The Illustrated Biographies of Lauren Redniss

Through eclectic primary sources, insatiable curiosity, and inventive illustrations, Lauren Redniss exquisitely captures the riveting experiences and consequences of her subjects’ lives in her biographies.

Century Girl: 100 Years in the Life of Dorothy Eaton Travis, Last Living Star of the Ziegfeld Follies looks at the existence of a dancer, actress, teacher and general enthusiast who toured the world and met everyone from Charles Lindbergh to Caribbean dictators without missing a beat. The book’s ingenious scrapbooking renders Eaton both more familiar and monumental, perfectly grounding her spirited life within the context of a dizzying century.
Marie Curie’s improbable trajectory—which is the stuff of some potent Brontë-Alger cocktail—is brought to life in the stunning Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, a Tale of Love and Fallout. Born Maria Skłodowska in Poland, Curie was first a governess shunned by her motherland’s aristocrats, then the Sorbonne’s first female professor, and later the first person to win multiple Nobel Prizes. She worked (and bicycled!) happily alongside Pierre until his tragic carriage accident, then became the victim of a xenophobic witch-hunt.

Redniss really digs into the Curies’ far-reaching accomplishments. Yes, their discoveries brought about great advances in medicine, but also laid the foundation for the atomic bomb. The book’s cyanotypes have a haunting, dreamy vivacity that beautifully captures the Curies’ feverish, indomitable minds. Plus, they actually glow.

I highly recommend Redniss’s books to anyone looking for an intimate, inspired take on other people’s lives.

-Megan

Patron Review: Super Immunity by Joel Fuhrman, M.D.

Want to be healthy for the rest of your life? Want to weigh the same as you did in 9th grade (provided you were not obese then)? Want to avoid disease?

Granted, most people do not want the above, but for the few, who do yearn for health and an ideal weight, get thee to the library and take out Super Immunity, by Joel Fuhrman, M.D. Dr. Fuhrman is also the author of Eat to Live, which was updated in 2011. Both are worthy of your time.

Patients come to Dr. Fuhrman’s New Jersey office with allergies, viruses, cancer, arthritis, Crohn’s disease, well, every disease of modern America. And his advice is always the same: heath=nutrition/calories. Open his Eat to Live book and find the page with the picture of three stomachs. One has 400 calories of oil; the next has 400 calories of meat; the third has 400 calories of greens. The first stomach is about 1/50th filled. The second stomach is about 1/8th filled. The final stomach is completely filled.
You might get the point now. Filling our stomachs with greens, onions, mushrooms, berries, beans, and seeds, not only fills the stomach with low calories foods and satiates us, it supplies our bodies with the nutrients it needs to fight every disease under the sun.

Dr. Fuhrman’s prescription is to work up to a pound of raw vegetables, a pound of cooked vegetables, and a cup of beans daily. He calls the prescriptions of most other doctors “permission slips,” the better to keep doing what we have always done: live a disease prone lifestyle.

Today we learned that Senator Mark Kirk, a supposedly health-conscious person, suffered a stroke. Please do not end up as he has. Get Dr. Fuhrman’s books, go to his website, and live a healthy, disease-free life.

-Janice Gintzler
Acorn patron

The Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown

The idea of baking bread from scratch had long fallen into the same category as Beyoncé’s abs circa 2004: enviable but intimidating. But The Tassajara Bread Book has gently eased me into the art of breadmaking, revealing its ease and joy.

Tassajara is a Zen monastery in central California, and this book was developed with simplicity in mind. The ingredients lists for most breads feature four to six basic items, and the directions are straightforward and sweetly whimsical. Does this sound a little austere, perhaps a tad precious? Worry not, as there are also recipes for unabashed delights like Butter Kuchen, Turkish Coffee Cake Cookie Bars, and Coffee Liquor Butter.

This book focuses on enjoying the process as it unfolds before you. Contrary to popular belief, bread is quite independent—it does not require full-time nurturing so much as a roll and a jab a few times throughout the day. And in the end, creating something so aromatic and delicious from nearly nothing is hugely satisfying. I’ll leave it to Mr. Brown to explain:

“Bread makes itself, by your kindness, with your help, with imagination streaming through you, with dough under hand, you are breadmaking itself, which is why breadmaking is so fulfilling and rewarding.”

-Megan

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog explores the inner lives of Renée, an outwardly inert concierge in a fancy Parisian apartment building, and 12-year-old Paloma, a precocious resident. At work, Renée lives up to the (apparent) stereotype of the philistine concierge, indulging in the French equivalents of Cheez Whiz-covered Doritos and In Touch Weekly. At home, Renée is an entirely different beast, one who devours opera and masticates on long passages of Husserl.

Paloma also has a double-life of the mind. Outwardly, she is the docile daughter of two well-meaning but superficial socialites. Inwardly, she is a cauldron of societal dissection, caustic barbs, and--yes, dear reader--suicide ideation. Much of the novel involves Renée and Paloma wittily discussing their ideas of the world and their isolated places in it until the lovely Kakuro moves into the building and unites the building’s misfits.

This novel succeeds in being philosophically rigorous, inspiring, and genuinely sweet. Highly recommended.

Please note: This title is available on Acorn's Touch Nooks, along with these titles. Call the Library to reserve yours!

-Megan

Eliot Spitzer Double Feature: Client 9 v. Inside Job

The erstwhile “Love Gov” has a new gig: movie star! Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but Spitzer has been featured prominently in two recent documentaries.

First up is Client 9, which briefly covers Spitzer’s meteoric rise in New York politics, then drones on an on about his fall. As attorney general, Spitzer earned the nickname "The Sheriff of Wall Street” as he actually managed to fine, imprison, and otherwise unsettle captains of industry for their misdeeds. His work earned him both popular support and powerful enemies; the former electing him governor in 2006 with nearly seventy per cent of the vote, and the latter--the film alleges--leading to his undoing. Spitzer is an incisive, candid interview subject, but he is used sparingly here. The film focuses on the tawdriest elements of the escort scandal and most ridiculous peripheral players instead. Why? I have no idea.

Next is Inside Job, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in February. Here, director Charles Ferguson’s surveys the logistics of the global financial near-collapse. The film has a definite, fire-breathing perspective, as Ferguson, Spitzer, and a coterie of others squarely pin the crisis on the shoulders of the world’s financial elite and their governmental enablers.

Inside Job admirably distills the mechanics of the derivatives market, and the revolving door between big banks, the plushest business schools, and government. Ferguson is a fearless interviewer, and most of his interactions end with disdainful glares, embarrassed laughter, or I-wish-I-were-kidding ingenuousness. The result is a suspenseful, darkly comic ride through a subject that people used to think was boring.

-Megan

Science Fair Season by Judy Dutton

Lately, news regarding the state of American education has been decidedly less than rosy. While much of the rest of the world has adjusted to the realities of the twenty-first century with determination and brio, the United States has generally responded with what seems like bewildered complacency. As Bill Gates said, “When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I’m terrified for our workplace of tomorrow.”

Refreshingly, this book explores the stories behind the wildly impressive entries at the Intel Science Talent Search, a sort of American Idol for high school scientists. The entrants come from disparate backgrounds--small-town Texas, the Navajo Indian Reservation, affluent Connecticut, and a juvenile detention center. The projects are just as varied, and include a solar water heater fashioned from the radiator of a 1967 Pontiac, a nanotechnology discovery that led to even smaller and more powerful microchips, a methodology for predicting water tables on Mars which was later proven by NASA, training cockroaches to do the work of drug-sniffing dogs, and pioneering work on the worldwide collapse of bee colonies.

While some of the entrants were science fair veterans, most of them just encountered an interesting problem and then had supportive teachers to foster their curiosity and dedication. Dutton does a great job with the scientific and humanistic aspects of each story. I highly recommend this book to any adult or teen reader looking for an inspiring read.

-Megan

Talking It Over by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes takes a go at the alchemy of a particular love triangle in this insightful, witty novel. Sturdy Stuart is an earnest, levelheaded banker (note that the book was published in 1992) and devoted husband to Gillian, a placid, somewhat inscrutable art restorer. Oliver, Stuart’s longtime friend, is a pedantic train wreck (think of an unholy Christopher Hitchens-Russell Brand alliance) whose untethered existence gives him plenty of time to systematically disrupt the happy couple.

Stuart, Gillian, and Oliver take turns narrating; so each character gets a chance to explain--and reveal varying degrees of delusion. This technique shows off Barnes’s deft understanding of human dynamics, as well as an unsentimental objectivity that makes for bracing realizations. Further, his elegantly adventurous facility with language rendered the book a remarkably good time. Highly recommended; and, so far, so is the sequel.

-Megan

Movie Review: HeartBreaker

Alex (Romain Duris) is a professional match-breaker in this frothy, giddily entertaining French film. His impeccable record is challenged when he’s enlisted to end the engagement of Juliette (Vanessa Paradis) and Jonathan (Andrew Lincoln). Jonathan’s a philanthropic billionaire (and British, ladies!), but still not nearly good enough according to Juliette’s father, who hired Alex.

So Alex and his suspiciously, ridiculously high-tech associates (his sister and brother-in-law) pull out a variety of amusing stunts to capture Juliette’s aloof heart, and absurd hijinks ensue. Alex uses every weapon in his arsenal, including but not limited to Juliette’s weakness for George Michael and Dirty Dancing.

Much of the movie’s charm can be credited to Duris, a remarkably agile and versatile performer who is something like a French Heath Ledger. It will be interesting to see who will be cast in the impending American remake. My money is on Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Alex and Amanda Seyfried as Juliette. (Kindly spare me your Jake Gyllenhaal and your Scarlett Johannson!) But I’ll savor this delightful original now and save the teeth gnashing for later.

-Megan

Movie Review: Exit Through the Gift Shop

The Oscar-nominated Exit Through the Gift Shop takes an unconventional, entertaining look at a bygone era of street art. Directed by Banksy, the enigmatic (e.g. shrouded in darkness and disguised by a voice decoder) superstar of the movement, the film follows the scene’s most inspired figures as they adorn unsuspecting buildings and billboards with wit and whimsy. Commercialization comes quickly, and with varying results. Banksy cashes in, Sotheby’s style; Shepard Fairey (of the ubiquitous Obama “Hope” image) is promptly sued by the Associated Press; and Thierry Guetta--a wannabe Andy Warhol for the porkpie hat set--goes about industrializing street art’s winking subversion with a team of workers and an Ikea-sized showroom.

Exit Through the Gift Shop effectively explores the wonders of artistry, inevitable commodification of youth culture, and the thin, stubborn line between clever and stupid. Spirited, slightly ridiculous fun.

-Megan