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Happier, by Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D. (abridged, read by Jeff Woodman, HighBridge Audio, 2008, 4½ hours on 4 CDs)
By Lisa Parsons lparsons@hippopress.com
“Following are some sentence stems…”
Let that warn you. Any man who writes a book on happiness and includes sentence stems is just not coming from the right place.
Strawbery Banke: A Seaport Museum 400 Years in the Making, by J. Dennis Robinson (2007, Peter E. Randall Publisher, 393 pages)
By Lisa Parsons lparsons@hippopress.com
Is a big, solid coffee-table book with lots of pretty pictures of Portsmouth old and new. It is more generally about Portsmouth and New Hampshire history than its title might lead you to expect.
The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, by the Editors of McSweeney’s (Vintage Books, 2008, 217 pages)
By Nate Graziano news@hippopress.com
Maybe it’s egocentric to believe a book could be written with me specifically in mind, but in the case of The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, the joke is definitely on me.
The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, by Nick Turse (2008, Metropolitan Books)
By Eric W. Saeger news@hippopress.com
These days, liberals and other politically disgruntled citizens wouldn’t expect a single member of the Dick Cheney junta to be hauled away in chains for the craziest conceivable offense. Nothing would happen, they reckon, even if, for example, high-def video evidence surfaced of Cheney and the CEO of Exxon-Mobil making foreclosure-crisis jokes while torturing a Code Pink protester to death.
The Blue Stone: A Journey Through Life, by Jimmy Liao (2008, Little, Brown and Company)
By Lisa Parsons lparsons@hippopress.com
Beautiful blue stone sits in forest. Men with bulldozers whack blue stone in half and take piece away. Little blue stone travels the world, but at every stop “Its heart breaks a little. It wants to go home.”
This is Who I Am: Our Beauty in All Shapes and Sizes, by Rosanne Olson (2008, Artisan, 115 pages)
By Lisa Parsons lparsons@hippopress.com
How many people have you seen naked?
The Scrapyard Detectives: Collected Cases, Vol. 1 (2007, The Diversity Foundation, 104 pages)
By Lisa Parsons lparsons@hippopress.com
Savvier, older kids might be aware that The Scrapyard Detectives has a diversity agenda, what with its three main characters being a black boy, a Latino boy and an Asian girl in a wheelchair. Or perhaps “diversity agenda” is just how a comic book like that looks here in New Hampshire, and in Utah, where The Scrapyard Detectives originated.
The Year of Adverbs, Elizabeth Smither, (Auckland University Press, 2007, 64 pages)
By Dan Szczesny dsczesny@hippopress.com
Elizabeth Smither’s newest collection, The Year of Adverbs, tries very hard to be clever. It mostly fails.
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, Marie Howe, (W. W. Norton, 2008, 68 pages)
By Dan Szczesny dsczesny@hippopress.com
New York writer Marie Howe is not prolific. Her first two collections are landmarks in ethereal poetry, simple flash points of dealing with everyday living. Which is what makes the release of The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, her first new collection in a decade, so anticipated.
Fight, by Eugene S. Robinson (spoken word audio on CD, Hydra Head Records, 2008; based on the HarperCollins hardcover book)
By Eric. W. Saeger news@hippopress.com
Allow me, ladies, to save you hundreds of dollars in Cosmo subscriptions by spoon-feeding you the only two things you need to know about your man.
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