Dave Zeltserman's THE CARETAKER OF LORNE FIELD Earns Starred Review in Publishers Weekly

Dave Zeltersman's The Caretaker of Lorne Field receives a starred review in Publishers Weekly: "Zeltserman’s superb mix of humor and horror focuses on Jack Durkin, the ninth generation of firstborn sons in his family who have daily weeded Lorne Field to purge it of Aukowies, bloodthirsty plants that could overrun the world in weeks if not attended to. Though Jack takes his job seriously, no one else does: his oldest son doesn’t want to follow in his footsteps; his wife is tired of living poorly on his caretaker’s salary; and the townspeople who subsidize him are increasingly skeptical of purported menaces that no one has ever seen because Jack diligently nips them in the bud. With his support dwindling, Jack finds himself driven to desperate measures to prove that he’s truly saving the world. Zeltserman (Pariah) orchestrates events perfectly, making it impossible to tell if Jack is genuinely humankind’s unsung hero or merely the latest descendant of a family of superstitious loonies. Readers will keep turning the pages to see how the ambiguous plot resolves."

The Caretaker of Lorne Field will be published in August 2010.

Laura Joh Rowland Continues the Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte in BEDLAM

Laura Joh Rowland's new Charlotte Bronte mystery, Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte, is already drawing excellent review attention:

"Jane Eyre’s alter ego returns when Charlotte Brontë again finds herself embroiled in a treacherous escapade that transports her from the squalid slums of Whitechapel to Queen Victoria’s regal summer estate. While visiting her publisher in London, Charlotte hopes to find the inspiration for her next novel during a visit to the notorious Bedlam Psychiatric Hospital. Instead, she recognizes one of the inmates as John Slade, her secret-agent lover whom she believed was on a mission to Russia—or dead. When Charlotte’s efforts to free Slade put her directly in the center of an international plot to stop a terrorist from launching a lethal biological weapon, the intrepid author herself is accused of heinous murders and becomes the subject of a police manhunt. Rowland’s literary heroine demonstrates all the cunning, guile, and daredevil skills of a modern-day Bond girl while retaining the essence of Victorian morality. Sharply relevant, Rowland’s inventive action-thriller delivers enough intrigue and romance to satisfy a wide array of readers."— Booklist

"Love draws the Victorian novelist into another breathtaking adventure. The surprising success of Jane Eyre has thrust Charlotte Bronte into the glare of the public spotlight, but this is a mixed blessing. Her sisters Anne and Emily have recently died after living through the commercial failures of their fiction, and Charlotte has left behind the love of her life, British spy John Slade, whom she met during an implausible escapade in Moscow. Renowned author and social lion William Makepeace Thackeray, who's taken Charlotte under his wing, shepherds her meeting with London's literati. Then an opportunity to visit the infamous mental institution Bedlam takes a dark turn. One inmate bears an unsettling resemblance to Anne; another, Charlotte is sure, is her beloved John, though asylum officials identify him as Polish refugee Josef Typinski. When Typinski escapes from Bedlam in the confusion following a murder of which he now stands accused, Charlotte knows what she must do. Chapters from John Slade's prior adventure alternate with dispatches from Charlotte's colorful investigation, which includes meeting the Queen and Prince Albert, a brief stay in prison and an incognito encounter with fans of her new novel, Shirley. The audacity of building a mystery caper around this unlikely heroine is part of the novel's considerable charm. Elegant stylist Rowland's prose remains as pitch-perfect as in Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte (2008), in what should be another long-running series from the author of the Sano Ichiro mysteries." - Kirkus Reviews

"Set in 1851, three years after the events in The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë, Rowland's fast-paced second Charlotte Brontë adventure continues to transform the shy author of Jane Eyre into an action heroine. Still pining for John Slade, the rugged spy from the first book whose marriage proposal she refused, Charlotte is stunned to come across John under restraints in Bedlam, the notorious London hospital for the insane. The last she knew John was in Russia on a secret mission. When Charlotte learns the police suspect that John is the Whitechapel Ripper, who's killed and mutilated three prostitutes, she sets out to prove him innocent, despite John's spymaster telling her that he betrayed Britain in Russia. The less than imaginative use of an ur–Jack the Ripper may disappoint those expecting the depth and sophistication of the author's series set in medieval Japan (The Cloud Pavilion, etc.). This historical thriller will likely appeal more to romance fans than Brontë enthusiasts. - Publishers Weekly

"Charlotte Bronte wants to mourn the deaths of her sisters Anne and Emily, but Jane Eyre will not allow her to. She feels survival guilt as her two novelist siblings never saw their writings make it though now thanks in part to her tale Jane Eyre, she and her late siblings are the talk of the nation. Charlotte has also ended her relationship with her beloved John Slade, whom she met during her Moscow adventure last year (see Secret Adventures Of Charlotte Bronte). Famous author William Makepeace Thackeray has mentored Charlotte and helps her deal with sudden fame and entrance to the literary lions of London. She is escorted on a tour of Bedlam Psychiatric Hospital, but one inmate looks like Anne’s twin and worse another has to be John. She challenges the officials re the latter’s identification and told he is Polish expatriate Josef Typinski, who escaped when a murder causes chaos. The authorities accuse Josef of the homicide while Charlotte gets involved. Rotating perspective between Charlotte’s journal and Slade’s escapades, readers will fully believe the last Bronte sister’s adventures this time in England. The story line is fast-paced, filled with action and feels plausible even with Charlotte turning into an amateur sleuth of sorts. As with the previous Charlotte Bronte’s secret adventures (in Moscow), fans of Victorian thrillers will be thrilled reading about the heroine’s bedlam escapades." - World of Romance

New Edition of THE FILM NOIR ENCYCLOPEDIA Coming in May

Film buffs rejoice: A new edition of The Film Noir Encyclopedia will be released on May 13.

The long-awaited, completely revised, expanded, and redesigned edition of Film Noir chronicles the classic noir period of American film with wonderfully exhaustive entries complete with cast, plot, and photos. Part One contains 400 entries that thoroughly explore the classic period of the noir movement, while Part Two of the encyclopedia explores the newer genre “neo-noir.” With 50% more content, insight from leading film industry experts, and 575 photographs and illustrations, this classic pioneering work is the final word on film noir.

"It's what you always want in a film reference book, but rarely find: comprehensive, intelligently organized, voluminously illustrated, and possessed of its own distinctive voice." -Lawrence Kasdan

"Pulp Fictions and Hypertexts with Robert Coover" in L Magazine

Michael Rowin takes a look at Robert Coover's new novel Noir for L Magazine: "You are at the morgue. Where the light is weird. Shadowless, but like a negative, as though the light itself were shadow turned inside out." So opens Robert Coover's latest publication, Noir: A Novel, and appropriately so: for forty-five years Coover has been inverting literary convention in works as wide-ranging as seminal experimental short story collection Pricksongs & Descants (1969), controversial Nixon psychodrama The Public Burning (1977), cubistic S&M farce Spanking the Maid (1982), irreverent Pinocchio sequel Pinocchio in Venice (1991), and kaleidoscopic small-town epic John's Wife (1996). Originally labeled along with John Barth, William Gass and John Hawkes as a "metafictionist" for his tendency to take the very act of writing as a subject, Coover's imagination cannot be contained: not only does he continue to expand the boundaries of fiction within the covers of his published books, but as a professor at Brown University he has also become one of the strongest advocates and teachers of the next frontier of fiction, the alinear, interactive medium known as hypertext.

The recently published Noir: A Novel (Overlook Press) is Coover's first in eight years, but in its total cinematic immersion takes up right where Lucky Pierre left off. The protagonist is "you," Philip M. Noir, a clumsy, forgetful, and lecherous private investigator who inhabits a permanently nocturnal labyrinthine cityscape right out of a chiaroscuroed crime thriller. Initially hired by a mysterious and beautiful veiled widow to find her husband's killer, Noir must now find her own murderer in an underworld populated by cantankerous cops (Blue), sultry nightclub singers (Flame), and seedy criminal informants (Rats). The real investigation for Coover, however, is into his usual concerns—memory, consciousness, identity, sex, the constant flux of a deceivingly malleable "reality," the intertwining of cinema and literature—with the dark, bawdy humor (a moll's fading full-body tattoo, used to relay messages between rival yakuza, is described as "suffering the fate of all history, which is only corruptible memory") and impeccable stream of consciousness prose that are his trademarks."

Click here to read Michael Rowin's interview with Robert Coover.

IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME Poetry Anthology Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly

Just as National Poetry Month wraps ups this week, Entertainment Weekly pays tribute to It's Not You, It's Me: "Jerry Williams is the editor of a fine new anthology, It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Poetry of Break-Up. It’s a collection featuring terrific poets such as Mark Halliday, Tony Hoagland, and Ai (a fine poet who died just last month). It’s Not You, It’s Me is divided into three themed sections “One Foot Out The Door,” “In The Middle Of The Storm,” and “The Aftermath.” This may be an anthology for anyone who’s been broken-hearted, but it’s not an anthology for anyone who’s faint-hearted: Treacly, romantic, winsome little poems are entirely absent Williams’ from conception of the messiness of breaking up with someone.

In his superb introduction, Williams says bluntly, “I have endured four major break-ups in my life. Each one nearly killed me.” You think he’s kidding… and then he goes on to describe each one. Williams is as good a prose writer as he is a poet. Get hold of this guy’s stuff and read it."

THE HORSES OF ST. MARK'S Reviewed in Publishers Weekly

Charles Freeman's lively history of the world's most famous statues and their turbulent movements, The Horses of St. Mark's, is reviewed in Publishers Weekly: "After Napoleon triumphed over Venice in 1798, he demonstrated his strength by plundering the city-state’s greatest treasures, including a set of four Greek or Roman gilded copper horses (their precise origins are not known) adorning St. Mark’s loggia and sending them straight to Paris. According to Freeman (A.D. 381), the horses were prime booty, symbolizing wealth, cultural assets, and military prowess. Thus, they were periodically looted by history’s victors, going first to Constantinople and then to Venice after its defeat of the declining Byzantine capital in 1204. After Napoleon’s fall, Venice recovered the horses from Paris. Despite Freeman’s efforts, too much remains unknown about the horses (such as how Constantinople originally obtained them), and the statues become almost peripheral to the narrative of the political and cultural environments of the 13th to 19th centuries. Freeman supposes the horses may have inspired artists such as Paolo Uccello and Dürer, who visited Venice. Most compelling for devout lovers of art and European history, Freeman effectively and ironically juxtaposes the horses’ location (atop a church) with the violence that punctuated their role as “plundered plunder.”

David Carkeet's FROM AWAY in St. Louis Post-Dispatch

David Carkeet's new comic mystery From Away is reviewed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "For years, David Carkeet taught linguistics and writing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Now, he lives in Vermont, the setting for his latest mystery novel, "From Away." Although the book centers on the murder of a lusty young woman, much of its tone falls under the category of humor of the absurd.

The result makes for entertaining reading, at least for readers willing to suspend disbelief. You see, the plot hinges on the fact that its hero is a fat Chicagoan who just happens to be in Montpelier, Vt., when the murder happens — and the Chicagoan just happens to be a dead ringer for a Montpelier man who left town without word three years back. The local cops think that the vaguely described Chicagoan is their murderer. But if the Chicagoan can convince everybody that he's really the local boy come back home, he's home free.

Much of the tale centers on the Chicagoan's cleverness in passing himself off to the clannish Vermonters as somebody he knows nothing about. He's glib and quick-witted, and his quirks make him a memorable character. Author Carkeet also shows a sure hand in depicting Vermonters and Vermont, which he calls "this backward state of dirt roads and dial-ups."

Oh, yeah — toward book's end, the comic tone gives in to a sinister twist before the murder finally gets solved. It's a different kind of story told in a different kind of way. If you can accept the premise, I promise you good reading." -Harry Levins

Ben Farmer's EVANGELINE Reviewed in ForeWord Magazine

Ben Farmer's debut novel Evangeline is reviewed in the May/June issue of ForeWord Magazine: "In one of several retellings of the legend of Evangeline, Farmer boldly writes into a classic; his words interlace with Longfellow’s first epic poem, published in 1847. Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Arcadie reawakened audiences to a part of this continent’s oppressive history, and Farmer’s version of the tale stands to do likewise. Responsive to issues of colonialism, Farmer calls attention to the “cruel circumstance…that insists this tale of deportation and wandering be told, as it was a century and a half ago, in the language of the conqueror.” The author teaches high school and also instructs through this work of fiction.

Beyond the shared historical context and the legend’s general plot, Farmer’s novel does not compare to the nineteenth-century work that served as its impetus; this telling is of another genre entirely. A historical romance written in unadorned prose, Farmer’s Evangeline will satisfy readers who allow themselves to swoon, who enjoy sentimentality. The book has saccharine tendencies (“Gabriel’s trusting smile in response made her heart ache”), but it remains endearing. “A rival of mine once complained that my stories begin awkwardly and end untidily.” This opening sentence is not a warning sign; it’s an invitation to a kind of fiction that’s underrepresented in U.S. bookstores." - Janelle Adsit

Chip Jacobs, author of SMOGTOWN, on California's Solar Scorecard in The New York Times

Chip Jacobs, co-author of Smogtown, offers his view on "California's Solar Scorecard" in the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times: "Californians: meet your sun. Or, rather, remember it. Despite living in America’s premier green state, most of the state’s homeowners continue to rebuff solar power as a way to shrink their electricity bills, and simply plug into their local public utility much as their parents did. With costs still too high for individual homeowners, the beneficiaries of all those subsidies are corporations and utilities. The numbers paint the apathetic picture. Out of 7.7-million single family homes statewide, only about 50,000 have roof-mounted photovoltaic cells. In Los Angeles, the nation’s eighth sunniest city, only 1,627 homes boast solar hookups.

Just as distressing as that skimpy adoption rate, not one recognizable leader — not L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, not Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — has done enough from the bully pulpit recently to highlight home-based solar. The presumption seems to be that when the Wal-Marts of the world and the utilities themselves better harness renewable sources (think massive solar installations and wind farms), everybody will have.

Besides, we’re lobbing money at the problem. The state plans to spend $3.3 billion, including $2.2 billion under the ratepayer-funded California Solar Initiative, to add 3,000 megawatts of sun-generated power by 2016. To date, about 256 megawatts have come on line — a real achievement considering that during the 1980s and 1990s, only nine megawatts were added here in America’s solar capital.

Trouble is, corporations and institutions will scarf up most of that new capacity, when record state and federal subsidies can almost halve consumers’ equipment costs. Why? First, the outreach has been spotty. Second, even with those sweeteners, a typical home solar setup can run $24,000, and most people don’t have that disposable cash to lower their long-term electricity expenses after the Great Recession.

It didn’t have to be this way. Californians remember the electricity brownouts of the early 2000s. They know slowing climate change will mean new taxes, as it already has in L.A., and that new power plants are unlikely. A recent state law requiring utilities to pay homeowners for excess solar power they generate might have helped, but critics believe it’s too stingy — and utility-oriented — to ignite consumer excitement.

So it’s more hypocrisy in the Golden State, where we promote eco-living with low-carbon restaurants and carpool lanes and yet fail to inspire millions to tap that gargantuan generator in the sky."

Overlook Authors Jim Nisbet and Katie Arnoldi to Appear at Los Angeles Times Festival of Books April 24-25

Meet Overlook authors Katie Arnoldi and Jim Nisbet at this weekend's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, located on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles.

The largest public literary festival in North America will mark its 15th anniversary by once again delivering an exciting and diverse world of culture and amusement under the beautiful Southern California sun to more than 130,000 people of all ages. Seven outdoor stages will feature everything from celebrity and author readings, book signings and Q&A's, live music, comedy and children's activities to cooking shows and culinary demonstrations. Nearly 100 panel discussions and readings featuring more than 400 authors blend with hundreds of exhibitors representing booksellers, publishers, literacy and cultural organizations to make the Festival of Books one of the city's most cherished and engaging institutions.

Katie Arnoldi, author of Point Dume, will appear on Sunday, April 25, at 1:30pm, Rolfe 1200, and the Book Soup tent at 4pm.

Jim Nisbet, author of Windward Passage, will sign books at The Mystery Bookstore booth (#411) on Saturday, April 24, 5-6pm.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was created in 1996 to promote literacy, celebrate the written word, and bring together those who create books with the people who love to read them. Between 130,000 and 140,000 people attend the event annually.

General event information is available online at latimesfestivalofbooks.com or by calling 1-800-LA TIMES, ext. 7BOOK. Detailed speaker and event information will be provided in the official festival program, which will be published in the April 18th edition of the Los Angeles Times.

BETWEEN THE SHEETS Featured in Miami Herald

The Miami Herald reviews Leslie McDowell's Between the Sheets, a provocative study of nine women authors and their literary liaisons: "Power that once belonged to male gods alone, they took for themselves. So proclaims Scottish author Lesley McDowell about nine 20th century female writers in her distaff version of the Prometheus myth distilled into a modern and accessible literary study. In McDowell's feminist account, Katherine Mansfield, H.D. (Hilda Doolitle), Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Gellhorn, Elizabeth Smart and Sylvia Plath are heroines who snatch literary fire for themselves and - by extension -- other women writers.

McDowell's approach to her subject is governed by what, in her view, has characterized love relationships between all men and women since the dawn of time: a struggle for power.' Though much has been written about some of the relationships covered here -- Nin and Henry Miller, de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Plath and Ted Hughes -- McDowell offers an original framework through which to view these often unequal partnerships. She believes that the writers under discussion voluntarily decided to endure all manner of hardship with difficult and even abusive men, because the payoff would be apprenticeship to experienced and well-connected authors able and willing to shepherd them to literary greatness. As such, we shouldn't view these women as hapless victims but rather as clear-eyed realists who gave their literary pursuits precedence over all else."

Advance Praise for David Carnoy's Medical Thriller KNIFE MUSIC

Coming this summer is Knife Music, a new thriller from David Carnoy. Here's a sneak preview from Booklist: "David Carnoy injects an uncommon level of medical expertise, from physical trauma through hospital hierarchy, into his fine debut thriller about the fraught world of doctors. The novel certainly works as medical drama, but it is also a gripping detective story and a revealing character study about what makes docs tick. We learn, for example, that many doctors’ lack of empathy can be seen as stemming from the fact that they were trapped in labs and libraries during the crucial social-skills-gaining years. One such doctor may be Ted Cogan, a surgeon, who is questioned by detectives after the death of one of his former patients, a female high-school sophomore. Cogan saved her life after a car accident six months before. Now the girl has taken her own life, and a trail of evidence points to a sexual relationship with Cogan and a motive for him to have killed her. Veteran detective Hank Madden, in charge of the case, is a brilliantly realized secondary character. Utterly baffling until the very last page." -— Connie Fletcher

Novelist Ben Farmer on EVANGELINE and Acadian History

Louisiana book critic Chere Coen speaks with Evangeline author Ben Farmer for the Louisiana Book News Service: "Ben Farmer is excited. He's found newly acquired but little-known historic information, like an Indiana Jones discovering a lost tribe. He's fired up about his subject matter, ready to spread the tale to the world.

Farmer is a high school teacher who writes non- fiction books for Overlook Press. When his editor Peter Mayer approached him about writing the novelization of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, "Evangeline,"the colonial historian gladly gave a few chapters for consideration.

Mayer liked what he read and Farmer's debut novel, Evangeline, is now on shelves.

"The Acadians were a footnote all the way through college," Farmer said of his education. "It's (the Acadian settlement and deportation) largely forgotten. Historically speaking, I saw this as a tremendous opportunity."

The book faithfully follows Longfellow's poem but adds background material on both characters
Gabriel Lajeunesse and Evangeline Bellefontaine, two only children who fall in love and plan to marry, only to be separated by the English when they deported the Acadians from their homeland of Nova Scotia beginning in 1755.

The book also keeps the characters firmly in the 18th century, describing in great detail "a more accurate portrayal of Colonial America" as opposed to Longfellow's view that's more relative to his time, Farmer said. Longfellow published the poem in 1847.

"These were refugees without anything at all," Farmer explained. "They were really living in poor conditions. The casualty rate was extremely high."

What makes Farmer so excited about the Acadians and their history, however, is not just the injustice of what he calls "an early example of genocide." He sees the Acadians as the healthiest people in North America before le grand derangement, or expulsion, with good farmland, big families and a friendly relationship with their Indian neighbors, one of the reasons they were so desperate to get back to Canada.

"Acadians were anxious to have a life in Nova Scotia because it was better than most colonists," he said. He also sees Acadians as the precursor to Jeffersonian America, calling them the "early American ideal" with their family values, neutrality and desire for "sensible, ordinary" rights.

"Basically, the first North American people are the Acadians," Farmer said. "And it's such a staggering thing that happened."

More Praise for Robert Coover's NOIR

Christopher Guerin takes a look at Robert Coover's new novel Noir in Pop Matters: "The author of 23 works of fiction, Robert Coover is perhaps most famous, or infamous, for his hilarious satire on Richard Nixon and the Rosenberg Trials, The Public Burning, in which Nixon is, shall we say, abused by the mythical Uncle Sam.

In his 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Coover proved himself a champion of the then-emerging postmodernist movement with a tale of a man who’s invented a form of baseball in which thrown dice determine every action. What appears to be a study of obsession and genius morphs into an ending so random and inscrutable that when I asked an English professor specializing in contemporary fiction what it all meant, he replied, “Damned if I know!”

Since then, Coover has applied his po-mo tactics to politics (casting the Cat in the Hat as a presidential candidate, and Nixon as Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears), sex and cinema (the story, “You Must Remember This”, describes what happens between Rick and Ilsa when the camera’s off), and, more recently, the fractured fairy tale, with wonderful re-imaginings of the Pied Piper, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and Pinocchio stories, among others. His parodies of genre fiction include Ghost Town, a western, and now the hard-boiled detective novel in Noir: A Novel.

Among other things, Noir is a hard-boiled detective novel about film noir. The entire novel is told in the second person, putting “you” at the center of the story.

The cinematic quality of this, with its layers of film metaphor, is no mere po-mo trope applied for its own sake. Film noir is about storytelling and so is this novel. “You” are one Philip Noir, private dick, and the novel wastes no time injecting “you” into the plot: “Following the usual preamble: You were in your office late. The phone call came in. You pulled on your old trench coat with the torn pockets, holstered your heater under your armpit, and headed for the docklands. The scene of the crime.”

What follows is a story that pours every conceivable detective story plot element into a multi-layered time frame. (

Along the way you’ll hear the Widow’s back story, which includes incest with three generations of men in her family, learn how two Japanese Yakuza once communicated across town by tit-for-tat tattooing a beautiful moll, and how to use a mummified hand to catch a murderous pawnbroker. “You” will be led to safety more than once by a bag lady and find yourself stark naked in a coroner’s drawer wearing only a toe tag and a new tattoo on your fanny. This is all serious fun.

The book is also a compendium of noir clichés, each one twisted to Coover’s purpose, which is to repurpose noir into a metaphor for existence itself: “On the third floor of a cheap hotel in the theatre district, a silhouetted woman was undressing behind a drawn blind. Same window as last night? No, different neighborhood. The kind of movie showing nightly all over town. The movie you’re in. Chasing shadows.” Noir is total artifice, self-consciously so, and with a tongue more often in cheek than sticking out at the reader, which is what postmodern fiction has pretty much always done."

Lesley McDowell's BETWEEN THE SHEETS in The New Republic

Lesley McDowell's Between the Sheets: Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women Writers is reviewed by Daphne Merkin in The New Republic: "It is laudatory that McDowell has set herself against the tenor of much of the critical discourse on the price of female talent: even so idiosyncratic a thinker as Elizabeth Hardwick was inclined to look at victimhood as the natural habitat of creative women, especially when they teamed up with creative men. One might wish for a more mellifluous prose style and more bold speculation on the role of the eroticization of intellect, but overall this is a welcome addition to the lives of writers in love and lust—writers who sometimes manage to write peacefully together in the same room, and who are equally dominated by the same demanding master: literature."

Starred Review in Booklist for R.J. Ellory's THE ANNIVERSARY MAN

Magnificent praise for The Anniversary Man, by R.J. Ellory in Booklist: "This is one of those police-procedural gems that come along once in a blue moon. The book is entirely free of the tired formulas that drive way too many procedurals and that often seem more oriented toward
securing movie rights than telling a story. And what a story this is! NYPD Detective Ray Irving—overworked, underpaid, and absolutely dedicated to his job—risks his code of ethics and, ultimately, his life to track down a serial killer who is imitating the crimes of some of the worst monsters our society has spawned. An increasing number of leads begin flowing in from newspaper researcher John Costello, a psychologically damaged survivor of the “Hammer of God” killer. Two decades after that traumatic event, Costello now seems to have garnered an uncannily encyclopedic knowledge of serial murderers. Costello’s almost prescient information soon makes him Irving’s number-one resource as well as his number-one suspect. Although Ellory is widely acclaimed in his native Britain, his books have not yet received widespread distribution in the U.S. Following A Quiet Belief in Angels (2009), this could be the one to put his name in lights in this country. Expect his name to be on every crime-fiction fan’s lips in short order." — Elliott Swanson

Q&A with Dilip Hiro, author of INSIDE CENTRAL ASIA, in Harper's Magazine

Dilip Hiro, author of Inside Central Asia, is interviewed by Scott Horton in Harper's Magazine:

"With unrest and another revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the Central Asian region is back in the news. I put six questions to Dilip Hiro, one of the region’s most prominent observers, on the basis of his recent book Inside Central Asia.

1. Your discussion of Central Asia includes Turkey and Iran, whose historical importance to the region can’t be questioned, and who continue to play significant roles that you describe—but you omit discussion of Afghanistan, even though its centrality to current Central Asian politics is apparent from every morning newspaper. Explain your call.

Dilip Hiro: My answer lies in examining the list of the 68 countries attending the international conference on Afghanistan hosted by Britain in London on January 28. Of the three Central Asian republics present—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—only Tajikistan has a common border with Afghanistan. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the remaining two immediate Central Asian neighbors of Afghanistan, were absent. Their absence was all the more striking when juxtaposed with the presence of such countries as Cyprus, Slovenia, and Switzerland: they are not members of NATO and have no or little contact with or interest in Afghanistan.

So it is hard to agree with the statement about Afghanistan’s centrality to current Central Asian politics being highlighted in the Western press. What comes through in the Western media, though, is the inextricable linkage between Afghanistan and Pakistan; and rightly so.

Nonetheless I have described at length the impact that the events in Afghanistan have had on Central Asian republics, starting with the Soviet Union’s military intervention in Afghanistan in 1979. I have also dealt in detail with the Taliban’s capture of Kabul in September 1996 and how the independent Central Asian states and Russia reacted.

Overall, the recent history of Afghanistan is incorporated into the general narrative of Central Asia, with emphasis on its impact on Afghanistan’s immediate Central Asian neighbors, particularly Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. By the way, this is also the case with Russia: its relationship with the Central Asian republics is a common thread in the chapters dealing with individual regional states."

To read the entire interview, click here.

Inside Central Asia is also reviewed in the March/April issue of International Affairs: "Few people know Central Asia better than Dilip Hiro does… Inside Central Asia is a major contribution to the study of post-Soviet Central Asia, interesting for both specialized and non-specialized readers for its solid analytical framework, the author’s engaging style and the remarkable amount of information provided in the volume.” - Luca Anceschi

Meet Laura Joh Rowland, author of BEDLAM and THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE, at Upcoming Events

Acclaimed novelist Laura Joh Rowland, author of the forthcoming Bedlam: The Further Adventures of Charlotte Bronte, will appear at these upcoming events:

Tuesday, April 13: New York Public Library, Mid-Manhattan Branch, 6:30 p.m. Panel discussion, "Crime Scenes--From Cities to the Back of Beyond: Why and How Mystery Writers Choose Their Settings." Other panelists are Lorenzo Carcaterra, Henry Chang, Julia Pomeroy, and Wallace Stroby; moderator, Peggy Ehrhart.

Saturday, April 17: Connecticut Mystery Festival, Easton Public Library, Connecticut, Charter Room, 11:15am-12:00pm.

May 14-16: MAYHEM Mystery Festival, the Hamptons, New York (sponsored by the BookHampton bookstores)

July 7-10, 2010: Thrillerfest, Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York, signing and panel discussion

July 12, 2010: Flushing Library, New York, 6:30 p.m.. Summer reading program on historical mysteries.

Elizabeth Abbott's SUGAR: A BITTERSWEET HISTORY in the News

Elizabeth Abbott, author of Sugar: A Bittersweet History, appeared on Leonard Lopate's "Please Explain" radio show, broadcast nationally and available online. Abbott describes how the cultivation of sugar is linked with slavery, the Industrial Revolution, and the fast-food industry.

Listen to the entire program on the WYNC website.

Sugar is also reviewed in THE WEEK magazine: "Elizabeth Abbott's 'sprawling, often fascinating, sometimes annoying history of the world's favorite sweetener" should do wonders for the honey industry, said Fergus Bordewich in The Wall Street Journal. Sugar has been adored by humans since "the noble cane" was first domesticated a few millennia ago, but Abbott stresses its many evils. After slowly spreading westward from India to the Middle East, sugar helped spawn the trans-Atlantic slave trade and continues to lure millions of people into unhealthful diets.

Though it touches on countless topics, Abbott's energetic book "is largely a history of sugary slavery," said Fergus Mulligan in the Dublin Irish Times. Among European empires, "Portugal led the way," when it shipped 2,000 Jewish children to Caribbean sugar plantations in 1493— only to watch two-thirds die within a year. As the taste for sweetened tea and coffee spread through Europe, slave traders seized an eventual 13 million Africans to force them into sugar farming. Field slaves survived an average of only seven years, and Abbott spares no detail in describing how they were beaten, raped, and worked to death. Sugar, she argues, is to blame for the racist thinking that justified such treatment and still haunts the West.

Abbott gives due credit to the workingclass tea-sippers who joined sugar boycotts to help end the African slave trade, said Andrea Stuart in the Belfast, U.K., Telegraph. But sugar magnates soon enough filled their fields with indentured servants from India and China. Even today, worker mistreatment remains a common industry embarrassment. Most of us, of course, are merely addicted to the stuff, which explains the ever-rising incidence of sugar-induced diabetes. One doctor quoted by Abbott claims that 50 years from now, the Western workforce is going to look "fat, one-legged, and blind."

Clarissa Dickson Wright's SPILLING THE BEANS: "Riveting Glimpse of a Life Few of Us Can Imagine"

Book critic Judy Alter offers a review of Clarissa Dickson Wright's memoir, Spilling the Beans, a moving and honest account of her life before after her stint as one of the beloved Two Fat Ladies: "If you remember the BBC show, "Two Fat Ladies," you'll recognize the woman on the cover of Spilling the Beans—a bit dumpy, a bit rumpled, standing in the English countryside (or perhaps Scottish) with a smile on her broad face and no make-up, no pretensions. Clarissa Dickson Wright was the one who rode in the sidecar, in the motorcycle driven by Jennifer Paterson in the most successful cooking show ever, eventually watched by seventy million people worldwide. Her memoir is as zany and energetic as the show, and Wright's ironic, witty voice bursts off every page.

That happy cover picture belies what lies inside these pages. Wright came from an extremely dysfunctional family and was beaten, mostly as an adult, by her alcoholic father, who once broke two of her ribs and another time tried to ram her head into a marble mantel in what she thought was a sincere attempt to kill her. Nineteen years younger than her older sister, she became the ally and protector of her mother, her beloved Mollypop. In spite of her father's refusal to support her efforts, she studied law and became the youngest woman ever called to the Bar in England.

Her successful legal career ended after the unexpected and sudden death of her mother, a loss from which Clarissa found oblivion in drink. For years she was the kind of wild, outrageous, carefree alcoholic who couldn't remember the day before. She was disbarred, penniless and homeless when she finally sought treatment, a long and arduous learning lesson from which she emerged with the clear knowledge that she could never drink again.

In her drinking years, she discovered that she loved to cook and hired out to various commercial operations and once for a family where she cooked an elaborate ten-course meal. The next day she couldn't remember what she cooked or if she had cleaned the kitchen (it was spotless!). Sober, she worked several years in a cookbook shop, then moved to Scotland, opened her own bookstore and branched out into catering. A mutual friend introduced her to Jennifer and came up with the proposed series. BBC liked it, and they were internationally famous.

After Jennifer's death, Wright made a series of specials with her friend Johnny Coleman, called Clarissa and the Countryman, promoting the values of coursing and hunting at a time when England was near banning fox hunting (which it has since done). They caused a furor of protest, and she was sometimes in danger but still enjoyed the touring and signings. Her television career ended, but she says today, "I have an enjoyable life."

Wright is a great story-teller but she is also brutally frank about herself, her drinking and periods of promiscuity, and the peace she found in sobriety. Some of her stories are sad but a lot are funny, like the time Jennifer's motorcycle went out of control and they careened toward a terrified cameraman, swerved at the last minute toward some rugby players, and finally came to a halt without any damage. Spilling the Beans is riveting, giving a glimpse into a life few of us can imagine."

More Praise for David Carkeet's FROM AWAY

David Carkeet's From Away is reviewed in ForeWord magazine: "From Away is a novel in the hallowed age-old tradition of mistaken and swapped identity fables. Yet it departs from its predecessors in the eccentricity of its main character: Dennis Braintree is an overweight model-train aficionado and writer who alienates everyone he meets. The novel features a murder, or at least what some want to believe is a murder. In all, this is a comical peek into the lives of small-town citizens, their relationships and desires, and a better-late-than-never coming of age.

After crashing his car, Braintree finds himself spending the night in a tiny Vermont burg where a sexual encounter gone wrong earns him the title of Suspect #1 for the disappearance (and purported murder) of a local woman. Instead of being brought in by police for questioning, Braintree is mistaken by the police as long-absent hometown hero Homer Dumpling. In order to avoid arrest, Braintree has to assume the role. At this point, based on what we have seen of Braintree, who bears a resemblance to John Kennedy Toole’s character Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, the reader is in serious doubt that this play-acting will hold. The tension builds from there.

Amazingly, the mistaken identity does hold long enough for Braintree to find himself in the position of accompanying local police as they attempt to find...Dennis Braintree. Meanwhile, for what is probably the first time in Braintree's life, those around him are treating him as if they like him (with some notable exceptions). In order to stay in character, Braintree must try to suppress his usual callow and often crass behavior. It's no easy task, and several lapses make for serious comedy.

Suspending disbelief on the part of the reader is the primary challenge of the mistaken/swapped identity genre. One has to accept that, by the power of suggestion and consensual validation alone, the supporting characters could discount all inconsistencies and mishaps and believe that the one person is actually another. Author Carkeet makes the suspension of disbelief less painful than it could be. The character of Braintree is so over-the-top in his interior monologue that the reader can hardly pay attention to anything else. He’s foolish, unpredictable, and hilarious.
Steeped as he is in a murder investigation; the guise of a man he knows nothing about; and thirty years’ worth of friends, family, and former lovers; Braintree manages to surprise even himself. A coming-of-age story about a man in his late thirties, From Away is a light read full of gentle humor and rural charm." - Leia Menlove

Dilip Hiro, author of INSIDE CENTRAL ASIA, on the Current Crisis in Kyrgyzstan

Dilip Hiro, author of Inside Central Asia, provides some insight on the current crisis in Kyrgyzstan in The Guardian: "The return of Viktor Yanukovich as the duly elected president of Ukraine in February seemed to mark a reversal of the colour revolutions that started with Georgia's rose revolution in November 2003 and ended with Kyrgyzstan's tulip revolution in March 2005. Following a rigged election, Yanukovich was deposed by peaceful demonstrations in Kiev in the country's orange revolution in December 2004.

After the successful tulip revolution in the mountainous central Asia republic of Kyrgyzstan, which resulted in the flight of President Askar Akayev, the opposition leader, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, promised to curtail presidential powers and eradicate corruption and nepotism. He won 89% of the ballots in an election with a voter turnout of 53%, a refreshingly true figure.

But once in office Bakiyev reneged. The long-running tug-of-war between the parliament and president on the division of power resumed. By introducing a new electoral law and founding his own party, Ak Zhol (bright path), he gained control of the legislature in the 2007 parliamentary poll. Despite his enhanced powers, Bakiyev failed to tackle the rise of the black economy, persistent corruption, and the general weakness of the economy. It was estimated that as much as 52% of the Kyrgyz economy was black or related to smuggling. Another problem was the growing influence of organised crime related mainly to the smuggling of drugs from Afghanistan via Tajikistan on their way to Russia and beyond.

Having failed to learn a lesson from the past, Bakiyev and his close aides resorted to fraud in the presidential poll in July 2009. Protesting against widespread malpractice on polling day, the leading opposition challenger, Almazbek Atambayev, withdrew his candidacy. This dashed any lingering prospect that this small republic of 5 million people would turn into a beacon of democracy in central Asia.

Armed with a fresh mandate, Bakiyev intensified his persecution of opposition leaders and independent journalists with a series of arrests and physical assaults by government agents, who authorities described as "criminals" but failed to apprehend. The long-simmering popular disaffection began crystallising around the steep rise in fuel and water and gas charges that the Bakiyev government decreed. This provided a platform on which the fractious opposition groups could unite. They did. The condemnation of Bakiyev's curtailing of democratic rights by the visiting United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, on 3 April led to the united opposition to name 7 April as the day of national protest.

To the surprise of opposition figures and the authorities, the protest escalated into a national uprising, with demonstrators occupying official buildings and state-run TV stations all over the country, including the capital, Bishkek. The bloody reprisals by the security forces left between 40 and 100 people dead. Bakiyev took off in his presidential plane to an unknown destination.

Roza Utunbayeva, the opposition heavyweight, claimed that the government had fallen and that the interim authority she planned to lead would draft a new constitution and call a fresh presidential election. Other reports said that opposition leaders were to meet the prime minister, Daniyar Usenov, to resolve the crisis. However, Bakiyev's fate is sealed. He is set to follow Akayev into exile, signalling the beginning of the tulip revolution, mark II."

Irene S. Levine, author of BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, Interviewed in Chicago Tribune

Irene S. Levine, author of Best Friends Forever, is interviewed by Heidi Stevens in a feature article on friendships for the Chicago Tribune: "Kids can do a number on friendships — eating up the time previously reserved for lengthy phone calls, girls' night out, basketball with the guys. When a circle of friends starts having kids around the same time, the pals tend to give each other a pass. But when one friend has kids and the other doesn't, the dynamics of that friendship get trickier.

The time differential is the most obvious challenge. The child-rearing friend and the child-free friend are likely both busy, but often at opposite times of the day: 8 p.m. for one friend means winding down homework and gearing up for bedtime, while the other friend may just be heading out for dinner. For parents, weekends are a time to reconnect with their kids after a week of school and work. For non-parents, weekends are for hanging with pals.

But schedules are only part of it. Previously inseparable friends often start to feel like they live on different planets. Your buddy wants to fill you in on his latest dating conquests, and you're lucky to schedule "date night" once every few months. The key is owning up to those feelings, say experts. Admit — early and often — that the friendship has changed, possibly forever, but that doesn't mean it has to end.

"No relationship is perfect and neither are friendships," says Irene S. Levine, author of Best Friends Forever: Surviving a Breakup with Your Best Friend (Overlook Press). "Kids are always a challenge that upsets the balance, but if you talk about it you can often work it out."
Levine says to focus on the things you still have in common, whether it's where you grew up, where you work or a shared hobby. "The more ties people have, the closer they remain usually," Levine says. "If the friendship was tenuous to start with, the baby could be the Achilles heel that kills it."

Mark Booth's THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORLD: "A Scholarly and Imaginative Masterpiece"

Just released this month in paperback is Mark Booth's provocative bestseller The Secret History of the World. From mystic revelations to esoteric codes, here is an alternative history of the world, based upon the beliefs of the secret societies. Based on over twenty years of research, Booth offers a radical reinterpretation of human existence and a view of the world previously hidden from us.

Here's a sampling of praise for The Secret History of the World:

"This book will take you on a jaw-dropping journey through the spiritual and mythological history of the world . . . A wonderfully controversial read, which challenges the accepted view and spiritual history of human society."- Soul and Spirit Magazine

"I can say without exaggeration that this book is the best and most accessible treatment of the western esoteric tradition that I have read in decades . . . a scholarly and imaginative masterpiece." - Ronald M. Mazor, Professor of German and French, Winona State University

"A totally engrossing book, an esoteric journey from the beginning of time to the present day, based on beliefs and writings of the secret societies. I loved it!" - Patricia Scanlon, "Books of the Year," The Mail on Sunday.

Robert Coover's NOIR Reviewed in Dallas Morning News

Jane Sumner reviews Noir by Robert Coover in The Dallas Morning News: "Who but Robert Coover would name a hard-boiled detective character Philip M. Noir? In fact, that's the title of the postmodernist's latest short novel – Noir.

Makes you wonder if Coover listens to A Prairie Home Companion, or if Philip M. Noir is any relation to Garrison Keillor's hilarious creation, Guy Noir: Private Eye.

If the public radio storyteller spoofs the conventions of film and pulp fiction of the '40s and '50s, Coover deconstructs them for 192 pages. With its flashbacks and glittering allusions, Noir is an exuberant, edgy laugh in the dark.

Keillor is constrained by Federal Communications Commission regulations, but Coover, who's been called "a potty-mouthed Svengali," doesn't shrink from sex or mayhem. Noir has a penchant for getting conked on the head and, like Sherlock Holmes, is not averse to the occasional opiate. At 78, the author writes like a young lion on Red Bull. Either Coover has lusty genes or a good memory, because sex is still forefront in his wordplay.

Written in the slightly disconcerting second person instead of the subgenre's customary first, Noir opens with: "You are at the morgue. Where the light is weird." A veiled beauty in widow's weeds hires Noir to find her late husband's killer – if he was killed. Then the comely client – if she was his client – is killed. When Noir goes to view her body, it's gone. Only a black veil remains.

The game's afoot and so is Noir, as he chases down mean, dimly lit streets and even meaner, darker underground tunnels in what his unpaid secretary Blanche calls "The Case of the Vanishing Black Widow." Along the way, Noir encounters human night owls like Fingers, Rats and Snark, who has a contortionist wife and Siamese twins for kids. The dockside detective's lady friends include Michiko, a totally tattooed sex worker who was passed back and forth by "two yakuza bosses as a kind of message board," and Flame, a red-haired torch singer with a "smoky voice and the sort of body that cracks mirrors."

In his 23 works of fiction, this literary maverick has broken all the rules. Brian Evenson devoted an entire book to Understanding Robert Coover that's a primer for reading his outrageous, stylish prose. As in the Western sendup Ghost Town (1998) and parlor mystery Gerald's Party (1986), the master of magic realism seems to be having a high old time in Noir. We are, too, although with Coover, there's always a mordant undertow, a whistling-past-the-graveyard feeling. Examining old myths can be unnerving.

If you're looking for a Sam Spade, Mr. Noir is not your sleuth. He's an empty trench coat, which makes the ending so delicious. If you're a Coover groover, you'll love how the writer gooses this classic subgenre. Noir is an obsidian gem."

Meet Novelist David Carkeet, Author of FROM AWAY, at Upcoming Events

David Carkeet, author of From Away, will appear at these upcoming events:

April 7 (Wednesday), New England Independent Booksellers Association meeting, University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine

April 8 (Thursday), 7:00 p.m., Phoenix Books, Essex Shoppes and Cinema, 21 Essex Way, Essex, Vermont

April 17 (Saturday), 11:00 a.m., Kingdom Books, 283 East Village Road, Waterford, Vermont

April 24 (Saturday), Tables of Content (authors' dinner), Rutland Free Library, Rutland, Vermont; information at http://www.rutlandfree.org/.

April 26 (Monday), 7:00 p.m., discussion of Double Negative with Bear Pond Books Mystery Book Group, 77 Main St., Montpelier, Vermont

More Praise for Billy Lombardo's THE MAN WITH TWO ARMS

Journalist, sportswriter, and biographer Allen Barra offers some glowing praise for Billy Lombardo's new baseball novel The Man With Two Arms: "Most great baseball fiction—books such as Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and Kevin Baker’s Sometimes You See It Coming come quickly to mind—are heavy on the realism but with a touch of the weird. Billy Lombardo’s fits neatly on a shelf with those classics. Lombardo, author of such fine collections of short stories as Logic of A Rose and Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns, is a Chicago-based writer and editor who is both a master of fiction and a consummate observer of the game, which is what makes his strange premise so oddly believable: Henry Granville, a baseball fanatic, trains his son Danny to pitch with both hands, much in the way Mickey Mantle’s father trained him as a switch hitter. Lombardo is as deft at handling the comic and tragic aspects of his story as his creation, Danny, is at whizzing them in from both sides of the plate. Let’s subtitle The Man with Two Arms “The Unnatural” and call it the best baseball-themed fiction so far this decade.

NOT UNTRUE AND NOT UNKIND "Contains Equal Measures of Beauty and Brutality"

Ed O'Loughlin's debut novel, Not Untrue and Not Unkind, is reviewed in Kirkus: "A novel of Africa that focuses on politics and personal relationships. The narrative begins with a death and a photograph. The death is that of Cartwright, a newspaper editor who we find out has died by suicide, while the photograph had been taken ten years before by the narrator, Owen Simmons. The subjects in the photo are some of his newspaper colleagues: Fine, Tommo, Beatrice and Charlie Brereton. This image catalyzes a series of flashbacks, and we slowly get acquainted with the characters and with the circumstances that gave rise to the photo. Africa in the 1990s was in chaos, with uprisings in Zaire, genocide in Rwanda and rebellions in Nigeria. This crew of itinerant journalists—some stringers, some covering Africa for respected newspapers—follow the mayhem and try to make sense of what's going on. In some ways the violence of African politics is merely a backdrop to the real action—the personal dramas that entangle the journalists themselves. Even O'Loughlin's spare style is reminiscent of Hemingway's, for while violence becomes an integral part of the landscape, Owen numbs himself in order to maintain objectivity and sanity. Contains equal measures of beauty and brutality."

Welcome to the Mysterious World of Susan Hill

Susan Hill's extraordinary collection of mysteries featuring Simon Serrailler and the English cathedral town of Lafferton continues to gain fans and draw attention across the country. New in paperback this month is The Risk of Darkness, which follows last year's hardcover release of The Vows of Silence.

Here's what one appreciative reader has to say: "In The Risk of Darkness- A Simon Serrailler Mystery by Susan Hill. the third in the Sellailler series, one of my favorite police inspectors is back, and finally, for those of you that might have read the second book and been a bit dissatisfied by the ending, we has a conclusion to the crime of the abducted children. And quite a interesting conclusion it is, not one I expected at all. Nor did I suspect that we would have the solution within the first 70 pages of the book. But fear not. As in the previous books of the series, there are any number of other issues, other storylines, to be explored and in this book, the solution of the crime is just the beginning of the story. It is one of the strength of this author, of this series, is that all these various plots can be explores without ever becoming confusing. Of course, not surprisingly, death is at the center of so many of these stories. The heartbreaking reaction of a family to death, a man driven mad by the loss of the one he loves to a horrible illness and even Simon again see death and loss touch his life in several ways. A fine continuation of this series.

In The Vows of Silence, the fourth in the series, the town of Lafferton is being terrorized by a gunman. A woman is killed in her house with a handgun, another shot by a sniper and, to the police, the shootings appear to be random. And while the killer is perused throughout the book and as in previous books, there are given some narrative from the killer point of view, once again the crime is not at the heart of this book. Yes, death is, but not death by murder, and once again our favorite police detective Simon Serrailler will be personally touched. Now, if you have read my reviews of the three previous books in this series, you know I am a fan of Ms. Hill's book. And I will continue to be a fan and anxiously await the next book that will be released in September. I think Simon and his family and acquaintances are excellent characters, I love the cathedral town of Lafferton and I will indeed be back for the next episode. If you have not read any of the books in this series, I must say that this is one series that really must be read in order. These books are written in order and if you are to have a chance of understanding the characters, you must get to know their history and that means starting at the very, very good first book, The Various Haunts of Men. Once you get to know Simon and the rest, will be so vested in them that you will even forgive them one book that was not up to the very high standards of the rest."

Elizabeth Abbott's SUGAR: A BITTERSWEET HISTORY in The Wall Street Journal

"Fascinating... epic in ambition... there is much to savor in Sugar. . .generally excellent," says Fergus Bordewich in The Wall Street Journal review of Elizabeth Abbott's Sugar: A Bittersweet History.

Already an international success and one of only three books shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction, Elizabeth Abbott’s Sugar: A Bittersweet History tells the extraordinary story of sugar from its very origins to the present day. Exhaustive research took Abbott across the globe, retracing the route of slaves across three continents. She illuminates how the cultivation of sugar put a series of events into effect that created a new form of slavery, fueled the Industrial Revolution, kick-started the fast food industry and the current obesity crisis.

Library Journal also weighs in on Sugar: "In this study, Abbott reveals the sordid past of a seemingly innocuous kitchen staple. Because she is a descendant of Antiguan sugar farmers and a former resident of Haiti, Abbott's sugar obsession runs deep and, not surprisingly, focuses primarily on the Caribbean. She recounts the origins and development of the sugar industry as a history of the people who suffered for its profitability. Paying considerable attention to the eradication of indigenous peoples and the inhuman treatment of African and Creole slaves, she is seemingly intent on exposing the immorality of sugar by pairing descriptions of its enslaved and indentured harvesters with startling vignettes of excess sugar consumption in Europe and the carefree lives of largely absent plantation owners. Although Sugar lingers a bit too long on the dark side of sugar production and can at times feel more like a tome on Caribbean slavery, Abbott has still produced a scholarly yet quite readable work. Her closing chapters on "sugar diasporas" and the modern sugar industry ultimately succeed in drawing readers back out of the cruel intricacies of sugar plantation slavery."