Seriously? Apparently so - some people have actually broken the cat-leash barrier. Here is the editorial review of the official guide to walking your cat:
Walk Your Cat - The Complete Guide is written for indoor cat owners who want to give their cats access to the outdoors by taking them for walks on a leash. While it is often believed that cats can’t be leash-trained, Walk Your Cat shows that taking your cat for a walk does not have to be a drag. This book is unique in that the authors have developed a thorough, easy-to-follow approach to walking cats that is solidly grounded in the current scientific understanding of feline behavior. Following their approach, you can allow your cats to enjoy a full range of natural behaviors while on walks, making their lives richer and healthier. But, Walk Your Cat is more than just a training guide. Getting to the heart of feline behavior to show you how cats can be leash-trained, the book offers readers a new window into the inner lives of their cats–as well as insights into the important and natural role that walks on a leash have to play in the life of the modern indoor cat.
“As I strolled past Bernard L. Madoff’s apartment house in the East 60s the other day on my way to cash a check at my neighborhood bank on Madison Avenue and 63rd Street, I was greeted by a middle-aged panhandler who sat on the sidewalk leaning against the bank’s brick wall waving a plastic cup in my direction” Read more…
Despite the fact that tonight’s listings are shot for all non-West Coasters (my apologies for the unintentional bias), here’s a rundown of notable author appearances on the telly this week.
Monday, February 16 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Growing up in Seattle’s suburbs circa 1990, Faythe Levine came of age in an era of zines and riot grrrls.
By the mid-’90s, this DIY culture of creative expression had sparked the indie craft movement that–fueled by the Internet’s connective power and the commercial platform of sites like Etsy.com–grew into a full-on revolution. By 2006, Levine was a crafter herself, and so inspired by the amazing work she saw happening in the wider community that she hit 15 cities across America to interview and film independent artists and crafters at work.
Levine’s documentary, Handmade Nation, premiered in her current hometown of Milwaukee, WI, on February 3, and screened three times this weekend at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. Buzz had been building since ‘07 thanks to the YouTube trailer and the massively connected, supportive nature of the underground craft culture, so those of us who care passionately about handmade crafts and people who make them have been anxiously eying the film’s screening schedule–and consoling ourselves in the meantime with the film’s fantastic companion book, co-authored by Levine and Cortney Heimerl and released last fall. Read more…
In his 22nd book, The Associate, John Grisham returns to “vintage Grisham” territory with a legal thriller about Kyle McAvoy, a young law school graduate with limitless potential who is blackmailed into taking a dream job at the largest firm in the world in order to lead a double life that could send him to prison–or get him killed. Listen in as we talk about lawyers, baseball, his favorite contemporary writers, and what it’s like when he sees someone reading one of his books while he’s on vacation.
Today in the Times, Michiko Kakutani has put a Presidential reading list together, along with a little analysis of Obama as a writer and a reader (”Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.”), so I thought I’d put a reading list together here in one place, based on her research and ours, to kick off inauguration week:
If the Oscars are the main course, the SAG Awards the salad and the Golden Globes the drinks and appetizer, the Critics’ Choice Awards are like the bread basket. If you’re hungry for something it’s fine to nibble on, but once the rest of the courses come in you’re most likely to forget its existence.
Still, with the Globes three days away, I’m hungry, so I watched. Some highlights:
Because of Slumdog Millionaire’s multiple wins, we got to hear that really catchy dance number “Jaiho” a total of five times.
I was amused by the addition of the “house band” Rooney (fronted by Robert Schwartzman, son of Talia Shire, brother of Jason, nephew of Coppola), who got to translate A-Ha’s “Take on Me” into walk-on music for Amy Adams and the “Rocky” theme for Dustin Hoffman. Wonder if the stars got to suggest their own cues?
I got slightly teared up when the room, filled to the brim with A-listers, stood up for Heath Ledger when he posthumously won Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight, with his black-and-white mug filling the screens.
What a dismay that Kate Winslet, always the bridesmaid, finally won an award (Best Supporting Actress for The Reader) but was not there to accept. If she loses all the other awards this season we’ll have been deprived of seeing her finally give an acceptance speech.
In a surprise, Meryl Streep (Doubt, who was not present) and Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married) tied for Best Actress. Hathaway, who exclaimed, “I know how to not be nominated for awards!” In what may or may not have been a reference to her tumultuous personal year, she tearfully thanked her dad “for showing me that there are good men in this world.”
Sean Penn was nowhere to be found during the first award (Best Ensemble) which went to his film Milk. (”He’s parking the car,” joked his co-stars Emile Hirsch and Josh Brolin, who were on hand to accept) He was, however, there at the end to accept Best Actor. “At heart, this was a beauty contest so I had an advantage,” he said to his fellow nominees, who included Brad Pitt, Clint Eastwood, Mickey Rourke, and Richard Jenkins.
Sunday Book Review cover: Leah Hager Cohen on The Mercy Papers by Robin Romm: “Full disclosure: I may have a little crush on Romm. Not because she’s a good writer, although her prose … is so fresh and uncompromising it can feel practically impertinent. Nor because of her wit, although she can be startlingly funny (particularly on the subject of her nonagenarian grandfather). Not even because of her fearless, scathing honesty, like a gauntlet thrown down on page after page. It’s ultimately her anger that is so magnetic — though like a real magnet, it holds power both to repel and to attract.”
Liesl Schillinger on The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories by Louise Erdrich: “Readers of Erdrich may think of her as a chronicler of Native American ways, and this she certainly is, but her mine taps other veins as well. Many sorts of Americans appear among her characters: a reclusive New Hampshire sculptor; a small-minded German sister-in-law; a trapeze artist who saves her daughter from a burning house; a play-acting bank robber; a Eurasian doctor who lures a college girl by promising to cook her an omelet. Some readers may think of Erdrich as a teller of folk tales and parables, which she also is, although much of her writing lies outside that category. Still others may regard her as a master tuner of the taut emotions that keen between parent and child, man and woman, brother and sister, man and beast, and she is that as well. She can also be very, very funny.“
Adam Kirsch on Amerika: The Missing Person by Franz Kafka, translated by Mark Harman: “Karl’s innocence is the main reason ‘Amerika’ remains less persuasive a parable than ‘The Trial’ and ‘The Castle.’ To be sure, in his first novel Kafka lighted instinctively on many of the techniques he would later use to such great effect. So similar are all three novels in structure and mood that they can be seen as the successively widening turns of a spiral; each time, Kafka surveys the same spiritual territory, but from a more commanding height.”
Maslin on The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston: “‘The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death’ is his almost entirely successful leap into crime fiction’s mainstream. Despite frequent and literally splashy touches of the grotesque, it takes a tart, quick-witted, sharply funny trip, hijacked only by certain conventional plot touches and brushes with sentimentality. The vivid hilarity of Mr. Huston’s hippies manqué and stumblebum, Hollywood-obsessed tough guys is this book’s hallmark.”
Kakutani on Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips: “Jayne Anne Phillips’s intricate, deeply felt new novel reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr’s war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original.”
Washington Post:
Dirda on Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill: “Only writing — a talent that the now 91-year-old Athill discovered relatively late in life — affords some modest pleasure to this former editor for the English publisher André Deutsch. To readers Athill delivers far more than modest pleasure: Her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting, for whither she has gone many of us will go as well…. A refusal to sugar-coat and a commitment to utter frankness, coupled with an engaging style, make Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End unusually appealing, despite its inherently cheerless subject.”
David Smick on The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath by Robert J. Samuelson and The Return of Depression Economics and the Crash of 2008 by Paul Krugman: “The world desperately needs a big-think financial doctrine. The problem is not a lack of capital or liquidity, but a lack of trust in the financial system. Team Obama needs to use its considerable brainpower to outline nothing less than a global financial architecture for the 21st century. This, however, will be a process of muddling through, a sorting out of possible solutions by trial and error. As Samuelson and Krugman show, there are no quick-fix panaceas. The age of hubris is, or should be, over.”
Los Angeles Times:
Donna Seaman on Lima Nights by Marie Arana (who just stepped down as the editor of the Washington Post’s Book World to focus on her writing): “‘Lima Nights,’ her second novel, is a study in contrasts and a devastating cross-cultural and cross-racial urban love story as sinuous, precise and incendiary as a tango…. So rich in feeling and perception, so wrenching and paradoxical is ‘Lima Nights,’ its beautifully sad, mysterious and soulful music plays on long after the book is closed.”
Wall Street Journal:
Mark Falcoff on The Shameful Peace by Frederic Spotts: “With ‘The Shameful Peace’ he lifts the lid on one of the least known — and most shameful episodes — of the period: namely, the role of artists and intellectuals in occupied France…. Hitler, far from trying to eradicate French national culture, chose to nourish it as a distraction from his other demands. During the years of occupation the German authorities positively encouraged literature, theater and the arts — as long as Jews, Freemasons or (after June 1941) communists were excluded…. Carefully and authoritatively written, ‘The Shameful Peace’ peels back the pages of history and reminds us of events that many would still prefer to forget.”
The Guardian:
Killian Fox on A Quiet Adjustment by Benjamin Markovits: “The conflict [Lord Byron's] attentions produced in the mind of this subtle, calculating young woman is dramatised with extraordinary precision by Markovits, a 35-year-old American who studied in England and now lives in London. It’s hard to decide which is more remarkable - his insight into the psychology of a 19th-century Englishwoman or his control over the language of her thoughts…. A brisk, straightforward narrative lends ballast to each lyrical flight, making Annabella’s story as compelling to read as it is dazzling. Then again, it would take a lot to make any tale from Byron’s life seem dull.”
The New Yorker:
Adam Kirsch on Hannah Arendt: “This is the insight that makes Arendt a thinker for our time, when failed states have again and again become the settings for mass murder. She reveals with remorseless logic why emotional appeals to ‘human rights’ or ‘the international community’ so often prove impotent in the face of a humanitarian crisis. ‘The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they were supposed to be independent of all governments,’ she writes in ‘Origins,’ ‘but it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them.’ This is exactly what happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and what is happening now in Darfur. Genocide is a political problem, Arendt insists, and it can be solved only politically. Yet the supreme value that Arendt places on individual pride and aristocratic distance, on intellect and excellence, also sharply restricts the human understanding that must be the basis for any confrontation with political evil, especially the evil of the Holocaust. Too much of life and too many kinds of people are excluded from Arendt’s sympathy, which she could freely give only to those as strong as she was.”
Nothing says “the holidays” like a new book about a mysterious pathogen that turns ordinary people into raging killers, “psychopaths driven by a terrifying, alien agenda.” Yes, that’s right, its Contagious, the latest from Scott Sigler, the monstrously successful podcaster and novelist.
As the contagion spreads, a small team of unpredictable individuals is assembled to fight against the ravages of the ever-mutating, ever-adapting threat. But this team has its own problems. For example, former football player Perry Dawsey is emotionally scarred and possibly violent due to his encounters with the pathogen. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t stop fighting the intelligent disease long enough to give Sigler a list of his New Year’s resolutions:
#1: I will stop killing my friends (but that doesn’t mean I have to stop killing complete strangers).
#2: Poultry shears will be left in the kitchen, and only used on poultry.
#3: Just because there are voices in my head doesn’t mean I have to do what they say–I am the captain of my own ship.
#4: I promise myself to get some flippin’ therapy already.
Sigler’s Contagious has just been released on an unsuspecting populace. As Publishers Weekly warns, “this page-turner builds inexorably to an explosive ending.” We recommend you make a New Year’s resolution to pick it up and vaccinate yourself immediately. And, if you’re already Contagious, you might as well admit to being Infected, too.
David Michael Slater seems to know exactly what kids want, whether he’s doing books for younger readers or somewhat older, as with his recently released The Book of Nonsense, aimed at children ages ten and up. The book is already a finalist on the Association of Booksellers for Children’s Best Books 2008 list and a 2009 Cybil Award Nominee. Slater’s previous books have been alternate selections of the Children’s Book-of-the-Month and Mom’s Choice Award winners He’s also working on a film called Mocha Cola High with Right Angle Pictures.
As for The Book of Nonsense, it revolves around a book, naturally–an ancient weathered book that enters the lives of Daphna and Dexter. It seems to be nothing but pages and pages of nonsense, but soon bizarre events begin to occur, seemingly influenced by the book. Their father suddenly is distant. An old man who took their father to a hypnotist suddenly seems suspicious. Meanwhile, Daphna and Dexter have a thirteenth birthday coming up. Together, they’ll have to figure out the secrets behind the Book of Nonsense before it destroys their lives.
As the Portland Tribune wrote, this series is “fraught with suspense, hidden clues, bizarre twists and an ancient book full of utter nonsense…Slater understands that the secret to capturing the interest of teens is to engage their curiosity and intelligence by hooking them with a blend of unusual references, mysterious clues and a dark, suspenseful plot packed with action.”
There’s also a nice website for the book. If you’re looking for something well-written and engaging for your kids, this is a great new series to check out.
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Seriously? Apparently so - some people have actually broken the cat-leash barrier. Here is the editorial review of the official guide to walking your cat:
Today, tucked away in the New York Times was a short piece printed from their 
happening in the wider community that she hit 15 cities across America to interview and film independent artists and crafters at work.
