism and shunning of her native & natural subjects. It's also a sympathetic political and societal perspective of what it was like in British Columbia when the colonizers were wiping out the native peoples as best they could, while she valued and adored (some said idealized) their culture and way of living. It's hard to be "ahead of the times" at any time, apparently.

Mmm. A tall, handsome, maniacal farmer snags a city-slicker lady who, even after reading her memoir, seems like the unlikeliest of candidates for Farmer of the Year. It's heavy on the real dirt of farming, including passages thick with jargon that I found irritating, but very sincere and totally effective in waking up other citified folks from their I-wanna-be-a-farmer fantasies...though it didn't do as much for my desire to find a farmer-lover!

Much like the seasons do for us, the intertwining voices of this book carry us through a year in the life of a family and its widening community in a familiar but dynamic manner. Percival Darling is the man you're glad isn't your neighbor but he could be a male version of me when I'm old if I'm not careful now. Still, you've got to love fictional curmudgeons who love others, right? And reading about my new "hometown" of Cambridge, MA and its still-unknown-to-me environs was a real pleasure. If you like character-driven stories of ordinary people who are more interesting than you would think just passing them on the street, you'll probably like Glass's newest novel.

Against my will, I'm a real stickler for how a poem looks on a page-at least at first sight-but once I let go of my distaste for the ample spacing, I really enjoyed his collection. It's deep and beautiful and there's a lot to ponder in his poems. Like his brother (pardon the comparison), you'll find young male sexuality, working class childhood, and tragedies of drug abuse that might turn you on, make you grateful, and keep you humble.

I hesitate to recommend books that I read during a day spent in airports and in flying metal tubes because of the "captive audience syndrome" but this one really was a page-turner. It's always fun for a francophile to read about someone who lives in France but this went deeper with its historically heart-wrenching subject matter, and based on the character's experience, one that even many French people were unaware of until the mid-1990s. It's a heavy story, not entirely original either, but it is engrossing.

Excellent and informative, this introduction to modern poetry by its most famous female pens is fun to read and a great overview of where to start an exploration of contemporary poets and their work.

This book interested me because of the protag's gift/curse of tasting emotions in food but it is not, I repeat NOT, "Like Water for Chocolate" or any other tale that makes a foodie's heart salivate. It is well-written and compelling beyond reason. Will it creep you out, make you crave cake, and revisit its peculiarity long after you put it down? It did all this for me.

I felt like a kid on Christmas morning when I heard Maira Kalman had a new book out! Drooling over "Principles of Uncertainty" was a personal revelation (what?! no one told me you could make your interesting, witty, beautiful journal into a BOOK!) and her new volume is no less majestic. Remember that history teacher you had who was a little eccentric but loved teaching and always digressed during lectures--only you couldn't tell they were digressions because they were so damned interesting? Meet Maira. She'll be your guide on the coolest (and most wonderfully illustrated) carpet ride through America's past and present ever offered to freedom-loving citizens with short attention spans and no gift for remembering important dates.

A quick paced, slice-of-life tale that makes you root for its characters. Compellingly straight-forward, this is a glimpse of life as an obsessive-compulsive, a teen mom, and as a fetus and infant told in their own voices. Addonizio's first novel isn't sweet and mild (and neither is her poetry, thank god), and it won't change your life, but it will make you keep turning the pages to make sure her characters change theirs.

For anyone interested in the process of poetry and in poets as people, this anthology is a unique opportunity to get inside the heads of many respected contemporary poets. Even more compelling than the discussion of how one of each poet's works-in-progress is being crafted is the way their personalities shine through in the dialogues they had with Pearl London (an unusually ardent devotee of poetry) in her college workshops. It's so engaging that reading it makes your back ache from the stiff classroom chairs and your brain's awe synapses all fire at once. All poetry lovers owe Alexander Neubauer a bow of gratitude for compiling such an amazing and enriching book.

This book found me by chance at the library and I highly recommend it to anyone who values powerful poetry. I started to make a list of my "favorites" and found it included almost the entire collection which is not something I can say about most poetry books that I come across. He has cleverly illuminated Donald Rumsfeld's unique brand of communication by using his quotes (and Pliny the Elder's) to head book sections and some poems, but manages to make the poems speak with their own quiet force. Listening carefully is all that's required! I look forward to getting my hands, eyes, and ears on his second collection.