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Books: CookBooks: Canapes
The Amulet of Samarkand (The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book 1)by Jonathan Stroud List Price: $17.95 Available from Amazon $11.67 On 7-22-2006 
See Item's Page Product Review Nathaniel is a boy magician-in-training, sold to the government by his birth parents at the age of five and sent to live as an apprentice to a master. Powerful magicians rule Britain, and its empire, and Nathaniel is told his is the "ultimate sacrifice" for a "noble destiny." If leaving his parents and erasing his past life isn't tough enough, Nathaniel's master, Arthur Underwood, is a cold, condescending, and cruel middle-ranking magician in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The boy's only saving grace is the master's wife, Martha Underwood, who shows him genuine affection that he rewards with fierce devotion. Nathaniel gets along tolerably well over the years in the Underwood household until the summer before his eleventh birthday. Everything changes when he is publicly humiliated by the ruthless magician Simon Lovelace and betrayed by his cowardly master who does not defend him. Nathaniel vows revenge. In a Faustian fever, he devours magical texts and hones his magic skills, all the while trying to appear subservient to his master. When he musters the strength to summon the 5,000-year-old djinni Bartimaeus to avenge Lovelace by stealing the powerful Amulet of Samarkand, the boy magician plunges into a situation more dangerous and deadly than anything he could ever imagine. In British author Jonathan Stroud's excellent novel, the first of The Bartimaeus Trilogy, the story switches back and forth from Bartimaeus's first-person point of view to third-person narrative about Nathaniel. Here's the best part: Bartimaeus is absolutely hilarious, with a wit that snaps, crackles, and pops. His dryly sarcastic, irreverent asides spill out into copious footnotes that no one in his or her right mind would skip over. A sophisticated, suspenseful, brilliantly crafted, dead-funny book that will leave readers anxious for more. (Ages 11 to adult) --Karin Snelson
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Ava Gardner: Love Is Nothingby Lee Server List Price: $29.95 Available from Amazon $18.87 On 7-22-2006
See Item's Page From Publishers Weekly At the ripe old age of 32, having collected three ex-husbands-Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra-Ava Gardner waxed introspective: "I still believe the most important thing in life is to be loved." Server's (Baby, I Don't Care) deliciously entertaining tome bursts with Hollywood dish and Oscar-worthy dialogue and is written in a crackling style that reads like great pulp. "Love became her terrible habit," he writes, "something hopeless to resist, impossible to get right." A Tobacco Road urchin turned "statue of Venus sprung to succulent life," Gardner ditched her secretarial aspirations and started at MGM in the early '40s as a contract actress earning $50 a week. She became an international star, drawing huge crowds on both sides of the Atlantic. But life wasn't always sweet for the gorgeous star of Show Boat and The Barefoot Contessa; her steamy affair and marriage to Sinatra ranks among the most notorious of Hollywood love stories. Gardner's career, hard drinking and screen-worthy love affairs are all chronicled in Server's page-turner prose, doing justice to one of cinema's most beautiful faces. Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Server follows his superb biography of Robert Mitchum (Baby I Don't Care, 2001) with the life of another midcentury movie icon: Ava Gardner. Gardner's rise from North Carolina tobacco country to Hollywood superstardom began when an MGM talent scout spotted her picture in the window of a photographer's studio. It's a Cinderella story, to be sure, but Server gives us the unexpurgated version, complete with Gardner's Mitchum-like credentials for booze consumption, rugged individualism, and sexual appetite (marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra and affairs with pretty much everyone else). And then there was her beauty--in interviews with dozens of stars, the message is the same: no one ever looked better than Ava Gardner. This is also a story of the studio system, and Gardner was one of its most notable victims, ill-used throughout her career, forced to do bad movies and forced to watch her good movies decimated in the cutting room. Server capably assesses the hits and misses, languishing on those electric moments when the camera caught the "feline sprawl of her exquisite body." A no-holds-barred view of a larger-than-life star. Bill Ott Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved |
Let Me Finishby Roger Angell List Price: $25.00 Available from Amazon $15.75 On 7-22-2006 
See Item's Page From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Over the past few years, New Yorker readers have been treated to the occasional personal reflection from Angell, stepping outside his usual baseball beat to write about such intimacies as his passion for sailing or his childhood fascination with the movies. It's the family drama that's of most immediate interest, as Angell recalls the divorce of his parents, Ernest and Katherine Angell, and his mother's subsequent remarriage to E.B. White, affectionately known as Andy. Or perhaps readers will be more eager to hear about life at the New Yorker, especially since Angell admits, "I no longer expect to write" much more about his fellow writers and editors than the miniature portraits collected here (but thankfully we do have such scenes as the visit he and S.J. Perelman paid to W. Somerset Maugham while vacationing in France in 1949). Whatever the subject, Angell writes with his customary elegance and modesty; "I've kept quiet about my trifling army career all these years," he says in one essay, just before spinning off a series of captivating anecdotes about his WWII service. The assembled pieces add up to a fine memoir. (May 8) Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* New Yorker readers have been savoring Angell's autobiographical essays every few months for the last three years. Now they can be read consecutively, and the effect is both less and more than a traditional autobiography: less because there is no attempt to tell the story of a life as a developing narrative, but more because the book unfolds like memories do, a single image crystallizing a traumatic event or encapsulating a period of years ("the look of the overgrown lawn and our knees oddly in a row," when Angell is told by his mother about her impending divorce). The topics of the individual essays range from baseball in the 1930s (Gehrig and Ruth in Yankee Stadium, Mel Ott and Bill Terry at the Polo Grounds) to friends, family, and colleagues at the New Yorker, where Angell, now in his eighties, has worked for 40 years and where his mother, Katherine, and stepfather, E. B. White, worked before him. His recollections of literary people are uniformly fascinating, as much for the low-key manner in which they are related as for the glimpses they offer into the private lives of such luminaries as William Maxwell and S. J. Perelman. The most memorable aspects of this captivating chronicle, however, are the purely personal memories. Describing his teenage attempt to become a screwball-throwing pitcher in the manner of Carl Hubbell, Angell notes that after he threw his arm out, he "took up smoking and irony in self-defense." The irony never left him; it flavors these graceful essays throughout, but it never tastes bitter. Instead, there is an endearing objectivity ("I've had a life sheltered by privilege, and engrossing work, and shot through with good luck") and a lingering sense of bemused surprise that so much can be remembered so fondly. Bill Ott Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved |
Canapesby Eric Treuille and Victoria Blashford-Snell List Price: $23.95 Available from Amazon $16.76 On 7-22-2006
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Canapes for the Kittiesby Marian Babson Available from Amazon $5.99 On 7-22-2006 
See Item's Page From Library Journal When Lorinda Lucas, a well-known mystery writer in Brimful Coffers, kills off her popular fictional heroines, neighboring writers rebel. Old and new resentments (that even involve local cats Had-I, But-Known, and Roscoe) lead to murder. Another humorous charmer from a popular author (Break a Leg, Darlings, Copyright 1997 Reed business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From AudioFile Kitties, writers and mystery converge on Brimful Coffers , a community of authors in an English village. Chaos follows as new resident novelist Lucinda Lucas and her feline companions inquire into threats that lead to murder. Nadia May composes a lighthearted narration of feline and human happenings. With enticing charm and a bit of satire, she voices the intrigue, fear and frivolity by which characters collectively attempt to sniff out a killer. B.J.L. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition. |
My Canape Hellby Imogen Edwards-Jones Available from Amazon $7.00 On 7-22-2006 
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Canapes Made Easyby Abigail Brown and Melissa Webb Available from Amazon $12.95 On 7-22-2006
See Item's Page Book Description Throwing a party should be fun. With the more than 50 illustrated recipes in this delicious collection, you can prepare mouthwatering canapés for your guests without spending hours in the kitchen. Miniature delights, rich in color, texture, and flavor, these incredible morsels reflect many culinary influences and feature a variety of ingredients. Tempt your guests with an assortment of filo-wrapped tidbits, including turkey and cranberry and mushroom and tarragon. Try caramelized red pepper and rosemary tartlets or cilantro chicken on lemon grass skewers. Dip crab cakes in lime and tomato salsa, and enjoy new twists on fondue. Choose from a number of bruschetta toppings such as pea and mint and three-bean pâté. For a bite of something sweet, serve mini crème brûlée spoons or chocolate brownies. Gorgeous photographs showcase every recipe, and presentation tips ensure that your canapés please the eye as well as the palate. |
Practical Hors d'Oeuvre and Canape Art: A Pictorial Presentation of Foodservice Specialtiesby Charles Mok Available from Amazon $8.48 On 7-22-2006
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