Amy Reiter

What’s so special about the 11 women who grew up together in Ames, Iowa, who are the subject of Jeffrey Zaslow’s “The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship”? Well, nothing really — and yet, in another sense, everything. With this book, Zaslow, who writes the Wall Street Journal’s “Moving On” column, has set out to explore long-term female friendships — what makes them tick, how they evolve, what they mean to women — selecting this tightly bound group who grew up amid midwestern cornfields in the ’60s and ’70s and came of age in the ’80s, specifically because they are so typical …

In Brief: The Girls from Ames (The Barnes & Noble Review)

You may know her from ABC’s “Pushing Daisies” or the Broadway musical “Wicked” or as “Sesame Street’s” Miss Noodle, but you may not know Kristin Chenoweth as she comes across in her new memoir, “A Little Bit Wicked: Life, Love, and Faith in Stages.” If Chenoweth — singer and sexpot, comedian and Christian, inspiration to hometown girls and drag queens alike — is a little bit wicked, she’s also a lot of bit wholesome: a lesson in surprising contrasts …

In Brief: “A Little Bit Wicked” (The Barnes & Noble Review)

Out of all the reasons to recommend a book to a friend, my motivation is rarely “This might help.” But twice now, since reading Amy Dickinson’s new memoir, The Mighty Queens of Freeville, I’ve passed it on in precisely that spirit. In one case, I thought a city-dwelling friend of mine, who’s lately missed the small midwestern town she grew up in, might find comfort in Dickinson’s loving description of her own rural hometown in upstate New York. In the other, a mother of three very young children revealed that her husband (the rat) had recently left her for another woman; I hoped she might find some salve in Dickinson’s survival under similar circumstances …

Review: “The Mighty Queens of Freeville” by Amy Dickinson (The Barnes & Noble Review)

As a partially reformed practitioner of snark — a snippy, quippy manner of writing that has become a preferred style in Web journalism — I approached David Denby’s “Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation” with high hopes. Having penned a popular daily online gossip column for years — back when the Web was still young and finding its voice — I had mastered the snappy turn of phrase, the knowing wink, the gentle elbow poke directed my readers’ way. Yet as the tone spread wide, to sites like Gawker, TMZ, Perez Hilton (shudder), and beyond, its cadences, once so comforting, began to feel repetitive and tired, and I more or less moved on.

Was Denby, a longtime film critic for the New Yorker, going to make the case that snark is not just tiresome and played out but actually a malevolent force? It seemed so …

Review: “Snark” (The Barnes & Noble Review)

Each crinkle in the well-lined faces that stare out from the crisp black-and-white photos in Norman H. Gershman’s “Besa: Muslims Who Saved Jews in World War II” seems to tell a story. The Albanian Muslims standing proud before Gershman’s lens have endured much: Nazi occupation, Communist rule. But look into their eyes and you see heart-melting kindness, righteous determination, joy. Gershman, a fine-arts photographer, traveled to Albania and Kosovo to photograph Muslims who rescued Jews during World War II and to hear and share their stories …

In Brief: “Besa” (The Barnes & Noble Review)

Yona Sabar, a professor at UCLA, is an eminent scholar of Neo-Aramaic, the heroic rescuer of a language near extinction, and the sort of mensch who prompts rapturous reviews and fierce admiration from his students. But to his son Ariel, growing up among the privileged offspring of Los Angeles’s moneyed set, Yona — a Kurdish Jew born in Zakho, Iraq, who emigrated to Israel and, ultimately, the United States — was a source of shame and an object of ridicule, an immigrant with funny hair, a funny accent, and funny habits. In a flashy world of fast cars, rock ‘n’ roll, and Hollywood glitz, Yona drove a dented Chevette, cut his own hair, wore ugly discount clothing, and further mortified his son by, say, bringing his own travel shampoo bottle of Manischewitz Cream White Concord into restaurants because paying $3 for a glass of wine off the menu was “out of the question” …

Review: “My Father’s Paradise” (The Barnes & Noble Review)

“Most of us, I think, have imagined what it might be like to experience a plane crash or a fire or an earthquake,” writes Amanda Ripley in her engaging, enlightening and surprisingly upbeat new book, “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes — and Why.” “We have ideas about what we might do or fail to do, how it might feel for our hearts to pound in our chests, whom we might call in the final moments, and whether we might be suddenly compelled to seize the hand of the businessman sitting in the window seat. We have fears that we admit to openly and ones that we never discuss. We carry around this half-completed sentence, filling in different scenarios depending on the anxiety of the times: I wonder what I would do if …” …

Review: “The Unthinkable” (The Barnes & Noble Review)

Literary historians have not been kind to Ann Shakespeare, ne Hathaway. She is painted as old, ugly and desperate, leading poor William astray, trapping him into a loveless marriage at age 18 (she was a ripe 26). Or maybe she was beautiful and sexually experienced and…unfaithful. Perhaps her talented husband hated her — or lived in fear of her. In fact, little is known about William Shakespeare’s wife, the mother of his three children, whom he married in 1582 …

In Brief: “Shakespeare’s Wife” (The Barnes & Noble Review)

Readers could be forgiven for approaching Paul Chambers’ “Jumbo: This Being the True Story of the Greatest Elephant in the World” with a degree of caution. A whole book about a circus elephant who died in 1885? Could be seriously sentimental. Could be a kitchy freak show. Could be as flat as yesterday’s cotton candy. In fact, it is none of the above. Clear-eyed, carefully researched, and crisply written, Chambers’ book explores the surprisingly compelling life story of the African elephant whose name would become synonymous with “extra-extra-large” and whose saga would inspire a classic Disney movie about a flying pachyderm …

In Brief: “Jumbo” (The Barnes & Noble Review)

You’ve doubtless heard the expression “Food is love” — but it’s rarely so literally expressed as in Kim Sunee’s memoir, “Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home.” Abandoned by her mother in a Korean marketplace at age three, Sunee was adopted, along with another Korean baby girl, by an American couple and raised in New Orleans. She came closest to finding a sense of belonging when she worked in the kitchen alongside her adopted grandfather, Poppy. “Suzy and I are the only Oriental girls, as we are called, in our school,” she writes, “so the comfort of Poppy’s kitchen after school every day, the promise of his home-cooked meals, are a refuge … solid food to remind us that we exist, that we live in a new world where we have not been forgotten” …

In Brief: “Trail of Crumbs” (The Barnes & Noble Review)