Journalist, Author & Syndicated Columnist
Come July 8, 12-year-old Allie Greenberg will be one of the first kids in Chicago to own the new Harry Potter book. Allie, who’ll be in seventh grade at the University of Chicago Lab School this fall, put her name on the pre-order list at Barbara’s Bookstore in Old Town, oh, a year ago.
In her first book, rap star-turned-actress Queen Latifah, candidly writes about her steady rise to fame, her close-knit family and and how she treated her grief with alcohol and drugs after her brother died in a motorcycle accident. At 173 very short pages (the type is huge and the margins generous), readers are entertained and, to a certain extent, enlightened. But they never get the feeling that they have gotten to know the artist.
At 19, Queen Latifah was the first female solo rapper to have a major label record deal. Four years later, she had crossed over into acting with roles in Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” and her own Fox sitcom, “Living Single.”
Patti Kim shows the eloquent anguish of an abandoned child in her debut novel, A Cab Called Reliable (St. Martin’s, 156 pp., $18.95 . Her story is told through the eyes of 9-year-old Ahn Joo Cho, a Korean immigrant whose life changes forever when she sees her mother and little brother drive off in a cab. Without her. The last thing she remembers seeing is the word “reliable” on the car door.
Marya Hornbacher learned to hate her body at an early age. She couldnt control her parents fighting or the way her male classmates leered at her maturing figure. But she could control how big her body got by refusing to help it grow. The 23-year-old author writes candidly about her lifelong battle with eating disorders in “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia,” a fascinating memoir that details one woman’s take on anorexia and bulimia. Her conversational style makes the difficult subject matter easy to digest.
Novelist Judith Rossner admits that her characters’ antics often get so violent that they frighten her out of her own house. “The violence and the plots I come up with sometimes scare me,” Rossner said.
With her first book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman poignantly documents the head-on culture clash between a family of Hmong refugees from Laos and the American physicians who treat their infant child. Each party wants whats best for the child. But neither is ready to acknowledge that whats foreign to them may be the best treatment for little Lia Lee.
In Great Britain, Oasis isnt just any band–it is the band. To get a perspective of how popular they are in their homeland, check this out: The five-man group from Manchester performed two nights at Englands Knebworth Park to more than 250,000 people. It was the largest audience for any single band in Britain.
You’re a novice Beatles fan. You could pick John Lennon and Paul McCartney out of a lineup. But you don’t know which one sang “Strawberry Fields Forever” (John). And you don’t have a clue on where to begin to get a handle on the world’s most famous musical group. What to do? Plenty. ABC’s “The Beatles Anthology” can help get you up to speed on the Fab Four’s career and chronology.
In 1958, comedian Carl Reiner wrote his first novel, Enter Laughing. Now, thirty-seven years later, the sequel Continue Laughing (Birch Lane Press, $19.95) arrives. That’s quite a gap, but Reiner hasn’t exactly been lying low in the intervening years.