Book Rec of the Day 12/20-12/24/2008

EVER GREAT
“Auntie Mame is a unique literary achievement—a brilliant novel disguised as a lightweight piece of fluff.”—Robert Plunket, author of Love Junkie

It made a great movie and a hugely entertaining Broadway musical, but it’s in Patrick Dennis’s book that you’ll find Auntie Mame, the American grande dame, in all her sparkling, potent, witty glory. There’s also material that never made it into the other versions, such as the affair with the college student and what finally became of Agnes Gooch.

AUNTIE MAME, by Patrick Dennis (1955; Broadway, 2001)

WAR OF THE SEXES

As former staffers for the hit show Sex and the City, the authors know what they’re talking about when it comes to men. This book may be a lighthearted, funny look at the way men miscue women (and the tendency in women to want to be miscued), but the advice it gives is sensible: Men aren’t that complicated. If he likes you, you’ll know it; and if he doesn’t, don’t waste your precious time on him. With worksheets and questions at the end of each chapter to make sure the lessons take.

HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU: THE NO-EXCUSES TRUTH TO UNDERSTANDING GUYS, by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo (Simon Spotlight, 2004)

PEANUTS!

Lucy, Schroeder, and Linus started out in the strip as babies, and Snoopy was once a mere puppy. As time went by, they grew into the characters we all came to know. It’s in this first collection of an ongoing project to reprint the entire Peanuts comic strip that we observe Schulz refining his ideas and developing his extraordinarily enduring characters.

THE COMPLETE PEANUTS 1950-1952, by Charles Schulz; introduction by Garrison Keillor (Fantagraphic Books, 2004)

POET LAUREATE

“Ted Kooser is a poet whose company will always be welcome, whether in Nebraska or in East Anglia.”—The Hudson Review

A Nebraskan, Pulitzer Prize winner, and poet laureate of the United States from 2004 to 2006, Ted Kooser writes poems of small moment (a family in the kitchen during winter’s first snow, a sleeping cat, a farmer turning on his yard light) and great heart. Flying at Night is a collection from two earlier books, Sure Signs and One World at a Time.

FLYING AT NIGHT: POEMS, by Ted Kooser (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005)

WAR IS HELL

“The poignancy of these moments is accentuated by our knowledge that the slaughter will resume in a few hours.”—Booklist (starred review)

Weintraub paints the bloody picture of the first months of the “war to end all wars.” But on Christmas Eve 1914, a sort of miracle occurred: The men in the trenches spontaneously, and against orders, signaled a cease-fire by singing “Silent Night/Stille Nacht.” The fighting stopped and, warily at first, then with spirit, the men exchanged gifts of food, shared photographs from home, and started a soccer game.

SILENT NIGHT: THE STORY OF THE WORLD WAR I CHRISTMAS TRUCE, by Stanley Weintraub (Plume, 2002)