friday october 31
Halloween is a happy time of year...wait, no, really!! If you love all things "haunted", this is the best time of year of all. Not that ghosties and gremlins wait for October to come around, but this is when most people think about them.
Just in time for the Presidential Election (now, that's scary), there is a terrific new children's book, Who's Haunting the White House: The President's Mansion and the Ghosts Who Live There (2008) by Jeff Berlanger. Not just for kids, this book has the lowdown on hauntings and ghosts in the White House.
Some people (like me) want to go looking for ethereal, ephemeral occupants that co-exist with us. In other words, we want to go ghost hunting. Cincinnati Magazine has an article in this current October 2008 issue, I, Ghosthunter, in which a skeptical reporter accompanies the paranormal investigation group CAPER (Cincinnati Area Paranormal Existence Research) into a house to gather evidence of a haunting, and... well, let's just say she changes her mind.
Cincinnati Ghosts (2008) presents absorbing evidence on local haunts that will shake the doubt of the most serious skeptic. The author, Karen Laven, and her husband are extremely entertaining speakers, and will be at the Oakley and Anderson branch libraries on Nov 3 and Nov 5.
Southwest Ohio Is Haunted (2008) by local authors Michael and Jeff Morris of Miamitown Ghost Tours is a fascinating case study of paranormal activity in our area. They will be speaking on Nov 6 at the Cheviot branch.
Happy Reading....and have a Happy Halloween!
wednesday october 29
When Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, elderly relatives in New York or Florida would pinch his cheeks and begin to cry. Daniel, it seemed, looked uncannily like his great-uncle Shmiel (Sam) Jaeger, who, along with his wife and daughters, died in the Holocaust.
Mendelsohn’s grandfather and most of his grandfather’s siblings were safe in America, having emigrated long before the war. Only one estranged brother stayed behind in Bolechow, Poland, with his family.
But to Mendelsohn, his grandfather’s mesmerizing tales of life in the old country made Bolechow almost a legend, and the family likeness between himself and his long-vanished great-uncle haunted him. Years after his beloved grandfather’s death, he decided to trace the clues to his uncle’s family’s fate.
The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million is the deeply moving account of how Mendelsohn worked from a few snapshots and letters, a few half-rumored family stories, to discover the fate of his uncle, his aunt, and their four daughters.
Continue Reading…
tuesday october 28
The second annual Books by the Banks regional book festival will be held this Saturday, November 1 in downtown Cincinnati, and it is an event that is not to be missed. Featuring nearly 100 authors representing books for all ages and interests, it promises to be a day to celebrate writers, readers, and the joy of reading.
Many of the participating authors and illustrators are from the greater Cincinnati area, some are from farther afield, and some are former local residents who are returning to town for the event. For example, Alan Gratz, former Cincinnatian who now lives in the mountains of North Carolina, will be making his return in order to promote his highly-praised series of mysteries for teens. His "Horatio Wilkes Mysteries" first appeared in 2007 with Something Rotten, which has been recently followed by Something Wicked. Each title gives a clue that the stories are influenced by the works of Will Shakespeare.
Featuring authors of fiction, non-fiction, local and military history, cookbooks, and books for children, Books by the Banks also includes 22 different panel discussions and loads of activities for kids. Make your way to the Duke Energy Convention Center at 5th and Elm Streets this Saturday between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm to meet some authors, buy some books, and to gather with hundreds of people who make reading an important part of their lives.
This past weekend, I went to a family Halloween party. There was plenty of food on hand, including my aunt’s famous iced pumpkin, bat, and ghost cookies. If treats are on your menu this Halloween, I highly recommend these delicious new mysteries:
A Catered Halloween by Isis Crawford: Sisters Bernadette and Libby Simmons are hired to cater a haunted house fundraiser for the volunteer firemen of Longely, New York, at the old Peabody School. The severed head that is found at the haunted house turns out to be real—and the victim, Amethyst Applegate, was a former student at the school and a classmate of Bessie Osgood, who died under suspicious circumstances years ago and whose ghost still haunts the place. Bernie and Libby, along with their father, the town’s retired police chief, must solve this culinary cozy mystery.
Working Stiff by Tori Carrington: The week before Halloween, a body disappears from the funeral home of Greek American and Private Investigator Sofie Metropolis’s aunt. While working on this case—which may be a holiday prank--Sofie is also trying to prove the innocence of teenager Johnny Laughton, about to go on trial for the murder of his girlfriend. Complicating matters even further is her romantic interest in two men—family-approved Greek baker and pastry shop owner Dino Antonopoulous and the ever-mysterious Australian bounty hunter Jake Porter.
wednesday october 22
As a Kansas high school student, Matthew Polly used to make lists of all the things that were wrong with him. “Ignorant” topped the list, and after he took care of that by getting himself into Princeton, he decided to work on the “cowardly” and “spiritually confused” items.
His plan for that? Leave college and travel to China, where he would find the legendary Shaolin Temple and study at the feet of the fabled Buddhist kung fu masters he knew from his religious studies readings, Chinese language classes, and countless martial arts movies.
With considerable charm and self-deprecation, this gawky, geeky laowai (white foreigner) takes us along on that surprising journey in American Shaolin : Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China.
Continue Reading…
tuesday october 21
In an ideal world, I would have a stack of Booker prize winners on one side of me, a stack of Pulitzer prize winners on the other side of me, and an infinite amount of time to read these wonderful books. (The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County has a page with links to award-winning books in a variety of categories).
But like most people, my reading habits are shaped by the various pushes and pulls of the real world. Instead of reaching for long, engrossing epic novels (such as previous favorites Middlesex and The Poisonwood Bible), I find myself doing more and more of my reading online in shorter segments, whether it's an article from The New York Times or a book review on one of the many literary websites across the internet.
In addition to Turning the Page, there are many other book-themed sites worth visiting. The Elegant Variation is a site dedicated to providing book reviews and information about author visits around the country, as well as connecting writers with one another. The book blog of the New York Times, Paper Cuts, has frequent author interviews and discussions about the world of books and publishing. In a fascinating entry from October 17, 2008, a writer discusses the dangers of writing truthfully in some regions of the world.
Continue Reading…
wednesday october 15
There have recently been so many fascinating books set at the intersection of psychology, neurology, sociology, and evolutionary biology to explain why people act the way they do. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink was probably one of the first to hit the bestseller lists. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others, and This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession are a few that I’ve blogged.
Add to those Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says about Us) and Daniel Gardner’s The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t—And Put Ourselves in Greater Danger.
Technology writer Vanderbilt explains in the prologue to Traffic that one of his inspirations for writing his book was the firestorm of reaction he got when he posted to a question-and-answer website: is it better to be an early merger, getting over cooperatively as soon as the road signs tell you your lane is going to end ahead, or a late merger, making as long as possible a use of the emptier lane and tucking into traffic at the last second?
Continue Reading…
