When you first meet 18-year-old Donna Lane in the opening pages of My One Square Inch of Alaska, you realize that this Midwestern high school senior growing up in the 1950s has a lot on her plate. Since her mother’s death seven years ago, her father has become a broken man and an alcoholic. Donna waits tables several nights a week to support her father and her younger brother Will. She keeps up with her studies and earns extra money sewing alterations in a dress shop in hopes of one day moving to New York to begin a career in fashion design.

As Donna pursues her dream of becoming a fashion designer, Will collects cereal box tops for a contest; the prize is a deed to one square inch of land in the Alaskan Territory. He plans to rescue a mistreated junkyard dog, a mute Siberian Husky, and take the dog with him on this journey.

Donna thinks her little brother’s plans are childish. But when he grows ill, Donna is committed to making her brother’s dream come true. It is this point in the book when her greatest exploration begins. Her determination to make it to Alaska is inspiring, and she takes readers along for an exhilarating and challenging adventure.

Not only will young adults enjoy this heartwarming, family-oriented novel, but author Sharon Short will take baby boomers back to the 1950s, reminding them of their own coming-of-age experiences.

I recommend this book to the individual reader, as well as to a book club looking to encourage thoughtful discussion about the memorable characters and events, and as a catalyst for club members to share their own stories and similar experiences from early adulthood.

The novel is a new creative direction for Short, who is the “Literary Life” columnist for the Dayton Daily News and author of the Josie Toadfern and Patricia Delaney mystery series.

My One Square Inch of Alaska by Sharon Short is available for preorder from Penguin Group for a list price of $16.

Book Review: My One Square Inch of Alaska The Saturday Evening Post

The American White House is the nation’s house, the people’s house, and every year the president and first lady present us with a magnificently decorated tree following a theme they choose to represent and honor the country’s spirit. And each first lady, from Jacqueline Kennedy to Michelle Obama, lent her own style to the interior design, the decorations, and the festivities.

The book’s author, Coleen Christian Burke, begins with the first holiday theme presented in the White House, which was orchestrated by Kennedy in 1961. It was based on “The Nutcracker Suite,” and reflected Jacqueline’s love for ballet and classical music. She liked using small wrapped presents on her trees, and simple instructions on how to make them are included.

In the years and administrations that followed, each first lady’s holiday theme interpreted the mood or condition of the time. On December 23, 1963, the black mourning bunting came down, and Lady Bird Johnson used only live evergreens to decorate the White House, her way of showing respect for President Kennedy. Christmas of 1967 saw the White House wedding of daughter Linda Bird Johnson, and the unofficial theme that year was red velvet and satin.

Photos of themed trees and décor. Official presidential family Christmas photos. Hillary’s cookies, Nancy’s monkey bread, Rosalynn’s hat ornaments, Laura’s topiary champagne buckets. Burke collects the White House traditions in chapters organized chronologically, each dedicated to the holidays of a first lady. And each chapter promises special treats: recipes, ornament crafts, or entertaining tips from the first ladies’ personal files.

Reading this book led me to seek the White House online, and I found photos for the day after this Thanksgiving when Michelle Obama and her daughters received this year’s Christmas tree delivery. And so the tradition continues, to the delight of the nation.

With anecdotes and historical, intimate photos of the presidential families during the holiday season, this book is a wonderful gift for anyone who loves Christmas and the heartwarming traditions it inspires. This book is a prized collection that invites all of us into America’s house for the holidays.

Book Review: Christmas with the First Ladies The Saturday Evening Post

Food blogger Deb Perelman’s first book The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook: Recipes and Wisdom from an Obsessive Home Cook will be released on October 30, 2012, and it’s a winner! Perelman, who is a self-taught home cook, has been blogging at Smitten Kitchen successfully for years “on the premise that cooking should be a pleasure and that the results of your labor can, and should be delicious.”

As someone who spends way too much time online already, I’m delighted that Perelman has put her sumptuous recipes into a form that sits nicely on my kitchen counter.

In the introduction, we learn two important facts about Perelman: She spent many years as a vegetarian, and she lives in a Manhattan apartment with a 42-square-foot half-galley kitchen. These two details heavily influence her cooking and translate effectively into a cookbook that works well for everyone. For most of us, space is always an issue in the kitchen, and healthy eating is an ongoing challenge in today’s culture of fast food.

Each recipe always begins with a bit of candid insight into the background or motivation for its creation. The recipe format is well-organized, interesting, and not too fussy.

I enjoyed cooking my way through this book and found the vegetarian mushroom bourguignon to be fabulous—I truly didn’t miss the beef. The big breakfast latkes were delicious, along with her vinegar slaw with cucumber and dill, shown below. The deepest dish apple pie was a big hit with The Saturday Evening Post staff members. And, with a husband who loves bagels, the New York breakfast casserole has landed on our list of favorites. The buttered popcorn cookies and the ratatouille sub recipes are next on the list.

Big breakfast latkes with scrambled eggs and salsa (top) and eggs over easy (bottom), with two sides of cucumber slaw. Photo by Pamela Holmes.

Perelman gives readers additional sections in the back of the book, which offer guidelines on measurements and conversions, information on setting up a kitchen, a summary of some of her favorite utensils, and an in-depth index.

As well as a happy home cook, wife, and mother, Perelman is a skilled photographer. All of the color photos in the book are her work. The dust jacket is lovely and I was pleased to find that under it is what appears to be a waterproof cover with many more of her photos arranged in an inspiring grid, front and back.

The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook is available for preorder on Amazon for a list price of $35.

Book Review: The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook The Saturday Evening Post

When the owners of the Central Pacific Railroad drove the golden spike that completed the transcontinental railroad in 1869, they were widely hailed as heroes. Visionaries. Men of ambition, drive, and patriotism. Newspapers praised the hard work and high risks they’d undertaken to build the first railroad across the United States.

What they didn’t mention was how much cheating, perjuring, short-changing, misleading, and outright theft went into the railroad’s achievement.

For 30 years, the Central Pacific was able to shape public opinion about itself, and manipulate legislation in state and federal governments. Starting in 1896, though, its fortunes changed. Dennis Drabelle’s book, The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took On the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad, recounts how two writers helped expose the corruption of the Central Pacific to the country.

Of the two, Ambrose Bierce is probably the better remembered. In 1896, his great successes—his Civil War stories and Devil’s Dictionary—were behind him. He was a fading journalist looking to revive his career. The opportunity came when William Randolph Hearst asked him to cover a congressional funding bill and the actions of Central Pacific’s owner-builder, Collis Huntington.

The last of the Central Pacific’s founders, Huntington had arrived in Washington with an army of lobbyists, hoping to convince Congress to forgive a debt of $75 million. The government had loaned his company this amount in 1866 to build the railroad eastward over the Sierras to link up with the Union Pacific. A Supreme Court decision had freed the railroad from paying back a single penny of the loan for 30 years. Now, with that grace period about to expire, Huntington believed he could convince the government to write off the loan.

Huntington didn’t count on Bierce, who began filing scathing reports from the Washington hearings on the railroad’s misdeeds and bribery of government officials. Bierce created so much noise over the deal that legislators who’d been longtime friends to the railroad suddenly forgot who had paid for their campaigns and opposed forgiving the debt.

Unfortunately, Drabelle gives us only small samples of the fiery denunciations that Bierce served readers of Heart’s papers. Even if readers couldn’t understand all the references, they would appreciate Bierce’s skills with an acid-tipped pen.

The other author in Drabelle’s account is Frank Norris, a promising young novelist who set out to expose the corrupting influence of the Central Pacific in his 1901 novel, The Octopus. Norris further damaged the railroad’s reputation by dramatizing several events in which the railroad had imposed its will on California’s government, businesses, and communities. Unfortunately, some of the events Norris used were based more on legend than fact, as Drabelle points out. However, he includes a factual account of the shootings at Mussel Slough, which he contrasts with Norris’ fictionalized version.

The Octopus became an important bestseller in the Progressive Era, and one of the more readable muckraking texts of the early 20th century. As Drabelle points out, the novel was more than simply an attack on the railroads’ executives. Norris was chiefly concerned with how the railroad and the wheat market, as vast, inhuman forces, shaped the destiny of all who came close to it.

For both writers, their critiques of the railroads marked the high point of their careers. Bierce drifted off into war-torn Mexico and was never seen again. Norris died young, never finishing the trilogy he had begun with Octopus. (The second book, The Pit, first appeared as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post.)

Drabelle narrates this tale of railroads and reformers with enough context that the reader gets a sense of the scale of fortunes and corruption in this great American epic.

The Great American Railroad War is available on Amazon.

Book Review: The Great American Railroad War The Saturday Evening Post

The ability to socialize freely and proficiently in a foreign environment is a valuable skill that “at least one-third of the people we know” are either reluctant or unfitted to pursue. However, according to Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, the social ambivalence that correlates with introversion is a much more minor issue than perceived by many of today’s intellects. Her work not only outlines the advantages of introverted behavior but provides “convincing evidence for valuing substance over style, steak over sizzle, and prizing qualities that are, in America, often derided.”

As an introvert herself, Cain shares personal experiences and firsthand investigations to express discontent with the “extrovert ideal.” This evolutionary attitude became apparent during what cultural historian Warren Susman describes as a shift from a culture of character (where good deeds are valued by society) to a culture of personality (where societal admiration goes to the charismatic).

Her experimental findings emphasize the positive aspects of introversion. Throughout Quiet, Cain diagnoses behavioral tendencies and assesses the potential of certain personality types. She also introduces readers to some of the most successful introverts in history, including Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt.

For decades, self-help gurus have written countless best-selling tomes promising to “fix” introverts by changing them into extroverts. But in Quiet, Cain explains the detrimental consequences of such irrational and inherently self-defeating efforts.

While Cain concentrates on the power and the vitality of introverts, she in no way undervalues the significance of sociability. She is quick to point out that her husband and many of her best friends are extroverts, and she deftly straddles the fence, careful to avoid siding with one personality type over another. As the title of her book suggests, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking is meant to make people more aware of introverted potential in primarily extroverted environments.

Based on years of research and scientific inquiry, Quiet eloquently addresses the bias against introverts and provides previously unacknowledged agency to those of subtler personalities. From Saddleback Church in California to Harvard Business School, Cain travels an extraordinary distance and absorbs her readers in all of her intricate observations along the way. Quiet is an excellent read that will surely change your opinion of the relationship between introverts and extroverts.

Graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, Cain has published a number of works on introverted behavior. After the release of Quiet, she appeared as a featured speaker on TEDTalks: Ideas Worth Spreading, thus propelling her to a number of other speaking opportunities all over the world. You can visit Cain at her blog, ThePowerofIntroverts.com, or view her TED lecuture “The Power of Introverts.”

Click here to take the “Are You an Introvert?” quiz, excerpted from Quiet, and find out where you fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.

Book Review: Quiet The Saturday Evening Post

1. I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities.
True

False
2. I often prefer to express myself in writing.
True

False
3. I enjoy solitude.
True

False
4. I seem to care about wealth, fame, and status less than my peers.
True

False
5. People tell me that I’m a good listener.
True

False
6. I’m not a big risk-taker.
True

False
7. I enjoy work that allows me to “dive in” with few interruptions.
True

False
8. I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members.
True

False
9. People describe me as “soft-spoken” or “mellow.”
True

False
10. I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it’s finished.
True

False
11. I tend to think before I speak.
True

False
12. I often let calls go through to voicemail.
True

False

The more often you answered True, the more introverted you are. If you found yourself with a roughly equal number of True and False answers, then you may be an ambivert—yes, there really is such a word. Note: This is an informal quiz, excerpted from Quiet, based on characteristics of introversion commonly accepted by contemporary researchers.

Are you an introvert? The Saturday Evening Post

I learned so much about Penny Marshall while reading My Mother Was Nuts that my awareness and appreciation of her talent has grown. I must say, I wish I had Penny as a friend.

From early in her life, she lived by a few valuable rules: always try hard, play by the rules, tell the truth, help your friends, don’t get too crazy, and have fun. As she began her groundbreaking career as a director in film and TV, she learned another important rule from her brother, Garry Marshall: how she could “give someone a life.”

Born October 15, 1943, in the Bronx, New York, Carole Penelope Marshall was the third child of Marjorie and Anthony. Penny’s father was of Italian descent, and he changed his last name from Masciarelli to Marshall before Penny was born.

Her mother was a dancer and entertainer, and gave dancing lessons in her own school, the Marjorie Marshall Dance School. It was clear to Penny at an early age that her mother hated her husband and found her independence in teaching other people’s children to dance. She had 360 students over the years, and according to the book, she was beloved by 359 of them. Penny was the hold out.

Dancing did give Penny confidence and eventually put her on the stage of the Ted Mack Amateur Hour with a group of students from her mother’s school. Penny found her acting start on the stage and in bit parts on TV shows like That Girl. Garry was the producer of the hit sitcom Happy Days and cast Penny in five episodes as Laverne before he wrote and launched a spin-off. Penny went on to become Laverne DeFazio in the popular sitcom Laverne & Shirley, which ran from 1975 to 1983. She received three Golden Globe nominations for her performance.

Penny was married and divorced twice, the second time to actor Rob Reiner who has also become a successful director and producer. While Laverne & Shirley was the No. 1 sitcom on TV, Rob was working on the No. 2 sitcom, All in the Family. It made for an interesting social and home life.

During this time, Penny began to make history behind the scenes as the first woman director of a feature film and the first woman to direct a film that grossed over $100 million, not once, but twice. Over the course of a decade’s time, she directed Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Big, A League of Their Own, Awakenings, Renaissance Man, The Preacher’s Wife, and Riding in Cars with Boys.

Penny’s path as an actress and director is impressive, and it led her to connections and lifetime friendships with a long line of names we all know. But who knew she had such a long and wonderfully romantic adventure with Art Garfunkel? The name-dropping in this book is amazing—her personal Rolodex is an impressive collection of Who’s Who from the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. Her loyalty and devotion to her friends, and they to her, is truly inspiring.

Throughout this memoir, Penny talks frankly as if she’s sitting next to you. She tells it as it happened—the good, the bad, and the weird; the successes and the struggles; all the fun she’s had and that she still wants five more minutes.

My Mother Was Nuts is available from Amazon for a list price of $26.

Book Review: My Mother Was Nuts The Saturday Evening Post

As one who has enjoyed a lifetime of exploring style and learning about designers and the history of fashion, I found Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible to be a good resource on the basics of fashion history, classic style, current dos and don’ts, and how to assess your closet in order to put yourself in good fashion order.

If you are new to all things related to the fashion industry, designers, or understanding personal style, this book is a good beginner’s guide. It is filled with illustrations, pictures, interesting history and trivia, as well as details that represent many an era, a designer, a trend, and how, as in life, what goes around comes around. Who knew how many times the platform shoe would be considered the latest style!

Mr. Gunn has organized his table of contents by articles of attire and accessories, in the same manner as retailers once organized their stores’ departments. I was amused to find that Gunn’s table of contents is ordered by the way one might get dressed, beginning with underwear, and so on.

Mr. Gunn highlights a moment in the movie The Devil Wears Prada that relates to something I’ve always marveled at: the fact that every garment worn today has history and that history can run back years, centuries, or even longer! For example, there are stone carvings of a woman exercising in what is believed to be the first evidence of a sports bra, no less. What started out as a new design of its time has moved through the channels of high fashion and low fashion, from couture to retail to consignment and retro.

Mr. Gunn has a diverse and interesting background in the world of fashion, and he shares many of his experiences and opinions about what works and what doesn’t. His expertise is very up to the minute, and while this book is a valuable guide for today, it will also reflect well historically on our current styles in decades to come.

From the start, I wondered about “Bible” being used in the title—feeling it might be a bit over the top—but the book is directed to everyone, whether you prefer to spend a month’s salary on an outfit or you look and feel just wonderful in your nice looking daily uniform. Gunn is speaking to everyone.

In the last chapter, Gunn talks about shopping, and how to prepare for it. And when you choose something from the rack, seeing it on the hanger thinking I can’t wear that, Gunn tells you to just try it on and see. After all, that hanger looks nothing like you!

The book’s appendix contains worksheets to help you explore and understand your closet and wardrobe. It will help you organize, cull, and plan for that next shopping trip, by determining what to love and preserve, and what to leave behind.

Tim Gunn is an American fashion consultant and television personality. He was on the faculty of Parsons The New School for Design from 1982 to 2007 and chair of fashion design at the school from 2000 to 2007, after which he joined Liz Claiborne as its chief creative officer. He is well known on-air for the reality television program Project Runway and his spin-off show, Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style. Mr. Gunn has authored three books in addition to this one—A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style, Abrams, 2007, Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making It Work, Gallery, 2010, and Shaken, Not Stirred, Gunn/ADSI 2011/Kindle.

Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible: The Fascinating History of Everything in Your Closet is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Book Review: Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible The Saturday Evening Post

For his part, Roosevelt came to despise the great American humorist, once saying to a small group of friends he’d like to skin Mark Twain alive.

Back when the two men first met in the 1880s, they had admired each other. Roosevelt loved Twain’s writings and Twain said he’d never shaken Roosevelt’s hand without feeling an electric charge move up his arm. But their background and their principles were already leading them in vastly different directions.

Where those differences came from, and how they shaped the lives of these men, is the focus of Philip McFarland’s Mark Twain and the Colonel: Samuel L. Clemens, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Arrival of a New Century, (Rowman, & Littlefield, 2012).

These men—who were probably the two most famous Americans of their times—took vastly different routes to success. For Twain, it was a wandering path for a small-town boy who became a steamboat pilot, prospector, journalist, and finally world-renowned humorist. For Theodore Roosevelt the journey was much quicker: in just 43 years, this frail child of money and privilege became a reform-minded politician and, to everyone’s surprise, president.

To a great degree, Twain retained the outlook of a man of the 19th century, while Roosevelt saw a future in which America would become a global power, and that’s where the trouble lay.

But the bitterness between the two wasn’t caused only by their differences. As McFarland points out, “There were enough similarities between Roosevelt and Clemens to cause friction anyway. Both were writers and public performers possessed of restless, perpetually youthful temperaments. Each grew a bit nettled when the spotlight wandered off him. And both had a wide circle of friends, the circles often overlapping… keeping the one, if only inadvertently, aware of the other’s views and doings.”

In this dual biography, McFarland weaves the threads of their lives around the key events and important people of their day. While Clemens lambasts the moneyed classes in his novel The Gilded Age, Roosevelt becomes a progressive who challenges “the malefactors of great wealth.” But McFarland also notes the difference between what these men said and what they did. How both men talked a better attitude toward black Americans than they practiced. How they could withhold their criticism of robber barons when it suited themselves.

Their lives, and their outlook couldn’t be too divergent because they were, ultimately, shaped by the same great forces in American society: the excesses of the Gilded Age, the financial panic of 1893, the rise of Progressivism, the growing desire to reform America, the pride in America’s new technologies, the growing realism in art—McFarland seems to weave it all together.

I should note one peculiarity of this book. Because McFarland writes about themes more than sequential events, the continuity of “Mark Twain and the Colonel” is more disrupted than a typical biography. But then, a book concerning two men born a generation and a world apart should be expected to be a little disjointed.

Overall, it’s a highly enlightening book that offers you two biographies and a vast panorama of American society at the beginning of its modern age.

Mark Twain and The Colonel is available from Amazon for a list price of $28.

Book Review: Mark Twain and The Colonel The Saturday Evening Post

Some of these gems, from genre notables like Orwell and Huxley, hearken all the way back to the early 20th century. Others, such as the best of Stephenson and Gibson, offer a contemporary escape from the everyday. These aren’t just beach reads, though, as all of them will challenge the way you view your world and prepare you for what’s coming next.

Dune

Forget that awful David Lynch movie. And forget the SyFy channel miniseries. If you want the full measure of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which is widely considered one of the greatest sci-fi yarns ever written, go directly to the source. The original novel was published in 1965, and it told a tale of young Paul Atreides and his transformation into the prophetic savior of the Fremen known as Muad’dib.

Herbert’s masterwork melded environmentalism, politics, and high adventure into a rousing tale that still resonates decades later. Dune also won the inaugural Nebula Award, which is given annually to sci-fi’s best of the best by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

1984

Regardless of your political persuasion, we can probably all agree on the fact that it’s getting positively Orwellian out there when it comes to American politics. 1984 is thus a timely read and an essential one, both for its harrowing account of protagonist and unwilling propagandist Winston Smith and its frighteningly plausible fictionalizations like Newspeak and Big Brother.

One part science fiction and two parts political satire, George Orwell’s magnum opus magnified popular culture notions of surveillance and state-sponsored encroachment on individual rights—and it did all of this way back in 1949.

It’s double-plus-good.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

You’ve no doubt heard of the movie Blade Runner. You may not have heard of the novel on which it’s based. Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? debuted in 1968, but it wasn’t until Harrison Ford brought main character Rick Deckard to life in director Ridley Scott’s 1982 big-screen classic that Dick and his substantial body of work entered the popular consciousness.

If you’re familiar with the film and you’re expecting a similar, if more detailed experience from the source novel, you’re in for a surprise. Novel Deckard’s motivations are much more complex than those of his film counterpart, and he spends much of the text questioning everything from his orders to “retire” renegade replicants to the ways in which war and extinction have altered humanity’s philosophical and religious views.

Snow Crash

Summing up Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash in a couple of paragraphs is basically impossible, but we’re going to give it a shot. Stephenson is something of a folk hero in the hardcore computer nerd community, and this book is one reason why. It’s also a fun read even if you’re not a super-genius like the author and many of his fans. 

Snow Crash posits that the ancient Sumerian language is in fact a sort of programming language for the human brain stem, which in turn functions much like a BIOS chip for the brain. If you think that sounds wacky, just wait until the goddess Asherah shows up as the personification of a virus, the antidote to which is to make humanity speak different languages.

Stephenson doesn’t stop with this retelling of the Tower of Babel story, though. He also gives us a sword-fighting, pizza-delivering main character named Hiro Protagonist and a wisecracking young street urchin named Y.T. who is fond of “pooning” cars (“poon” being short for the harpoon with which Stephenson’s skateboard couriers attach themselves to moving vehicles to travel across town).

Watchmen

Here’s one for those of you who like pictures more than you like words. Technically, Watchmen is a graphic novel, but that didn’t stop Time Magazine from naming the limited edition comic series to its 100 best English-language novels list.

If you’ve seen director Zack Snyder’s 2009 film adaptation, you have a pretty good idea of what you’re in for should you decide to read the original comic. It’s long, ambitious, and decidedly darker than your average superhero epic. It’s no exaggeration to say that Watchmen is one of those seminal works that transcends the trappings of its genre. Though comics have tackled adult themes and psychological drama in the years following its 1986 publication, Alan Moore’s prose and Dave Gibbons’ illustrations led the way, and Watchmen continues to influence a generation of comic book writers, artists, and filmmakers.

Brave New World

If Orwell’s 1984 was a cautionary tale about totalitarian excess, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was a meditation on the opposite extremes of pleasurable passivity and egotism. The novel is set in the year 2540, but it explores hot-button issues that were foremost on the minds of Huxley’s 20th-century readers and critics.

The novel, published in 1932, was seen as Huxley’s reaction to an America that was literally changing the world following the Industrial Revolution. He made no attempt to hide the sources of inspiration for many of the novel’s characters, and fictional individuals such as Henry Foster (modeled after assembly line pioneer Henry Ford) and Bernard Marx (a hybrid of George Bernard Shaw and Karl Marx) served as avenues to explore Huxley’s views on Americanization and social upheaval.

In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, critic Neil Postman contrasts Huxley and Orwell and arrives at what we feel is a pretty succinct summary of Brave New World as a whole. “Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us,” Postman wrote.

Pattern Recognition

Yes, William Gibson is most famous for Neuromancer and for coining the term “cyberspace.” His works have influenced thousands of artists and engineers, and some critics have even gone as far as to credit him with inspiring the iconography of the world wide web and the internet itself. That said, one of his best novels is 2003′s Pattern Recognition, which is also the first of his books to be set in the contemporary world.

Pattern Recognition, as its title implies, is largely concerned with the human desire to derive meaning from bits of data. This desire is given physical form in the character of Cayce Pollard, a 30-something marketing consultant who is tasked with finding and hiring the creators of a film clip that has gone viral on the internet. The novel is part detective story and part postmodern pop culture meditation. It’s also Gibson’s most affecting and humanistic work to date.

7 Classic Sci-Fi Novels for your Summer Reading List The Saturday Evening Post

The Deltas huddle off-screen around Verna Bloom, who played Mrs. Wormer—the dean's alcoholic, lecherous wife, Marion, in the film. Photos from Fat, Drunk, and Stupid by Matty Simmons. Copyright © 2012 by the author. Reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

Like Tiger Woods for golf or Elvis Presley for rock ‘n’ roll, National Lampoon’s Animal House single-handedly redefined the art of comedy and provided a quintessential model for future Hollywood projects. Following its release in 1978, Animal House spent eight weeks at box-office No. 1 and emerged as one of the highest grossing, most successful movie productions in the history of the entertainment business.

Today—and $600 million later—it remains one of the funniest movies to ever hit the big screen.

Fat, Drunk, and Stupid: The Inside Story Behind the Making of Animal House by producer Matty Simmons, recounts the film’s imperishable legacy.

“I wrote Fat, Drunk, and Stupid because I have constantly been amazed at the continued popularity of Animal House,” Simmons says. “People talk to me about it all the time, and I’ve always found it hard to believe that a movie released in 1978 would still be quoted and copied [today].”

Years before Animal House was even so much as a thought, Matty Simmons was living in New York City working as a press agent for local nightclubs and restaurants. However, as he details in the opening chapters of Fat, Drunk, and Stupid, it took but a few strokes of luck for his occupation to change and his career to flourish. From local press agent to company executive, he escalated up the professional hierarchy and eventually founded National Lampoon Inc., earning the title of CEO and propelling him ever closer to Animal House.

(From left) Animal House screenwriter Douglas Kenney, producers Matty Simmons and Ivan Reitman, and screenwriter Chris Miller on the last day of the 32-day shoot. Founder and CEO of National Lampoon, Matty Simmons shares the movie’s outrageous story in Fat, Drunk, and Stupid.

By 1975, Simmons had proven himself as a magazine, television, and Broadway musical producer. Despite Hollywood’s cruel and unpredictable reputation, he decided to embrace the challenges of the film industry, thus vowing never to allow the thought of failure to inhibit his vocational pursuit.

“Hollywood has a way of deflating egos. [However], it never entered my mind that I would remain a New York press agent forever,” Simmons remarked. “All my life, I’ve tried to reach up.”

Humorously appealing and utterly revealing, Fat, Drunk, and Stupid traipses through the development of Animal House and depicts how an unplanned trip through Hollywood resulted in one of the greatest American comedies of all time. Through personal stories and direct testimonies, Simmons reflects upon the days of production and engages his readers with on- and off-set humor from the Animal House undertaking. Complete with behind-the-scenes reports and exclusive cast and crew interviews, Fat, Drunk, and Stupid celebrates the success of Animal House with the unveiling of its incredible Hollywood saga.

For four weeks in 1977, the cast and crew of Animal House invaded the town of Eugene, Ore., home to the University of Oregon. Shooting on the grounds of an actual college campus in a fictional fraternity —Delta Tau Chi House (background)—gave the film a sense of authenticity.

Like all breakthroughs in filmmaking, Animal House experienced its share of difficulties and took time to evolve. In fact, as Simmons openly admits, the initial idea for Animal House received negative feedback and overwhelming disapproval from practiced Hollywood agents. Several networks and multiple Hollywood directors passed on the film’s script, and even when Universal Studios President Ned Tanen agreed to fund Animal House, he prefaced his proposal by saying, “I hate this treatment. … I’d never make this movie—except you’re the National Lampoon.” Thus, according to Simmons, the green light for production was offered somewhat unenthusiastically with Universal confining the crew to 32 filming days and $3 million in finances. However, with stories about luggage requirements and costume efficiency, Fat, Drunk, and Stupid explains how the Animal House team managed to overcome its financial concerns and turn a harshly criticized initial film script into an icon of the American cinema.

Saturday Night Live star John Belushi played the unforgettable character Bluto in the film, directed by newcomer John Landis who went on to direct such hits as The Blues Brother and Coming to America.

With the exception of John Belushi, Animal House cast members showed up on set with very little experience in the Hollywood spotlight. Many were struggling in the entertainment business, and some were even pursuing careers elsewhere. In Fat, Drunk, and Stupid, Simmons reveals the team’s recruiting tactics and explains the evaluation process he and director John Landis adopted to build their cast. He goes on to describe how well they interacted and how impressively they balanced work and fun, saying “It was Animal House during the day and a real-life animal house party room at night.” From fistfights to drunken romances and wild parties to harmless pranks, members of the Animal House team engaged in activities nearly as wild as those displayed in the movie, and Fat, Drunk, and Stupid recounts them all.

Because of the relationships that developed as a result of the Animal House production, many members of the cast and crew kept in touch and continue to meet at celebrations, awards ceremonies, and other social gatherings today. However, several members of the team have since passed away and Fat, Drunk, and Stupid honors them all, commemorating Belushi specifically with a special chapter tracing his illustrious career and recalling his wild, yet inspiring personality.

The cast of Animal House was made up almost completely of then-unknowns. However, the film earned more than $600 million, launched countless careers, and eventually became one of America’s most beloved comedy classics.

The legacy of Animal House extends far beyond Otter’s testimony or Bluto’s aggression against the guitarist, and despite an inauspicious start, sits perched atop the list of Bravo TV’s “100 Funniest Movies.” In what is Matty Simmons’ eighth book publication, Fat, Drunk, and Stupid rationalizes how a bunch of unknown actors came together to spearhead the movie production that will forever remain embedded in the culture of Hollywood and the roots of modern film comedy.

Book Review: Fat, Drunk, and Stupid The Saturday Evening Post

Mary Soames is the youngest and only surviving child of Winston and Clementine Churchill. Mary was their “consolation baby” following the death of their daughter, Marigold. She was born in 1922 and brought up at the family home known as Chartwell in Kent. Her bond with her father, as shown in this book, was immediate, extremely warm, and lasted to the end of the great man’s life. Her relationship with her mother didn’t really bloom until later, but Mary always had the highest regard and admiration for her.

Her nurse, Nana, helped raise her and influenced the person she grew to be. They remained close throughout her life. Her mother traveled often and her father, “WSC” as Mary liked to refer to him, was very much a hands-on, involved parent, even in Mary’s very early years. This is surprising when you consider the demands of his work and his importance in global politics.

Because Mary’s siblings were much older than she, Mary grew up in the company of adults; she was directly involved in her parents’ associations. Their friends included many powerful people, famous artists and entertainers from all over the globe. Chaplain, De Gaulle, T.E. Lawrence/Shaw, the Roosevelts, among many others, were known to Mary and she to them.

Following school, in 1941, she joined the Army Transport Service with a desire to make a difference and to do her part for the war. She later trained and served in anti-aircraft batteries in England and Europe. She traveled extensively with her father on his wartime journeys.

It seems clear that the bulk of this book came directly from Mary’s diaries, which she started in childhood, as well as an excellent recollection of her life’s many memorable moments. She is thorough in her writing, often including menus and guest lists in the pages of the events described.

She made many friends her own age along the way and even broke some hearts. This book comes to a rather sudden end when, at the age of 25, Mary meets and marries Christopher Soames. This leads me to wonder if there will be a second book, telling the rest of the story of Mary’s remarkable life.

A Daughter’s Tale: The Memoir of Winston Churchill’s Youngest Child is available at Amazon.

Book Review: A Daughter’s Tale The Saturday Evening Post

Filling its pages are tales of surgeons removing their own appendixes, nuclear physicists preoccupied with blowing up the moon, and a man who couldn’t stomach food any longer—so he ate glass. And steel ball bearings. And gold. And when he was in the mood for a treat, well, cotton (soaked in orange juice of course).

Too bad it isn’t science fiction.

Boese is a collector of the absurd. He’s curator to the Museum of Hoaxes, a website which reveals the truth behind popular urban myths. It was this collection, he writes, that led to his discovery of strange scientific experiments.

Looking at this site, you’ll find seven stories relating to one of the scientists from Electrified Sheep. And Post readers should recognize this scientist too. To give you a hint, Boese reveals he never actually held a kite in a lightning storm, and he was the first person documented to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation…on a turkey.

This book is not Boese’s first dip into weird science. Five years earlier he wrote Elephants on Acid along the same premise: “Just how far would they [scientists] be willing to go … to get the answers they want?”

Like Elephants, each story is threaded to the next by a scientific theme: electricity, nuclear power, primatology, psychology, and finally, “do-it-yourselfers” (scientists that experiment on their own bodies). But this time around, Boese promises to go into more detail.

The inclusion of the psychoneurotic goats in Operation Crossroads—the name for the U.S. Navy’s nuclear weapon testing at Bikini Atoll—gives Boese an opportunity to delve deeper. Fact-driven and unsentimental, he briefly mentions the Bikini residents. “They were given a vague promise that they’d be able to return once the US government was finished. (They’re still waiting.)”

His focus then turns to goats. Oddly enough, he found information in an article published in The Saturday Evening Post in January of 1950, written by Richard Gerstell. A small paragraph in the article, “How You Can Survive an A-Bomb Blast,” provided the reason behind the presence of the goats in the Bikini tests.

While many of the experiments mentioned in Electrified Sheep are common knowledge, Boese’s fascination with obscure details makes the book frightfully interesting. It’s packed with enough material to challenge any would-be science-fiction writer, and proves truth in a lab coat is stranger than fiction.

Electrified Sheep is available from Amazon at a list price of $27.50.

Book Review: Electrified Sheep The Saturday Evening Post

I was not disappointed.

Each woman spent a year in Paris in a significant decade of the Baby Boomer generation: the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Each decade presented uniquely different environments to the three distinctly different women.  Clearly, their time in Paris influenced them greatly, and the experiences and lessons learned were carried throughout the rest of their lives.

Kaplan researched not only the women for each section of the book, but the events of the time when they grew to young womanhood, why they decided to go to Paris, and how their individual experiences were directly connected to their ultimate place in history.

Each woman’s chapter has two parts, beginning with her background prior to Paris, her decision to venture to Paris, and the details of her stay there. The second half illustrates the life of each woman after her return and what became of her, personally and professionally.

Unless you’ve lived under a rock since birth, you know Jacqueline was, and still is, one of America’s favorite and most significant First Ladies. She brought her intense love of history, beauty, and art to bear during her time in the White House, finding and restoring the historic and significant artifacts of the Executive Mansion while acting as an internationally-recognized hostess to the world leaders who graced her table.  Jackie was always French, in her ancestry and in her style of living.

Susan Sontag was the lesser known to me of the three women, and what a year she had in Paris! She left her husband and infant son to travel to Paris on her husband’s dime, explored the community of writers as well as her own sexual orientation at a time in her life when she was struggling to truly know herself and find the freedom to be who she wanted to be. The New Novel was changing the way authors wrote, without plot or character, and she made this style her own. Susan came to be known, first and foremost, as a significant American author and one of the leading intellectuals of her generation.

Angela Davis was a recognized philosopher and teacher when she traveled to Paris. Two significant events occurred during her time there: she learned from a newspaper article that four girls had died in a church bombing in Birmingham, her hometown, and she decided to join the Communist Party. Returning to the United States to continue her studies, she became a professor and an advocate for the American prison system. She spent 18 months in jail for her consequential connection to a courtroom shooting, also related to her involvement with the rights of prisoners.  She still teaches today and has written several books.

Dreaming in French is the first multiple biography I’ve had the pleasure to read and it is unique in that regard, bringing together three very different women with one similarity, which helped to shape their influence on those of us fortunate to live in their time.

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis The Saturday Evening Post