Books

Books Robert Downes Ripping the Lid Off the Writing Racket

By Robert Downes

How I Became a Famous Novelist
By Steve Hely
Black Cat Books
322 pages - $14

“When my career as a novelist began, my ambitions were simple: to learn
the con, make money, impress women, and get out.”

Books Anne Stanton The World Peace Diet
Author: animal cruelty, waste & illness make our eating habits all wrong

By Anne Stanton 7/6/09

When Will Tuttle was still in high school some 35 years ago, he read a
book, Cosmic Consciousness, written in 1901. The book examined historic
figures such as Jesus and Buddha, who were able to attain unusual empathy
and compassion for all mankind. The author proposed that these powers of
transcendence could be achieved by others.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli DEER SEASON
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli 6/29/09

Deer Season
By Aaron Stander
Writers & Editors, LLC
$15.95

It is deer season in Northern Michigan and the area is caught (as if in amber) under an unusual blanket of snow. The roads are dangerous. Things are hidden in the snow — clues to attempted murder, then murder. Also hidden beneath the snow -- beneath the years in Cedar County, Michigan, beneath family facades -- are the old secrets and simmering hatreds about to explode during this hunting season.
In this new mystery from Traverse City writer, Aaron Stander, Sheriff Ray Elkins is recuperating from past injuries while confronting a group of suspects ranging from super-wealthy, international businessmen to your everyday saloon habitués; from barmaid and drunks to condescending lawyers.
Elkins has his work cut out for him: while returning from her morning yoga class, local anchorwoman Lynne Boyd is shot and wounded in front of her twin daughters and their French au pair.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli A Gay Green Acres
Set in Saugatuck
At Least in the City Someone Would Hear
Me Scream
By Wade Rouse
Harmony Books

By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli 6/22/09

You take comedian Stephen Colbert, throw in a generous dash of the guys from Queer Eye, and what you get is Wade Rouse’s hilarious new memoir, At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream - Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life.
Wade, and his partner, Gary, leave St. Louis to come live their dream life in the Michigan woods outside of Saugatuck, where they innocently run smack up against themselves, the culture of the north woods, and the problem of getting what they asked for and maybe not wanting it at all.

Books Rick Coates Like Father,
Like Son
Elmore & Peter Leonard share a passion for writing

By Rick Coates 6/22/09

At the age of 83, crime novelist and pulp fiction master Elmore Leonard remains at the top of his game. Last month he released his 43rd novel, Road Dogs, that is currently on the New York Times Best Seller list. Leonard has built his 56-year writing career around his ability to let his characters “tell the story.”
Elmore Leonard will come to Northern Michigan on Sunday, June 28 as part of the new “Traverse City National Writers Series” created by author Doug Stanton and Traverse City attorney Grant Parsons. Leonard will be joined by his son Peter, who is following in his father’s footsteps. Both authors are currently touring in support of their latest novels. The evening of conversation will begin at 6:30 p.m. at the City Opera House. Proceeds will benefit the college-bound writing students in the Traverse City Area Public Schools and the Grand Traverse Area Catholic Schools.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Summer’s Best Beach Reads

By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli 6/15/09

A soft, summer day; a comfortable chaise lounge; a cold drink beside you, and a good book in your hands. It’s the stuff of winter dreams, but nothing can bring a bigger letdown than the wrong book; or one not perfect for a summer mood.
When I asked people about favorite beach reads, or when I spoke to Lois Orth at Horizon Books, or Deb Bull at the Kalkaska County Library, everyone felt strongly about their picks. Still, it is a matter of personal taste—some people want to be instructed, some want to catch up on books they’ve heard about all winter, some want to wallow in things they don’t usually read, and some want to simply slide into a book the way they might a warm pool on a sun-ridden day. The following books are among the most entertaining, memorable, or just plain fun, that have come out in the last couple of years.

Books Elizabeth Buzzelli A Family Secret Reveals Mental Illness and Death in
Annie’s Ghosts
Elizabeth Buzzelli 6/1/09

ANNIE’S GHOSTS
By Steve Luxenberg
Hyperion, $24.99

As family secrets go, maybe Steve Luxenberg’s isn’t the biggest. As obsessions go, maybe it is. Annie’s Ghosts, his investigative memoir, covers a lot of bases, from family secret to family secret; from family tragedy to tragedy, while along the way he raises as many questions as he answers. The biggest of these questions being why he wrote the book at all?
Before his mother, Beth Cohen, died, her long guarded secret came to light. She wasn’t the only child she’d always claimed to be. There was a sister, Annie Cohen, who died in a mental hospital. Beth told her children she didn’t remember the sister. After all, she’d only been four years old when Annie entered Eloise, near Detroit, an asylum for the insane.
When that proved to be a lie too, Luxenberg, began to delve into the reasons behind his mother’s now obvious subterfuge. He took a leave of absence from his job at the Washington Post and began this very personal trek which would take him from Depression era Detroit to the Holocaust in the Ukraine, and even more disturbing, to the mental facilities of the time, to the forced incarcerations, to moves to other facilities without as much as an announcement, let alone agreement.

Books Special Forces Ride to Victory in
Horse Soldiers
HORSE SOLDIERS: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan
By Doug Stanton
Scribner 5/25/09
Illustrated. 393 pp. $28

Author Doug Stanton’s first book In Harm’s Way enjoyed nine months on the New York Times Bestseller List back in 2001, including several weeks in the Top 10. His second book Horse Soldiers, a dramatic tale of a small number of Special Forces soldiers who entered Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 and eventually defeated the Taliban while riding on horseback, is expected to hit number 10 on the New York Times list this week.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read Stanton’s work over the years in a variety of publications including Esquire, Outside, Sports Afield and Men’s Journal, where he is currently a contributing editor, that he would follow up In Harm’s Way with another bestseller.
Stanton has a keenness to go beyond the surface of the obvious by using his journalistic instincts to get to what actually drives a story. In the case of Horse Soldiers he could have easily found himself caught up in the policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations on Afghanistan and distracted the reader by going into great detail as to how these soldiers ended up from a policy perspective in Afghanistan in the first place. Instead Stanton delves into what happened on the “war field,” not in the “war room.”
Too often battles and wars are reported or written from the perspective of those creating the strategies and the policies and not by those who carry them out. Stanton received unprecedented access to a group of Special Forces soldiers, whose modus operandi is to blend in versus seek the spotlight. He made the most of his access and as a result he takes readers right to the battlefield and into the minds and moments of this extraordinary group of human beings.

Books Robert Downes Is Glenn Puit the King of True Crime
Robert Downes 5/4/09


By day, Glenn Puit spends his time as an environmental reporter, sifting through reams of boilerplate reports and conducting interviews with bureaucrats and eco-activists to promote a greener world. But at night, chances are you’ll find him wading knee-deep through the bloody history of the Las Vegas underworld -- a place where psychopaths present a smiling face to the world, yet roil with killer impulses; a world where upstanding citizens and pillars of the community set their colleagues on fire in the desert, or bash the brains out of their loved-ones.

Books Elizabeth Buzzelli When
Grandma
wore
Nothing
But a Smile


Nothing But a Smile
Steve Amick
Pantheon Books

By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli 5/4/09

Nothing But a Smile isn’t about WWII, it isn’t about the porn industry, it isn’t even about your grandmother. Instead, this novel by Steve Amick, the Ann Arbor writer whose last book was the Michigan Notable Book: The Lake, the River & the Other Lake, is the intimate story of two young people during and just after the war, trying to make their way, suffering through tragedy, youth, impetuousness, and nobility as often as they suffer stupidity.
It’s about the kind of idealism that age crushes. It’s about America still reeling from loss. It’s about morality that deviates from the usual, proscribed morality of religion, springing instead from necessity, and then from joy. The war is over. They are the ones who lived. The future is theirs.

Books Mardi Link Can Bookworms
Solve a Crime?

By Mardi Link

That’s the question participants at the Petoskey Public Library will consider at an upcoming forum addressing Northern Michigan’s most notorious unsolved mass murder.
In June of 1968 all five members of the Detroit-based Richard Robison family were ambushed inside their Good Hart cottage. After more than four decades the crime remains officially unsolved, despite an exhaustive investigation by both the Emmet County Sheriff’s Office and the Michigan State Police. Law enforcement’s chief suspect committed suicide in 1973, just days before a rumored indictment and arrest.
How do you activate interest in a cold case when the crime scene is gone, the suspect is dead, the murder weapons were never found, and the evidence is ancient? You rally the bookworms.
First among those is Petoskey high school English teacher, Rick Wiles. At the time of the murder Wiles had been receiving a subscription to Impresario, the monthly arts magazine that Richard Robison’s company published. Wiles began keeping a scrapbook of newspaper articles on the case and eventually wrote a lengthy, unpublished research paper detailing the investigation and delving into the possible psychology of the named suspect, Joseph R. Scolaro, III.
Wiles’ research led him not to the police but rather to other literary types like himself. Namely Royal Oak psychologist and author Eleanor Payson, whose book The Wizard of OZ and Other Narcissists dissects the personality type Wiles attributes to the Robison family killer; and to Indiana writer and criminal attorney Frank S. Perri, who writes in forensic periodicals about the new idea that white collar criminals (theft) can become red collar criminals (murder) when they believe they are in danger of being exposed.

Books Glen Young Eye candy... Playboy takes a stroll down memory lane
Glen Young 3/30/09

Okay, so no one is going to buy Playboy’s pictorial for the reading. Nonetheless, astute readers, as well as critics of the culture, will find as many insights into evolving mores in the essays as in the stylized and recognizable photographs.
Oh yes, the photographs. In living color spread across more than 637 pages are “The Complete Centerfolds,” those iconic images from Playboy, starting with Marilyn Monroe in December 1953, concluding with Sasckya Porto, Miss December 2007, and including every lovely lady in between.

Books Elizabeth Buzzelli Wesley the Owl
Stacey O’Brien
Free Press Publishers
$23.00
By Elizabeth Buzzelli 3/23/09

Rene Descartes was wrong. The 17th century philosopher/mathematician/scientist declared absolutely that animals do not possess real feelings and with that pronouncement he wiped away centuries of experiential evidence. Then came B.F. Skinner in the 20th century likening animals to furry automatons. They care nothing for anything or anyone beyond their own survival, scientists proclaimed. A lab’s head in your lap when you’re crying means only that your lap is a convenient place to rest. A cat draping herself over your shoulders and purring in your ear signifies an automatic response. A bird needing to cuddle exhibits nesting instinct. They can’t love; can’t care about each other or anything else; don’t grieve; don’t worry...
Twaddle and hogwash, said Jane Goodall after her years of close observation of apes in their native habitat as they loved and mourned and interacted in complex ways, exploding the ‘furry automaton’ myth to pieces.
Now comes a charming little book about a girl and her owl, capturing the imagination of animal lovers everywhere and once again opening a world of possibility.
Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl by Stacey O’Brien, isn’t about anthropomorphizing her feathered friend, Wesley, but about finding true affection and continued understanding between two such disparate creatures as a biologist and a barn owl.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli It is a bit like entering a dream, to open Historic Cottages of Glen Lake, and come across comfortable old places; meet the visionary families who built their residences along the shores of a lovely Northern Michigan lake so long ago. What struck me first was that the photographs, by Dietrich Floeter of Traverse City, were in black and white, not the sepia tones I was seeing. It was my imagination—the sepia. My own warming addition of memory and soft summer days to a book that allows for nostalgia.

Books Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Ahh—how I miss the scheming, the sex, the petty jealousies, the back-biting, the shameless snobbery, the hangers-on, and the social climbing, now that Sex and the City, has moved to rerun heaven.
I’m lost without my obsession with $900 Manolo Blahnik shoes, with $1000 Prada boots, and YSL bags at $1399. Take me back, oh Candace Bushnell! Take me back to the time of full-blown collagen lips and plastic noses. I want to feel, once again, how deprived I am because I don’t live in New York City, reside at one of the better addresses, buy clothes more expensive than my first house, and have friends who would drop me at the first hint of a pay cut or a loss of status.