Tuesday, February 26th at 8 pm

Kenneth R. Miller will be speaking about his book Finding Darwin's God as part of the UNCW Honors Lecture Series in the Warwick Building on the UNCW Campus.  The event is open to the public. Two Sisters Bookery will be handling book sales for the event.

In Finding Darwin's God, Kenneth R. Miller offers a surprising resolution to the evolutionism vs. creationism debate. A distinguished professor of biology at Brown University, Miller argues that the genuine world of science is far more interesting than either the scientific mainstream or its creationist critics have assumed. He begins by systematically demolishing the claims of evolution's most vocal critics, showing that Darwin's great insights continue to be valid, even in the rarefied worlds of biochemistry and molecular biology. As he puts it, evolution "is the real thing, and so are we."

Does this mean that evolution invalidates all worldviews that depend upon the spiritual? Does it demand logical agnosticism as the price of scientific consistency? And does it rigorously exclude belief in God?

His answer, in each and every case, is a resounding No. Not, as he argues, because evolution is "wrong." Far from it. The reason, as Miller shows, is that evolution is "right."

More details here

Also, you won't want to miss Yusef Komunyakaa-the keynote speaker at this year's Writers' Week Symposium, sponsored by the UNCW Creative Writing Department. Writers' Week takes place February 25-29, and Komunyakaa's appearance is on the 28th at 8 pm at Kenan Auditorium.  This is really a stellar opportunity to see one of the country's most exciting poets. Poetry books by Komunyakaa

The full Writers' Week schedule

More events information here

New on the shelf
(click on a jacket to read about the book)

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Jeffrey Eugenides has edited a collection of love stories entitled, My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead (24.95).

If you're looking for a unique gift for a reader, this would be perfect!  The authors range from Chekhov and Nabokov to Denis Johnson and Lorrie Moore, many in between that you'll be excited to read and some brand new ones that will have you seeking more of their writing.  I was very curious as to what Eugenides thought of when he thought of a "love story", and in his introduction, he has a great answer.  "Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart.  Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name. . ."  This is a really great collection that often took my breath away. . .and I've emerged relatively unscathed from the journey!

I just finished Beth Lisick's Helping Me Help Myself (24.95), and I think this will count as my self-help read for the spring!  Lisick is a hip writer who is also a spoken word performer and odd-jobs enthusiast living in San Francisco.  She and her music producer husband and their son live job to job paying the mortgage, feeding themselves, and having friends over for the annual New Year's Eve party.  For the last year, Lisick decided her next project would be to seek out some of the preeminent self-help gurus to help her grow in various areas of her life.  She went to seminars and read books by people like Stephen Covey (leadership principles), Suze Orman (money!), John Gray (relationships), and Thomas Phelan (kid raising).  She and a wonderfully described friend even went on a "cruise to lose" with Richard Simmons that deserves its own movie adaptation.  I thought this would be a real guru-bashing journey, but it really isn't.  Lisick went into each of her encounters with an open mind, and in most cases she took something helpful away from all of them, except for maybe John Gray who sounds like a throw-back to the Stone Age!  The upper echelon of the self-help world is a strange place that I'm glad I can read about rather than visit myself!

If you're a history reader (or a thriller reader for that matter) check out A Life in Secrets (16.00) by Sarah Helm.  This is the story of Vera Atkins, an elusive woman who recruited and trained special operatives who were sent into Nazi-occupied France to arm and assist the French Resistance.  I really couldn't put this one down.  Atkins was interviewed by the author not long before her death, and she held fast to her secrets.  Helm was allowed by the family to look through years of papers, and she made contact with some of the few surviving SOE agents which in turn sent her on a remarkable journey to trace the life of this woman who had spent so much of her own life trying to find out what happened to the agents she sent into the field.  The first-rate depiction of surprisingly young men & women parachuting into France by moonlight and getting caught up in the tangled web of espionage and compromised loyalties is just fascinating.  I was biting my nails as Vera and the others waited in Britain for wireless messages from their agents. . . and tried to determine if the messages were authentic or Gestapo plants.  Vera Atkins would probably have appreciated that this story becomes much more than just her story. . .and she really does deserve the story.

---Joan

The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner (Twelve/Hachette, 25.99) 

Weiner, a foreign correspondent for NPR, is a self-professed curmudgeon.  Granted, he has seen humanity at its lowest points having been frequently assigned to war-torn countries, but he admits he has pretty much been an unhappy, "woe is me", Eeyore-type for his entire life.

Weiner decides to take an extended road trip to seek out bliss.  But not your typical bliss-seeking vacation of lying in the sun with a pina colada in hand or even the ashram spiritual experience, but an honest-to-goodness search for the places in the world where people are the happiest and why.

He begins his search in Rotterdam by visiting Dutch professor Ruut Veenhoven who runs the World Database of Happiness.  Veenhoven has ranked the world's countries on a happiness scale and Weiner decides to visit places ranked both high and low on that scale to see what makes them particularly happy or unhappy.  What ensues is both an enlightening, confusing, and often hilarious tale of what makes the human race happy.  I don't want to ruin the results, but I think it will pique your interest to know that Iceland ranks near the top while the US is somewhere in the middle around Number 17.  Trust, family ties, the arts and alcohol seem to play a big part in the happiness factor.  Surprisingly, money does not play as big a part as you might think.  Weiner has taken on an interesting search that leads him to his own place of relative happiness and maybe takes readers a few steps closer to theirs.

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson (Grand Central Publishing, 23.99)

Laurel Hawthorne's life seems perfect . . . she has a loving husband, a well-rounded daughter, a lush yard in the well-groomed neighborhood of Victorianna, and an inspiring artistic career creating prize-winning quilts.  And then a neighbor's child is found floating dead in Laurel's backyard pool.

Suddenly Laurel is caught in the fear and intrigue of the child's death and is forced to face her own soiled past.  As with all good Southern tales, there are plenty of interesting, quirky characters and lots of dirty laundry to be aired.   Jackson is great at the balancing act of solving the mystery while digging at the psyches of the characters.
She juxtapositions Laurel's tidy life with the messy lives of her relatives who tend to live in doublewides with pit bulls chained to the fence alongside the babies who play in the dirt.  Jackson has deep empathy for the two Souths and manages to tell another story entirely from the mystery that begins on page 1. Those many layers made it feel like I got two stories in one and that is the mark of a great Southern storyteller.

Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips (Little, Brown and Company, 23.99)

Oh, the Brits and their witty sense of humor!!.  Londoner Marie Phillips has written a wry tale that keeps us chuckling.  The twelve Greek gods of Olympus are not dead.  They are very much alive and living together in a rundown London flat where they constantly argue about who has superior powers and how much better life was B.C. 

All of them have been forced to get day jobs in light of their declining powers.  Artemis (the god of hunting) is a professional dog-walker, Aphrodite (goddess of beauty) is a phone-sex operator and Apollo (the sun god) is a TV psychic.  When the bickering
Gods begin interfering with the lives of mere mortals and using their waning skills to cast spells on one another, mayhem and hilarity ensue.  The whole thing felt like an extended Monty Python skit and I mean that as the highest of complements to this first-time author.

The End of the Alphabet by CS  Richardson 

Ambrose Zephyr and his wife Zappora, nicknamed Zipper live a contented life. When Ambrose turns 50 he is told by his doctor that he has one month to live.  Ambrose decides to visit all the places he has always to see from A to Z, Amsterdam to Zanzibar. As they travel through the alphabet to romantic faraway destinations Zipper and Ambrose struggle with the unfairness that their
future together holds. They hold each other up with their devotion to each
other and humor.  This is a beautiful book, extolling the power of love and the "nature of love, loss, and life."

Living in a Foreign Language by Michael Tucker

Michael Tucker and his wife Jill Eikenberry (both of L.A. Law fame) buy a small cottage in the Umbrian country side.  A 350 year old "rustico" perched on a hill surrounded by olive groves and fruit trees.  I lived vicariously through their adventures of renovation, making friends, learning the language, learning to drive in Italy, and the FOOD, WINE.OH MY! Many days and nights of fantastic leisurely meals with great conversation, dancing.  Michael is quite the "foodie" so much of the book, to my delight, goes into the planning  and execution of meals. This book left me hungry and wanting to find my own little "rustico."

The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan

Kelly lives in a place she calls the "middle place, that sliver of time when parenthood and childhood overlap."  We perform our adult duties all the while we take comfort in that we are still someone's child.  Family is all important to Kelly. She has a good marriage, two small daughters and a good job, life is good.  At 36 she still sees herself as George Corrigan's daughter, an Irish American charmer who greets each morning by throwing open a window and shouting out "hello world." Kelly is thrust into full-tilt adulthood with her diagnosis of breast cancer followed by her father's diagnosis of bladder cancer.  I loved this book.  Being a
"daddy's girl" myself, Kelly gave me insight into the trading of places we do with our beloved parents, from child to caregiver.  To changes that will come and alter our sense of family and comfort.  This is a book about family and its centrality in our lives, how family makes us who we are and who we can be.

--Susan

Rosa Bianca on John Thorne

In an age when "cooking" seems to be the sole domain of dieticians or celebrity chefs, when food is all about either the calorie counts or the rarefied tastes of expensive and obscure dishes,  John Thorne is an oddity-a man who rejects food fads but revels in unusual tastes, who finds Martha Stewart too bland, Paula Wolfert too snobby and Rachel Ray rather silly. He produces a hard-to-find newsletter called "Simple Cooking" and every five years or so Farrar Straus Giroux collects his essays into a book. My first exposure to Thorne's idea of food writing was in his book, The Outlaw Cook,  which opens with a rather lengthy quote from The Tin Drum about making spaghetti sauce in a frying pan:

"Klepp rolled over on one side and silently, with the assured movements of a somnambulist, attended to his cookery. When the spaghetti was done, he drained off the water into a large empty can, then, without noticeably altering the position of his body, reached under the bed and produced a plate encrusted with grease and tomato paste. After what seemed like a moment's hesitation, he reached again under the bed, fished out a wad of newspaper, wiped the plate with it, and tossed the paper back under the bed . . . After providing me with a fork and spoon so greasy they stuck to my fingers, he piled an immense portion of spaghetti on my plate; upon it, with another of his noble gestures, he squeezed a long worm of tomato paste to which, by deft movements of the tube, he succeeded in lending an ornamental line; finally, he poured on a plentiful portion of oil from the can. He himself ate out of the pot. He served himself oil and tomato paste, sprinkled pepper on both helpings, mixed up his share, and motioned to me to do likewise . . . Strange to say, I enjoyed that spaghetti. In fact, Klepp's spaghetti became for me a culinary ideal, by which from that day on I have measured every menu that is set before me."

I was instantly both captivated and horrified by the passage, but "captivated" won out when later on in the essay that Thorne calls "The Outlaw Cook" he says how Gunter Grass made him "aware, against the force of all my upbringing, of a denied appetite, of a repressed and forbidden hunger." Thorne, in turn, brought home to me in the most vivid way that you can't write about food without writing about EATING-and next to sex, eating is one of the moments when we are at our most primal, most basic, operating on sheer instinct.

Thorne is far and away my favorite food writer, surpassing even Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) or Ruth Reichl (The Comfort of Apples). 

Books by, about, or otherwise touched by John Thorne

As recommended by the Readerville Journal

Bangkok 8, Bangkok Tattoo and Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett
Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
Laughing Sutra by Mark Salzman
Siddhartha, Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse
Lost Horizon by James Hilton
Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison
Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill
Buddha Wept by Rocco Lo Bosco
Buddha Da by Anne Donovan
Curious Case of Sidd Finch by George Plimpton

It's all about the author! Book clubs may spend their time discussing a single book, but it always brings something interesting to the conversation when somebody spends a little time researching the writer. In that vein, here are a couple of interesting author interviews and essays that might add an extra facet to your discussions:

John Grisham, entertainer

. . . "I'm not sure where that line goes between literature and popular fiction," the mega-selling author says."

Ann Patchett's Five Most Important Books (I've only read two of them!)

Rumer Godden

". . . Hers is a world of nuns and sinners, ballet dancers and one-legged soldiers, foolish fathers and knife-sharp daughters, obese hoteliers and wizened Indian nannies as thin and dried up as liquorice root -"

Peter Carey, Between Two Worlds

". . . Carey began adult life as a reluctant scientist, reading organic chemistry and zoology at Monash University in Melbourne before a serious car crash led him to abandon the course for jobs in advertising and allowed time for anti-Vietnam war political activism and writing."

Jeffrey Eugenides, Taking his time

". . . It is a condition of appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show that guests sign a confidentiality clause, agreeing not to discuss the show or, more particularly, Oprah. Eugenides argued that as an author he reserved the right to his own experiences and at some point in the future he might want to describe what it was like to appear on television.

'For example, one interesting thing is that your make-up is sprayed on you from a kind of spray-gun, which apparently leaves a beautiful matt finish. It's like having your body painted in an auto-shop. But I looked good, though.' He pauses. 'This is OK - they said I could describe the make-up sprayer.'"