Kids shows that will please parents, too
September 16, 2010 § Leave a comment
Just because kids like foods that are gross to grownups (I’m looking at you, bubblegum ice cream) doesn’t mean they have no taste at all. Kids can be surprisingly discerning viewers when it comes to TV. This fall’s impressive slate of new kid-oriented shows has a lot to please children as well as their parents — from an adorable claymation sheep to a hyperactive animated antihero battling a villain named Dorkus to a trio of intergalactic escapees bonding together “sym-bionically” to save the Earth. Here are a few shows to watch for …
Fall TV preview: Kid-oriented shows (Los Angeles Times)
Your kids’ summer reading lists
June 3, 2010 § Leave a comment
Memorial Day is just around the corner, and school is nearly out. Even if you’ve planned a full summer of activities for your kids — camps, trips, days at the beach — there may come a moment when they look at you, bored and beseeching, wondering how to fill those long, hot days. What then? Hand them a book. A really good book. To help you out, we’ve put together two lists of great books for kids, one tailored especially for girls, one curated with boys in mind, though of course all the books on these lists may be enjoyed by kids of either gender …
Molly Ringwald gets her pretty back
April 28, 2010 § Leave a comment
Here’s what you probably already know about Molly Ringwald: Back in the ’80s, she was the pretty, pouty face of suburban teen angst, starring in the iconic John Hughes movies Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink. Here’s what you may also know: recently, she’s returned to the topic of teen angst, playing the mother of a teen mom in the ABC Family series The Secret Life of the American Teenager. But there are many things you may not know about the flame-haired former Brat Pack member, and you’ll learn some of them in her new book, Getting the Pretty Back: Friendship, Family, and Finding the Perfect Lipstick. …
Interview: Molly Ringwald (The Barnes & Noble Review)
A Qatari’s take on U.S. culture
April 21, 2010 § Leave a comment
Every once in a while, you encounter a character in a work of fiction who feels like such a real person, such a friend, that once you finish the book, you miss having him around. Karim Issar, the protagonist of Teddy Wayne’s captivating debut novel, “Kapitoil,” is such a character. When we first meet Karim, a gifted computer programmer from Doha, Qatar, he is en route to New York City, flying in to help the financial services firm he works for, Schrub Equities, survive the Y2K bug. The year is 1999, and “Kapitoil” reminds us that pre-9/11 New York was not quite as innocent as we may remember it …
“Value the passage of time”
March 24, 2010 § Leave a comment
On December 8, 2007, Roger Rosenblatt’s 38-year-old daughter, Amy, collapsed while running on her treadmill in her Bethesda, Maryland, home. The two eldest of her three children, ages 6, 4 and 1, were playing nearby and ran for help. Amy’s husband, a hand surgeon, rushed to her and performed CPR, but it was too late. Amy — mother, daughter, sister, friend, doctor — had died instantly of a heart defect she hadn’t known she had. What happened in the months following this unimaginable event, how a family reassembles itself after a devastating loss and moves on, is the subject of Rosenblatt’s spare, moving book Making Toast …
Review: “Making Toast” by Roger Rosenblatt (The Barnes & Noble Review)
Making peace with marriage
January 4, 2010 § Leave a comment
Anyone who has read Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, probably feels they know the author pretty well by now. In that book, Gilbert swept the reader into her world, her travels, her very thoughts as she launched herself out of a miserable marriage and brutal love affair and onto a redemptive quest to find pleasure, God and, ultimately, a sense of balance. Like happy travel companions, Gilbert’s readers tagged along as she devoured the sensuous dishes, sights, and cadences of Rome; experienced a spiritual awakening at an ashram in India; and at last found contentment in Bali, in the gauzily mosquito-netted bed of her kind, handsome, older Brazilian lover, “Felipe.” Through it all, Gilbert entertained us with her keen humor and keener self-awareness, turning what could have been a maddening ego trip into a pleasurable journey. Having been so open with her confidences, Gilbert now seems, to many readers, like a dear friend. When you’ve written a book like that — a book embraced by Oprah and squajillions of adoring women, a book that sat atop the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list for 57 weeks, has been translated into 30 languages, and is currently being made into a movie starring Julia Roberts — what do you do for an encore? …
Review: “Committed” by Elizabeth Gilbert (The Barnes & Noble Review)
A real-life “Top Chef”
December 14, 2009 § Leave a comment
As anyone who has ever devoured an episode of Top Chef knows, even if you can’t taste the food, cooking competitions can be a sensual feast to watch: the thrilling mix of colors and textures; the urgent rhythm of knife work and quiet fluidity of kitchen choreography; the mounting tension as empty plates and persnickety palates await; the pleasure of presentation — the imagined tastes and aromas — followed by the painfully attenuated moment of judgment. And then there are all of those riveting chef personalities …
In Brief: “Knives at Dawn” by Andrew Friedman (The Barnes & Noble Review)
An “impulse toward treachery”
November 10, 2009 § Leave a comment
At the tail end of the 1980s, shortly after I’d first arrived in New York, an earnest young grad student — straight and more or less straitlaced, all midwestern chirp — I took an administrative job at a midtown office in which the only other employees were two buff and beautiful gay men. AIDS was ravaging the city then. Classmates in my theater program were disappearing with heartbreaking regularity. It was a frightening, dangerous time. But there, in that office, gay New York seemed like one big, wild, raunchy, ridiculously fun party …
Review: “City Boy” by Edmund White (The Barnes & Noble Review)
It’s a man’s list after all
November 6, 2009 § Leave a comment
They probably saw it coming.
Publishers Weekly is catching some flak for its list of the 10 best books of 2009, all of which were written by men. “We wanted the list to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration,” explains the magazine’s reviews director, Louisa Ermelino, introducing the list, which includes Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply and Neil Sheehan’s A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, among other man-made works. The magazine deliberately ignored gender, she writes, but allows, “It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.” …
In the Margin: The Manly Art of List-Making (The Barnes & Noble Review)
“Just tell the truth”
October 5, 2009 § Leave a comment
Years ago, in a past life, I met Jeannette Walls at a conference, a “gossip” symposium organized by some now-long-defunct dot-com. I knew who she was — everyone in the room did; she wrote a widely read online gossip column for MSNBC, “The Scoop,” was a veteran journalist who’d worked at Esquire and New York magazines, and had published a terrific book on gossip called Dish. Strikingly tall, polished-looking, and sitting at the front of the room, she was a respected member of the gossip establishment, surrounded by colleagues and admirers. From my spot in the back, where I was slumped down trading snarky comments with the other dabblers and misfits, I swear, as the light bounced off her lustrous red hair, she looked like she had an aura …
Jeannette Walls: A conversation with Amy Reiter (The Barnes & Noble Review)
Amy Reiter 