A Crazy, Mixed-Up List of Books and Movies Related to Chocolate to Celebrate the Chocolate Tasting and Valentine’s Day

--by Hanje Richards

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Come celebrate the "19th Annual Chocolate Tasting" (Saturday, February 13, 6-9pm) with the Copper Queen Library, and get ready for Valentine’s Day (Sunday, February 14) -- make something chocolate out of a wonderful chocolate cookbook, enjoy a movie with a chocolate theme, or curl up with a murder mystery or a novel that has chocolate as a main character!

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And... check back in a day or two for a list of Young Adult and Juvenile titles featuring… you guessed it… CHOCOLATE!

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Art of Chocolate: Techniques and Recipes For Simply Spectacular Desserts and Confections (by Elaine Gonzalez and Frank Frankeny) - This is not just a book of masterful recipes, tips, techniques, and meticulously detailed, easy-to-follow instructions. It is an extravagant paean to decadent desserts. Filled with luscious creations and lavish artistry --Chocolate Swan Truffles, Enchanted Forest Torte -- this definitive guide to working with chocolate is unusual because it is written with beginners in mind.

A cooking teacher with decades of experience, Elaine Gonzalez has devised innovative techniques to put the art of working with chocolate within everyone's reach. After mastering a few basics, any cook can create shimmering cakes, seductive truffles, and amazing chocolate sculptures. With The Art of Chocolate, even novices will soon roll, curl, twist, coax, and nudge chocolate to dizzying heights of fantasy.

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Chocolat (directed by Lasse Hallström) - Based n the novel by Joanne Harris and nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress (Juliette Binoche), and Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench), Chocolat is a beautiful and captivating comedy.

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Nobody could have imagined the impact the the striking Vianne (Binoche) would make when she arrived in a tranquil, old-fashioned French town. In her very unusual chocolate shop, Vianne begins to create mouth-watering confections that almost magically inspire the straitlaced villagers to abandon themselves to temptation and happiness! But it is not until another stranger, the handsome Roux (Johnny Depp), arrives in town that Vianne is finally able to recognize her own desires...

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Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light (by Mort Rosenblum) - Chocolate, long considered the "elixir of the gods," is just about everyone's drug of choice. The preferred gift of Valentine's Day, it triggers the same brain responses as falling in love. And it's better for you than red wine. In this scintillating narrative, Mort Rosenblum delves into the mysteries of cacao: its history, its legends and lore, the processes that make chocolate, and, along the way, the dark side of the chocolate trade.

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Chocolate American Style (by Lora Brady) - In this collection of sweet treats both plain and fancy, Lora Brody builds an irresistible case for eating chocolate morning, noon, and night. In chapters entitled "The Candy Store," "Comfort Me with Chocolate," "Chocolate for Breakfast," "Isn’t It Romantic?" and more, she presents the stuff of which a chocolate lover's dreams are made. Start the day with Chocolate Chip Pancakes with Chocolate Butter or Chocolate Monkey Bread, perk up a lunch box with homemade Whoopie Pies or Chocolate Caramel Cheesecake Brownies, or take a trip down memory lane with Tunnel of Fudge Cake and real Boston Cream Pie. Set a festive mood with White Chocolate Heath Bar Cheesecake or Chocolate Raspberry Torte.

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There's even a section of fun-to-make chocolate favorites that are perfect for kids. Whether the occasion is a formal celebration requiring a showstopper, a casual meal with family, or simply an after-school snack, there is a chocolate indulgence to make the moment that much sweeter.

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Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme (by Pierre Herme) - Here you will find the simplest chocolate truffle -- Black-on-Black Truffles, bite-size balls of bittersweet ganache tossed in dark cocoa -- as well as the luxuriously soft and rich Suzy's Cake, which is spectacularly delicious yet quite simple to make. Chic desserts, such as the Triple Crème-individual ramekins layered with espresso crème brûlée, rich chocolate cream, and pure unsweetened whipped cream-or a cup of French-style hot chocolate, or a gâteau de résistance, such as Plaisir Sucré, will be the triumphant end to any meal or the centerpiece for any celebration. Through these more than seventy-five recipes, you will have the many pleasures of tasting chocolate in all its states-hot and cold, creamy and crunchy, smooth and custardy, thick and chewy, bittersweet and sweet, dark, milk, and white.

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Whether you are an expert in the dessert kitchen or a beginner with a desire for the delicious, this collection will introduce you to the myriad delights of Pierre Hermé's desserts, his unusual juxtapositions of ingredients, his conjurer's touch with textures, and his always perfect pitch when it comes to sweetness, tartness, and chocolatey-ness.

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Finally, there are the indispensable Base Recipes and a Dictionary of Terms, Techniques, Equipment, and Ingredients. Together they form a complete course in chocolate dessert artistry. Each recipe has been written with the American kitchen in mind, so that everyone with a passion for the richness of chocolate desserts can now enjoy Pierre Hermé's sublime creations at home.

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Chocolate For a Woman’s Soul: 77 Stories to Feed Your Spirit and Warm Your Heart (by Kay Allenbaugh) - 77 true stories that celebrate life and capture the essence of what it means to be a woman. Like chocolate, these stories soothe, satisfy, and delight -- better yet, they're good for you! Written by and for women, here are heartfelt insights on commitment, compassion, work, marriage, friendship, motherhood, love, courage, spirituality, passion, and dozens of other topics.

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Contributors share their most personal experiences -- funny, poignant, powerful, and uplifting -- as they inspire you to jump-start your own life, discover your talents and vocations, overcome old fears, find love, and let your dreams take flight. Like a box of chocolates, this book can be enjoyed in one sitting, or you can pick out treats at random and savor them one at a time. Whether you want a good laugh or need a good cry, the perfect "chocolate story" is right here, waiting for you!

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Death by Chocolate: A Savannah Reid Mystery (by G.A. McKevett) - Business has been a little slow at the Moonlight Magnolia Detective Agency, but full-figured P. I. Savannah Reid doesn't have time to drown her sorrows in a box of double-chocolate truffles. She's too busy watching the Gourmet Network -- and drooling over the sinfully scrumptious confections that Lady Eleanor ("The Queen of Chocolate") whips up on-air. But someone isn't sweet on the Queen's charming chatter -- and wants her to hang up her oh-so-quaint apron -- for good...

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Diabetic Chocolate Cookbook (by Mary Jane Finsand) - "Appetizing recipes for... using chocolate... A wonderful assortment." (Booklist) "For the chocolate lover... offers an alternative (sugar-free) way of cooking up the sweetest of the sweets." (Country Almanac) Includes the most recent Exchange Lists of the American Diabetes Association.

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Dying for Chocolate (by Diane Mott Davidson) - Meet Goldy Bear: a bright, opinionated, wildly inventive caterer whose personal life has become a recipe for disaster. She's got an abusive ex-husband who's into making tasteless threats, a rash of mounting bills that are taking a huge bite out of her budget, and two enticing men knocking on her door.

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Now determined to take control of her life, Goldy moves her business and her son to ritzy Aspen Meadow Country Club, where she accepts a job as a live-in cook. But just as she's beginning to think she's got it made -- catering decadent dinners and posh society picnics and enjoying the favors of Philip Miller, a handsome local shrink, and Tom Shulz, her more-than-friendly neighborhood cop -- the dishy doctor inexplicably drives his BMW into an oncoming bus.

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Convinced that Philip's bizarre death was no accident, Goldy decides to do a little investigating of her own. But sifting through the unpalatable secrets of the dead doc's life will toss her into a case seasoned with unexpected danger and even more unexpected revelations -- the kind that could get a caterer and the son she loves... killed.

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Hot Chocolate For the Mystical Soul: 101 True Stories of Angels, Miracles and Healings (by Arielle Ford) - This enchanting book is perfect for those who love magic and mystery, and who know that an unseen, loving presence is watching over us. This is an inspiring collection of mystical experiences involving angels, miracles, near-death experiences, divine interventions, animal experiences, personal transformations, and miraculous healings. The storytellers come from all walks of life -- doctors, lawyers, actors, musicians, mailmen, teachers, and others -- and include familiar figures, such as Neal Donald Walsch, Judith Orloff, M.D., and Joan Borysenko. With such a wonderful variety of enlightening stories, readers will find many that will touch them personally.

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Like Water For Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, With Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies (by Laura Esquivel; film directed by Alfonso Arau) - Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit.

Friday Fiction: Pete Dexter

--by Hanje Richards

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Pete Dexter began his writing career working for The Palm Beach Post, but quit in 1972 because the paper’s owners forced the editorial page editor to endorse Richard Nixon over George McGovern.
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Later, he worked as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, the Sacramento Bee, and syndicated to many newspapers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
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Dexter began writing fiction after a life-changing incident in 1981, in which thirty drunk Philadelphians, armed with baseball bats, beat him severely because they were upset by a column he had written about a drug-deal-gone-wrong murder. As a result of this beating, Dexter was hospitalized with several injuries, including a broken back, pelvic bone, brain damage, and dental devastation.
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Deadwood - Legendary gunman Wild Bill Hickcock and his friend Charlie Utter have come to the Black Hills town of Deadwood fresh from Cheyenne, fleeing an ungrateful populace. Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played-out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants, and various other entrepreneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse whore man bent on revenge, and a besotted Calamity Jane. Fueled by liquor, sex, and violence, this is the real Wild West, unlike anything portrayed in the dime novels that first told its story.
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Paperboy - The sun was rising over Moat County, Florida, when Sheriff Thurmond Call was found on the highway, gutted like an alligator. A local redneck was tried, sentenced, and set to fry.
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Then Ward James, hotshot investigative reporter for the Miami Times, returns to his rural hometown with a death row femme fatale who promises him the story of the decade. She's armed with explosive evidence, aiming to free -- and meet -- her convicted "fiancé."
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With Ward's disillusioned younger brother Jack as their driver, they barrel down Florida's back roads and seamy places in search of "The Story," racing flat out into a shocking head-on collision between character and fate as truth takes a back seat to headline news...
(1996 Literary Award. PEN Center USA)
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Paris Trout - A respected white citizen of Cotton Point, Georgia, Paris Trout is a shopkeeper, a money-lender, and a murderer of blacks. And his friends, family, and foes do not realize the danger they face in a man who simply will not see his own guilt.
(1988 National Book Award for Fiction)
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Spooner - Warren Spooner was born after a prolonged delivery in a makeshift delivery room in a doctor's office in Milledgeville, Georgia, on the first Saturday of December, 1956. His father died shortly afterward, long before Spooner had even a memory of his face, and was replaced eventually by a once-brilliant young naval officer, Calmer Ottosson, recently court-martialed out of service. This is the story of the lifelong tie between the two men, poles apart, of Spooner's troubled childhood, troubled adolescence, violent and troubled adulthood -- and Calmer Ottosson's inexhaustible patience, undertaking a life-long struggle to salvage his stepson, a man he will never understand.
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Train - Train is a 18-year-old black caddy at an exclusive L.A. country club. He is a golf prodigy, but the year is 1953 and there is no such thing as a black golf prodigy. Nevertheless, Train draws the interest of Miller Packard, a gambler whose smiling, distracted air earned him the nickname “the Mile Away Man.” Packard’s easy manner hides a proclivity for violence, and he remains an enigma to Train even months later when they are winning high stakes matches against hustlers throughout the country. Packard is also drawn to Norah Still, a beautiful woman scarred in a hideous crime, a woman who finds Packard’s tendency toward violence both alluring and frightening. In the ensuing triangular relationship, kindness is never far from cruelty.

J.D. Salinger (January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010)

--by Hanje Richards

How does an author who wrote (arguably) his best work two years before I was born, and who never had anything published after I was in 3rd grade, still keep me fascinated, interested, and saddened by his death last week at age 91?

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Yes, his reclusiveness and his absence of published work after the mid '60s were intriguing. His relationships and marriages were interesting. How he lived was cause for great speculation, but I don’t think that any of that would have occurred, had he not been an amazing writer to begin with.

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He has been credited with creating the "Young Adult" genre, and there are certainly plenty of us who read Catcher in the Rye and believed Holden Caulfield was a spokesman for our generation (and that went on literally for generations!)

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The Copper Queen Library's collections contain his three best-known works:

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Catcher in the Rye - Published in 1951, this influential and widely acclaimed story details the two days in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield after he has been expelled from prep school. Confused and disillusioned, he searches for truth and rails against the "phoniness" of the adult world. He ends up exhausted and emotionally ill, in a psychiatrist's office. After he recovers from his breakdown, Holden relates his experiences to the reader.

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Franny and Zooey - This volume contains two interrelated stories published in book form in 1961. The stories, originally published in The New Yorker magazine, concern Franny and Zooey Glass, two members of the family that was the subject of most of Salinger's short fiction. In the first story, Franny is an intellectually precocious late adolescent who tries to attain spiritual purification by obsessively reiterating the "Jesus prayer" as an antidote to the perceived superficiality and corruptness of life. She subsequently suffers a nervous breakdown.

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In the second story, her next older brother, Zooey, attempts to heal Franny by pointing out that her constant repetition of the "Jesus prayer" is as self-involved and egotistical as the egotism against which she rails.

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Nine Stories - In the J.D. Salinger benchmark "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Seymour Glass floats his beachmate Sybil on a raft and tells her about these creatures' tragic flaw: though they seem normal, if one swims into a hole filled with bananas, it will overeat until it's too fat to escape. Meanwhile, Seymour's wife, Muriel, is back at their Florida hotel, assuring her mother not to worry -- Seymour hasn't lost control. Mention of a book he sent her from Germany and several references to his psychiatrist lead the reader to believe that World War II has undone him.

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The war hangs over these wry stories of loss and occasionally unsuppressed rage. Salinger's children are fragile, odd, hypersmart, whereas his grownups seem beaten down by circumstances -- some neurasthenic, others deeply unsympathetic.

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There has doubtless been far more written about this reclusive author than he ever had published. The Copper Queen Library owns some biographies and memoirs that tell us about parts of his intriguing life.

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These can be found in the library's "Biography" section:

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At Home In The World: A Memoir (Joyce Maynard) - In the spring of 1972, Joyce Maynard, a freshman at Yale, published a cover story in The New York Times Magazine about life in the sixties. Among the many letters of praise, offers for writing assignments, and requests for interviews was a one-page letter from the famously reclusive author J.D. Salinger.

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A crucial turning point in Joyce Maynard's life occurred when her own daughter turned eighteen -- the age Maynard was when Salinger first approached her. Breaking a twenty-five year silence, Joyce Maynard addresses her relationship with Salinger for the first time, as well as the complicated, troubled and yet creative nature of her youth and family. She vividly describes the details of the times and her life with the finesse of a natural storyteller.

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Dream Catcher: A Memoir (Margaret Ann Salinger) - In her much-anticipated memoir, Margaret A. Salinger writes about life with her famously reclusive father, offering a rare look into the man and the myth, what it is like to be his daughter, and the effect of such a charismatic figure on the girls and women closest to him.

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With generosity and insight, Ms. Salinger has written a book that is eloquent, spellbinding, and wise, yet which at the same time retains the intimacy of a novel. Her story chronicles an almost cult-like environment of extreme isolation and early neglect interwoven with times of laughter, joy, and dazzling beauty.

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Ms. Salinger compassionately explores the complex dynamics of family relationships. Her story is one that seeks to come to terms with the dark parts of her life that, quite literally, nearly killed her, and to pass on a life-affirming heritage to her own child.

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The story of being a Salinger is unique; the story of being a daughter is universal. This book appeals to anyone, J.D. Salinger fan or no, who has ever had to struggle to sort out who she really is from whom her parents dreamed she might be.

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In Search of J.D. Salinger (Ian Hamilton) - When Ian Hamilton set out in 1983 to write a biography of Salinger, he knew that there would be difficulties. Just how great those difficulties would be, what implacable hostility he would meet from Salinger, and what astonishing finds he would stumble upon, he could not have guessed.

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This text is the story of that quest, a literary detective story which ended in court as Hamilton forced the writer out of his reclusive hideaway to challenge his discoveries in a bitter and protracted lawsuit in which Salinger sought to restrict the use Hamilton could make of his letters.

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If these titles, or other materials you are interested in borrowing from The Copper Queen Library are checked out, you can put them on hold and you will be notified when they are available again.

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Check it out!

Spotlight On Biography: Visual Artists

--by Hanje Richards
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Every time I browse the Copper Queen Library's "Biography" section, I find all sorts of people I want to learn more about. This time, I was looking specifically for visual artists, and I found some great books. The following list is just sample. In addition to these titles, you'll also find books about Aubrey Beardsley, Henri Matisse, Grandma Moses, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo.
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It is a fascinating section of the library, and you might be surprised by what you find!
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Marc Chagall
Chagall : A Biography (Jackie Wullschlager) - Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive “potato-colored” tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Léger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where “one either died or came out famous.” Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography that he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories..
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His subject, more often than not, was the shtetl life of his childhood -- the wooden huts and synagogues, the goatherds, rabbis, and violinists — the whole lost world of Eastern European Jewry.
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Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who peopled it: Chagall’s passionate, energetic mother, Feiga-Ita; his eccentric fellow painter and teacher, Bakst; his clever, intense first wife, Bella; their glamorous daughter, Ida; his tough-minded final companion and wife, Vava; and the colorful, tragic array of artist, actor, and writer friends who perished under the Stalinist regime.
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Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall’s complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. Wullschlager provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall’s work, and at the same time she brings Chagall the man fully to life —ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth.
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Judy Chicago
Beyond The Flower : The Autobiography Of A Feminist Artist (Judy Chicago) - Twenty years after the publication of her autobiography, Through the Flower, the renowned artist and feminist continues the story of her life and takes a provocative look at late twentieth-century American culture and the allocation of our resources..
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Summing up her career, she evokes the collaborative energies that went into such projects as The Dinner Party, a multimedia, symbolic history of women, and Birth Project, an installation that portrays the childbirth experience as a heroic struggle. She and her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, rediscovered their Jewish roots in working on Holocaust Project, a touring exhibition that uses the Nazi genocide as a prism to probe the global structure of abusive power and powerlessness.
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Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin: A Biography (David Sweetman) - Explores the often contradictory history of artist Paul Gauguin, considering the scandalous rumors that surrounded him, the inspirations for his work, the influences of his contemporaries, and his painful death.
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As he patiently reconstructs the intricate puzzle of Gauguin's multifaceted life, David Sweetman dismantles the cherished legend about the artist's transformation from Euro-businessman to Tahitian noble savage, an alluring myth attributable in great part to Gauguin himself. Sweetman also emphasizes the importance of Gauguin's early childhood, which was spent in Peru under the protection of his great-uncle, the last Spanish viceroy.
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It was this interlude, Sweetman convincingly argues, that shaped Gauguin's sense of self, non-European aesthetics, and obsession with regaining a lost paradise. Another curious aspect of Gauguin's life was his relationships with unconventional women, from his famous socialist-feminist grandmother to his resilient mother and mannish wife.
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Writings of a Savage (Paul Gauguin) - Autobiography. Familiarity with Gauguin the writer is essential for a complete understanding of the artist. The Writings of a Savage collects the very best of his letters, articles, books, and journals, many of which are unavailable elsewhere. In brilliantly lucid discussions of life and art, Gauguin paints a triumphant self-portrait of a volcanic artist and the tormented man within.
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Robert Mapplethorpe
Mapplethorpe: A Biography (Patricia Morrisroe) - With Robert Mapplethorpe's full endorsement and encouragement, Morrisroe interviewed more than 300 friends, lovers, family members, and critics to form this definitive biography of America's most censored and celebrated photographer and discover how a middle-class Catholic boy from Queens became one of the world's most controversial artists.
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Morrisroe, who met Mapplethorpe at the pinnacle of his fame and the beginning of his rapid descent toward death from AIDS, provides as cogent an explanation as possible in an excellent biography notable for its dramatic structure and candor. She tracks Mapplethorpe's brief and excessive life from his awkward boyhood, through his miasmic college and ROTC years, to his abrupt sexual and artistic liberation when he discovered drugs and gay S & M bars, habits in which he overindulged right up to his death at age 43. Mapplethorpe's story is tied inextricably to the life story of his closest friend, sometime lover, and most important muse, Patti Smith, who Morrisroe also portrays with skill and ardor.
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Georgia O’Keeffe
Portrait Of An Artist: A Biography Of Georgia O'Keeffe (Laurie Lisle) - Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the most original painters America has ever produced, left behind a remarkable legacy when she died at the age of ninety-eight. Her vivid visual vocabulary -- sensuous flowers, bleached bones against red sky and earth -- had a stunning, profound, and lasting influence on American art in this century.

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O'Keeffe's personal mystique is as intriguing and enduring as her bold, brilliant canvases. Here is the first full account of her exceptional life -- from her girlhood and early days as a controversial art teacher... to her discovery by the pioneering photographer of the New York avant-garde, Alfred Stieglitz... to her seclusion in the New Mexico desert, where she lived until her death.
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And here is the story of a great romance -- between the extraordinary painter and her much older mentor, lover, and husband, Alfred Stieglitz. ..

Renowned for her fierce independence, iron determination, and unique artistic vision, Georgia O'Keeffe is a twentieth-century legend. Her dazzling career spans virtually the entire history modern art in America.
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Georgia O'Keeffe, 1887-1986: Flowers In The Desert (Britta Benke) - If you enjoy the works of Georgia O'Keeffe, this is a book you'll want to savor. The reproductions of her paintings are marvelously printed, and the accompanying essays on O'Keeffe's life and work are erudite and lucid.
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There are also pictures of O'Keeffe at various stages of her life and career, ranging from her time as a young student at the University of Virginia, into her weathered, mature age, the last one featuring her at 90 at Ghost Ranch in the desert.
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N.C. Wyeth
N.C. Wyeth: A Biography (David Michaelis) - N.C. Wyeth was hailed as the greatest American illustrator of his day. For forty-three years, starting in 1902, he painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and murals, as well as illustrations for a long shelf of world literature. Yet he proclaimed "the uselessness of clinging to illustration and hoping to make it a great art." He judged himself a failure, believing that illustration was of no importance.
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A family saga that begins and ends with the accidental deaths of small boys, a gothic tale that shows how N.C., while learning to live a safe and familiar domestic life, endangered himself and his children by concealing part of the family legacy--depression, suicide, incest.
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According to David Michaelis, Wyeth’s mother's emotional instability and his father's strictness set the stage for his profoundly divided personality. He found in fatherhood the foremost expression of his character -- trying to create in the Wyeth homestead his dream of childhood at its most enchanting. He held his children enthralled throughout their adult lives. He persuaded his inventor son, Nat, to live at home, shepherded his daughter Ann's career as a composer, and taught his three other children -- Henriette, Carolyn, and Andrew (N.C. was Andrew's only teacher) -- to paint.

I Just Read…Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes

--by Hanje Richards

Microtrends, by Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zafesne, is a fascinating look at how relatively small patterns of behavior are wielding great influence on business, politics, and our personal lives. Penn’s thesis is that it only takes one percent of the public -- three million people -- to launch a business or a social movement.

Mark Penn is the man who identified “Soccer Moms” as a crucial constituency in President Clinton’s reelection campaign. Using his polling expertise, he has identified over 70 "microtrends" that have the potential to rock the world, or at least a significant portion of it.

Some of the trends Penn identifies and discusses are: Commuter Couples, Working Retired, Protestant Hispanics, Southpaws Unbound, Video Game Grown-Ups, Shy Millionaires, and Vegan Children. Penn examines the actual and potential possibilities that are created by each of these microtrends.

"Stuffed with smart, offbeat tidbits....Penn and his co-author, E. Kinney Zalesne, deserve credit for leavening their facts and figures with humor and pop-culture asides." -- Bloomberg

Friday Fiction: Amy Tan

--by Hanje Richards

I became aware of Amy Tan about 20 years ago when I read her first novel The Joy Luck Club. I became reacquainted with her work when I read more recent novels The Bonesetter’s Daughter and Saving Fish from Drowning. I have not yet read, but look forward to reading, her memoir/autobiography The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. Tan weaves beautiful stories which include elements of what, for lack of a better term, I will call Chinese-American Magical Realism.

Bonesetter’s Daughter - Ruth Young and her widowed mother, LuLing, have always had a tumultuous relationship. Now, before she succumbs to forgetfulness, LuLing gives Ruth some of her writings, which reveal a side of LuLing that Ruth has never known.

In a remote mountain village where ghosts and tradition rule, LuLing grows up in the care of her mute Precious Auntie as the family endures a curse laid upon a relative known as the Bonesetter. When headstrong LuLing rejects the marriage proposal of the coffinmaker, a shocking series of events are set in motion — all of which lead back to Ruth and LuLing in modern San Francisco. The truth that Ruth learns from her mother’s past will forever change her perception of family, love, and forgiveness.

Hundred Secret Senses - This is an exultant novel about China and America, love and loyalty, the identities we invent and the true selves we discover along the way. Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese, but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's sarcasm, and sees the dead with her "yin eyes."

Even as Olivia details the particulars of her decades-long grudge against her sister (who, among other things, is a source of infuriatingly good advice), Kwan Li is telling her own story, one that sweeps us into the splendor, squalor, and violence of Manchu China. And out of the friction between her narrators, Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past — sweetly, sadly, and hilariously -- with searing and vivid prose.

Joy Luck Club - A stunning literary achievement, The Joy Luck Club explores the tender and tenacious bond between four daughters and their mothers. The daughters know one side of their mothers, but they don't know about their earlier never-spoken-of lives in China. The mothers want love and obedience from their daughters, but they don't know the gifts that the daughters keep to themselves. Heartwarming and bittersweet, this is a novel for mothers, daughters, and those who love them.

Kitchen God’s Wife - Focusing on the life of one woman, this book spans the years from pre-Revolutionary China to present day America. It covers the themes of cultural differences, the problems of exile, the generation gap and, above all, the special relationship between mothers and daughters. With the same narrative skills and evocative powers that made her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, a national bestseller, Tan now tells the story of Winnie Louie, an aging Chinese woman unfolding a life's worth of secrets to her suspicious, Americanized daughter.

Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings - Amy Tan has touched millions of readers with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world’s best-loved novelists. Whether recalling arguments with her mother in suburban California or introducing us to the ghosts that inhabit her computer, The Opposite of Fate offers vivid portraits of choices, attitudes, charms, and luck in action — a refreshing antidote to the world-weariness and uncertainties we all face today.

Saving Fish From Drowning - San Francisco art patron Bibi Chen has planned a journey of the senses along the famed Burma Road for eleven lucky friends. But after her mysterious death, Bibi watches aghast from her ghostly perch as the travelers veer off her itinerary and embark on a trail paved with cultural gaffes and tribal curses, Buddhist illusions and romantic desires. On Christmas morning, the tourists cruise across a misty lake and disappear.

With picaresque characters and mesmerizing imagery, Saving Fish from Drowning gives us a voice as idiosyncratic, sharp, and affectionate as the mothers of The Joy Luck Club. Bibi is the observant eye of human nature — the witness of good intentions and bad outcomes, of desperate souls and those who wish to save them. In the end, Tan takes her readers to that place in their own heart where hope is found.

Visual Art for Young People: "ArtVenture"

--by Hanje Richards

While researching artists’ biographies for a blog post, I came across this wonderful series of art books, geared toward 9-12 year olds, called the ArtVenture Series.

Inspired by the method used in galleries and museums in talking about art with children, readers are invited to look at the works and think about what the artists have done and why. Details in the works are pointed out and questions are posed for readers to think about. Outline information about the artists and the works (including a graphic representation of the works' relative sizes) are provided at the back of the book. A glossary and index are included.

Great for teachers, home schoolers, kids who are curious about all sorts of things, including art, and even for adults!

ArtVenture Series (all shelved in Juvenile Non-Fiction)

Action: Movement in Art - Artists use many different tricks and techniques to capture movement in their paintings or sculptures. This wonderfully attractive book explores these by looking at a wide variety of art, including works by Seurat, Delacroix, van Gogh, Monet, Hokusai, Turner, Pollock, Escher, Vasarely, Delauney, and Munch.

Families: Relationships in Art - In making images of families, artists choose to depict them in particular colors, settings, groups, and poses to show something special about their relationships. This title explores these choices by looking at a wide variety of art, including works by Rubens, David Hockney, Henry Moore, Stanley Spencer, Cranach the Elder, Mary Cassatt, Renoir, Peale, Gaugin, Matisse, Munch, Ford Maddox Brown, and Jan Steen.

Look At Me: Self-Portraits - Artists create self-portraits to show themselves as they want to be seen. Self-Portraits explores the various ways they have done this by looking at a wide variety of art, including works by Norman Rockwell, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Hogarth, Stanley Spencer, Rosalba Carriera, Durer, Frida Kahlo, Rousseau, Chagall, Peter Blake, Mignard, Andy Warhol, Wanda Wulz, and Paolozzi.

Sculpture: Three Dimensions in Art - Sculptors use all sorts of materials, such as clay, plaster, wood, metals, and plastics to create three-dimensional art. Author Thompson explores sculpture by looking at works by George Segal, Henry Moore, Bernini, Barbara Hepworth, Niki de Saint Phalle, Claes Oldenburg, Medardo Rosso, Deborah Butterfield, and Andy Goldsworthy.

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Sense of Place: Landscapes - Artists have pictured landscapes all over the world, at various times of day, in all weathers, and in every season. This book explores what they have seen, thought, and felt in landscapes by looking at works by O'Keeffe, Magritte, Rubens, Martin, Hobbema, Altdorfer, Delauney, David Hockney, Hokusai, Turner, Seurat, van Gogh, Homer, Nash, Stella, and Crali.

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Telling Tales: Stories in Art - Artists who want to tell a story in their works have to solve a problem: how to get the storyline across through still images. Thompson illustrates how they have done this by looking at a wide variety of works by Giordano, Gentileschi, Martineau, Wright of Derby, Grant Wood, Dorothea Lange, Ousmane Sow, and Rousseau.

Sound interesting? Check it out!

Friday Fiction: J.G. Ballard’s Empire

--by Hanje Richards & Peg White

James Graham Ballard (November 15, 1930 – April 19, 2009) was an English novelist and short story writer. He was a prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction, but his best-known books are the controversial Crash (1973) and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984). The latter was based on his boyhood in Shanghai, where he was born in the International Settlement, and on his internment by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II.

Both novels were adapted into films, Crash by David Cronenberg and Empire of the Sun by Steven Spielberg. Both are available in the Copper Queen Library's film collection.

The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian," defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”

With the exception of his autobiographical novels, Ballard most commonly wrote in the post-apocalyptic dystopian genre. His most celebrated novel in this regard is Crash, in which cars symbolize the mechanization of the world and man's capacity to destroy himself with the technology he creates.

In addition to his novels, Ballard made extensive use of the short story form. Many of his earliest published works in the 1950s and 1960s were short stories.

Particularly revered among Ballard's admirers is his short story collection Vermilion Sands, set in a desert resort town inhabited by forgotten starlets, insane heirs, very eccentric artists, and the merchants and bizarre servants who provide for them. Each story features peculiarly exotic technology -- poetry-composing computers, orchids with operatic voices and egos to match, phototropic self-painting canvasses, etc. -- and in his introduction to Vermilion Sands, Ballard cites this as his favorite collection.

Ballard's fiction is literary, sophisticated, and profoundly concerned with creating cognitive and aesthetic dissonance in his readers. Because of his tendency to upset readers to enlighten them, Ballard does not enjoy a strong mass market following, but he is recognized by critics as one of Britain's most prominent writers.

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[With thanks and acknowledgement to Wikipedia; for a more in-depth treatment, consult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard]

Here is a sampling of the library's Ballard holdings:

Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard - With 98 pulse-quickening stories, this volume helps restore the very art form that Ballard feared was comatose. Ballard’s inimitable style was already present in his early stories, most of them published in science fiction magazines. These stories are surreal, richly atmospheric, and splendidly elliptical, featuring an assortment of psychotropic houses, time-traveling assassins, and cities without clocks.

Over the next fifty years, his fierce imaginative energy propelled him to explore new topics, including the dehumanization of technology, the brutality of the corporation, and nuclear Armageddon. Depicting the human soul as “being enervated and corrupted by the modern world” (New York Times), Ballard began to examine themes like overpopulation, as in “Billenium,” a claustrophobic imagining of a world of 20 billion people crammed into four-square-meter rooms, or the false realities of modern media -- as in the classic “Why I Want to F[***] Ronald Reagan,” a faux-psychological study of the sexual and violent reactions elicited by viewing Reagan’s face on television, in which Ballard predicted the unholy fusion of pop culture and sound-bite politics thirteen years before Reagan became president. Stories from Vermilion Sands are included in this collection.

Day of Creation - At Port-la-Nouvelle, on the parched terrain of central Africa, Dr. Mallory watches his clinic fail and dreams of discovering a third Nile that will make the Sahara bloom. When there is a trickle on the local airstrip, and soon a river, the obsessed Mallory claims it as his own creation and sets out for the river’s source.
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Empire of the Sun - The classic, award-winning novel, made famous by Steven Spielberg's film, tells of a young boy's struggle to survive World War II in China.

1941 Shanghai is a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches in vain for his parents. Imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp, he is witness to the fierce white flash of Nagasaki as the bomb bellows the end of the war -- and the dawn of a blighted world.

Ballard's enduring novel of war and deprivation, internment camps and death marches, and starvation and survival is an honest coming-of-age tale set in a world thrown utterly out of joint.

Rushing to Paradise - Led by a charismatic and slightly unhinged woman, a group of environmentalists wins control over a small atoll in the Pacific and sets up a utopian community. Breeding other threatened species and among themselves, these homesteaders slowly transform an Eden of their own into a much darker place. A savage send-up of environmentalism, feminism, and extremism of all sorts.

R.I.P. Robert B. Parker

--by Hanje Richards

Prolific author of Spenser mystery novels and a host of other fiction, Robert B. Parker died suddenly on January 18, 2010, of a heart attack while sitting at his desk in Cambridge, MA.

He was 77.

Parker was best known for his Spenser novels (the wise-cracking, street-smart Boston private-eye Spenser earned him a devoted following and reams of critical acclaim), and the TV Show based on this character. However, Parker also wrote several other series as well as stand-alone novels, including Jesse Stone novels, Sunny Randall novels, Philip Marlowe novels, Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch westerns.

Parker received three nominations and two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. He received the first award, the "Best Novel Award" in 1977, for the fourth novel in the Spenser series.

In 2002, he received the Grand Master Award Edgar for his collective oeuvre. In 2008, he was awarded the Gumshoe Lifetime Achievement Award.

Robert B. Parker will be missed, but his books can still be enjoyed. If you haven't already, check out our large selection of Parker titles at the Copper Queen Library in the Mystery section.