Smart Talk: The summer book show

What to look for on Smart Talk Thursday, June 4, 2015:

Have you made your vacation plans for this summer?  Whether you’re traveling to the beach or mountains or just lounging by the pool or staying cool in an air conditioned house, a good book is probably an essential part of your efforts to relax.

On Thursday’s Smart Talk, we’ve assembled a panel to discuss what they’re reading and suggest a few books you may enjoy too.

Joining us on the program are Catherine Lawrence, a writer and owner of the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Todd Dickinson, an owner of Aaron’s Books in Lititz, and Jon Walker, who blogs at www.jonosbookreviews.com.

Panel recommendations:

Summer 2015 Reading Recommendations from Catherine Lawrence and the staff at Harrisburg’s Midtown Scholar Bookstore

 TALK OF THE TOWN / contemporary issues:

 Chris Papst – Capital Murder: An Investigative Reporter’s Hunt for Answers in a Collapsing City. We’ve almost completely sold out of signed copies of his book and his book talk was very well attended last month. 

 OSU Law Professor Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Nonfiction)

 REGIONAL AUTHORS with upcoming book talks and signings:

 Leonard M. Adkins – Along the Appalachian Trail: West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. We are looking forward to hosting him for a book talk and signing this Sunday June 7th from 2-4pm on our Main Stage. 

 Three authors are visiting on Saturday the 27th of June, which we’re calling “self-made/self-help” Saturday:

David Krulac – How I Started with Nothing and Made 12 Million in Real Estate Part-Time

Kelly Sangree – Hard Core Poor – a book on extreme thrift

Susan Hicks – Organized Serenity 

 July is for History!

Frank Varney, author of General Grant and the Rewriting of History, is coming for a special Independence Day weekend signing on Sunday the 5th of July from 2-4pm. 

 Book bio: Juxtaposing primary source documents (some of them published here for the first time) against Grant’s own pen and other sources, Professor Varney sheds new light on what really happened on some of the Civil War’s most important battlefields. He does so by focusing much of his work on Grant’s treatment of Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, a capable army commander whose reputation Grant (and others working with him) conspired to destroy. Grant’s memoirs contain not only misstatements but outright inventions to manipulate the historical record. But Grant’s injustices go much deeper. He submitted decidedly biased reports, falsified official documents, and even perjured himself before an army court of inquiry. There is also strong evidence that his often-discussed drinking problem affected the outcome of at least one battle.

Special guest author stopping by! We’re hosting a book talk and signing for Brandy Liên Worrall, author of What Doesn’t Kill Us, on the 25th of July from 3-5pm.

Book Bio: What Doesn’t Kill Us chronicles Brandy’s journey with an aggressive, rare breast cancer at the age of 31. The book reflects on the parallels between her experiences with cancer, and her American father’s and Vietnamese mother’s trauma and survival during and after the Vietnam War. The book crosses borders, from rural, Amish-country Pennsylvania, where Brandy grew up, to Vancouver, where she lived with her parents, husband, and two young children while enduring aggressive chemotherapy, radiation, and a double mastectomy. The book explores the enduring legacy of chemical warfare on three generations. That both of her parents had been heavily exposed to Agent Orange does not escape Brandy, who searches for reasons why she would have cancer despite not having a family history, as well as having had epilepsy as a child. She also wonders how this exposure has touched her own children. Brandy tells her story with razor-sharp humour and wit, leaving readers a lasting impression of the meaning of survival.

THE BUZZ / Fiction to take to the beach:

The Enchanted, by Rene Denfeld.

A journalist who transformed her experiences investigating death penalty cases into a powerful and moving novel about a stark world where evil and magic coincide. Reviewers write that she combines the empathy and lyricism of Alice Sebold with the dark, imaginative power of Stephen King. “The enchanted place” of the title is an ancient stone prison, viewed through the eyes of a death row inmate who finds escape in his books and in re-imagining life around him, weaving a fantastical story of the people he observes and the world he inhabits including visions of golden horses running beneath the prison. Violence becomes mystical.

The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins. In the psychological thriller genre. Twisty plot, unreliable narrators, mysterious possible murder. Set in London.

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker-Prize winning author of the Remains of the Day. Historical fantasy exploring the power of forgetting, or why we sometimes choose not to remember.

The Knock-off: A Novel, by Lucy Sykes.

An outrageously stylish, wickedly funny novel of fashion in the digital age, The Knockoff is the story of Imogen Tate, editor in chief of Glossy magazine, who finds her twentysomething former assistant Eve Morton plotting to knock Imogen off her pedestal, take over her job, and reduce the magazine, famous for its lavish 768-page September issue, into an app.

Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee. – With characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, twenty-years on, in mid-1950s America. * Releases in mid-July. We’re taking pre-orders, in-store, now!

NONFICTION that makes great summertime reading:

My Life in Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead.

A New Yorker writer revisits her favorite book as a young adult–George Eliot’s Middlemarch–and explores how feeling passionately attached to a special book can shape our lives when we re-reading it. The kind of reflective personal essay-writing, life-as-a-journey, that becomes especially resonant reading when you’re embarked on summer travels, or want to be an armchair traveler!

Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring, by Alexander Rose. Now the basis of a new original television series on AMC, called TURN. It will inspire you to take a summer road trip to Colonial Williamsburg, where the series is being filmed!

Best of… Children’s Books:

Lauren Castillo – Nana in the City 

A new artist-in-residence coming to Midtown Harrisburg! She is the latest award winning illustrator to be moving into Harrisburg! Nana in the City won a 2015 Caldecott Honor. We’re pleased to stock it in the store. 

Deborah Underwood (Author) Jonathan Bean (Illustrator) – Bad Bye, Good Bye

We’ve just received copies in-stock now of nationally acclaimed, Harrisburg-based Jonathan Bean’s latest release as an illustrator. Great story for any young child who is experiencing a move this summer!

 

Todd Dickinson of Aaron’s Books:

Funny Girl by Nick Hornby

Hornby enters the world of vintage British sitcoms in the warm, funny and honest novel about a young woman in 1960s London determined to be a comedian. She faces deep skepticism from agents, writes, and her own family, but she succeeds on her own terms. Hornby is the author of numerous bestsellers, including “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy”.

 H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald

MacDonald was dealing with deep and profound grief over the death of her father, and she decided to raise and train a goshawk – a very large and notoriously difficult bird of prey. She recounts her efforts to bond with the bird during a time when she was having difficulty interacting with people. She also weaves in her perspective of novelist T.H. White’s disastrous efforts to train a similar bird in the 1940s.

Otter in Space by Sam Garton

(Picture Book; Ages 3 to 6)

Otter–the adorable picture book character who made her debut in “I Am Otter”–is back for more adventure! This time, she and Teddy set off on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure in space. It’s a funny read-aloud that parents and kids will giggle through over and over. Encourages imagination and playfulness.

I recommended “Station Eleven” by Emily St John Mandel last year, but it just came out in paperback this week and deserves another mention. A National Book Award Finalist, Station Eleven is a breathtaking novel about loss, fame, love, and so much more. It begins with a famous actor in his last stage appearance, and moves to several characters whose life he had affected, including an ex-wife, his best friend, and a young woman travelling in a near-future post-apocalyptic world with a troupe of Shakespearean actors.

* On the top of my reading pile:

The Hurricane Sisters by Dorothea Benton Frank

Benton Frank sets her bestselling novels, full of love, loss, and family drama, in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. She is making her first visit to our region on June 30.

Emma: A Modern Retelling by Alexander McCall Smith

This retelling of Jane Austen’s classic in today’s world is bright, bold, and funny. Alexander McCall Smith gained his worldwide following through his bestselling “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series.

The Lobster Kings by Alexi Zentner

Hailed as a “powerhouse” novel, this story re-imagines the Shakespeare tragedy “King Lear” as set within an island’s lobster fishing community. The paperback edition has just been published.

Jon Walker recomends:

Stuff Matters, by Mark Miodownik

A short book tailor-made for beach reading written by a materials scientist that explores the historical development and  composition of the ordinary yet amazing materials that shape our modern-day, man-made word.  Take for example, plastic.  It was invented because in the late 19th century pool halls were all the rage in America and ivory pool balls were becoming too expensive to manufacture. A young chemist and inventor, John Wesley Hyatt seized the opportunity and began working on a material that would have the same weight, spin and “click” of ivory pool balls and came up with plastic.  Since this strange new synthetic material was petroleum-based the first generation of pool balls had a nasty tendency to literally explode on the table from time to time!

 Glass, too has an interesting history.  As we all know it’s made of sand and it takes intense heat to melt the stuff into glass.  You find little glass beads on deserts around the world which are made when lightening strikes the ground. That’s how mankind got the idea to try and make the stuff in the first place.  It took us several centuries to perfect the process. A thousand years ago Western Europe and the Orient were about tied in their ability to make clear glass, but the West soon pulled ahead. Our love of wine was the principle reason why. Once people discovered how much better their finest wines both tasted and looked in vessels made of clear glass versus wood, metal or porcelain, they tried really really hard to figure out how to make goblets, flutes and tumblers. The West’s superior glass technology led to important scientific and economic advantages. First, glass windows brought more light indoors making it easier for smart people to do scientific research.  More importantly, scientists in the West eventually learned to make glass lenses that led to the ability to build the microscopes and telescopes that exponentially increased our understanding of the material world.  Without glass, the West never would have known the Enlightenment Era.  

 Miodownik has similar stories to tell about concrete, paper, graphite and porcelain among other everyday materials. 

 Nature’s God, by Matthew Stewart

 A big 400-page summer book for serious readers … In his book Nature’s God, the Heretical Origins of the American Republic, Matthew Stewart makes a meticulously researched and highly scholarly argument that our Founding Fathers (principally Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Washington) were not orthodox Christians who believed in the God of Moses and Abraham but were instead Deists who believed in what they described as “Nature’s God.” Stewart makes his case largely by referring directly to the Founder’s writings and to the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers that inspired them – Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza among others. 

 You need to look no further than the first few lines of the most famous document ever penned at our nation’s founding to get an idea of what Stewart is talking about: The Declaration of Independence, written by Jefferson with important assists by Adams and Franklin.  

 [We] assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them …

 Here Jefferson is making a clear distinction between the revealed truths, or laws, of the traditional Christian God, and the truths of Nature’s God. The entitlements in Jefferson’s mind aren’t revealed to man from above and inscribed on some mythical tablet. They are instead laws of nature that can only be discovered by man from the ground up using his powers of reason.

 That famous Green Mountain Boy and lesser-known Founding Father, Ethan Allen, was quite a guy.  He was a true son of the Enlightenment, a Deist who railed lustily against the superstitions of Christian orthodoxy.  At a time when scientists were first learning how to successfully inoculate people from the deadly ravages of smallpox, many Christian town elders throughout the American Colonies forbade its practice on the grounds that using a manmade deterrent to a disease sent by God was blasphemous.  Not wanting to be subjected to unfavorable political fallout and possible arrest, guys like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson got themselves and their families inoculated in secret.  Not so Ethan Allen.  He got himself inoculated right on the town square, while boldly – and quite colorfully – cursing out the local powers-that-be.  His actions and outburst got him thrown into the stocks, but not before making his point.   Nature’s God, by Matthew Stewart is full of interesting anecdotes like this, plus important background about the enlightened philosophy that founded our nation. 

 All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

 I’ve read so many WWII novels and histories I was reluctant to give this one a go in spite of the rave reviews it received when it came out last year.  I’ve also just recently read The Book Thief (which was great) and Sarah’s Key (which was okay) and on the surface All the Light We Cannot See sounded really similar to these novels, so I was doubly reluctant to pick it up.  But boy, I’m glad I did! 

 This is not classic literature.  It won’t challenge your English Major Chops, nor add to your understanding about human nature or the Second World War in any big way.  But it is a book that totally draws you in with captivating main characters. There’s Marie-Laure, a blind French girl who is as strong as steel in spite of being young and sweet and vulnerable, and Werner, a nice German boy, and a radio genius who gets swept up by the monstrous Nazi machine but never turns into a monster. You will love these kids and root for them. 

 The plot moves forward on two parallel fronts, following the two protagonists. Marie-Laure lives in Paris with her father, a locksmith for the Museum of Natural History who, initially unbeknownst to Marie-Laure, is given the dangerous task of smuggling out a priceless museum piece – a blue diamond – that Nazi treasure-hunters are determined to locate. As the war heats up, Marie and her father move in with their Uncle Etienne who lives in the remote seacoast city of St. Malo where they join the French resistance and begin transmitting secret radio messages to the Allies from a radio hidden in the attic.

 Werner is brought up in an orphanage with his younger sister, Jutta, in a grimy mining town in Germany.  Thanks to his precocious ability to understand all aspects of radio technology, he gets noticed by the Nazi’s and is sent to a nightmarish training school for exceptionally bright up-and-coming Nazi thugs.  During the war he proves himself to be adept at finding, and invariably killing resistance-fighters like Marie-Laure.

 From page one you know that these two are destined to cross paths before the war is over.  While it’s easy to surmise how and when their paths will collide, you never know until the end what will happen when they do eventually meet.  Will the collision be tragic, happy or something in between?  These are the simple questions that keep you reading.

 All the Light We Cannot See is as suspenseful as a high-wire spy novel, but way more down to earth. It is as quick moving and entertaining as an action-packed thriller like Raider’s of the Lost Ark, but without the cartoon characters and with much more to think about. It is sweet, but never sentimental, a book with both brains and a lot of heart.  

 The Contrast, a play by Royall Tyler 

 This play that premiered in 1787 is a true American gem. Or should I say, an ALL-AMERICAN gem. It’s not only an entertaining satire with themes about culture, class and young love that ring true yet today, it is a work of great historical significance and well worth the hour or so it takes to read.

 One of the reasons why the play has such historical importance is that it is the very first play written by an American that was also produced and staged by a professional American production company.  Not only was it a tremendous commercial success in its time, it was the play that quite literally brought the theatrical arts to America.  Thanks to its tremendous popularity – including an enthusiastic review by President George Washington himself – the uptight Puritans who still dominated the New England political establishment – finally relented and scrapped the Blue Laws that had made theatrical entertainments illegal in their states for so long. 

It’s also historically important for giving us the very first “Yankee” ever depicted as a character in literature.  He’s Jonathan, the archetypal American “country bumpkin” and servant of Colonel Manly, one of the play’s main protagonists. Jonathan is a total riot of homespun innocence and wisdom and he flat steals the show.  He supplies most of the play’s comedy while at the same time embodying the All-American ideals so familiar to us yet today: common sense, unpretentiousness and honest industry.

You can Google The Contrast and download and print it for FREE!!

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving

Here’s another all-American classic than can be downloaded for free.  Thanks to the Disney cartoon, we’re all at least vaguely familiar with this endearing and enduring story.  It’s worth going back and reading the original version. It’s such a short, breezy book you can finish it on the beach before it’s time to re-apply your sunscreen!  It’s a fun ghost story and a sweet love story with two guys — the alpha Brom Bones and the underdog hero Ichabod Crane — competing for the lovely Katrina Van Tassel.   It’s also a fascinating splice of ordinary American life at a time in our history (the early 1800’s) when we were going through great changes, feeling restless and on the move.  

 Let Me be Frank With You, by Richard Ford

I’ve just started this book and won’t be able to review it until we go on the air.  It’s a follow-up to Richard Ford’s famous and award winning novels featuring Frank Bascombe, the crusty and highly amusing old cuss with an irreverent take on our current world.  So far, I love it!