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On Fox 6 in May

These are the books I'm talking about on Fox 6 this May. I'll be on Good Day Alabama the first Tuesday and the first Saturday. There's a the real story of Cinco de Mayo, a summer-ready garden book, historical fiction, a new way to eat and the dirt on earthworms. May you truly enjoy this month’s picks!

May 5, 1862:  A Story of Cinco de Mayo (Pine Ivy Books) by Jim Noles

This chapter book for very young readers is by Birmingham attorney and writer Jim Noles with illustrations by Mountain Brook High School senior Brinkley Edge. It is a fictionalized story of a real battle between France and Mexico:  the Battle of Puebla. On that day a brave but outnumbered Mexican army defeated the French army. The battle cost hundreds of lives, nearly 100 Mexican soldiers and nearly 500 French fighters.

One Writer’s Garden:  Eudora Welty’s Home Place (Random House) by Susan Haltom

One Writer’s Garden was written by garden designer Susan Haltom (who actually restored the Welty garden) and landscape historian Jane Roy Brown. It’s a beautiful book with photographs by Langdon Clay, whose work appears in museums and private collections all over the world.

Welty, of course, is known for weaving Southern flora into her writing.  But not many people know that the abundant references to flowers and gardens in Welty’s work come from hands-on experience digging in the dirt. Much of her knowledge grew from time spent in her mother’s garden.

NOTE:  Haltom will share the story of the book and her ongoing preservation of the Welty garden when she comes to Birmingham on May 10. She will lecture beginning at 2 that afternoon at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Admission is $5 per person, and there will be copies of the book available for purchase. Or you can go to the Garden Party that follows and get a book and more. The party is from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at the home of Tom and Cathy Adams on Aberdeen Road. Tickets are $50 per person and include food, beverages and a copy of the book. Again, both events benefit The Literacy Council, and it occurs to me that a ticket would be a great Mother’s Day gift.

Remarkable Creatures (Penguin) by Tracy Chevalier

In 1810, a brother and sister found a fossilized skull of an unknown animal in the cliffs off the southern coast of England. Mary Anning was that girl, and, by age 12, she had discovered the first complete specimen of an ichthyosaur. Bestselling historical novelist Tracy Chevalier tells her story, and it’s not only a story of scientific discovery, it’s also about how Mary’s discoveries challenged the accepted notions of the world and how it was created. Class differences play a big role here as Mary finds herself ostracized for her eccentric habits, and, for friendship, she turns to Elizabeth Philpot, an upper-class spinster and recent exile from London who shares Mary’s fascination with finding old things on the beach. Readers will consider issues of gender, too, as Mary’s unique talent for finding these remarkable creatures puts her in close contact (but always at a remove) with the male-dominated, middle- and upper-class scientific community.  Chevalier says she first found out about Mary when she took her son to a small dinosaur museum in Dorchester. She writes: “(Mary) was prickly and independent and eccentric. Plus, she was struck by lightening as a baby and survived. Discovering her felt like my own jolt of lightening, and I knew I had to write about her.”

Taste What You’re Missing (Free Press) by Barb Stuckey

In what she calls “the passionate eater’s guide to why food tastes good,” Barb Stuckey explains how all of us can get more enjoyment from what we eat. She looks at the anatomy of taste—what’s going on in your nose, mouth and mind when you eat. Did you know that food tastes less salty and less sweet with loud noise in the background? (That’s one of the explanations for awful airline food.) Also, taste inclinations can be inherited. Stuckey says that the most important thing she learned while writing this book is that “... we Americans don’t appreciate the flavor of food.” She says we need to integrate taste appreciation into our school systems and in the way we raise our children. “Taste appreciation,” she says, “will help you be a better eater, as well as help you eat better.” And that, of course, has countless implications these days.

The Earth Moved (Algonquin) by Amy Stewart

The author of Wicked Plants and Wicked Bugs has moved on to earthworms—just in time for all that summer gardening! With the same attention to detail and things you probably don’t already know, she takes readers on an underground journey to meet the humble, yet vitally important, earthworm. Spineless, deaf and blind, the earthworm has profound effects on our ecosystem, destroying plant diseases, plowing the earth and more.  Plus, earthworms survived two mass extinctions, including the one that took out the dinosaurs! Inspired by Charles Darwin, who also had a high regard for the lowly earthworm, Stewart writes with humor, intelligence and a great deal of enthusiasm. The Earth Moved will move you in ways you don’t expect. You’ll certainly look at this most unassuming creature in a whole new way.

 

Put a Poem in Your Pocket

Thursday, April 26, 2012 is Poem in Your Pocket Day. Celebrate poetry by putting a poem in your own pocket, carry it with you throughout your day and perhaps take it out every now and then to share.

I’ll send my family to work and school with poems I picked out especially for them. I've turned to my poetic hero Billy Collins for inspiration. The idea comes from The Academy of American Poets. And it’s a cool and simple way to share poetry with those you love … and those you might not even know.

The official Poem in Your Pocket Day started in New York in 2004. Since then, each year the city parks, bookstores, workplaces and other venues there (and elsewhere as the idea has spread!) are pocket-poem friendly.

Here are just a few ways to share some poetry and celebrate this fun day: 

• post pocket-sized poems in public places;
• handwrite some lines of poetry on the back of the business cards you give out;
• grab some co-workers and hand out poems to passersby during your lunch hour;
• add a poem to your email footer;
• post a poem on your blog or social networking page;
• text a poem to friends.

 Go to www.poets.org/pocket for more ideas and for free downloadable pocket poems.

 

Write Out of Place

The 15th Annual Alabama Writers Symposium is set for April 26-28 in historic Monroeville.

The 2012 Alabama Writers Symposium will explore the theme “Write Out of Place,” looking at all the ways in which Alabama writers are affected by their “placehood,” specifically, the ways in which Alabama as a place informs their literary efforts.

Join Fannie Flagg, the 2012 winner of the Harper Lee Award for Alabama's Distinguished Writer; Dr. William Ulmer, the 2012 winner of the Eugene Current-Garcia for Alabama's Distinguished Literary Scholar as well as writers Brad Watson, Wayne Flynt, Allen Tullos, Eli Gold, Irene Latham, Rachel Hawkins, Trudier Harris, Kerry Madden, Jeanie Thompson, Abraham Smith and Mary Murphy.

Featured Scholars are Nancy Anderson, Kirk Curnutt, Anita Miller Garner, Peter Huggins, Jim Murphy, Don Noble & Jacqueline Allen Trimble



You’ll hear music from Kathryn Scheldt, and the featured artist is Opal Smith.

Expect a lively weekend of literary offerings featuring readings, signings, and an award-winning production of To Kill a Mockingbird. Of course, there will be delicious food galore.

This is a celebration of our literary heritage with some of the state’s most talented writers! For more info, go to www.writerssymposium.org

Whole Lot of Love for Libraries

Thursday, April 5 is another 5% Day at Whole Foods Market, and this time our Jefferson County Libraries will benefit! On Thursday, 5 percent of that day's net sales will be donated to our local public libries.

Eat well. Read well. Feel good about it all.

On Fox 6 in April

A timely family story, fiction from a familiar name, local literature and maybe the most useful cookbook ever! Here's what I'm talking about on Fox 6's Good Day Alabama on Tuesday, April 4 and Saturday, April 7. 

A Rare Titanic Family:  The Caldwells’ Story of Survival (NewSouth Books) by Julie Hedgepeth Williams

This book is as timely as it is fascinating. April 15 marks the 100^th anniversary of this tragic event that continues to capture our attention and our imaginations. Williams grew up hearing family stories about how her great uncle Albert Caldwell; his wife, Sylvia, and their young son escaped the Titanic. They were among the very small number of families that came out of that disaster alive and together. But there’s more to this story:  The Caldwells had been Presbyterian missionaries in Siam (now Thailand), but they left when Sylvia got sick. They ended up in England, via the Far East, the Middle East and Europe. But fellow missionaries believed the couple made up Sylvia’s illness and that they planned to renege on their contract with the church that had sponsored them. So, it turns out that being involved in the most famous shipwreck in history was only one of this family’s problems! Williams relied on Albert’s firsthand account of the disaster as well as family stories, newspaper articles, journals and church documents to tell her family’s extraordinary story.

 

A Wedding in Haiti (Algonquin, publication date April 24) by Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez’s books are internationally acclaimed. Many, like How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of Butterflies, are taught in high school and college curriculums. In A Wedding in Haiti, we follow Alvarez on her own journey into a new country and culture. It’s a narrative that spans both pre- and post-earthquake Haiti and includes Alvarez’s parents; her husband; and a young Haitian boy named Piti, whom Alvarez first met in 2001. The author, over the years, has come to view Piti as a son; she even promised to be at his wedding one day. As Alvarez explains, “… devastation happens around the world and at home. But those tragedies are too huge to absorb. We understand them best in the small, human-sized portion a story serves up. This is a journey of the heart to a Haiti that often gets missed. In a far-off hut, an hour’s hike from where a dirt road ends, Piti is getting married. I invite you to enter this story and see what happens when we keep a promise.”

 

PMS 11 Poem Memoir Story (University of Alabama at Birmingham) edited by Kerry Madden

This newest edition of PMS, a journal of women’s poetry, memoir and short fiction, opens with an interview by Lauren Slaughter with internationally esteemed poet Mary Jo Bang, and it’s followed immediately with Bang’s beautiful Canto XXVI. From there, the pages cover a variety of subjects (the isolation of a nursing home, the terrifying world of drug addiction, the angry teenage daughter of a racist, a revelation in a Hallmark store). “ … a theme of displacement can be seen in the fractured settings of so many of poems, memoirs, and stories,” writes editor Kerry Madden. “Displacement is in the air these days with families being uprooted and broken, often to the running soundtrack of our age of information overload.” Sit down with this spring issue; slow down with this spring issue. Understand something new.

 

Birmingham Poetry Review (University of Alabama at Birmingham) edited by Adam Vines

Award-winning poet David Bottoms, the poet laureate of Georgia, opens this Spring 2012 edition with My Old Man Loves Fried Okra, and his simple, straightforward, relevant poem paints a picture that is both lovely and heartbreaking and, quite possibly, very familiar. Other poems that stay with the reader include Michelle Penaloza’s Reverie:  Nightfishing

“The silver fish sidle inshore, opaque lines, nets

of the mind – words before they leave the tongue.

The torches their lures, the old men fall silent and watch

the clamor of fish climb the branches of their swaying nets.”

And Travis Wayne Denton’s Local Men

“They’re the ones you read about in the papers,

Never good news. For Example:  Local Man, Found Face Down

In His Teriyaki at Bill’s Lucky Buddha, Foul Play Suspected.

Look around, gaggles of local men,

Just waiting to be picked off – thrown in the back

Of a rusted-out Buick (said car last seen speeding

Away from the Circle K).”

 

How to Cook Everything:  The Basics (Wiley) by Mark Bittman

“Cooking, at its heart,” says Mark Bittman, “is simple and straightforward.” It’s also satisfying, economical, time well spent, and it results in truly nutritious food. It also leads to family meals. This book, with its 1,000 informative and encouraging photos, starts by showing you how to set up your pantry. Then there’s a visual guide to basic prep like rinsing and chopping and cooking techniques from boiling water (yes, really) to braising. The recipes here progress from easiest to most challenging, so you can build skills with each dish. Recipes include Quick Pickle Spears, Garlicky White Bean Soup, Paella with Chicken and Sausage and Chili from Scratch. How to Cook Everything:  The Basics is perfect for the novice cook (think wedding presents and graduation gifts here), but accomplished cooks will learn a thing or two, also.

 

Birmingham Reads!

I hope you’ll join me in celebrating Birmingham Reads, an annual city-wide literacy event. The Literacy Council, the Junior League of Birmingham, Better Basics, the Children's Literacy Guild, Alabama's 13, Books A Million and Colonial Brookwood Village have come together to bring this three-pronged kid-friendly event to the Magic City. There are plenty of fun ways you, literacy friends that you are, can help: Thursday, April 19: Birmingham Reads Day - Volunteer to be a class-room reader! At 1 pm on April 19 all 15,000 K-5 school children in Birmingham City schools will listen to a story read by a volunteer reader and will be given a book to take home, courtesy of Books A Million. I’ve done this for the past few years, and it’s great fun. To volunteer to read in one of these elementary schools, please contact Kathleen Drake at Better Basics, volunteer@betterbasics.org. April 9 - 19: Birmingham Reads Book Drive Challenge - Donate children's books! Join 11 area schools and 15 area businesses as they race to collect the most books for Birmingham Reads. All books will be donated to at-risk children in Better Basics reading enrichment programs. You can donate books at any Books A Million location, at the Literacy Council office, or at Brookwood Village on Friday, April 20 or Saturday, April 21. Saturday, April 21 - Birmingham Reads and Brookwood Celebrates - A fun-filled literacy day! Come down to Brookwood Village from 10 am - 3 pm for an outdoor street party celebrating literacy! Live entertainment, games, story time, fun for the whole family!

Book Group Done Right

At last night’s book group meeting, hostess-with-the-mostess Peggi Davis certainly made sure the odds for a great time were in our favor.

We were discussing The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and, as usual, we met for dinner at a member’s home. Peggi started our evening with a tasty assortment of “Capitol Canapés” and treated us to “Katniss Beef Stew” for dinner. “Peeta Bread” (clever!) could have been pita bread, but in this case we had Sister Schubert rolls.

Delicious!

Discussion around Peggi’s round table (love a round dining room table!) was great and insightful. For placecards, we were assigned Districts (based on our zip codes) and there was a drawing … for a prize.

For dessert we enjoyed cookies imprinted with the Mockingjay symbol.

Give that woman an Internet connection, a printer and a good bakery (Icing on the Cookie in Homewood), and she can work wonders!

Happy to report that everyone made it safely back home.

 

March Books On Fox 6

A powerful memoir every Alabamian should read, something new from a local favorite, an Indie Next chart topper and a bestseller now in paperback. March on!

 Grace and Grit:  My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond (due in stores March 6) by Lilly Ledbetter with Lanier Scott Isom

Lilly Ledbetter, of course, is the woman behind the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act that President Obama signed into law in 2009. And we all know how her fight for equal pay at the Goodyear plant in Gadsden changed the way things work. That’s the public side of this brave woman. Grace and Grit shows the more private side of a smart, determined woman who came from very humble beginnings (born in Possum Trot into a home with no running water or electricity) but who somehow knew she was destined for better things. This memoir was written with the help of Birmingham writer Lanier Scott Isom.

The Fault in Our Stars (Dutton Books) by John Green

Indian Springs School alumnus John Green has a huge local following. At his recent appearance at his alma mater’s Visiting Writer Series, on a cold, rainy evening, the line to get books signed was hours long, and Green’s young fans in the overflow crowd were very vocal. Green first made a name for himself with his debut novel, Looking for Alaska. Then there was An Abundance of Katherines, followed by Paper Towns and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (with David Levithan). The Fault in Our Stars, both funny and tragic, is about a 16-year-old girl named Hazel who has been battling thyroid cancer for about three years; she’s still alive, thanks to an experimental miracle drug. When she meets handsome Augustus Waters at a support group for adolescents with cancer, suddenly Hazel finds she has a lot to live for. Like Green’s other books, this one might indeed be written for young adults, but the themes here (and the good, smart writing) will appeal to older readers, as well. Want to know more about John Green? Join his 1.1 million followers on Twitter (@realjohngreen) or visit him online at www.johngreenbooks.com.

A Good American (Putnam) by Alex George

A Good American is not only good, it’s timely as well—given all the current back and forth about immigration. This is an immigrant’s story written by an immigrant. It’s also another book well worth reading brought to us by Amy Einhorn, publisher of The Help. A Good American is a sweeping novel, written by Alex George, an Englishman who lives, works and writes in America’s heartland. It follows three generations of one German immigrant family through both World Wars, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the assassination of JFK and more. George’s perspective and his story will remind us of how the immigrant experience is fundamental to the American experience. As he says, “… Almost every family living in the United States today has a story similar to this one somewhere in its past. Whether ten years ago or three hundred years ago, whether through due process or by way of a midnight ghosting across an unmanned border, whether by slave boat or luxury airplane, we all came here from somewhere.” A Good American recently was named a Barnes & Noble Spring 2012 Discover Great New Writers selection.

West of Here (Algonquin) by Jonathan Evison

This NYT bestseller and #1 Indie Next Pick is now in paperback. With a duel narrative, Evison brings past and present together in a way that exemplifies the American dream. West of Here is set in the mythical town of Port Bonita on Washington State’s Pacific coast. One part of the book focuses on the town’s founders, carving out a place in the 1890s wilderness. The other part is about their descendants in 2006. Together, this is a story of aspirations, adventure, opportunities (realized and squandered) and the ever-present hope of something better. West of Here also was one of Bookpage’s Top 50 Best Books of 2011, and it was on Amazon’s Top 100 of 2011 list. 

 

Library Book Sale in Mountain Brook

The Friends of the Emmet O’Neal Library Book Sale 2012 is this weekend!

It actually starts tonight (Thursday, Feb. 23) for any patron who donates $25 or more to the library. Do this, and you can attend the Library Book Sale Preview Party. This wine and cheese reception is happening from 6 to 8 p.m. Go to http://www.eolib.org/friends.php to donate and join the fun.

The sale is set for Friday and Saturday, February 24-25 from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday, February 26 from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

New this year:

• Dream Cakes truck on site
• Cookbook signings 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday
• Sesame Street characters from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday
• 10% discount for seniors 60+ all day Friday and Saturday
• Half-price books on Sunday (basement books $10 for a bagful)

 

Tim Dorsey's Florida

Sometimes truth is well and truly stranger than fiction.

Consider the exploits of Tim Dorsey, the New York Times bestselling author of a darkly funny collection of books set in Florida and featuring a history-loving, gloriously unrepentant serial killer named Serge Storms.

In Dorsey’s newest book, Pineapple Grenade, Serge—a maniacal, yet quite lovable, hero—has managed to become a secret agent in Miami where he’s spying for the president of a banana republic. But Miami has problems beyond those surrounding Serge:  There’s a media frenzy over the “Hollow Man,” a corpse found on the beach without any innards. Also, someone has been leaving giant shark carcasses at busy intersections around the city. Fishy enough, but then the medical examiner finds severed limbs from an unknown body inside them.

I should mention that there’s a certain fantastically gross factor in these rather violent books.

Dorsey, an Auburn grad who once edited The Plainsman, does have quite the imagination, but strangeness has always managed to find him on a fairly regular basis.

I knew Tim when we both worked at The Alabama Journal in Montgomery in the mid-80s. We—along with my husband and some of our oldest and dearest friends—were part of a really small newsroom that did some really great work. Many of us also went on to work at The Tampa Tribune. Tim stayed longer than most and worked as a general assignment reporter, a political reporter, a copy desk editor and the paper’s night metro editor before leaving in August of 1999 to write full time. Today, he lives in Tampa with his wife and two daughters.

When I got Pineapple Grenade in the mail recently, my husband and I began remembering “Dorsey stories” from way back when. Granted we’re relying on 25-year-old (plus!) memories, but some things tend to stay with you.

• Tim had a column in The Alabama Journal, and once he wrote a piece about the Wall Street Journal’s role as a fashion accessory. This prompted a nasty letter from the WSJ saying that the esteemed and award-winning newspaper was indeed quite a bit more than a fashion accessory. We seem to recall that they also sent Tim a tutorial about how to read the WSJ; this was something they usually sent to schoolchildren.
• Our favorite Dorsey story involved a presidential motorcade. In 1984 President Reagan visited Alabama, and Tim drove out to the airport in his Trans Am to cover this newsworthy event. When the President got into his waiting limo and the motorcade began to travel to his destination, Tim jumped into his car, too. Some helpful spectators, seeing that Tim was trying to leave the airport, pulled the barricade aside allowing him to inadvertently become part of the actual motorcade. There he was, speeding along, sandwiched between two Secret Service cars full of agents furiously waving him away. When they finally pulled him over, Tim didn’t have his driver’s license on him—but he did have his library card. They told him he was lucky to be alive.

So when Tim writes about dumb guys hooked on cocaine and cartoons, rampaging Hemingways, drugged-out Don Johnson impersonators and dressed-up lap dogs that predict the weather (I know for a fact that the weatherdog is based on real life), I just happily go along for another wild ride.

Pineapple Grenade is Tim’s 15^th novel, and my, how things have changed. When his first book, Florida Roadkill, was published, I remember that Tim loaded up the enormous trunk of his old Cadillac with boxes of books and took himself on tour, stopping at whatever bookstore would have him. Now he’s in the middle of a 30-city tour throughout Florida followed by a busy national tour that will take him all across the country. This book tour culminates with the first-ever “Serge Storms” Caribbean cruise out of Tampa on the Carnival Legend on March 11 to 18. This fundraiser, organized and sponsored by the Friends of the St. Pete Beach Library, is billed as “seven days of mayhem and trivia” with a cocktail reception; “at-sea” programs; and manic tours with Tim of Grand Cayman, Belize, Cozumel and Isla Roatan.