The Buzz...About Books

Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir by Amanda Knox

Waiting to be Heard: a Memoir by Amanda Knox promises to tell her side of a particularly brutal story.

Knox, an American student living in Italy, was sentenced to 26 years for the 2007 murder and sexual assualt of her British roomate, Meredith Kercher. Knox's boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito was also convicted for his role in this gruesome murder.

In 2011, the convictions were overturned on appeal and both were released.  In March 2013, these acquittals were reversed and a retrial ordered.

Sensational media coverage with reports of satanic rites, sex, drugs, police brutality, false allegations, conspiracies, and cover-ups makes it difficult to tell fact from fiction. 

Here is a timeline of the main events. 

One thing is clear: people just love to hate Amanda Knox. Social media and online communities are fixated on the 25-year old woman now living in Seattle. 

Her supporters claim she is a victim of a sexist and corrupt judicial system. Her haters (and there are many) claim she is simply a pretty little liar - a psychopath who might get away with murder.  

Here's some recent coverage of her book: Toronto Star, Globe, New Yorker, CBC, Telegraph, Guardian, and The New York Times.

Watch an excerpt from Knox's first interview after her release from prison with Diane Sawyer. Full interview (warning-some graphic content): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. 

Listen to her Canadian interview on the CBC. 

 

Meredith Kercher, Age 19 in England

 

The Kercher family responds to the release of Knox's book and her impending retrial. Meredith's father, John Kercher, is a journalist and has released a book in the UK about his daughter (to date, it's not available in Canada).

 Further reading available at the Toronto Public Library:

Memoirs (Momoirs?) for Mother's Day

Today is Mother's Day. There are lots of books, both fiction and non-fiction featuring mothers. Here's a list of good mothers in literature from the Chicago Tribune. Meanwhile Publishers' Weekly has created a list of bad mothers. The books on this list are written by mothers themselves--women who have learned too late that babies do not come with instruction manuals.

Area Woman Blows Gasket: Tales from the Domestic Frontier by Patricia Pearson
Pearson writes about trying (and failing) to have it all as a working mother.

Operating Instructions: a Journal of My Son's First Year by Anne Lamotte
• eBook
Writer Lamotte records the highs and lows of life with a new baby.

Say it Again in a Nice Voice: a Memoir of Imperfect Motherhood by Meg Mason
• eBook
New Zealand author Mason writes about her attempts to remain sane after having a baby.

When Did I Get Like This?: the Screamer, the Worrier, the Dinosaur-Chicken-Nugget Buyer, and Other Moms I Swore I Would Never Be by Amy Wilson
Actor-blogger Wilson describes herself as a "former perfectionist". In this collection of short essays she shares the pleasures and perils of motherhood.

Wiped!: Life with a Pint-Sized Dictator by Rebecca Eckler
Toronto writer Eckler discovers that motherhood is not what she expected and sets out to tell the truth about parenting a newborn.

Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: Reading to Help Your Nothing Day

The Mary Tyler Moore Show almost didn't make it after all.  Jennifer Armstrong's Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted reveals that early audiences gave it a chilly reception. 36 years later, The Mary Tyler Moore Show is cited as setting the bar for television comedy and for women's roles on TV. Without Mary Richards, there would be no Liz Lemon. Throw your hat in the ring - reserve your copy today to get the scoop on the writers, the cast dynamics, Veal Prince Orloff and Chuckles the Clown. 

Armstrong speaks about her book. Read her interview. Advance reviews are glowing: Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly love it. Recall some fave characters here. According to the Huffington Post, the female cast members will reunite on an upcoming Hot in Cleveland episode - made bittersweet with Valerie Harper's recent announcement about her illness.

 

Further reading from MTM alumnae:

Oprah is a serious MTM fan. Watch this:

Mimzi, the MTM kitty......

2013 Pulitzer Prize Winners

On April 15 winners of this year's Pulitzer Prize for Letters were announced in the following categories:

Biography or Autobiography

Winner:
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss
• Audiobook
• eAudiobook
• eBook
• Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)

 

Finalists:

The Patriarch: the Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw
• Audiobook
• eAudiobook
• Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)

Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra

Fiction

Winner:
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
• eAudiobook
• eBook
• Large Print

 

 

Finalists:

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
• eAudiobook
• Large Print

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander
• Audiobook
• eAudiobook
• eBook
• Large Print
• Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)

General Non-Fiction

Winner:
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King

 

 

 

Finalists:

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
• Audiobook
• eAudiobook
• eBook
• Large Print
• Talking Book (restricted to Print Disabled patrons)

The Forest Unseen: a Year's Watch in Nature by David George Haskell

History

Winner:
Embers of War: the Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall
• eBook

 

 

Finalists:

The Barbarous Years: the Peopling of British North America: the Conflict of Civilizations 1600-1975 by Bernard Bailyn
• eBook

Lincoln's Code: the Laws of War in American History by John Fabian Witt

Poetry

Winner:
Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds

 

 

 

 

Finalists:

The Abundance of Nothing by Bruce Weigl

Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert

Putting on the Fitz: Books about F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald ruled the Jazz Age. Rich, talented, beautiful, and outrageous - Scott and Zelda partied like it was 1925.  Both continue to fascinate the public and inspire novelists, filmmakers and artists. Director Baz Luhrmann's upcoming The Great Gatsby and the recently published Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Fowler will renew interest in this beautiful but damned couple.

Fun fact: video game designer Shigeru Miyamo named his pixel princess "Zelda" after Zelda Fitzgerald.

Scott, one of the greatest modern writers, wrote The Great Gatsby.  Zelda was a glamorous southern belle who smoked, drank, played with boys - and got away with it. 

Together they ruled as the celebrity couple of the 1920s, the king and queen of the Lost Generation with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, Jon Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, and Isadora Duncan.

But it wasn't all golden. Zelda was Scott's muse - but she was also a rival and struggled with her artistic ambitions. Hemingway viewed her as Scott's Yoko Ono; Zelda thought Hemingway was a jerk. Alcoholism and mental illness were the dark passengers that dogged their so-called charmed life. Scott died at 44 from a heart attack; Zelda died in a fire at a mental institution.

 Rare glimpes of the Fitzgeralds:

Fictionalized works with the Fitzgeralds:

  The Beautiful and the Damned

Five Books to Celebrate Harry Houdini

Erik Weisz, who would later use the stage name Harry Houdini, was born in Budapest on March 24, 1874. His family emigrated to the United States in 1874 where the spelling of his name was changed to Ehrich Weiss. When he was 9, Ehrich helped to support his family by working as a trapeze artist in vaudville shows. In 1891, he switched his specialty to magic and adopted the stage name Harry Houdini, as an homage to French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin.

While performing at Coney Island, Harry met and fell in love with another performer, Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, known as Bess. The couple would marry in 1894 and she became his stage assistant. During this time, Houdini began to experiment with escape acts and by 1900 he had acquired an international reputation for his escapes from shackles, handcuffs and various locked containers.

In addition to performing around the world, Houdini also appeared in movies and became an aviator. During the 1920s, he began an enthusiastic career debunking spiritualists and mind readers after unsuccessfully trying to communicate with his deceased mother. Although he believed that supernatural powers were fraudulent, he and Bess agreed that whichever of them died first would try to contact the survivor.

Houdini died of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix on October 31, 1926. Bess Houdini dutifully held a séance on the anniversary of his death for the next decade. After the tenth unsuccessful attempt to contact her late husband, she announced that "10 years is long enough to wait for any man" and declared the experiment a failure.

Houdini: Fact and Fiction:

Fiction

Escape Artist by Edward Ifkovic
Reporter Edna Ferber asks her friend Harry Houdini to investigate after a girl mysteriously disappears from her school.

The Last Illusion by Rhys Bowen
After a number of suspicious incidents, Bess Houdini hires private investigator Molly Murphy to protect her husband.

Non-Fiction

Houdini!: the Career of Ehrich Weis: American Self-Liberator, Europe's Eclipsing Sensation, World's Handcuff King and Prison Breaker by Kenneth Silverman
Pulitzer Prize winning author Silverman draws upon previously unpublished letters, diaries and scrapbooks in this biography.

Masters of Mystery: the Strange Friendship of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini by Christopher Sandford
Both Houdini and Doyle had an interest in Spiritualism but Doyle was a believer and as Houdini became more sceptical, their friendship grew strained.

The Secret Life of Harry Houdini: the Making of America's First Superhero by William Kalush and Larry Sloman
This controversial biography suggests that Houdini's most spectacular trick was working as a spy for the British secret service.

Remembering Chinua Achebe 1930 - 2013

  

Chinua Achebe, the father of modern African literature, has died at the age of 82 in Boston.  Born in Nigeria in 1930, Achebe's first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) took the world by storm and set the stage for Africa to reclaim the literary voice usurped by her colonizers.  Novelist, critic, political activist, professor, and poet - the power and influence of Achebe's work and legacy is staggering.

Read about it here: CBC, Globe, Toronto Star, Guardian,  BBC, Times Nigeria, The New York Times, Ottawa Citizen, Washington Post, and in the AllAfrica Times.

Read (or re-read) Achebe's works.  Here is a selection available at the Toronto Public Library:  

 

Things Fall Apart is also available on Audiobook.

Check out the Guardian's photo gallery.  Toronto's 680 News has posted selected quotes.

Read what the Guardian had to say when Achebe was awarded the International Man Booker Prize in 2007.

 Watch the 2008 PBS Interview: Achebe Discusses Africa 50 Years After Things Fall Apart:

 

 

Achebe, aged 26

The Skinny on The Heavy: A Mother, A Daughter, A Diet

 The Heavy: A Mother, A Daughter, A Diet by Dara-Lynn Weiss is the latest parenting memoir causing controversy with supporters and critics eager to weigh in.

Weiss put her overweight daughter on a strict calorie-based diet which she policed vigorously and very, very publicly. So public, in fact, that Weiss, a free-lance writer, got her story published in last April's Vogue, with photographs of mother and daughter in designer duds, sipping tea. 

Now here's the thing: Bea is only seven years old.

A firestorm of outrage followed the Vogue article - with Weiss at its epicentre, and according to her - she remains 'stunned' by the negative reaction.  As with Amy Chua's The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Weiss' memoir of extreme parenting evokes strong feelings from parents, pundits, doctors, critics, and bloggers.

The alarming statistics on childhood obesity is creating front page news, and Weiss' supporters see her as courageously proactive in protecting her daughter's health.  Conversely, her critics have accused her of damaging Bea physically and emotionally. Jezebel, a feminist blog, spared nothing in its assessment of Weiss and her project.  

Critics also zero in on her public enforcement of Bea's diet (just ask the Starbucks barista who put whipped cream on Bea's hot chocolate without asking). Indeed, much of this memoir is Weiss defending her actions against her many critics.  

Listen to Weiss' CBC interview today on the Current. Read the coverage in the Toronto Star, the Globe, Huffington Post, New York Magazine, UK Times, and Slate.  Watch the coverage on CTV and on ABC below (click on the link to take you to YouTube, then click on the new tab to view).

  

The Heavy is also available in these formats:

• Audiobook
• eBook
• eAudiobook
• Talking Book (restricted to print disabled patrons)

 

Further Reading:

• Always the Fat Kid by Jacob Warren and K. Bryant Smalley
• Overcoming Childhood Obesity by Colleen Thompson and Ellen Shanley
• Combat Fat for Kids by James Villepigue
• Get a Healthy Weight for Your Child by Brian McCrindle

Related Posts:

• Year of The Tiger Mom
• Kid-Friendly Food: Nutrition for Children

 

Finally, on a lighter note: Internet cats and body image? 

 

 

 

Take a Break From Your Family History

Researching you family tree has always been a popular activity. Learning stories that you never knew about relatives is fascinating and there is always the dream of discovering that you are related to a historical figure or someone famous. However, if your search has been disappointing and slow, here are a few genealogical novels and true stories to inspire you.

The Island by Victoria Hislop
Alexis travels to Crete to uncover information about her mother's past. Exploring her family's history reveals the story of her great-grandmother and a dark secret that brought tragedy to her family.

Family Secrets by Judith Henry Wall
After the death of their father, three sisters discover an old letter revealing that their paternal grandmother is not dead, as they were told. The sisters begin a journey to Montana to locate Hattie, the author of the letter.

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton
Fifty years after it was sent, a letter finally arrives at its destination. This letter sends Edie Burchill on a journey to learn about her mother's life as a teenager during World War II.
Also available in: Audiobook, eBook, Large Print

The Opposite of Me by Sarah Pekkanen
In one devastating night, Lindsey Rose loses the dream job that she had been working towards. Fleeing New York to her parents' home in Maryland, Lindsey stirs up a long buried family secret.

Aunty Dimity and the Village Witch by Nancy Atherton
Lori Shepherd begins assisting Amelia Thistle, a newcomer to the village of Finch, in her search to discover if a family diary is correct and Amelia is a descendant of the Mad Witch of Finch.
Also available in: Large Print

The Year of Finding Memory: A Memoir by Judy Fong Bates
After the death of her parents, author Judy Fong Bates returns to her ancestral home in China. Here she discovers many stories about her parents and their lives of which she was unaware.
Also available in: eBook, Talking Book (Restricted to print disabled patrons)

The Perfect Nazi: Uncovering My SS Grandfather's Secret Past and How Hitler Seduced a Generation by Martin P. Davidson
Discovering that his grandfather, who was originally believed to be a dentist in Berlin during the war, was in fact a Nazi, Davidson becomes determined to uncover his true identity.

A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd
These tales reveal the lives of various women, who had connections to historical figures, yet history has all but forgotten these women, until now.

Well, Hi There: Happy 1982

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where were you in '82? For Jian Ghomeshi, host of CBC's hit radio show Q, it was Thornhill. In his funny, often self-deprecating memoir 1982, Ghomeshi recalls his experience as a teen of Iranian descent growing up in white suburbia, his efforts to fit in, and his music idols - in particular, David Bowie. Read about his book in the Star and on the CBC. Check out Ghomeshi's interview in the Huffington Post. He makes a compelling case for the significance of '82, just in case you think this golden year was all about the leg warmers and shoulder pads.

1982 was the year of Michael Jackson's Thriller, Madonna's first single, "Everybody" (has it really been 30 years?), Pac-Man and the Commodore 64 computer.

Here are some books that were making news in 1982:

Different Seasons by Stephen King.  His four novellas include Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Body. Both were adapted for film: The Shawshank Redemption and Stand By Me. Fun fact: While everyone recalls River Phoenix in Stand by Me, it was Wil Wheaton's starring role that sent him forth to Star Trek glory.

North and South by John Jakes. First in a trilogy about two buddies who find themselves on opposite sides of the American Civil War. The book is available to read at the Toronto Reference Library and you can borrow the television series starring Patrick Swayze.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Focused on the lives of black women in the southern U.S, this Pulitzer Prize winner continues to be in demand today.  It was later adapted for film, with Oprah making her screen debut.

Jane Fonda's Workout Book by Jane Fonda. Ok - she was all about the leg-warmers. Her seminal workout may no longer be available, but you can read her memoir, My Life So Far. 

In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters. A blockbuster business book. In 2001, a controversial article alleged that Peters' fact-checking was somewhat less than excellent.  You can borrow the 2006 edition in print and ebook.

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo.  A British children's book about the horrors of WW I through the experiences of Joey, a cavalry horse.  Who knew that decades later it would be a stage and screen hit? Steven Spielberg's 2011 War Horse is available to borrow on DVD. 

Bowie's ground-breaking video for Ashes to Ashes from his Scary Monsters album. It's still pretty darn cool:

 

 Below: Pac-Man and the Commodore 64.  All the rage in 1982. Retro cool in 2012. 

Further reading:  Retro Reads: That 70s Book