Books

Up for grabs is all 4 books. US Only. Ends tomorrow, Monday night. Leave a comment with your email address as to whihc if all books you want to win.A father for ten years, a mother for eight, and for a time in between, neither, or both ("the parental version of the schnoodle, or the cockapoo"), Jennifer Finney Boylan has seen parenthood from both sides of the gender divide. When her two children were young, Boylan came out as transgender, and as Jenny transitioned from a man to a woman and from a father to a mother, her family faced unique challenges and questions. In this thoughtful, tear-jerking, hilarious memoir, Jenny asks what it means to be a father, or a mother, and to what extent gender shades our experiences as parents. "It is my hope," she writes, "that having a father who became a woman in turn helped my sons become better men." Through both her own story and incredibly insightful interviews with others, including Richard Russo, Edward Albee, Ann Beattie, Augusten Burroughs, Susan Minot, Trey Ellis, Timothy Kreider, and more, Jenny examines relationships with fathers and mothers, people's memories of the children they were and the parents they became, and the many different ways a family can be. Followed by an Afterword by Anna Quindlen that includes Jenny and her wife discussing the challenges they've faced and the love they share, Stuck in the Middle with You is a brilliant meditation on raising – and on being – a child.” To connect with Boylan, you can follow her on Twitter @JennyBoylan. The provocative bestseller She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders also by Jennifer Finney Boylan (the tenth anniversary edition on sale April 30, 2013) is the winning, utterly surprising story of a person changing genders. By turns hilarious and deeply moving, Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the territory that lies between men and women, examines changing friendships, and rejoices in the redeeming power of family. Told in Boylan’s fresh voice, She’s Not There is about a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret. As James evolves into Jennifer in scenes that are by turns tender, startling, and witty, a marvelously human perspective emerges on issues of love, sex, and the fascinating relationship between our physical and intuitive selves. Now with a new epilogue from the author and an afterword from Deirdre "Grace" Boylan, She’s Not There shines a light on the often confounding process of accepting ourselves. “She’s Not There, the Running with Scissors of sex-change stories, brings irreverence and a merrily outrageous sense of humor to this potentially serious business.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times Deep in the jungle where the borders of Vietnam meet those of Laos and Cambodia is a region known as "the lost world." Large mammals never seen before by Western science have popped up frequently in these mountains in the last decade, including a half-goat/half-ox, a deer that barks, and a close relative of the nearly extinct Javan rhino. In an age when scientists are excited by discovering a new kind of tube worm, the thought of finding and naming a new large terrestrial mammal is astonishing, and wildlife biologists from all over the world are flocking to this dangerous region. The result is a race between preservation and destruction. Containing research gathered from famous biologists, conservationists, indigenous peoples, former POWs, ex-Viet Cong, and the first U.S. ambassador to Vietnam since the war's end, Gold Rush in the Jungle goes deep into the valleys, hills, and hollows of Vietnam to explore the research, the international trade in endangered species, the lingering effects of Agent Orange, and the effort of a handful of biologists to save the world's rarest animals. In Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World, (in paperback March 26, 2013) historian Hugh Brewster seamlessly interweaves personal narratives of the lost liner’s most fascinating people with a haun

Hi everybody, Still working on that new theme – we need some new ad code and one more little tweak before I unleash it on the world. In the meantime, entertain yourselves with this little gem from yesterdecade.   Your Environment and What You Can Do About It Saltonstall 1970 Submitter: So the topic isn’t [...]

This was a quick read for the plane ride back to Maine for the summer. It made the flight zip by!Mike Scanlon is a doctor serving in Afghanistan when he gets news that his wife has died from an accidental fall in the kitchen. He returns home to try to make sense of his life. He has an eight-month old daughter to care for and questions about his wife's death and life.I found the picture on the cover to be a bit misleading since his daughter is just an infant and she hates him because she was only one month old when he got deployed.But, I still enjoyed the book and was happy to have it to keep me company on the plane ride.

The Alphabet in Crime Fiction - a Community Meme. This meme is an annual event on this blog. This is its 4th outing. We already have a strong core of weekly contributors but you can join at any time. Last week we featured the letter F This week's letter is the letter G Here are the rules The page telling bloggers which letter to focus on will appear on each Monday together with a Mr Linky. By Friday of each week participants try to write a blog post about crime fiction related to the letter of the week. Your post MUST be related to either the first letter of a book's title, the first letter of an author's first name, or the first letter of the author's surname, or even maybe a crime fiction "topic". But above all, it has to be crime fiction. So you see you have lots of choice. You could write a review, or a bio of an author, so long as it fits the rules somehow. (It is ok too to skip a week.) You probably won't have to do a lot of extra reading in order to participate, but I warn you that your TBR may grow as a result of the suggestions other participants make. Feel free to use either of the images provided in your blog. Your assistance in advertising this community meme, and pointing people to this page, would be very much appreciated. By the end of this week post your blog post title and URL in the Mr Linky below. Please place a link in your blog post back to this page. Visit other blogs and leave comments. Check the Crime Fiction Alphabet page for summaries of previous years, and for links to this year's entries. Thanks for participating.

Ideas about easing my way back into regular posting present themselves from time to time but never seem to take hold the way I intended. But hope springs eternal and the Pym love of above event sponsor, Thomas, and his Twitter partner in sly humor, JoAnn, have inspired me to take part. JoAnn sent me my first Pym title, Jane and Prudence, last year, and I recently read and loved it. Then at a book sale last month, Thomas encouraged me to purchase a copy of Crampton Hodnet. And now a copy of Excellent Women has found its way into my hands. So it shall be those three titles for me for the week of June 1-8. In order to avoid the now customary dissolution of my posting plans, I have already pre-scheduled the Jane and Prudence thoughts. Now to make a plan for the others.... If you would like to make a reading plan of your own for the week, if you are a closet Anglophile for whom the words "vicar," "wry," and "repressed" drip from your tongue like honey, then check out the details here and here. The discussion, led by #PymPimps or #Pymps promises to be lively.

The playwright Nicky Silver has adjusted Kurt Vonnegut’s 1993 play “Make Up Your Mind” so it can be staged in Boston.

I am familiar with Meike Ziervogel in her role as founder of Peirene Press but now I've had the chance to think of her as a novelist. (It's an aside but I find Peirene's progress encouraging and inspiring. People talk about the death of the book and other such nonsense, but the success of small independent publishers shows that the world is a much better, and much more interesting, place than some would have us believe.) Some time in the dim and distant past I watched a documentary about Magda Goebbels and I've found her an interesting character ever since. The idea of mothers who harm their children seems to have a power to shock like nothing else (nothing else I can think of anyway) but when I first watched that documentary it seemed to me quite possible to empathise with Magda's decision to kill her children, uncomfortable, but possible.I also read somewhere that the British have such an obsession with the second world war that more books are published about it here than anywhere else in the world, I'm still not quite sure what I make of that but I am interested in how Germany has come to terms with it's 20th century history, and more specifically how we, the British, can accept and discuss that changing relationship with the past. The book that started this interest was Bernhard Schlink's 'The Reader', easily the first time I'd seen a Nazi portrayed with any sympathy, it's an excellent book but Schlink chose to make his heroine a victim of circumstance. 'Magda' moves that process along, Magda is hardly a victim but Ziervogel does make her human.Fiction that uses real people or events isn't always my cup of tea and I must admit that whilst I enjoyed the first half of 'Magda' enough to carry on reading it wasn't until the second half of the book - when the family arrive in the bunker - that it really came alive to me. The bunker is deftly sketched, mentions of the dark, the close air, the impact of bombs falling over head, drunken soldiers gathered in corners, and whispered conversations as Eva Braun and Hitler's wedding preparations are made heighten the sense of tension and claustrophobia as the story winds towards it's inevitable conclusion. It's at this point that Magda's eldest daughter, Helga, really makes her impact on the narrative. She's recording her experiences in the bunker - the day to day life, first love, and a growing sense of unease with her mother. For Helga and the children there is the idea that life is the thing, and that the future will take care if itself. They have been shielded from the reality of war, even into the last days the possibility of defeat is inconceivable, the talk of soldiers who say it's so seems iconoclastic to the point of blasphemy. For Magda there is the reality of the situation, she knows what the consequences of defeat are likely to be for the first lady of the Reich. Ziervogal chooses to have Magda believe in Hitler with a religious fervour so that her final act is a blend of loyalty and protectiveness amongst other things.In truth I've always been inclined to see what Magda did as at least in part an act of compassion. Her children would have had a hard legacy to bear. In a letter to her eldest son from a previous marriage Magda stated that Our glorious idea is ruined and with it everything beautiful and marvellous that I have known in my life. The world that comes after the Führer and national socialism is not any longer worth living in and therefore I took the children with me (or at least something like it, that quote is lifted from wikipedia). What kind of life can you imagine for those children, and later yet their children? 'Magda' is a complex portrait of a difficult and emotive situation. It's good to read about these names from history as people rather than monsters, and worthwhile to try and understand what drives a person to do terrible things. The result is something that has lingered in my mind and imagination weeks after reading it and which I wholeheartedly recom

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new book, “Americanah,” the main characters find the race matters where ever they go.

Reviewed by Melanie Kline Drop 7 foods. Lose 7 pounds. In just 7 days. Sounds amazing, doesn’t it? I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this book. Food intolerance is the real cause of weight gain? Yeah, sure! Sounds great – where do I start? Sign me up! Not quite so fast. The Virgin Diet is jammed full of testimonials. I wound up skipping about half of the book because frankly, if I don’t personally know you and believe that I can take you at your word, then your testimonial is just a waste of my time. I want to see it for myself and since I already have the book in my hands, I’m not going to bother reading what other people have to say. Overall, The Virgin Diet provides some good points to ponder and that make a whole lot of sense. For example, food intolerance creates inflammation. Not so good if you are trying to get that lean, flat stomach you had when you were young. You have to eat fat to burn fat. Even this makes sense once you read the explanation and examples. Basically, The Virgin Diet gives you a list of 7 problem foods to remove from your diet. Not as easy as it sounds though. Sure you can quit eating corn on the cob, canned corn, frozen corn, etc., but corn is also found in corn fed chickens and the eggs they lay, and so on. After you eliminate these foods, you slowly start adding them back into your diet so that you can tell which ones you are intolerant to and viola, you lose weight after getting rid of all the problematic food. This is a great concept, but I did not lose one ounce and people really looked at me funny when I ordered “grass-fed beef tenderloin” and “pasture-fed pork tenderloin” at the grocery store meat counter. Can’t say I had much luck with ordering “wild fish” when I went out to eat either. This concept might work extremely well for some, but since I have neither the time nor money to research out and purchase all of the “pure” foods necessary to truly follow this diet in the way it is designed, I guess I’m stuck with my muffin top. Rating: ★★☆☆☆ Review copy was provided free of any obligation by Harlequin. No monetary or any other form of compensation was received. Pin It

...The losing game of writing books to win The trouble starts at the moment when you get the crazy idea that not winning a prize means you're no good. It doesn't mean that at all. I have been a member of several judging panels. I have witnessed the strange dynamic of their functioning. Forces that outsiders can't even conceive of are at work in those meeting rooms. Under all their beautiful intelligent reasoning, prize judges, like people in every sphere of action, are driven by unconscious urges. How could it be otherwise? They are not sphinxes, or oracles, or disembodied spirits. They are people, subject to moods, full of contradictions and unacknowledged emotions and thwarted longings of their own.