IN THIS ISSUE

In This Issue

CELEBRATIONS

Hot Sour Salty Sweet

Hot Sour Salty Sweet
Jeffrey Alford, Naomi Duguid
Artisan; ISBN: 1579651143

In Julia's Kitchen Wisdom: Essential Techniques and Recipes from a Lifetime of Cooking, Julia Child reveals mistakes she's made over the years and how she resolved problems in her kitchen. Maybe there's hope for the rest of us after all. Leave the French kitchen behind with the flavors and sensations of southeast Asia in the award-winning Hot Sour Salty Sweet.

Bartending for Dummies

Bartending for Dummies
Raymond Foley, Ray Foley
Hungry Minds, Inc; ISBN: 0764550519

Appropriately for the time of year, we know one host who will benefit from Bartending for Dummies. We're expecting to be invited to barbecues, too. Recognizing that oenophiles don't necessarily turn up their noses as vintages from the colonies anymore, we also took a look at The Oxford Companion to the Wines of North America, a serious encyclopedic reference on the subject. We don't know much about wine critics, but we know who editor Jancis Robinson is and we're comforted by the fact that she doesn't take herself too seriously, so we tend to sit up and take notice.

The Complete Kwanzaa

The Complete Kwanzaa
Dorothy Winbush Riley
Harperperennial Library; ISBN: 006092764X

If your family or friends celebrate the holidays around a menorah rather than a Christmas tree, consider Chanukah: Eight Nights of Light, Eight Gifts for the Soul, , By the Hanukkah Light for the younger celebrants, and A Different Light: The Hanukkah Book of Celebration and Hanukkah (The Art of Jewish Living) for the family. Sharon, Lois and Bram's Candles Long Ago is a delightful CD collection of Hanukkah songs like Dreydl, Dreydl combined with uncharacteristic numbers like the winter dances (The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and The Waltz of the Flowers) from The Nutcracker Suite. Kwanzaa's emerging traditions find voice in Celebrating Kwanzaa and The Complete Kwanzaa: Celebrating Our Cultural Harvest.

FOR HISTORY BUFFS

In Search of Deep Throat

In Search of Deep Throat
Leonard Garment
Basic Books; ISBN: 0465026133

When Leonard Garment published his educated guess at the identity of the shadowy Deep Throat, all the expected parties made all the expected denials. We fully expect that it will be ever thus where the speculation is concerned. He gave the credit - or made the accusation, depending on your perspective - in In Search of Deep Throat: The Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time. Still, Garment's story - as much about eliminating possibilities as it is about finding them - touches on one of the truly intriguing questions in recent American history. At the heart of the whole affair, of course, was Richard Nixon's tortured personality. At the end of the whole affair was an irreparably damaged relationship between the American public and its presidents, not to mention the policy decisions that continue to flow from it. Your history buff will be fascinated by Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America, a close look at the elements that gave us all the world we have today. Chris Matthews, host of the freewheeling Hardball, is a familiar face and voice in American political commentary. He reveals some of what really happens in the halls of power in Hardball: How Politics Is Played - Told by One Who Knows the Game. Washington certainly doesn't show its real face to the public, but even less forthcoming are some of the government's agencies - like the CIA. It just might be even worse than you think, as The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA suggests. Further back, to a time that shaped American history even more fundamentally, there's The Day the American Revolution Began: 19 April 1775. There was no CNN, of course, that could alert colonists or imperialists to the drama unfolding on that day, so the revolution actually trickled into reality. Neither did it have the same meaning for everyone. Hallahan uses original sources to set the stage, detailing the effects on the famous, the infamous, and the anonymous.

Pack of Thieves

Pack of Thieves
Richard Z. Chesnoff
Doubleday; ISBN: 0385487630

On the world stage, The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany chronicles the story of orchestras that were at the same time suppressed and trumpeted by the Nazi regime and the very precarious lives of the musicians who tried to survive in them. The Avengers tells the little heard story of Jewish resistance fighters during World War II. We know that the worlds of money, art, and power have long turned a blind eye to the benefits they reaped from the Nazis' expropriation of property - and lives. The pettiness of the venality is matched only by the staggering tragedy of the outcome in Pack of Thieves: How Hitler and Europe Plundered the Jews and Committed the Greatest Theft in History. Too little understood, Africa's varied history earns close examination in McMillan's The History Atlas of Africa. Receiving similar attention: the continental histories of Europe and Asia.

Gimme Some Truth

Gimme Some Truth
Jon Wiener
Univ California Press; ISBN: 0520222466

If history through biography is more to the liking of the people on your list, try these books. Nat King Cole's daughter, famous in her own right, tells her harrowing tale in Angel on My Shoulder: An Autobiography. Another daughter, Tina Sinatra, spills the beans on her father's wives (including Ava Gardner, Mia Farrow, and Barbara Marx), the complex truths and myths of the Sinatra/Kennedy/Mafia relationship, and her dad's own hard living ways. My Father's Daughter, is only one of the recent books about Ol' Blue Eyes. There's also The Sinatra Files: The Secret FBI Dossier. In the end, there are as many unpleasant revelations about the FBI as there are about the saloon singer that they dogged. For a different twist on the FBI story, consider Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files, wherein author Jon Wiener details the obsessive lengths to which the agency would go to protect its ludicrous years-long surveillance of another musician. The FBI isn't all nonsense, of course. Almost as famous as Mulder and Scully is real-life agent John Douglas, the man on whom 'most every fictional profiler is based. On our list is a man who loves unanswered questions, and we get those in spades in Douglas' The Cases That Haunt Us: From Jack the Ripper to Jonbenet Ramsey, the FBI's Legendary Mindhunter Sheds Light on the Mysteries That Won't Go Away. Douglas reviews classic old cases and proffers his own analysis of the crimes and their perpetrators.

The Duchess of Windsor

The Duchess of Windsor
Greg King
Carol Pub Group; ISBN: 1559724714

Some of our younger readers might remember Joe DiMaggio only as the shill for Mr. Coffee. Older Netsurfers will recall him for the power of Joltin' Joe's game. Others will always think of him as the eternally shy, eternally smitten husband of the fragile Marilyn Monroe. Joe DiMaggio: This Hero's Life covers all the bases. It seems royal gossip just doesn't go out of fashion, which would have made a big difference to our next subject. For a look at one of the most supremely silly lives of the 20th century, 'though unquestionably influential, there's The Duchess of Windsor: The Uncommon Life of Wallis Simpson.

FICTION

Pagan Babies

Pagan Babies
Elmore Leonard
Dell Pub Co; ISBN: 0385333927

Hailed for his own sort of poetry, Elmore Leonard offers Pagan Babies. This time out, among the characters are a hustling priest (who also happens to have committed murder) and some old-school mafioso. Tom Robbins' Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates gives us vintage Robbins in a main character who is perfectly capable of walking - but lives in a wheelchair to forestall a curse that if his feet touch the ground, he'll die. Fans of Tom Wolfe will delight in the vitriol of his collection, Hooking Up. At the very least, it sure won't do anything to heal Wolfe's fractured relations with John Irving or Norman Mailer. Few writers spin more universal yarns than Larry McMurtry. In Boone's Lick, he follows the Cecil family across the American west, this time putting another of his strong women in the hero's role. It's hard to find a writer with a more loyal following than this straightforward teller of tales.

Mortalis

Mortalis
R. A. Salvatore
Del Rey; ISBN: 0345430395

Equally devoted fans await the words of R.A. Salvatore, who tells more fantastic stories like the one in Mortalis. This is a new installment in his Demon Wars series, focusing on Jilseponie, widow of the much mourned Elbryan, lately killed off by Salvatore in Demon Apostle. Imagine a quadriplegic boy with telekinetic powers so prodigious that he can move his own body or construct space stations. There you have the central character in Anne McCaffrey's Pegasus in Space, one more installment in her Talents/Pegasus series.