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Books: Travel: Brazil
The Time Traveler's Wifeby Audrey Niffenegger List Price: $14.00 Available from Amazon $8.40 On 7-21-2006 
See Item's Page From Publishers Weekly This highly original first novel won the largest advance San Francisco-based MacAdam/Cage had ever paid, and it was money well spent. Niffenegger has written a soaring love story illuminated by dozens of finely observed details and scenes, and one that skates nimbly around a huge conundrum at the heart of the book: Henry De Tamble, a rather dashing librarian at the famous Newberry Library in Chicago, finds himself unavoidably whisked around in time. He disappears from a scene in, say, 1998 to find himself suddenly, usually without his clothes, which mysteriously disappear in transit, at an entirely different place 10 years earlier-or later. During one of these migrations, he drops in on beautiful teenage Clare Abshire, an heiress in a large house on the nearby Michigan peninsula, and a lifelong passion is born. The problem is that while Henry's age darts back and forth according to his location in time, Clare's moves forward in the normal manner, so the pair are often out of sync. But such is the author's tenderness with the characters, and the determinedly ungimmicky way in which she writes of their predicament (only once do they make use of Henry's foreknowledge of events to make money, and then it seems to Clare like cheating) that the book is much more love story than fantasy. It also has a splendidly drawn cast, from Henry's violinist father, ruined by the loss of his wife in an accident from which Henry time-traveled as a child, to Clare's odd family and a multitude of Chicago bohemian friends. The couple's daughter, Alba, inherits her father's strange abilities, but this is again handled with a light touch; there's no Disney cuteness here. Henry's foreordained end is agonizing, but Niffenegger has another card up her sleeve, and plays it with poignant grace. It is a fair tribute to her skill and sensibility to say that the book leaves a reader with an impression of life's riches and strangeness rather than of easy thrills. Copyright 2003 Reed business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From AudioFile Although the title suggests that this is science fiction, Niffenegger's charming, emotionally charged novel is much more a love story. Told alternately from the viewpoints of time traveler Henry and his wife, Clare, it's highly enjoyable on audio. Readers Christopher Burns and Maggi-Meg Reed blend their respective chapters seamlessly. Each reader characterizes all roles within a chapter, and the depictions mesh beautifully. Both narrators characterize Korean friend Kimmy in a charmingly amusing voice and lend a light mood to the couple's daughter, Alba. Burns portrays the emotional chaos of Henry's life so genuinely as to cast the listener directly into his pain and joy. The abridged recording leaves one longing for more. J.J.B. 2004 Audie Award Finalist © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition. |
The Heartless Stone: A Journey Throught the World of Diamonds, Deceit and Desireby Tom Zoellner List Price: $24.95 Available from Amazon $15.72 On 7-21-2006 
See Item's Page From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. After his fiancée dumps him and he's left with a diamond ring to unload, Men's Health contributing editor Zoellner crisscrosses the globe unlocking the mystique of this glittering stone "that brings misery to millions of people across the world." Zoellner probes how "blood diamonds" are used to fund vicious civil wars in Africa; how De Beers, seeing new markets to exploit, linked diamonds to the ancient yuino ceremony in Japan and played on caste obsession in India; and how India is pushing Belgium and Israel out of the gem trade. The author is expert with vivid prose: Australia's Argyle deposit is "shaped a little like a human molar"; impoverished urchins in the diamond-smuggling haven of the Central African Republic get high on bread-and-shoe polish sandwiches; and a Brazilian miner finds a rich concentration of river diamonds but fritters away much of the loot on prostitutes and booze, and eventually is ruined by a dishonest money changer. Politically conscious consumers can now avoid African and Brazilian mines teeming with human rights abuses. Canada pulls $1.2 billion worth of rough diamonds out of the tundra every year while enforcing tough environmental laws, and a Florida company uses Siberian high-pressure chambers to create low-cost chemically perfect diamonds. This is a superior piece of reportage. (June) Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Jilted by a fiancee, journalist Zoellner mulled over the emotions churned up by the return of the diamond engagement ring and decided to write up the diamond industry. A fluid account, somewhat similar to Matthew Hart's Diamond: Journey to the Heart of an Obsession (2001), Zoellner's is distinct for its astuteness about the psychology of diamond marketing. Presenting the example of postwar Japan, where De Beers created demand for diamonds out of thin air, Zoellner alludes as needed to the meaning attached to an engagement ring as he constructs a travelogue to remote, dangerous regions. At the base of the supply pyramid, Zoellner finds destitute miners in the Central African Republic and Brazil. Prosperity is not much more evident in India, where the author tours cutting and polishing factories; the money is concentrated in London, headquarters of De Beers. Zoellner's sharp, observant descriptions of people and places will sensitize readers to the wider processes of monopoly, smuggling, and war, all of which lurk in the background when a suitor buys a ring for his beloved. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved |
How to Travel Practically Anywhereby Susan Stellin List Price: $15.95 Available from Amazon $10.37 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page Product Review The Chicago Tribune : "Even the most experienced travelers are sure to learn a thing or two." Atlanta journal Constitution : "Helpful advice . . . Even seasoned travelers could benefit from information in the book, and neophytes will save themselves a lot of mistakes." Library Journal : "A distinctive guide . . .Including all types of travel from cruise to rail, this comprehensive and well-researched guide is useful for both new and seasoned travelers." Book Description Ever try to book your own travel plans on the Web, only to find yourself lost in cyberspace? Ever spend hours researching airfares, hotels,cruise lines, and itineraries, and find yourself still unsure of where to find the best prices and most accurate information? Whether you are Web savvy or still learning your way around the Internet, traveling on business or vacation, travel planning can be confusing and time-consuming. Now Susan Stellin, a regular contributor to the New York Times's travel section, offers the ultimate insider's guide to researching travel plans on the Web and avoiding pitfalls on the road. This single-source guide includes comprehensive and up-to-date information on the most useful Web sites, strategies to find the best deals, and resources to help you decide where to go and what to do. It also provides crucial tips to ensure that your trip is a success, such as: - how to find the best deals available online - how to make informed decisions about what to book - avoiding surprises that can ruin a trip - how to use the Internet effectively to get travel advice How to Travel Practically Anywhere is an indispensable guide to the sometimes overwhelming logistics of travel, whether for business or pleasure, domestic or international, budget or break-the-bank, adventure or leisure. |
The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsongby Donald Kroodsma List Price: $28.00 Available from Amazon $17.64 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page From Publishers Weekly Kroodsma, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, shares what he's learned from more than three decades of recording and analyzing the songs of birds in this intriguing, instructional book. Using "sonagrams" (also known as sound spectrograms, they plot a sound's frequency over time), he illustrates the songs of 30 birds, from the familiar American robin to the exotic three-wattled bellbird of Costa Rica. He considers how birds acquire their songs (some species learn them; others have their tunes "encoded somehow in nucleotide sequences of the DNA"), what makes the songs unique, what functions they serve, and how they've evolved. No two species sound alike, of course, but groups of birds within each species have their own dialects, and individual birds have their own repertoires as well. A CD of the bird songs discussed is included, as are descriptions of the recording equipment Kroodsma used and explanations on how to make similar recordings and "sonagrams." Kroodsma is a warm, encouraging guide to the world of birdsong, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Illus. Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Scientific American Just as the colors and patterns of the feathers that birds wear show tremendous variation, so, too, do the songs that they broadcast--but much more so. Songs may be absent, or they may range from a few simple genetically encoded notes endlessly repeated, to virtuosos of variety resulting from copying and learning, and even to seemingly endless improvisation. In The Singing Life of Birds, Donald E. Kroodsma, an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, celebrates the diversity through carefully chosen examples, one for each of the 30 years that he has studied birdsong. The book is best described by its subtitle, The art and Science of Listening to Birdsong. Kroodsma shares his secrets--solid, practical advice on how to record bird sounds and how to "see" the sounds in sonagrams, visual representations of the recordings of songs. A compact disc that accompanies the text aids readers in this task. He concludes: "There's no longer any mystique to what I have done all these years. Anyone can do this kind of stuff. And anyone should." His infatuation started with a single male Bewick's wren in his backyard in Oregon. Kroodsma discovered that this one wren sang 16 different songs, and in any singing bout it poured forth 40 to 50 renditions of one of them before switching to another, and then to another, and on and on. Meanwhile neighboring wrens hearing the song replied with the same one, while distant males sang other songs. Why? The proximal answers to why birds sing and what they sing run from the trivial to the fascinating: they enjoy it, they are primed by hormones that activate neuronal pathways, they respond to neighbors. But the ultimate, evolutionary question of why they sing and what they sing can be answered only by the comparative study of many species. Sometimes the anomalies provide a clue. For example, most individual wrens of different species learn many songs, and neighboring birds have similar songs--that is, they have dialects. The sedge wren of North America is an exception, however. Unlike other wrens and the sedge wrens of Central and South America, it has lost the ability to learn songs; it can only improvise on songs that are inscribed on its DNA. It is therefore unable to "match" the songs of its neighbors, and no dialects are found. So what is different about the North American sedge wrens in respect to other wrens? They are nomads that live in unpredictable habitat--meadows that can quickly dry up. As a consequence, these birds can never predict who their neighbors will be from one season to the next; hence, learning songs as youngsters for later use in song matching is pointless. Contrast this to the bellbird, a long-lived tropical bird in which individuals come to know one another well. These birds listen to one another all year long and learn the changes in others' songs throughout life. The young birds learn the latest of these variations, and the dialect of the population changes from year to year. Kroodsma takes us repeatedly into the field, into the birds' world. He shares an all-night vigil with a whip-poor-will, tallying 20,898 identical repetitions of its one song for the entire night. He describes a brown thrasher that in one two-hour session sang 4,654 songs, 1,800 of them different (many borrowed from neighbors of other species). We enter the mind of the researcher as he tries to penetrate the mind of the bird. As much as we humans may enjoy the spectacle of birds flaunting their gaudy garb to the accompaniment of vocalizations and dancelike antics, the show is meant primarily to attract females. It is about sex--about who will be the father of the female's chicks. The males presumably enjoy putting on their show, but whatever else it may do for them (such as serving as a territorial marker), it is the females who have shaped the performance by their tastes and preferences, and these are as various as the 10,000 or so species of birds. Kroodsma emphasizes that we know little about why one or another bird has a specific repertoire. Yet despite the dazzling variety, it appears to me that all birdsongs have general requirements and constraints, and I believe that these shared characteristics may in themselves shed some light on the enigma. The primary requirement of a species' display song is that it must stand out from environmental noise--that is, it must carry--and it must be distinct from competing voices on the stage. Once females reward a specific song type with mating, then success breeds success, and whatever it is that attracts, the male that has more of it enjoys a huge advantage. But singing is not cheap: the performers are conspicuous to predators, and the displays are so costly in time and energy that the performers may appear to handicap themselves. I doubt, however, that it is the flaunting of handicap as such that attracts the females ("I am so strong and healthy that I have energy to waste on singing"). The singer must cater to the females' taste. As in our own fashions of clothing and music, there is not necessarily rhyme or reason in the specifically chosen attribute, except the most important one--it works. Konrad Lorenz reputedly said that birdsong is "more beautiful than necessary." It seems to me that it is just as likely that the flamboyant displays of song and dance, of feathers and, in the bowerbirds, of decorated love shacks are indeed necessary, because females compare, and they are picky. Arbitrary though their criteria of choice may be, it is significant that we humans also find many of the same displays beautiful. Bernd Heinrich is professor emeritus at the University of Vermont and author of many popular books on science. Among the most recent are The Geese of Beaver Bog, Winter World and Mind of the Raven.
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The Travel Bookby Roz Hopkins List Price: $50.00 Available from Amazon $31.50 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page From Booklist *Starred Review* Even the most avid readers of travel guides and travel literature will not have encountered a book quite like this one. It is huge and heavy but reasonably priced, and it is vastly informative, which is its calling card. All the writers who contribute to the Lonely Planet travel guide series have put heads, knowledge, and experience together and come up with an A-Z series of capsule profiles of every country in the world, 230 in number. Each country gets a two-page spread, on which are placed, like luscious dishes set before one at a feast, illustrations that are typical of Lonely Planet's unique, non-picture-postcard brand of shots. The accompanying text presents a cogent rundown of the best experiences for gaining the essence of the place; books to read beforehand; music to listen to before you go; food and drink to consume once you are there; and a few brief but pungent closing comments on the trademark things to do and buy and see and what, ultimately, is the best surprise awaiting the tourist. For borrowers in the travel section to sit down, look at, and make notes from, without taking off the premises. Brad Hooper Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Book Description The world is a breathtakingly big place, and in this big book we have undertaken the big task of detailing as much of it as we can - every single country, many of the larger dependencies and other, smaller destinations. With the traveler's experience at its heart, this book shows a slice of life in every corner of the globe, and all points in between, engaging the reader's senses in an adventure which conjures up the sights, smells, tastes, sounds and feel of our amazing world. |
The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H.A. Reyby Louise Borden List Price: $17.00 Available from Amazon $11.05 On 7-21-2006
See Item's Page From School Library Journal Grade 4-8–This beautifully designed volume is a must-have for children's literature buffs. The book is divided into two parts: the first gives background on the couple's childhoods and early life together; the second half is devoted to their dramatic escape from World War II-torn Europe. Husband and wife were both Jewish, born in Hamburg. After serving in the German army during World War I, Hans sailed to Brazil, where he wore a big hat and sailed down the Amazon. Margaret, an old family friend, joined him in 1935, and they soon married. Their honeymoon in Paris lasted four years. It was here that they began writing children's books about a curious little monkey named Fifi. By May of 1940 it was clear they must flee. So begins the second part. Tirelessly cycling by day, they boarded train after train as the Nazis occupied Paris, finally sailing to Rio. From there, it was on to New York, and within a year, Curious George was published. An afterword describes the balance of their lives. Borden spent years going through personal papers, notebooks, and photographs, and contacted people who knew the Reys. As a result, the book is richly detailed. Drummond's charming watercolors appear throughout, some full page, and many sharing or framing a page of text. In addition, abundant primary-source documents and photos along with original art combine to complete this attractive package. An appealing choice for biography assignments and units on World War II or refugees.–Barbara Auerbach, New York City Public Schools Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Gr. 3-6. Handsomely designed and illustrated, this large-format book tells the story of Margret and H. A. Rey. Part 1 concerns their childhoods in Germany, their lives together in Rio de Janeiro and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, and the growing menace after war broke out in 1939. As German-born Jews, they were suspect in many quarters. Part 2 recalls the Reys' flight from Paris and the couple's escape to Lisbon, Rio, and finally New York. They were carrying several illustrated manuscripts, including The Adventures of FiFi, later retitled Curious George. Photos, reproductions of documents, and artwork appear throughout the book, as do Drummond's spirited ink-and-watercolor illustrations, brimming with action and details. The text, set in large type and strung out like poetry on the page, reads well. Given the average age of Curious George fans, the audience for this unique book is an open question, but the account is well worth reading for its accessible portrayal of the Reys' personal adventure at a pivotal point in modern history as well as for their lasting contribution to children's books. Carolyn Phelan Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved |
Lonely Planet Brazil (Lonely Planet Brazil)by Regis St. Louis, Andrew Draffen, Molly Green, and Thomas Kohnstamm List Price: $26.99 Available from Amazon $17.00 On 7-21-2006 
See Item's Page Book Description Sunbathe in Tambaba, float down the Amazon on a riverboat or dance to pulsing axé in Salvador - whatever your dreams, live them in Brazil. Explore its pristine beaches, steamy jungles and music-filled cities with our inspirational guide, which takes you from Rio's unrivaled nightlife to the Pantanal's spectacular wildlife without missing a beat. • JOIN THE PARTY - expanded Carnaval chapter packed with insider tips on Rio's bacchanal, plus details on year-round festivals throughout the country • BE INSPIRED - wander the cobblestone streets of Ouro Preto, spy dolphins on the Rio Negro and hike beside waterfalls in lush national parks • FIND YOUR WAY with more than 150 maps, nearly double the number of any other Brazil guide • SLEEP SOUNDLY - accommodations for every budget, from beachfront pousadas to glitzy Ipanema hotels • TALK THE TALK - order a meal or make new friends with our easy-to-use language chapter
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Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartreby Hazel Rowley List Price: $26.95 Available from Amazon $17.79 On 7-21-2006 
See Item's Page From Publishers Weekly Though Rowley identifies her engaging and accessible chronicle as the "story of a relationship," it is in fact the story of the many relationships forged by two of the most brilliant, unorthodox and scandalous intellectuals of the 20th century: Beauvoir and Sartre, who from 1929 until Sartre's death in 1980 remained "essential" to each other but never monogamous. Without undue prurience, Rowley (Richard Wright) romps through the major entanglements, loves, triangles, friendships and affairs engaged in by the authors of, respectively,the seminal feminist work The Second Sex andthe controversial autobiography Words. And to place these fascinating interactions into literary and biographical context, Rowley draws from vast stores of published and unpublished writings, correspondence and interviews. Though Beauvoir is the heroine of the book, Rowley offers revealing insights into Sartre: including the extent to which he juggled, depended upon and supported his many mistresses and the compulsive need he had to seduce women far more beautiful than he, despite his tepid sensuality. Intrigues aside, however, Rowley concludes that, for both Sartre and Beauvoir, the most enduring commitment was not to each other or to their many lovers but to their writing, politics and philosophical legacy. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine The Washington Post calls Tête-à-Tête a "highbrow Francophile edition of US Weekly"; most critics seem to welcome an opportunity to indulge in scholarly fluff. That Reviewers devote the bulk of their column-inches to thrilling over de Beauvoir and Sartre says much for Rowley’s choice of material as well as her skill as a storyteller. Whether they find this storied relationship despicable or admirable, the critics praise Rowley, the biographer of Richard Wright (Richard Wright: His Life and Times) for her skillful prose and, one imagines, her prurient interest as well. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
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