Christopher Lane's SHYNESS on LibraryJournal.com

LIBRARYJOURNAL.COM ANNOUNCES BEST SELLERS IN MEDICINE

Best Sellers in Medicine, October 2007–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13-digit ISBNs in brackets)

1. Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness
Lane, Christopher
Yale University Press
2007. ISBN 0300124465 [9780300124460]. $27.50

For the full article, click here.

Moying Li interview on BookBrowse

Author Statement from Moying Li, Author of Snow Falling In Spring: Coming of Age in China During the Cultural Revolution

I feel very fortunate that my memoir, Snow Falling In Spring will be published just a few months before the 2008 Olympic Games, which will be held in the city of my birth—Beijing.

As Pierre de Coubertin, the modern father of the Olympic Movement, once said, "The foundation of real human morality lies in mutual respect—and to respect one another it is necessary to know one another." The 2008 Beijing Olympics, and the time leading up to it, offers an unprecedented chance for China to interact and communicate with the rest of the world.

Overall, from the increasing media focus to the fast-growing commercial and cultural interactions, it is evident that the world has fixed its eye on China for quite some time. This attention will only intensify with the Summer Olympics. It’s estimated that 4.5 million people from around the world will visit Beijing in 2008, in addition to billions of others who will tune in via satellite television.

I believe that, in true Olympic spirit, a better understanding of human commonality and shared vision will emerge from this engagement. And I hope my book, in a small way, will help toward reaching that goal.

-Moying Li

For the full article, click here.

Moying Li's SNOW FALLING IN SPRING on Scholastic's Best Books list

BEST BOOKS
10 books for younger readers, 10 for older!

By Hannah Trierweiler | May/June 2008

Here’s something that no one but other teachers seem to understand: The best part of your job isn’t the summers off. It isn’t the shiny apples or the all-access pass to the teacher’s lounge. No, it’s the fact that you never have to leave the world of children’s books. It’s okay for you to read Ramona on the subway or Harry Potter on the Stair Master. When people ask what you’ve read lately, you won’t raise eyebrows if you say Eric Carle. You’re doing research, after all. No need to trade the wonderful adventures written for children for the grown-up side of the bookstore! With that in mind, we’ve pored through the offerings from the past school year to deliver the best new stories for every child—and for your beach tote, as well. Enjoy your stay in the worlds of Charlotte and Harriet, Despereaux and Stuart Little. It’ll be our little secret.

Best Memoir for Middle Schoolers
Snow Falling in Spring, by Moying Li.
Subtitled “Coming of Age in China During the Cultural Revolution,” this is Li’s engrossing story about her life from ages 12 to 22—the tragedies faced by her friends and family, the harsh conditions of Chinese labor camps, and the refuge she found in books.

For the full article, click here.

Paul Goldstein's ERRORS AND OMISSIONS reviewed in Booklist

A PATENT LIE

Review in Booklist.

In Goldstein’s debut novel, Errors and Omissions (2006), the story of a movie studio hell-bent on securing the rights to the James Bond franchise, he showed that copyright law can be sexy. Here, Goldstein brings pizzazz to another area of intellectual property, patents—pharmaceuticals, to be exact. Michael Seeley is enjoying his reclusive life back in his hometown of Buffalo, New York, handling small-time cases instead of the corporation litigation suits he used to head up at a big Manhattan firm. He doesn’t miss that cutthroat (and alcoholic) life, but he is hard-pressed to turn down his estranged brother Leonard’s plea for help. Leonard is a doctor with a small pharmaceutical company in San Francisco, and he claims one of the giant corporations in the industry has stolen their patent for a breakthrough drug treating people who are HIV-positive. As he learns about the case, Michael realizes that his brother has not been completely forthright. Goldstein pairs a first-rate medical drama with a tragic story of a broken family, and he effectively combines suspense with rich characterization.

For more Booklist reviews, click here.

Lou Ureneck's BACKCAST in The Philadelphia Inquirer

FATHER-SON RIFT HEALED BY FISHING ADVENTURE

By Art Carey,
Inquirer Staff Writer

Posted on Thu, Jun. 5, 2008

When Lou Ureneck was a young man, the future he envisioned centered on one certainty: He would never get divorced. He would always be there, a father to his children.

He knew well the pain of divorce. When Ureneck was 7, his father abandoned the family. He never saw or heard from him again.

His mother remarried a charismatic charmer. Johnny Kababick took Ureneck fishing in central Jersey and returned from his voyages with the merchant marine brimming with enchanting stories. He was "the kind of father every boy wants to have," Ureneck recalls.

But one Saturday afternoon, after escalating marital clashes, Johnny walked out, without packing clothes or saying a word, and never came back.

And so when Ureneck married a pretty girl from Portsmouth, N.H., and fathered two children of his own, Elizabeth and Adam, he vowed that he would give them a "normal life," a life that was rooted and secure, with both parents living happily under the same roof.

"Divorce - I couldn't even conceive of it," Ureneck says. "I'd never let it happen to me. It would not be part of my life. . . . But guess what? Life has a way of surprising us."

Ureneck tells of the terrible toll of his divorce - on himself, his son and their relationship - in a beautiful book, Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska (St. Martin's Press, $24.95). Ureneck will read from the book at 2 p.m. Sunday at Barnes & Noble in Exton.

An adventure story wrapped around a memoir, it chronicles a fishing trip Ureneck took with his son in the summer of 2000. Adam, a newly minted graduate of Germantown Friends School, was smarting from his father's devastating decision to part from his mother. Ureneck, a former Inquirer editor, was struggling with guilt and the conviction he had failed as a husband and father.

"My life was in a ditch: I was broke from lawyers, therapists and alimony payments and fearful that my son's anger was hardening into lifelong permanence," he writes.

"In the last few years, I had met many men who no longer had any contact with their children because of a divorce. These men didn't see their children at holidays and missed their graduations. . . . I couldn't bear the thought of losing my son. I wouldn't let it happen, even if it meant taking the risk of a self-guided and underfinanced trip to Alaska."

The trip begins inauspiciously. The weather is foul; the mosquitoes, relentless. Ureneck's homemade map of the wild Kanektok River is inadequate. Adam is surly and sullen, rejects his father's diffident attempts to exert paternal authority, and misses no chance to express contempt and criticism. The exchanges between them are strained and awkward.

"Meeting angry bears and getting lost in the woods was scary," Ureneck says, "but not half as scary as the prospect of losing my son."

Backcast is bejeweled with reflections about fatherhood and philosophical musings about the soul-soothing pleasures of fishing in general and fly-fishing in particular.


For the full article, click here.

David W. Blight's A SLAVE NO MORE a 2007 book to remember

Remember 2007?
The NY Public Library does. They've announced their annual list of 25 books to remember, including:

A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
Blight, David W. | Harcourt, © 2007 | 973.7115 B
These powerfully moving writings open a unique window into slave society and the complex struggles of life after escape.

For the NYPL's full list, click here.

Benjamin Taylor's THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN in The New Yorker

Books Briefly Noted

THE BOOK OF GETTING EVEN
by Benjamin Taylor (Steerforth; $23.95)

June 9, 2008

Gabriel Geismar, the embattled protagonist of Taylor’s excellent second novel, is the son of a domineering rabbi growing up in nineteen-fifties New Orleans. Homosexual, suffering from a physical deformity (he has a supernumerary thumb), and enthralled by mathematics—“calculability, sweet detachment from the corporeal universe”—Gabriel has “a furious craving for other, nobler origins.” In college, he meets Marghie and Danny Hundert, whose famous physicist father is one of his heroes, and adopts the family as his own. The book explores the tortured and often misguided process by which children attempt to define themselves in relation to their parents (one iteration of the “getting even” of the title), a process from which Danny and Marghie, as Gabriel slowly discovers, are not exempt. Taylor captures their quests for identity in pitch-perfect dialogue and lengthy meditative passages; his elegant plotting feels at once deliberate and improvised.

For the full article, click here.