The Buffalo News - Books and Poetry http://www.buffalonews.com Latest stories from The Buffalo News en-us Thu, 20 Jun 2013 02:21:40 -0400 Thu, 20 Jun 2013 02:21:40 -0400 <![CDATA[ Buffalo Niagara International Poetry Slam set for Saturday ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130606/GUSTO/130609453/1058
When Gault started the festival in 2010, he hoped to model it after two poetry slams that he admired: Def Poetry Jam, the popular HBO series that blends hip-hop and spoken-word performances, and the Toronto International Poetry Slam, which has drawn fans from Canada, Western New York and other parts of America for more than a decade.

The BNIPS got off to a decidedly more modest start, only drawing attendees from Buffalo in its first year. Shortly before the second slam was scheduled, Gault suffered two strokes, putting the slam on hiatus for 2011 and leaving its future uncertain.

But by 2012, Gault recovered, and the BNIPS returned to find its footing again. This year, it stands as the largest poetry slam in Western New York – and Gault almost feels satisfied.

“We wanted to make Buffalo a mecca for poets and performers,” he said. “And that’s what’s happening this year.”

The BNIPS, which will be held at 8 p.m. Saturday in the Tralf Music Hall (622 Main St.), captures the hip-hop flavor of Def Poetry Jam, and comes closer to reaching the broad audience of the Toronto slam. Before this year’s competing poets get to show their stuff, the evening will start with sets by two DJs and a group of dancers who will perform “krumping,” a high-energy street dance.

The early performances are meant to give the event “more of a party and festive atmosphere,” Gault said. “It gets the crowd all warmed up before the poets even come on.”

When the dancing ends and the slam begins, it will feature the widest range of poets that the BNIPS has hosted. Slam poets from New York City, Toronto, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, Philadelphia and Detroit will sling words with local poets including Marquis “10,000” Burton, Danielle Johnson, Jacon Herring, Ronald “Sir Rock Bottom 137” Jackson and Tyesheka “Spoken” Long.

Each poet gets three minutes and 10 seconds to perform, with $1,000 in cash prizes at stake.

Toronto spoken-word artist Dwayne Morgan will be the evening’s “sacrificial poet” – that is, a poet who calibrates the judges but doesn’t perform.

Gault will once again host the slam with his wife, Erika D. Gault, who won last year’s Toronto International Poetry Slam. (“She smashed the competition,” Gault gleefully noted.)

In preparation of the slam’s growing stature, Gault for the first time started selling tickets beyond Buffalo, opening up the event to more fans across New York State.

The competition became so crowded that he had to close registration for new performers. Even so, Gault said he’ll only “take it up another notch” next year, when he plans to add a youth program to the competition.

Young poets in Buffalo and beyond: Start practicing now.

preview

What: Buffalo Niagara International Poetry Slam

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Tralf Music Hall, 622 Main St.

Tickets: $20 general, $15 students advance; $25 door.

Info: Doris Records (286 E. Ferry St.), Record Theatre locations and Ticketmaster

email: jsilverstein@buffnews.com ]]> Thu, 6 Jun 2013 08:41:20 -0400 By Jason Silverstein

News Staff Reporter

]]> <![CDATA[ What do you know about Buffalo’s most famous politician? ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130616/CITYANDREGION/130619518/1058
A new book, “The Forgotten Conservative: Rediscovering Grover Cleveland,” by John M. Pafford, lays out Cleveland’s life and makes the case that the two-term president – in nonconsecutive periods, as 22nd and 24th of our chief executives – was both a deeply Christian man and a more conservative president than he is given credit for.

After all, as Pafford points out, Cleveland vetoed more legislation in his terms than all of the men who held the office before him – combined.

That follows on the heels of a recent book by Matthew Algeo that related the story of the top-secret surgery that Cleveland had aboard a ship in 1893 to remove a cancerous growth from his mouth. Algeo came to Buffalo in 2011 to speak about his book.

Both books shine a little more light on the talented and multifaceted man who came to Buffalo early in his life, and spent a good portion of his early political career in local office.

Buffalo has connections to a few presidents – William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt and Millard Fillmore among them – but Grover Cleveland’s striking life story makes him a unique reflection of Buffalo in some key ways.

He lived a portion of his life here, starting with his arrival in the city as a young man.

He built a law career here, and began his political activity in Erie County and the City of Buffalo.

Then there’s the not unimportant fact that he fell in love with – then married, and had five children with – a Buffalo woman who still wins praise as one of the best hostesses ever to occupy the Executive Mansion.

Cleveland is all this – and a colorful personality, too.

“Cleveland’s capacity for work was impressive,” writes Pafford, at one point in the new book. “After a full day in the office, he could work through the night, take a bath, drink some coffee, and be back in the office at eight o’clock the next morning.”

At the same time, Pafford notes, Cleveland “could play as hard as he worked” – and spent a good deal of time in the city’s raucous taverns and beer halls.

So if Grover Cleveland is having a bit of a heyday?

Good for him.

We can take part in it, a little, by upping our knowledge of the former mayor of Buffalo – who went on to even bigger things.

Here are 15 Grover Cleveland-themed quiz questions, with answers drawn from the recent Cleveland books:

1. What was Cleveland’s full name?

a. Grover William Cleveland

b. Stephen Grover Cleveland

c. Grover Washington Cleveland

d. Samuel Grover Cleveland

2. Where was Cleveland born?

a. Buffalo

b. Washington, D.C.

c. New Jersey

d. Ohio

3. Cleveland first arrived in Buffalo in the 1850s to visit an:

a. uncle

b. eligible young woman who became his wife

c. associate from school

d. old friend

4. When Cleveland ran for Erie County district attorney in 1865 – a race he lost – he did so as a:

a. Republican

b. Know-Nothing

c. Whig

d. Democrat

5. Cleveland would go on to marry a local woman who was the daughter of one of his early:

a. drinking buddies

b. political enemies

c. law partners

d. pastors

6. Cleveland took office as mayor of Buffalo in:

a. 1878

b. 1882

c. 1884

d. 1900

7. Buffalonian Frances Folsom, who in 1886 became the bride of Grover Cleveland at age 21 in a small White House ceremony, changed her first name as a young woman from her original given name, which was:

a. Frank

b. Philippa

c. Consuela

d. Bonita

8. The lapse of time between Cleveland’s assuming the mayor’s office in Buffalo and his taking on the position of New York’s governor was:

a. Six months

b. Twelve years

c. Six years

d. One year

9. While in office in the nation’s capital as president, Cleveland and his wife, Frances, spent their down time living at a home on 23 acres of land in outlying Washington called by both a formal name and a casual one, as:

a. Maple Hill, or “the Lair”

b. Rosecliff, or “Camp David”

c. Oak View, or “Red Top” (for the red roofs of the place)

d. Summersdale, or “The Retreat”

10. Cleveland died at age:

a. 71

b. 100

c. 60

d. 88

11. In his first inaugural address, Cleveland vowed to do all of the following as president except:

a. Protect the Indians

b. Hold the country to a gold standard for currency

c. End polygamy in the country

d. Expand railroads to all states in the Union

12. According to Algeo, the tumor-plagued Cleveland disappeared from public view in 1893 for a secret surgery-at-sea on a boat in Long Island Sound that kept him away from office for:

a. Three weeks

b. Five days

c. Six months

d. Twelve hours

13. In religion, Cleveland was a:

a. Roman Catholic

b. Quaker

c. Presbyterian

d. Mormon

14. Cleveland’s two terms as president were interrupted by the four years in office of:

a. Benjamin Harrison

b. Chester Arthur

c. William McKinley

d. James Garfield

15. First lady Frances Cleveland, 27 years younger than her husband, became the first presidential widow to:

a. Relocate overseas

b. Hold political office in her own right

c. Switch party affiliation after her husband’s death

d. Remarry



email: cvogel@buffnews.com

Answers:

1.) b., 2.) c.; 3.) a.; 4.) d.; 5.) c.; 6.) b.; 7.) a.; 8.) d.; 9.) c.; 10.) a.; 11.) d.; 12.) b.; 13.) c.; 14.) a.; 15.) d. ]]> Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:42:02 -0400 Charity Vogel
]]> <![CDATA[ Poetry and Literature Calendar (June 16-22) ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130615/LIFE/130619524/1058
Tuesday, 7 p.m.: Circleformance Series reading featuring poets Jennifer Campbell and Lisa Wiley Maslow. Meridian West Gallery, 1209 Hertel Ave. $5.

Wednesday, 7:30 P.M.: The Screening Room Series presents a PRIDE Poetry Event to celebrate PRIDE month, featuring readings by Gary Andrews, Marek Phillip Parker and Amy Upham. Additional reading slots available. Northtown Plaza Business Center, 3131 Sheridan Drive, Amherst. $2.

Saturday, 5 p.m.: Reading and book signing by Buffalo native Ron Irwin, author of “Flat Water Tuesday,” a new novel about competitive rowing published by the Macmillan imprint Thomas Dunne Books. Irwin, who learned to row at the West Side Rowing Club, now lives in South Africa. Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main St. ]]> Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:24:38 -0400 <![CDATA[ Books in Briefs: The Apprentices, The Carrion Birds ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130615/LIFE/130619379/1058
The Apprentices by Maile Meloy; illustrations by Ian Schoenherr; G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 432 pages ($16.99). Ages 10 and up.

...

Meloy performed a kind of alchemy in “The Apothecary,” her wondrous 2011 novel, set in 1952, of an apothecary, his son Benjamin and Benjamin’s friend Jane, using a rare old book The Pharmacopoeia - with its secrets of plant elixirs and ways to alter matter and transform the body - to stop a nuclear test. The same winning formula - a thrilling adventure set against a backdrop of the Cold War and the aftermath of World War II - works its magic in this marvelous sequel, set two years later. Jane had her memory of events chemically erased for her own safety and has only a diary to go by. She is at a pricey private school working in the school’s chemistry lab on a desalinization experiment begun by her Chinese friend Jin Lo when she is framed by a classmate, the daughter of wealthy Mr. Magnusson, and expelled for cheating. Mr. Magnusson has plans for Janie as she quickly finds out, terrible plans that will eventually draw the characters of the first book together on a small island in the Pacific. Along with beautiful pacing and an elaborate plot blending realism and fantasy, the author offers the emotional resonance of complicated parent-child loyalties and the coming-of-age of adolescence, never condescending to her young readers. This book may be her readers’ first acquaintance with the story of someone like Jin Lo, who hid at age 8 and saw her family and a kindly neighbor murdered before her eyes by the invading Japanese in World War II. Among the vivid detailed settings of Meloy’s book are a sweltering uranium mine and a remote island where suspicious islanders are convinced they will be delivered cargo by any new arrival and name him John Frum.

– Jean Westmoore

SUSPENSE

The Carrion Birds by Urban Waite; William Morrow, 288 pages ($25.99)

...

A criminal who vows to go straight after that one last job is a tried and true idea, but Urban Waite makes the idea seem fresh as he adds the disintegrating of a family to his plot.

Akin to the brutal yet solid storytelling of the movie “The Wild Bunch” and Jim Thompson’s “The Getaway,” Waite delves into Western noir as he looks at destructive moral dilemmas.

More than 12 years ago, Ray Lamar left his home of Coronado, N.M., after his wife was killed and his toddler son left brain damaged in a car crash. Her death was retaliation against Ray by a drug cartel. All these years, Ray hasn’t seen his son, whom he left in the care of his aged father, nor his cousin, Tom, with whom he was raised like twins. In a misguided attempt to help Ray, Tom went after a suspected drug dealer; an incident that eventually cost Tom his job as the local sheriff and has “forever defined his life.”

Ray plans to do one last job for a crime boss so he can return home. But Ray has barely begun before everything goes horribly wrong.Set in a dying town where dried up oil wells and abandoned housing developments dot the landscape, “The Carrion Birds” moves at a brisk pace, with an unflinching brutality.

– By Oline H. Cogdill, Sun Sentinel ]]> Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:24:46 -0400 <![CDATA[ Hosseini’s ‘Mountains Echoed’ a sprawling, multigenerational tale ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130615/LIFE/130619520/1058
Hosseini says that such a love isn’t perfect. The result is that family members also “wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for each other.”

This new book is a lesser novel than his earlier ones, despite its broader intent. The reason is that, even for a virtuoso artist, it is hard to maintain focus and suspense with relatives across countries and years that glide in and out of this multitudinous story.

By the way, I can only guess what the title means. There is no direct reference to it in the book. The mountains echoing seem to be an evocation of remembrance – a collation of the important things that individuals in a distant land forget as they grow older and less attentive.

The filial stories in this volume begin in 1952. A young girl, Pari, and her brother Abdullah travel with their father, Baba Ayub, by foot and cart from a small village in the hinterlands, Shadbagh, to Kabul. The children’s father is desperate for work after their beloved mother has died in childbirth.

They are encouraged to come to Kabul by their Uncle Nabi, who works for a wealthy family there as a cook and a chauffeur. With permission, Nabi drives in his employer’s car back to Shadbagh to see family in the home village once a month.

Out of this sequence of events and worse – the selling of Pari by her father to Nabi’s employer, Suleiman Wahdati, and his wife, Nila - develops a false identity for Pari that, in the end and against great odds, is revealed. It sustains the novel’s broad scope but at a cost of the reader’s endurance.

When Pari is 6, she moves with the woman she believes to be her mother to Paris. The woman, the poet Nila Wahdati, withholds details of their life together in Kabul until after her death. Pari does not learn of her earlier existence until a reporter, Etienne Boustouler, writes a story about Wahdati for a literary magazine.

By this time Pari has carried on with Julien, Wahdati’s lover, and is studying mathematics at the Sorbonne. Little wonder that Pari’s foster Mamam should insult her by saying, “I don’t see me in you. I don’t know who you are.” Mamam is on the skids with alcohol abuse and commits suicide in 1974.

Time passes. Pari takes a doctoral degree, marries her soul’s delight, a fine young man named Eric Lacombe, and they have three children, Isabelle, Alan and Thierry. Then tragedy strikes. Eric dies unexpectedly at 48. Pari develops degenerative arthritis.

More than this, Pari receives a mysterious phone call from Kabul from Markos Vavaris, a Greek surgeon who had come to Afghanistan years earlier to operate on children who suffered facial injuries. Vavaris has lived in the house Pari grew up in before she left for Paris. He informs Pari of a letter written by Uncle Nabi that divulges Pari’s true identity, which she begins to inchoately remember. Her recollection is sharpest concerning her brother, Abdullah, who protected her as a little girl. They were very close.

The cornucopia of stories that overflow this new novel’s pages may prompt some readers to say, “Too much.” But for the huge audience that awaited its publication, it may not nearly be enough. Hosseini’s earlier books have already sold more than 10 million copies.

Why such a big following? Hosseini writes a clear, vigorous prose. Characters grow and plots develop with the variability of life, chapter to chapter. This may seem obvious, but many novels lack the spine of humanity and contention to hold them together. Here, episodes are brief but powerful, adaptable to the “pick up, put down” pace of readers’ lives.

A brief reprise of Hosseini’s earlier books shows the scope of his enterprise. A decade ago, when I reviewed Hosseini’s remarkable first novel of prerevolutionary Afghanistan, I wrote that “ ‘The Kite Runner’ is a story of friendship, growing up, moral regret and learning that there is a way to be good again. The frame of the story is the rhythm of life.”

Four years ago, that rhythm of life in his second novel, “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” was more asymmetric and heart-stopping than the first. It was the story of Mariam and Laila. The two of them lived – if one can call it that – through Afghan history from the 1970s to the present. Mariam was more than a decade older than Laila and there developed a mother-daughter closeness in what is at first a hostile relationship.

In these first two novels, Hosseini described the collapse of the Communist revolution, the depredation of Soviet occupation, civil war pitting tribe against tribe, the rise of the simple-minded and vicious Taliban, American intervention and attempted reconstruction by world powers. The author relived these years in miniature through Mariam and Laila’s eyes, showing how external events far beyond their understanding framed their lives. It was not a pretty picture.

In “And The Mountains Echoed,” Hosseini has lost a few steps to his writerly stride, but he does what all great artists do: He takes individual stories and, through the alchemy of insight, compassion and expression, universalizes them, thereby turning them into art.

...

A second book featuring Afghanistan has had the misfortune to be overshadowed by “And The Mountains Echoed.” “The Honey Thief” is an agreeable piece of artistry that attempts to put Afghanistan’s fable and fighting in historical context. These lyrical fables, set over the past 200 years in Afghanistan, are described by Afghani writer Najaf Mazari to Australian writer Robert Hillman.

The stories feature a poor people, the Hazara, who live in the hills between Kabul and Kandahar. As the authors put it, they “tenderly convey what it is like to grow up in a land of bloodshed and brotherhood, of miracles and catastrophes.”

One example may illustrate the stories’ value. “The Honey Thief,” the second piece in the collection, features two characters, Ahmad Hussein, a perwerrish dahenda, a beekeeper, a maker of honey. “This is a craft honoured amongst the Hazara since honey is the prince of foods and the process by which it is made is one of the marvels of the world. … The bees work for Ahmad Hussein as if he were their king.”

For his new apprentice, Ahmad chose Abbas, the grandson of an old friend who died, Esmail Behishti, as a matter of respect. Ahmad takes a great deal of time showing Abbas the proper place in certain fields where the bees’ special boxes might be placed. The reader is right to ask: Why all the care and rigor with this young boy by the beekeeper?

The answer is that Ahmad himself years earlier stole honey from the bees, and Abbas’ grandfather caught him. Because the bees were not angered with Ahmad’s theft, Esmail realized that Ahmad brought something special to his new craft. Now it is Ahmad’s turn to return the favor to Abbas.

Honey and more is the flavor of the stories: “… making a small difference here and there to the sympathy for people who are struggling through life.” As the authors relate, “Literature cannot change people’s hearts completely. Just a little. A little is OK.” “The Honey Keeper” is a sweet OK.



Michael D. Langan served as a senior expert with the United Nations, dealing with al Qaida and Taliban issues. ]]> Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:25:16 -0400 By Michael D. Langan

NEWS BOOK REVIEW

]]> <![CDATA[ Walls’ ‘Silver Star’ is another tale of hardscrabble pluck ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130615/LIFE/130619521/1058
By Jeannette Walls

Scribner

269 pages, $26



By Karen Brady

News Book Reviewer

There is nothing subtle about Jeannette Walls’ latest novel, an obvious and often heavy-handed offering called “The Silver Star.”

But – like Walls’ memoir, “The Glass Castle,” and her first novel, “Half-Broke Horses” – “The Silver Star” has the selfsame hardscrabble pluck that landed those earlier books on America’s best-seller lists for a very long time.

Plus, this time ’round, Walls does not confine herself to her own grim story or that of her mustang-breaking grandmother, Lily. This time, Walls gives us the completely fictional Bean, a 12-year-old akin to Frankie in Carson McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding” or Scout in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the latter a book Bean makes sure to tell us she has read:

“The best part, I thought, wasn’t the stuff about race but the way Scout and the two boys snooped around the big haunted house where the scary recluse lived. That really reminded me of being a kid.”

Neither Bean nor her older sister Liz has much chance of “being a kid,” not in the Peyton Place-like circumstances that comprise their lives. In fact, before “The Silver Star” ends, they will deal with abandonment, bullying, sexual harassment and abuse not to mention having to fend for themselves, at times worrying where they will next eat and sleep and how to pay for such privilege.

We meet them in Lost Lake, Calif., where their mother, Charlotte Holladay – a sometime singer, songwriter, actress – leaves them one time too many times to pursue her dreams, and the girls, afraid of being separated by child protective services, set off, alone and by bus, for the Byler, Va., farm of Charlotte’s brother, a loner known as Uncle Tinsley.

“Mom always said her big break was right around the corner,” Bean explains their predicament. “Mom always talked about how the secret to the creative process was finding the magic. That, she said, was what you needed to do in life as well … ‘Find the magic … And if you can’t find the magic … then make the magic.’ ” And Bean and Liz do.

The year is 1970. Nixon is president. The Vietnam War is still on. Feminism’s second wave is holding strong, and forced integration is about to take place at Bean and Liz’s new school, Byler High. Even Charlotte’s childhood home has changed since the days when Charlotte’s family owned the local cotton mill – and Charlotte had yet to be known as “Charlotte the Harlot.” A woman who gives Charlotte’s girls a ride from the Byler bus station to the Holladay estate tells them:

“… twenty years ago there was always something going on there – oyster roasts, Christmas parties, cotillions, moonlight horseback rides, Civil War costume balls. In those days everyone was hankering for an invitation there.

All us girls would have given our left arm to be Charlotte Holladay. She had everything.”

Now, Charlotte’s girls discover, the family farmstead (known as Mayfield) is in a state of disrepair: “The paint was peeling, the dark green roof had brown rust stains, and brambly vines crawled up the walls … We climbed the wide steps to the porch, and a blackbird flew out of a broken window.”

Walls does well with description and dialogue, and she has done her homework here on the era. Bean, in addition, is a worthy follower of Frankie/Scout – ever honest and optimistic and, best of all, brave. Witty too, and wonderfully unaware of it.

“Mom was still pretty for a mom,” she observes early on. “Any lawyer who couldn’t afford a secretary to keep his office neat must be honest,” she tells us later.

Uncle Tinsley, alarmed at first by the sudden appearance of his nieces, rises (reluctantly) to the occasion. Charlotte herself comes back to Byler briefly, presaging some of what is to come with this exchange in Bean’s presence:

“ ‘Being back here is all too dark and strange,’ Mom said. ‘I feel the old chill. Mother was always so cold and distant. She never truly loved me.

All she cared about were appearances and being proper. And Father loved me but loved me for the wrong reasons. It was very inappropriate.’

‘Charlotte, that’s nonsense,’ Uncle Tinsley said. ‘This was always a warm warm house. You were Daddy’s little girl – at least until your divorce – and you loved it. Nothing inappropriate ever happened under this roof.’ ”

“That’s what we had to pretend. We had to pretend it was perfect. We were all experts at pretending.’ ”

Yes, Walls tends to go all Hallmark movie here (Anne Heche would be just right in the role of Charlotte) but she is dead-on when “The Silver Star” grows a great deal more serious. Bean and Liz are victims of family and circumstance throughout the novel but, when one of them is personally violated, all of the other humiliations and issues fall aside.

Bean, who has discovered her late father’s identity and become close to his kin, consults the Silver Star he earned in the military: “I wondered what advice my dad would give me if he were around … I knew the one thing Charlie Wyatt would never do. He would never pretend nothing happened.”

Little is as easy as it often seems here, Walls presenting everything so simply – in black and white, with no gray. The plot’s prime offender is Mr. Maddox, the current mill foreman, a big bully of a man with both a mean streak and a temper.

An argument he has with Bean about a newfangled product – Pringles – is itself worth the price of “The Silver Star.” After Mr. Maddox tells Bean, “They’re just out, and they’re better then Cheetos,” and Bean tries one and says, “This tastes funny,” Mr. Maddox goes on a tirade calling Pringles “far superior in every way” and “the wave of the future.” What’s more, he declares, “you don’t get that orange crap on your fingers.”

Walls’ way with levity in the midst of gravity is a winner here – as is Bean. Liz is but a shadow in comparison – a girl who loves Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” and speaks in a sort of Jabberwocky whenever (as is often) her world becomes tense.

Charlotte, their errant, New-Agey mother, is splendidly irresponsible – and Charlie Wyatt’s family includes the memorable Uncle Clarence, a Southerner still skeptical about school integration: “It’s the doing of those damned Harvards … They started this war and told our boys to fight it, then they changed their minds about the war and went around spitting on our boys for serving their country. And now the Harvards want to come down here and tell us how to run our schools …”

Uncle Clarence is married to the magnanimous Aunt Al who famously says, “Wondering why you survived doesn’t help you survive.”

This is a sometimes maddeningly unambiguous book – and one wonders why it isn’t being marketed in the young adult rather than the adult category. But wondering about such things would hardly suit Bean, the girl who faces each of life’s vicissitudes fearlessly, then gets on with it, always remembering her mother’s words, “Don’t be afraid of your dark places. If you can shine a light on them, you’ll find treasure there.”



Karen Brady is a retired Buffalo News columnist. ]]> Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:25:44 -0400 <![CDATA[ ‘Guns at Last Light’ is both epic and personal ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130615/LIFE/130619522/1058
By Rick Atkinson

Henry Holt

877 pages, $40



By Stephen T. Watson

News Book reviewer

On June 6, 1944, a massive armada crossed the English Channel to begin the long-awaited Allied attempt to win back Western Europe from its German conquerors.

Eleven months later, on May 7, 1945, a group of German generals representing what remained of the Third Reich surrendered unconditionally to an 11-man Allied military delegation in Reims, France, concluding six years of war in Europe.

Schoolbook history leaves the impression that the fight against the Germans ended on D-Day, skipping over the months that followed with a brief stop to congratulate the stalwart U.S. Army division that held fast at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.

In reality, the last 11 months in World War II’s European theater were marked by bitter combat, divisions over strategy and episodes of bravery and villainy.

Rick Atkinson, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, captures all of this in “The Guns at Last Light,” the exhaustively researched, highly readable final book in his Liberation Trilogy. The first volume, “An Army at Dawn,” examined the uneven debut of the American armed forces in Africa and won Aktinson a Pulitzer Prize for history. The second, “The Day of Battle,” detailed the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy.

“The Guns at Last Light” treads more familiar ground. Atkinson’s final work picks up in spring 1944, as American and British military planners wrap up preparations for Operation Overlord – an ambitious amphibious landing in France.

He takes us through the deadly assaults on beaches codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, the breakout into France, the liberation of Paris, Brussels and the other subjugated cities of Europe and the final, relentless attack on Germany itself. At least 165,000 Americans died between D-Day and V-E Day, along with tens of thousands of British, Canadian, French and Polish soldiers.

Atkinson spent years studying official military histories, materials collected in national archives, the diaries kept by soldiers and the letters they sent home, and he personally visited many of the battlefields.

“The Guns at Last Light” doesn’t focus on any one combatant, or company of soldiers.

But Atkinson does provide telling thumbnail profiles of the main American, British and German generals, such as Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander and future president who read “cowboy pulp novels” to take his mind off the war, and Bernard Montogmery, the “wiry, elfin” British field marshal who clashed frequently with Americans over credit and strategy.

Atkinson takes us to the top-secret planning meetings and to the moments when the generals shared their true feelings, as when Eisenhower, shortly before Overlord, confessed to his driver, Kay Summersby, “I hope to God I know what I’m doing.”

The grunts and Tommies, their German adversaries and the civilians caught in the war’s grip also have a voice.

Some found sardonic humor in war, as with the nickname given to the Purple Heart, which was awarded to U.S. personnel wounded in combat: “the German marksmanship medal.”

Many quotes are grimmer.

One soldier, fighting in the Hürtgen forest along the German-Belgian border, recalled, “The days were so terrible that I would pray for darkness, and the nights were so bad that I would pray for daylight.”

Soldiers, sailors, air crews and civilians are gunned down, blown to pieces, starved, frozen, gassed and drowned.

If ever the American or British soldiers forget why they were fighting this war, they learn when they arrive at the concentration camps, where 6 million Jews, and others considered undesirable by the Nazi regime, were killed during the war.

“If all the heavens were paper and all the water in the world were ink and all the trees turned into pens, you could not even then record the sufferings and horrors,” a rabbi said.

Atkinson is good at explaining the ultimate reasons why the Allies defeated the Germans. He cites their coordinated collaboration but primarily credits the might of American industry.

“The enemy was crushed by logistical brilliance, firepower, mobility, mechanical aptitude, and an economic juggernaut that produced much, much more of nearly everything than Germany could,” he writes.

He highlights episodes that show the Allies in a less favorable light, too, such as the occasional killings of Germans attempting to surrender, the continued, costly use of airborne forces for little strategic gain and the missed warning signs that allowed the Germans to – briefly – turn back the tide during the Battle of the Bulge.

Atkinson also reveals the political side of war strategy, taking the reader to the Allied council at Yalta, where promises to allow all liberated countries to control their destinies were swiftly broken by the Soviets.

Atkinson doesn’t condemn a dying FDR for giving away Eastern Europe to the Communists. It was not a “disgraceful capitulation,” he writes, but “an intricate nexus of compromises by East and West.”

Atkinson, who spent 14 years researching his trilogy, also seeks to place the war in its historical context. The end of World War II saw the dimming of the British Empire, and the rise of the Soviet Union, the United States and the Cold War.

Just over 16 million Americans served in uniform in the war, and only one million are expected to still be alive at the end of next year.

Seven decades later, the story of their service remains compelling, and that’s why so many find it worthy of retelling.

An unnamed lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division, writing a letter to his sister, perhaps best summed up their experiences: “I’ve learned what it means to be alive, to breathe and to feel. I have seen men do such things, both good and bad, that surely the recording angel in heaven must rejoice and despair of them.”



Stephen T. Watson is a News business reporter. ]]> Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:25:29 -0400 Stephen T. Watson
]]> <![CDATA[ Poem of the Week by Jennifer Campbell ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130615/LIFE/130619523/1058
By Jennifer Campbell



And nothing, not even that girl you love

will follow you into that even darkening: old age.

It’s an unreachable, shadowy cupboard that girl

you love, in her flip-flops and youthful distraction,

cannot begin to explore. And she doesn’t even try,

just a feeble grasp at a handle, and then your love –

your affair – doesn’t seem glamorous anymore. Even

the cabinets are bare; no riches, mystery, and nothing

you tell her will make you appear younger, stocked with life.



And nothing, no shiny car or stock portfolio or

even devotion, will keep that girl you love pressed

to your frail side as you become more insubstantial,

a stale cracker or bottle of tonic that’s gone flat.

Even your wife, the one you are supposed to love, knows that.



JENNIFER CAMPBELL will join poet Lisa Wiley Maslow in the next Circleformance Series reading at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Meridian West Gallery, 1209 Hertel Ave. She will also be the featured reader at the next Empire State College Series reading at 7:30 p.m. June 25 at the college’s Appletree campus, 2875 Union Road, Cheektowaga. She is a professor of English at Erie Community College-North and a co-editor of Earth’s Daughters magazine. This is the title poem of her second book of poems published in March by Saddle Road Press. A sonnenizio is a variant form of the sonnet, beginning with a line from a poem by another poet. ]]> Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:24:32 -0400 <![CDATA[ Editor’s choice: Lynda Obst loses sleep over ‘the new abnormal’ ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130615/LIFE/130619525/1058
If you understand that as the purview you’re spending almost 300 pages with here, you’ll find producer Obst’s “Sleepless in Hollywood” nothing if not informative and instructional about present-day Hollywood and perhaps even revelatory.

Her subtitle is “Tales From the New Abnormal.” She explains, “Hollywood is never actually normal. … Famous hairdressers, notable Israeli gunrunners, Russian gangsters, mothers who score on their daughters’ successfully leaked sex-taped escapades, and Harvard grads who chase Hip-Hop stars and Laker Girls make a unique kind of melting pot … It’s an equal opportunity exploiter of talent.”

Where “lying is a continual job skill,” a producer can’t expect to even know who’s funding her films. Obst’s film “How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days” was, she discovered, financed not by Paramount but by “a lovely guy named Winnie who ran a German tax shelter. I found this out on the set when Winnie introduced himself to me and told me that Paramount had sold off their domestic and international box office rights to him to fund the relatively low cost of the movie ($40 million.)”

So the Old Abnormal became the New Abnormal. And a former New York Times copy editor like Obst will certainly be adequate to the tale – and even inspired at times. But with a book by the producer of “Adventures in Babysitting, and “Hope Floats” (as well as Ephron’s films, “Contact,” “The Siege” and the TV show “Hot in Cleveland”), you’ll quickly understand that a smart eyewitness isn’t quite the same thing as an entirely sympathetic protagonist. It’s nice to know, I must say, that she envisions, at the end, “new alternatives to watch” and “fresh ideas” from all this “wild and woolly narrowcasting.”

I’m not sure how convincing that willl be for anyone, though.

– Jeff Simon ]]> Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:24:54 -0400 <![CDATA[ Best sellers: June 16 ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130615/LIFE/130619527/1058
1. Inferno. Dan Brown.

Doubleday, $29.95

2. And the Mountains Echoed.

Khaled Hosseini.

Riverhead, $28.95

3. Zero Hour. Cussler/Brown.

Putnam, $28.95.

4. Revenge Wears Prada. Lauren Weisberger.

Simon & Schuster, $25.99

5. Deeply Odd. Dean Koontz. Bantam, $28.

6. The Kill Room. Jeffery Deaver.

Grand Central, $28

7. Ladies Night. Mary Kay Andrews.

St. Martin’s, $26.99

8. 12th of Never. Patterson/Paetro.

Little Brown, $27.99

9. The Hit. David Baldacci.

Grand Central, $27.99

10. Silken Prey. John Sandford.

Putnam, $27.95

NONFICTION

1. Happy, Happy, Happy. Phil Robertson.

Howard Books. $24.99

2. American Gun. Chris Kyle.

William Morrow, $29.99

3. George Washington. Jack Levin.

Threshold Editions, $18.

4. Lean In. Sheryl Sandberg.

Knopf, $24.95

5. The Duck Commander Family.

Willie & Korie Robertson.

Howard Books, $23.99

6. Keep It Pithy. Bill O’Reilly.

Crown Archetype, $21.99

7. Finerman’s Rules. Karen Finerman.

Business Plus, $27

8. Eleven Rings. Phil Jackson.

Penguin, $27.95

9. The Guns at Last Light. Rick Atkinson.

Henry Holt, $40

10. Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls.

David Sedaris. Little, Brown, $25.99 ]]> Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:24:42 -0400 <![CDATA[ ‘The Drunken Botanist:’ The history of alcoholic drinks, with a humor chaser ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130614/LIFE/130619456/1058
On their way to get the ingredients, she rhapsodized on the horticultural pedigree of gin – juniper, coriander, citrus peel, lavender buds, “an alcohol extraction of all these crazy plants from around the world – tree bark and leaves and seeds and flowers and fruit.” Inside a liquor store, she gestured wildly and pronounced, “This is horticulture! In all of these bottles!”

Thus, before even a sip was taken, “The Drunken Botanist” was born.

It’s another endlessly entertaining and enlightening book from the author of “Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities” and “Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects.” With her foray into the world of “The Plants that Create the World’s Great Drinks,” Stewart combines a jigger of history, a splash of science, a dram of chemistry and a garnish of biology into a most palatable volume.

Anyone whose understanding of the role of plants in the creation of spirits is limited to a dim awareness that grapes go into wine and barley and hops become beer is in for an eye-opening, palate-tingling ride when Stewart comes to town Monday. Starting at 6 p.m. she will talk about her book in the lounge of Mike A’s at the Lafayette, 391 Washington St. She plans to delve into the history, chemistry and even a bit of mythology of the fruits, vegetables, herbs, flowers, roots and bark that go into making both familiar and exotic alcoholic drinks.

Both Stewart’s books and cocktails made with some of her recipes will be sold at the event, and she will sign books purchased at the event from Talking Leaves Books.

Like her previous books, “The Drunken Botanist” aims to be entertaining and interesting, with the plentiful transmission of facts as a painless side effect.

“It had to be entertaining to me as I was working on it,” Stewart said in a phone interview from Manhattan on a gorgeous spring day, which she was enjoying in Washington Square Park. “I didn’t want it to be just a dull compendium of information; it should be interesting to read even if you’re not really into the subject.”

And that process continues to this day. “With the exception of maybe a few really cheap synthetic products, every single bottle is just liquefied plant matter, that’s all it is,” Stewart said.

Well, mostly. Some alcoholic preparations famously or sneakily include bugs. The worm found in mezcal is actually the larva of the agave snout weevil; the carmine dye that contributes a ruby red color to some drinks is made from a scale insect called cochineal.

Stewart’s book starts with the classics, then detours into some of the lesser-known sources of alcohol from around the world, which she calls “Strange Brews.”

“I tried to include enough of the really obscure and interesting things from around the world to give people a sense that if you look at Africa, at China or South America, there are these amazing drinking traditions around the world with plants that you might never have heard of,” she said.

Those would be such drinks as beer made from bananas or cassava roots and wine fermented from parsnips or the ponderous jackfruit, which grows up to three feet long and can weigh 100 pounds.

Beyond the basic brew, Stewart provides dozens of plant accents, from fruits and flowers to spices and herbs, to create sensational cocktails, from the familiar to the somewhat freakish – from tobacco liqueur to maidenhair fern syrup.

One of the many plants that gardeners might be able to harvest and use right now is lemon verbena, a kin to the flowering ornamental verbenas with strongly citrus-scented leaves. “Lemon verbena is great with gin, great with rum, great with vodka,” said Stewart.

Tony Rials, beverage director at Mike A’s, not only read Stewart’s book, he “took a ridiculous amount of notes from it” to help him plan a menu of cocktails to be served at the book talk.

“Obviously, it’s right up my alley, because I already manipulate elements in my cocktails,” he said, referring to the drinks list that already contains such tasty ingredients as flower honey, fig-maple syrup, walnut bitters and beet. “It was fun to see the flavor profiles these things actually start from,” said Rials. “This helps me find what complements each other and what I can do with it from that point. I also liked her stories, the old anecdotes about where some of this stuff came from.”

During Stewart’s talk, Rials plans to offer a drink called the Ghost of Negroni, which he describes as “a tequila-based cocktail in which the tequila itself is infused with rosemary, pepper and thyme, and we finish it off with a rhubarb amaro, so it’s got a really big, hearty flavor, and a very strong herbaceous quality to it as well.”

He may add two or three cocktails from Stewart’s book, he said, so patrons may sip and savor while they listen. All will be offered for the standard price of $10.

Although Stewart wrote about 160 plants in “The Drunken Botanist,” she “could have easily explored a few hundred more.” And every day could bring a new discovery, she wrote. “I am certain that at this very moment, a craft distiller in Brooklyn is plucking a weed from a crack in the sidewalk and wondering if it would make a good flavoring for a new line of bitters.”

She said, “There could definitely be a second volume, because it’s hard to imagine any plant anywhere that somebody is not trying to figure out a way to make into alcohol.”

email: aneville@buffnews.com ]]> Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:07:23 -0400 Anne Neville
]]> <![CDATA[ Poem of the Week by Peggy Towers ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130609/LIFE/130609057/1058


By Peggy Towers



I am a citizen of longing.

Oh, don’t flatter yourself.



I stopped long ago longing for you

to plant the seed of something like love in me.



That I ever thought you capable

of anything but greed amazes me.

You twist the truth of what you were –

pulling me out of the quagmire of myself, ha.



If you pulled me out of anything it was only

to thrust me into the quicksand of you –



glug glug – I can still feel the suck and clutch

of you grabbing me by the hips and pulling me under.



You claimed I had a knack

for orienting myself the wrong way,



but I learned how to breathe

through narrow tubes from the top



and let the light seep in

pinpoint by pinpoint



while you flopped around

in darkness like a fish in mud.

PEGGY TOWERS earned her master of arts in Creative Writing at the State University at Buffalo, where she studied with the late John Logan. Her work has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize, and appeared in dozens of publications over the past three decades, during which time she has been a Just Buffalo Writer in Residence, and a fellow in the WNY Writing Project Summer Institute at Canisius College. She has studied poetry and fiction writing in Santiago, Chile, St. Petersburg, Russia, at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee, and most recently, in the Advanced Poetry Workshop at the famed 92nd Street Y in New York City. She also holds a bachelor of science degree in physical therapy from UB, and has been an avid runner for more than three decades, completing five marathons, including the Boston Marathon. ]]> Tue, 11 Jun 2013 08:38:44 -0400 <![CDATA[ Poetry and Literature Calendar (June 9-15) ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130609/LIFE/130609058/1058
Monday, 6:30 P.M.: Wordflight Series reading featuring poets Loren Keller and Fred Whitehead. A playwright, actor, novelist, literary reviewer and longtime Buffalo-area educator, Keller is the author of six collections of poems, including “Evening Everything: The Collected Poems.” Whitehead is the author of four collections of poems, the most recent of which is “Water From A Toad” (No Frills Buffalo Press, 2012). He is the founder of Destitute Press and organizer and host of the Fourth Friday Poetry Series at Dog Ears Books. Additional reading slots available. Crane Branch Library, 633 Elmwood Ave. (upstairs).

Tuesday, 6 p.m.: Book talk and book signing featuring Judy Wicks, co-founder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) and author of a brand new business book/memoir “Good Morning, Beautiful Business.” Wicks is in Buffalo this week to attend BALLE’s annual national conference hosted by Buffalo First at various locations around the city. Hallwalls Cinema, 341 Delaware Ave. (near Tupper Street.).

TUESDAY, 7:30 P.M.: A local book launch for “Another Little Piece,” a Young Adult novel published by HarperTeen, will feature a reading and book signing with author Kate Karyus Quinn, a graduate of Sweet Home High School and Niagara University who recently moved back to Buffalo. The author, who has an MFA in Film and Television Production from Chapman University, has published short romantic fiction in “Woman’s World” magazine and her second novel, “(Don’t You) Forget About Me,” will be published by HarperTeen in 2014. B is for Books, 6562 E. Quaker St, in Orchard Park.

6 p.m.: “From Animal House to Our House: A Love Story,” a comic monologue by award-winning writer and preservationist Ron Tanner based on his book of the same title in which he tells the story of how he and his wife bought condemned property – a wrecked former frat house – and restored it to its original Victorian splendor. Buffalo & Erie County Public Library, Central Branch Auditorium, One Lafayette Square. ]]> Tue, 11 Jun 2013 08:38:09 -0400 <![CDATA[ Editor’s Choice: A new Dos Passos to chronicle our ‘Unwinding’ ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130609/LIFE/130609087/1058
“The unwinding is nothing new. There have been unwindings every generation or two – the fall to earth of the Founders’ heavenly Republic in a noisy marketplace of quarrelsome factions; the war that tore the United States apart and turned them from plural to singular; the crash that laid waste to the business of America, making way for a democracy of bureaucrats and everymen. Each decline brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding comes a cohesion.”

Clearly we can recognize in that where we are now in an era of Obama, the Internet and new Wall Street calamity.

Thank God for writers who think big. Really big. One of them – New Yorker staff writet George Packer – has found a literary forebear suitable for the unwinding we are undergoing now and a cunning and brilliant a literary ancestor it is for the world where we find ourselves: the great John Dos Passos, whose “U.S.A.” was probably the most radical literary vision of its era.

Without Dos Passos’ “Camera Eye” but with his own versions of Dos Passos’ “Newsreels” and short biographies, Packer is telling us stories both public and private, personal and communal. We follow Rust Belt inhabitants of Youngstown, Ohio, and sun-drenched Tampa, Fla. There are Wall Streeters and people who work for Joe Biden. And there are public figures, too, in various different shades of Packer praise and obloquy, from Elizabeth Warren, Raymond Carver and Jay-Z to Newt Gingrich, Colin Powell, Andrew Breitbart and Sam Walton. George Packer on the moment Jay-Z “bought a slice of the Nets and fronted the team’s move to Brooklyn”: “he came the boss and the star, the black Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson with sins.” Before the game “Jay-Z held up his middle finger. Sixteen thousand middle fingers answered him.”

– Jeff Simon ]]> Sun, 9 Jun 2013 14:23:39 -0400 <![CDATA[ Sokolov’s ‘Steal the Menu’ is a fascinating culinary history ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130609/LIFE/130609112/1058
The Cuisinart, for heaven’s sake!

Anyone even remotely interested in American food is aware that the last half century of gastronomy has provided thrills, chills and exciting new sustenance, and Raymond Sokolov tells us all about it.

After all, Sokolov – a self-described “child prodigy” – has seen cuisine from many angles in his 40 years of food writing. High and mighty angles to be sure.

Hired as food editor and restaurant critic for the New York Times in 1971 as successor to the rightly celebrated Craig Claiborne (and famously fired by editor Abe Rosenthal without explanation a couple of years later); serving as arts editor and later as restaurant writer for the Wall Street Journal whose political philosophy, he’s quick to tell you, he definitely does not share. He did perhaps his best work as a food historian in columns for “Natural History” magazine.

He charts here the turbulent culinary waters he managed to navigate.

“I was there and I ate what was put in front of me,” he says.

Which made for some memorable meals.

Sokolov’s first story is the best one. Sharing a lunch with the retiring columnist in the New York Times cafeteria (in the company cafeteria, you understand) he was stunned when Claiborne sloshed a little tomato-pea puree mongole around in his mouth and announced “there’s too much basil in this soup.” (The guy was never averse to showing off now and then.)

Later, Claiborne gave him but one piece of advice, Sokolov says, although it was one every restaurant reviewer in the ’70s already knew about:

“Steal the menu,” His Eminence said.

“If you ask for it, they might give it to you or they might not but if they don’t, they’ll be watching you and counting them when they take them away after you’ve ordered.

“So just put it in your lap, fold it up and slip it in your pocket. You might look like you’re playing with yourself under there but no waiter is going to bother you about that.”

(Clarification department: The printed menu provided an important fast-checking reminder of ingredients and prices for reviewers in those ancient days – it’s no longer so necessary when just about every place has a website of its own.)

Larceny aside, Sokolov had a rollicking time with his food beat. There was the Tricia Nixon/Edward Cox wedding cake debacle for instance – hardly a debacle for Sokolov but surely one for he White House. (Sokolov, not a fan of the then president, says that fact had had nothing whatever to do with his glee.)

Seems the kitchen staff had concocted a 6-foot tall, lemon flavored wedding cake for the event based on a recipe from Pat Nixon’s mother and then – with great fanfare – released a reduced recipe for home cooks to try.

And Sokolov, who saw himself as “the nation’s designated palate,” thought he ought to taste the cake the White House was proposing. He turned the recipe over to the newspaper’s recipe tester and the darn thing “erupted from its pan all over her immaculate Garland oven.”

Oh what a story. Chaos in the kitchen – so much better than a tempest in a teapot. Sokolov ran the thing in the Times the very next day. Headline: “Warning! It May Not Work.”

The wire services picked it up and the mistake went round the world – and this was before the Internet, mind you. Despite corrections and additions that came from the White House press office, all carefully documented in the newspaper, the cake was never a winner. “It was a cheap shot heard round the world,” says Sokolov. He felt no guilt.

Then there were the later trips abroad when Sokolov investigated nouvelle cuisine and its influence in lightening and simplifying Western cuisine in general. He thinks Michel Guerard, one of its originators, a genius.

But he can still take a respectful stab or two at a later emerging and even more esoteric cuisine. “Science played a transforming role with gels and slow cooking dehydration and colloidal trickery – all the magic of the so-called molecular gastronomy harnessed to intensify and concentrate the diner’s notions and experience of food,” is how he describes it.

Sokolov describes a personal incident in the famous chef Ferran Adria’s now closed, enormously influential El Bulli outside Barcelona, considered the world’s most outstanding restaurant at the time.

“There were 26 courses, mostly small and surreal, beautiful creations unlike anything my wife or I had ever eaten before. Starting with an intense mojito pumped out of a siphon, we moved on to little white paper cones filled with fine white powder. Before the waiter had a chance to say what it was. Johanna knocked hers back and aspirated enough of the pulverized popcorn to precipitate a choking fit.

“She recovered in time to join me in the ‘snack’ courses among which were a crunchy object made of quail egg and an anise flavored consommé siphoned into a beer mug and looking quite a bit like a dark ale with a two-inch head.”

Sokolov, as his many bosses no doubt discovered, is no warm and fuzzy fellow – in fact, there’s a certain aspect of twerp in his makeup. And his sometimes overly professorial style of writing can get dull, dull dull.

He loves his little dig, all right – make that a thousand digs. No one – nothing – is sacred. Not the Times when he worked there. (“the basic tone of the criticism was middlebrow and all rightnik.”) Nor present TV biggies like Paula Deen (“exhaustingly exhuberant”) nor the late and usually canonized Henri Soule of New York City’s influential Le Pavillon restaurant (“snobbish mediocracy”).

But then, culinary heresy was always Sokolov’s signature dish.

On the other hand, who needs warm and fuzzy when the tales are such juicy ones?

And – what’s this? The guy even seems to have mellowed in his old age. He knows many of the elaborate meals he ate and described were of interest only to the moneyed and well traveled…

“Canapes cunningly composed with crackling from hand-raised hogs and leather confected from handpicked black currants will never replace pot roast on the dinner tables of the 99 percent,” he admits. “But” – get ready for a Sokolovism: “Packaged food has already done that,” he says.

It’s a good read.



Steal the Menu: A Memoir of Forty Years in Food

By Raymond Sokolov

Knopf

242 pages, $25.95



Janice Okun is the retired food editor and restaurant critic of The News. ]]> Sun, 9 Jun 2013 07:37:16 -0400 By Janice Okun

NEWS BOOK REVIEWER

]]> <![CDATA[ ‘Those Angry Days’ is history written as a thriller ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130609/LIFE/130609113/1058
One would think going to war against Nazi Germany and its canon of diabolic beliefs would be the exception.

But no. It took more than two years of bitter national debate before a hesitant President Franklin Roosevelt and a recalcitrant Congress overcame a vocal and well-organized minority to lead the nation into war. And then it came only after the Japanese sneak attack on our Pacific Fleet stunned the nation into action.

That is the story of Lynne Olson’s “Those Angry Days”: The momentous national conflict of the period between the spring of 1939 when Hitler seized all of Czechoslovakia and Dec. 7, 1941, the day the debate abruptly ended.

Olson is a historian with the heart of a storyteller. She understands the need for protagonists and human conflict in the writing of history. Every chapter of this book – like her last work, “Citizens of London” – moves the narrative briskly forward.

At first, the storyline seems simple enough. President Roosevelt will push an isolationist nation, stung by the failures of post-World War I Europe, into rescuing Britain and France from Nazi tyranny. American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, strongly pro-German – some would say a Nazi sympathizer – will spend every drop of his star power to keep America from taking sides in this, another useless European war.

The two icons of prewar United States are set on a collision course.

To appreciate Lindbergh’s importance to this plot, one most understand the 1930s. Lindbergh, the tall, blond, boyish Midwestern flier was everything Americans dreamed of in a hero. He was Elvis Presley and Jack Kennedy, all rolled into one flying suit. His words influenced millions.

But the simple plot thickens when the Nazi military machine rolls into the Low Countries, and the French sue for peace, leaving England alone to defend Western democracy.

The wildly popular president, still stung by a humiliating defeat at the hands of a coalition of conservative Democrats and solid Republicans over expanding the Supreme Court, shows signs of timidity and indecision for the first time in his career.

He is torn between a desire to rush to the aid of Great Britain and the Western Allies, and his ambition to seek an unprecedented third term, he hopes by national acclamation. The president reasons he mustn’t get out ahead of his voters.

At the same time, the matinee idol Lindbergh, once he is thrust into the public policy spotlight, proves to be a stubborn, prejudiced and outspoken loner, lacking in human empathy. Today, we would say of Lindbergh, it was his way or the highway.

Olson captures the hysteria and the color of a bygone era when the newspapers were the people’s Facebook and the Western Union telegram was their Twitter.

There were the syndicated newspaper columnists competing for readers, and the fledgling radio networks, vying for the attention of the American family, which listened to live political speeches broadcast into their living rooms.

The new weekly magazines, tried each with their own points of view – today we call that a biased media and think it’s a 21st century phenomenon – mirrored the great chasm that existed between the interventionists and the isolationists.

It was a time of Fifth Columnists, FBI dossiers and the wiretapping of foreign diplomats and the Americans they contacted. Both England and Germany had active propaganda machines operating inside our borders.

Talk about political conflict! Some of it was regional, some ideological, much of it economic and lots of it ethnic. But each side believed strongly in its cause, often based on a few catchphrases heard on the radio or read in the newspaper.

Olson describes in electrifying detail the thousands standing daily in Times Square, staring up at the illuminated news bulletins on Times Tower as the Nazi Blitzkrieg crushed Denmark, then Norway, Holland, Belgium and finally France, trapping the British Expeditionary Force on the beach at Dunkirk.

As we move closer to Pearl Harbor, the once simple plot breaks down. Lindbergh shows himself to be politically myopic. The more he talks, the more he self-destructs, culminating in his September 1941 speech in Des Moines, Iowa, which bared his openly anti-Semitic sentiments to a national radio audience estimated at more than a million listeners. It was universally disavowed. Even his staunchest supporters were outraged.

Lindbergh’s wife, Anne, who initially was taken in by Hitler’s charm before admitting she had been conned, later insisted her husband was not prejudiced but was “tone-deaf to nuance and the sensibilities of others.” Unlike Anne, Lindbergh never was able to admit he had been wrong about Nazism. Or anything else.

A socialist detractor, Norman Thomas, said: “I honestly don’t believe Lindbergh is an anti-Semite, but I think he is a great idiot.”

As the story line moves away from Lindbergh and deeper into Roosevelt, Olson takes us through the 1940 presidential campaign in which GOP challenger Wendell Willkie defies his party and comes out in favor of helping the Brits at all cost, even if it means Americans on the front lines. Meanwhile, the president, who vowed not to campaign for a third term, takes to the airwaves to criticize his opponent in the tightening race.

At one point in what became a mud-fest, Roosevelt aides agreed to keep secret Willkie’s extramarital affair if Willkie’s people promised not to raise Henry Wallace’s history of mental instability. Wallace was Roosevelt’s handpicked running mate.

It often is lost in history that the 1940 election was the closest presidential election in a quarter century. Willkie, who would become more interventionist than many Democrats, eventually worked with Roosevelt on preparations for war, but he confided to his friends that he never trusted the president.

Author Olson, in defiance of conventional wisdom, argues Roosevelt did not use his political savvy to nudge America into World War II.

She insists the master political juggler fell way behind the American public and procrastinated through this period, unnerving not only Winston Churchill but Roosevelt’s own aides. The president, she claims, never gave up hope America could remain a noncombatant, while supplying the Allies with the materials needed to overcome the enemy.

In keeping with that premise, she dispels out of hand any Roosevelt complicity in Pearl Harbor.

In any event, Pearl Harbor and its aftermath seem to have lowered a curtain over the deep animosity and national divide in the years leading up to the U.S. entry into World War II.

Olson reminds us with this thrilling narrative – a page-turner – of just how bitterly conflicted we were as a nation until that Sunday morning of Dec. 7, 1941, the day on which the U.S. took a sharp turn toward world leadership and never looked back.



Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

By Lynne Olson

Random House

548 pages, $30



Edward Cuddihy is a former News managing editor. ]]> Sun, 9 Jun 2013 07:36:30 -0400 By Edward Cuddihy

NEWS BOOK REVIEWER

]]> <![CDATA[ Best sellers: June 9 ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130609/LIFE/130609114/1058
1. Inferno. Dan Brown.

Doubleday, $29.95

2. And the Mountains Echoed.

Khaled Hosseini.

Riverhead, $28.95

3. Zero Hour. Cussler/Brown.

Putnam, $28.95.

4. Deeply Odd. Dean Koontz. Bantam, $28.

5. 12th of Never. Patterson/Paetro.

Little Brown, $27.99

6. Dead Ever After. Charlaine Harris.

Ace, $27.95

7. The Hit. David Baldacci.

Grand Central, $27.99

8. Silken Prey. John Sandford.

Putnam, $27.95

9. Gone Girl. Gillian Flynn.

Crown, $25

10. Whiskey Beach. Nora Roberts.

Putnam, $27.95



NONFICTION

1. Happy, Happy, Happy. Phil Robertson.

Howard Books. $24.99

2. Lean In. Sheryl Sandberg.

Knopf, $24.95

3. Eleven Rings. Phil Jackson.

Penguin, $27.95

4. Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls.

David Sedaris. Little, Brown, $25.99

5. The Duck Commander Family.

Willie & Korie Robertson.

Howard Books, $23.99

6. Keep It Pithy. Bill O’Reilly.

Crown Archetype, $21.99

7. The Guns at Last Light. Rick Atkinson. Henry Holt, $40

8. The 100. Jorge Cruise.

William Morrow, $25.99

9. Life Code. Dr. Phil McGraw.

Bird Street Books, $26.

10. My Greek Drama. Gianna Angelopoulos.

Greenleaf, $26.95 ]]> Sun, 9 Jun 2013 07:35:27 -0400 <![CDATA[ A hypnotizing, heady second novel from Rachel Kushner ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130609/LIFE/130609115/1058
“I come from reckless, unsentimental people,” Reno warns early on in the book – while hurtling, at breakneck speed, toward even more reckless, unsentimental people, stopping only to mention that she is “shopping for experience.”

It is a heady ride, from coast to coast and across the pond, with stops on the killing fields of World War I but with most of the action taking place in and around the Manhattan art world of the 1970s.

Yet, and this should be said straightaway: It isn’t Reno who fascinates here (despite her thirst for experience and passion for speed, be it on skis or a motorcycle or whatever in the world goes fast, fast, fast). No. It is Kushner – with her pitch-perfect depictions of time and place, her strong dialogue, her sense of travel, in actuality and in life.

Reno, and those along Reno’s path, are but vehicles here for Kushner’s own artistry, for her stories, one after the other – tale after tale and tales-within-tales, vignette upon vignette, endless, unstoppable, riveting. Kushner’s Reno merely grounds them, holding each in place just long enough for us to read it. This is quite an achievement, equaled only by Kushner’s ability to make everything feel real. (Think of a marriage between Jack Kerouac and Jane Smiley.)

“I’d thought this was how artists moved to New York, alone, that the city was a mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place,” Reno muses toward the start of the book, recalling the night the course of her 20s was – literally – set in motion:

“What occurred did so because I was open to it, and not because fate and I met at a certain angle. I had plenty of time to think about this later. I thought about it so much that the events of that evening sometimes ran along under my mood like a secret river, in the way that all buried truths rushed along quietly in some hidden place.”

Kushner’s Reno – so called as she is from Nevada – is wide-eyed and guileless when she first encounters post-’60s Manhattan, and in particular its art scene, Warhol’s influence waning, the “artists” Reno meets more talk than talent, more than one of them given to fabrication.

“Is he telling the truth?” Reno asks her new lover, Sandro, of his inscrutable friend Ronnie. “He’s complicated,” Sandro replies. “You have to listen closely. He’ll say something perfectly true and it’s meaningless. Then he makes something up, but it has value. He’s telling you something.”

Sandro, not above duplicity himself, is Sandro Valera of the famed Valera motorcycle and rubber-manufacturing family in Italy – a good 15 years older than Reno, and working in New York as an artist (or let’s say someone who conceptualizes empty aluminum boxes that are subsequently made, not by Sandro, but in a factory).

It is Sandro’s late father, a leitmotif throughout the book, who supplies its title – serving, during World War I, with the motorcycle battalion, the Arditi (“to dare”), a group known for its fierceness and use of flamethrowers. And it is Sandro who, although essentially estranged from his family, arranges delivery of a new, top-of-the-line Moto Valera to Reno – to allow her to pursue a lifelong dream of participating in the land-speed trials over Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats.

“You don’t have to immediately become an artist,” Sandro counsels her before she leaves New York for the sand flats. “You have the luxury of time. You’re young. Young people are doing something even when they’re doing nothing. A young woman is a conduit. All she has to do is exist.” (There is a ’70s undertone of sexism throughout “The Flamethrowers,” the attitude blatant when the elder Valera is quoted – still another offering of verisimilitude from Kushner.)

Reno reaches 148 mph on the salt flats, telling us in Kushner’s flowing prose: “I was in an acute case of the present tense. Nothing mattered but the milliseconds of life at that speed. Far ahead of me, the salt flats and mountains conspired into one puddled vortex. I began to feel the size of this place. Or perhaps I did not feel it, but the cycle, whose tires marked its size with each turn, did. I felt a tenderness for them, speeding along under me.”

Reno will crash, heal and return to Sandro and New York where she is now part of an unreliable cadre of souls including Ronnie of the lies – who has given himself the “fake mandate to photograph every living person” – and the wonderfully named Giddle who is slightly older than Reno, fresh from the Warhol factory, a waitress, actress, shoplifter and sometimes stealer of boyfriends (who grew up in Rochester).

It is Giddle who sorts reality from pretense, telling Reno about a suspicious waitress who admits to Giddle she is actually a sociologist gathering data. “So it’s like a performance, Giddle had said to the woman. You’re performing the role of a waitress … The woman insisted, No, it’s sociology … I infiltrate to study this world.‘But that is performance,’ Giddle (says). She was performing, as a real but not actual waitress …”

Taken with Sandro (and, later in the book, his fearsome mother), Reno, Ronnie and Giddle are incipient flamethrowers themselves – with the same potential to disrupt and to harm, which they will do, over time, in their self-absorbed and cavalier ways. Reno’s naiveté is necessary here: It lets us see clearly, showing itself in the end as but another deadly weapon.

Sandro, Reno observes, “had a way of talking about our courtship that presumed there was a choice to it. Perhaps this was simply a difference between us. I did not experience love as a choice, ‘I think I will love this or that person.’ If there was no imperative, it was not love. But Sandro spoke as if he’d seen me on the street and simply made his selection.”

Which, of course, is exactly what happened. It was his way – particularly with American girls. As his mother will ask, in Reno’s presence, “How many have we met, at this point?” – later furthering her point to Sandro: “You bring them to place between you and your life.”

By now, Sandro and Reno are staying at the sumptuous Valera villa above Bellagio and when he, true to form, betrays Reno she bolts, accepting a ride to Rome where she finds herself in the bosom of the Red Brigades, a guerrilla group intent on sabotaging such capitalist entities as the Valera empire.

Kushner rushes the novel here, plunging Reno almost immediately into a life-altering situation that clearly renders her complicit in a violent act against the Valeras. This passes in a blur, and is not revisited in the book – a fault in the plot.

But the plot doesn’t matter in the grand scheme here. (Neither do Kushner’s characters – as intriguing and unforgettable as they are). What matters is Kushner. The girl can WRITE – and we are already yearning for the next offering from her remarkable imagination.



FICTION

The Flamethrowers

By Rachel Kushner

Scribner

383 pages, $26.99



Karen Brady is a retired Buffalo News columnist. ]]> Sun, 9 Jun 2013 07:35:17 -0400 By Karen Brady

NEWS BOOK REVIEWER

]]> <![CDATA[ Debut novelist crafts thriller from CIA experience ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130609/LIFE/130609116/1058
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

FORT WORTH, Texas — After more than three decades of conducting secret CIA missions overseas, it stands to reason that Jason Matthews would have some stories to tell.

Instead of producing his memoirs, however, he decided to write espionage fiction – and what a fine job he has done.

“Red Sparrow,” his debut novel, which came out Tuesday, is a winning combination of imaginative plotting, insider detail and, of all things, a recipe after every chapter.

Matthews explains his storytelling formula this way: “It’s the three S’s: spying, sex and sauces.”

“Red Sparrow” introduces Nathaniel Nash, a young CIA officer handling a high-ranking Russian mole. When the Russians sic an alluring “sparrow” (a female operative trained as an espionage courtesan) on Nate, the two spies fall in and out of bed – and love.

The globetrotting thriller (Moscow, Helsinki, Athens, Rome and Washington, D.C.) has already landed a seven-figure movie deal with 20th Century Fox.

Matthews is now working on a follow-up novel.

We chatted with him about his two careers.

Q: What compelled you to switch from real espionage to writing spy fiction?

A: I retired after 33 years in the agency, most of which was spent in overseas locations with my wife, also a 34-year veteran of CIA, and two daughters. With our worldwide experience, I thought it would be fun to write a spy novel with real tradecraft and terminology and gadgets and locales.

Q: How does the world of Nate Nash differ from the work you were in as an officer in the CIA’s former Operations Directorate (now known as the National Clandestine Service)?

A: The real world of intelligence work is a lot of waiting, analysis, research, so I had to insert some excitement into the fictional plot. All of the characters in “Red Sparrow” are fictional — and, truthfully, none of it is really autobiographical.

That said, everyone in CIA at one time had a mentor like Gable. Or saw a genius like Benford at work. Or suffered the excesses of an ambitious supervisor like Uncle Vanya. And I met Russians in my career, but no one like Dominika Egorova.

Q: Which matters more: making every last detail ring true or simply writing a good story? Does firsthand knowledge trump a vivid imagination? Or vice versa?

A: Story comes first, in my view. Of course, details that are authentic, that are evocative, make any plot stronger.

As a reader, I can appreciate, for example, medical dialogue that is authentic, even if I don’t have experience in that life.

And I think that equal parts of experience and imagination fuel the same fire: Having met outlandish characters in my career enabled me to concoct the fictional ones.

Q: When the Berlin Wall went down and the Cold War ended, people theorized that spy fiction would go the way of the dodo bird. It didn’t happen, because governments still keep secrets and want to know secrets. Would the genre be as popular in a world of peace, love and understanding?

A: It’s been said that espionage is the second oldest profession. Why? Because there always have been delicious, seemingly attainable secrets.

And there will always be human nature, base motivations, vulnerabilities, inescapable greed, overarching fear.

Espionage boils down to undetectably stealing secrets. ]]> Sun, 9 Jun 2013 07:33:47 -0400 <![CDATA[ ‘Abandoned Asylums’ photos shed light on poignant history of institutions ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130608/LIFE/130609289/1058
A curving hallway of magnificent arched windows is littered with dead leaves, broken panes and other debris.

A heavy door with a wire-reinforced peephole is stenciled with the words. “Keep door locked unless nurse is present.”

These mysterious and ominous images of closed and vacant institutions for the mentally, developmentally and physically disabled in Massachusetts and Connecticut were taken by photographer John Gray. Many of the buildings he photographed between 2000 and 2005 have since been razed.

But the images survive and have been republished in a glossy new art book titled “Abandoned Asylums of New England” by the Museum of disAbility History in Amherst.

“We want to introduce disability history to people in a way that’s not threatening, that’s interesting to them, that shows that disability has always been with us,” said James M. Boles, president of People Inc., which operates the museum and published the 219-page book through its People Ink Press.

Because of the stigma attached to people suffering from disabling conditions, their history was often ignored, suppressed or forgotten. Therefore, according to People Ink Press, their records and memories “are fading into the past – into the world of abandoned history.”

Gray took his photos at a critical time. Many of the massive institutions he photographed had been long closed, as the concept of how to treat the ill and disabled focused on smaller, more individual options. “Places like these are abandoned because we are trying to serve people by reintegrating them back into the community so they can participate,” said Douglas Platt, curator of the museum, who wrote the introduction to the book. “As a community we can also work toward tapping into the potentials that all different people in a diverse population have to offer, rather than institutionalizing them.”

With no interest in preserving the sometimes massive institutions, the buildings were left open to weather, vandals and the degradations of time. The resulting images are haunting and evocative.

In Gray’s photos, obsolete machinery, including a scattering of syringes, iron lungs and large tubs used in water therapy, were simply abandoned in the buildings. The stark beauty and mysterious poignancy of the scenes attracted Gray, who found the buildings wide open.

But, said Platt, the images are “more than just eerie photographs or ghost-hunterish sights. These were real places that tried to fulfill a real need in society. When you acknowledge the existence of people who have been marginalized in the past, you are giving them a voice and giving them a chance to be proud to be part of a community that is recognizing the value of their humanity.”

In 2003, Gray self-published a book that contained many of the photos. It is out of print, but is often mentioned in online discussions.

The Museum of disABILITY History, the only museum of its kind in the world, has already published several books as part of its Abandoned History series. They focus on such topics as Western New York almshouses and poorhouses and a school for the handicapped.

After learning of the photos, Boles met with Gray in Massachusetts and proposed publishing the photos, with some additions. Platt said, “We wanted to put in some history, we wanted to select the photographs, which there are hundreds and hundreds of, and we agreed that we would do an introduction, add a history of each site, and we also mapped each site.”

The photographer was enthusiastic, said Boles. “He especially liked the history part.”

“The Museum did a great job reproducing my images and the publication is great,” Gray said in an email.

In his introduction, Platt describes some of the ways institutions were designed and the philosophy behind each one.

“They wanted to build structures that the public could believe in, that would stand the test of time, and also meet the aesthetic and medical concepts that were put forth by Thomas Story Kirkbride,” a 19th century physician who worked with the mentally ill, said Platt. “A lot of these are Kirkbride-style buildings, much like Buffalo Psychiatric Center.” The Kirkbride buildings are constructed with male and female wards on either side of a central administration building, and offer plenty of natural light and ventilation. The Kirkbride structures were usually surrounded by manicured grounds and even farms where residents worked.

“The Kirkbride design was the architecture of balance,” said Platt. “It was believed that this design would help lift these people out of their plight of mental illness and bring them closer to being restored and balanced.”

Although designs changed throughout the years, the construction remained beautiful and high-quality for decades.

“These weren’t shantytowns, these were executed by some of the most prominent architects of their time for a reason,” said Platt. “When you look at the metaphor between the state of these buildings, and the changing states and perceptions of care for people with disabilities, I think it makes it much more poignant.”

Each chapter of “Abandoned Asylums” is about a separate facility, nine in Massachusetts and three in Connecticut. Each begins with a brief history of the institution, followed by a postcard or other image of the main buildings and a map.

Several of the hospitals have the word “insane” in their titles, while one was built “for dipsomaniacs and inebriates,” and another is a school “for the feeble-minded.” An editor’s note points out that the exact language of the historical period has been retained for historical accuracy.

Unable to find a Buffalo-area printer who could do what they wanted, the publishers settled on a Rochester company for the initial printing of 500 copies. The book, which is available only in the gift shop of the disABILITY History museum at 3826 Main St., Amherst, or on the web site (museumofdisability.org) costs $64.

Boles and Platt are extremely interested in producing a book on the Richardson Olmsted Complex, the former Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane. “We would love to do something with them,” said Boles.

“We’re thinking about a collaboration, because we have a beautiful Kirkbride building right in our area,” said Platt. “I’ve seen other books similar to this and almost every book will have a photo of the twin towers of the Richardson.”

email: aneville@buffnews.com ]]> Fri, 7 Jun 2013 16:59:47 -0400 Anne Neville
]]> <![CDATA[ Aiming for Julia’s glory? No, say cookbook authors, but ‘Mastering the Art’ is less sacrosanct than it once was ]]> http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130604/LIFE01/130609646/1058
Chicago Tribune

Julia Child had a problem in 1960. After spending much of the previous decade wrestling a book of French recipes for Americans into shape, she was stuck on what to call it. Suggestions, 45 or so, came and went without a winner. Finally, Judith Jones, her editor at Knopf, struck proverbial gold with “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” and the book was published in 1961.

Fast-forward about 50 years. Nathalie Dupree was wondering if she had a problem. It wasn’t that her new cookbook lacked a name; it had one: “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking.”

“It was terrifying,” Dupree recalls of the choice.

Now, the Charleston, S.C.-based Dupree is no newbie. She’s the author of 12 books, a seasoned television cooking show host, a kitchen pro. But her response reflected the fact that “Mastering the Art” as a cookbook title is a phrase charged with meaning. For as Russ Parsons wrote in a Los Angeles Times story shortly after Dupree’s book made its debut in November, “It takes a lot of chutzpah to name a cookbook ‘Mastering the Art of ... .’ After all, Julia Child pretty much has the rights to that phrase in perpetuity.”

No more, apparently.

“Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking,” co-written by Dupree and Cynthia Graubart, will be joined on bookstore shelves this fall by “Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing,” by Anya Von Bremzen, the Queens, N.Y.-based author and food writer, and Ann Mah’s “Mastering the Art of French Eating.” In 2014, expect “Rococo: Mastering the Art of Chocolate,” by Chantal Coady, a London chocolatier.

Mah says her title is meant as a sort of a joke — after all, how can one master eating? – but it is also a homage to Child, who was, like Mah, a diplomat’s wife in Paris. The Washington, D.C.-based food and travel writer describes her book as culinary tour of France using Child’s book as a guide.

“Mastering the Art of French Cooking” is such a universally recognized title that prospective readers of Mah’s book should immediately get the playful title spin. It might be what gets them to buy it, and that’s the point.

“Every publisher’s goal is to get his book attention, and the most important thing to get right is the title,” says Bill LeBlond, editorial director of food and drink at Chronicle Books. An Amazon.com search turned up: “Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking,” by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo in 2009; “Mastering the Art of Florida Seafood,” by Lonnie T. Lynch in 1999; “Mastering the Art of French Pastry,” by Bruce Healy and Paul Bugat in 1984; and, my sentimental favorite, “Mastering the Art of Outdoor Cooking on Your Gas Grill,” published in the 1970s for Sears, Roebuck & Co.

Dan Rosenberg, editorial director of Harvard Common Press, believes publishers were generally unwilling to use “Mastering” as the main title for a food book in the American market before Child’s death in 2004 at age 91. He cautions that publishers and authors need to take care if they choose the “Mastering” route for books.

“You are heightening expectations on two fronts,” he says. “You’re going out on a limb that the cuisine approaches French cuisine in importance and, even more risky, you are going out on a limb and saying you write cookbooks at the level of Julia Child and Simone Beck.” ]]> Tue, 4 Jun 2013 23:39:06 -0400