Jackson Pearce: Sisters Red
Decatur Library Auditorium
July 26th , 7:15 p.m.
Atlanta author Jackson Pearce is the highly praised author of several books for young readers including ”As You Wish” and her latest, ”Sisters Red.” Pearce will discuss ”Sisters Red,” written for 8th graders and up, a fable-inspired thriller featuring some dangerous werewolves and a mystery to be solved. School Library Journal gives it a starred review and calls it ”an adventure that grabs the reader and never lets go.”

For Scarlett and Rosie March, the world is not what it seems. Werewolves, called Fenris, live among them in the form of good-looking men who prey on pretty young girls. When a Fenris attacked the March girls, it killed their grandmother and left them emotionally and, for Scarlett, physically scarred. Since then, they have taken action and revenge. With the help of a friend, Silas, the girls are on a mission—to destroy as many Fenris as they can. This goal becomes more complicated when they try to unravel the mystery behind the pack and prevent the next "Potential" from transforming fully into a soulless, evil monster.
Pearce is on the mark with this modern-day retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Told by the sisters in alternating chapters, this well-written, high-action adventure grabs readers and never lets go. Rosie and Scarlett are true heroines; smart, tough, and determined, but their special bond is put to test when Rosie and Silas's relationship becomes more than just friendship.

Pearl Cleage: Till You Hear From Me
Decatur Library Auditorium
July 27th, 7pm
Just when it appears that all her hard work on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is about to pay off with a White House job, thirty-five-year-old Ida B. Wells Dunbar finds herself on Washington, D.C.’s post-election sidelines even as her twenty-something counterparts overrun the West Wing. Adding to her woes, her father, the Reverend Horace A. Dunbar, Atlanta civil rights icon and self-described “foot soldier for freedom,” is notoriously featured on an endlessly replayed YouTube clip in which his pronouncements don’t exactly jibe with the new era in American politics.

Along with Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright, Cleage’s fictional Reverend Horace Dunbar is considered one of the old guard of the civil rights movement. His position in the post-Obama firmament seems secure until the Rev, as he is known, vents an unsuspected level of frustration to a reporter and the rant goes viral on YouTube. The PR fallout is damaging enough to bring his estranged daughter, Ida, home to Atlanta from Washington, where she anxiously awaits a job offer from the White House as a reward for her campaign work. Right behind her on the road to Atlanta, however, is Wes, the son of the Rev’s best friend, covertly sent by the RNC to steal the Rev’s extensive voter-registration list. While she and her father inch toward a rapprochement, Ida and a coterie of sharp, sassy women work to foil Wes’ plans. Within the timely, politically relevant milieu of the new administration, best-selling, incisive Cleage zestfully crafts an intuitive novel of trust and responsibility, kinship and conviction.

Cleage’s many bestselling books include Seen It All and Done the Rest, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day and Some Things I Never Thought I’d Do.

Rafe Esquith: Lighting Their Fires: Raising Extraordinary Children in a Mixed-up, Muddled-up, Shook-up World
Decatur Library Auditorium
August 2nd , 7:00 P.M.
Schools are starting their new year, and if you care about the quality of children’s education, you won’t want to miss our guest, the only teacher to have been awarded the President’s Medal of the Arts and the author of the bestseller, Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire.

Rafe Esquith’s super-successful, inspirational teaching methods have helped thousands of children maximize their potential. His new book is Lighting Their Fires: Raising Extraordinary Children, is a book that enlarges on his themes and shows us how to make our kids not just great students but thoughtful and honorable citizens.

Rafe Esquith is an innovative, multiple-award-winning American teacher at Hobart Boulevard Elementary School, in Los Angeles, California, where he has taught since 1981. Most of the school's 2,000 students come from immigrant Central American and Korean families. According to a 2005 report on National Public Radio, 90 percent of his students were living below the poverty level, and all were from immigrant families, with none speaking English as a first language.

Esquith's fifth-grade students consistently score in the top 5 to 10 percent of the country in standardized tests. Many of Esquith's students voluntarily start class at 6:30 each morning, two hours before the rest of the school's students. They volunteer to come early, work through recess and stay as late as 6:00 pm, and also come to class during vacations and holidays.

Esquith has authored several books about teaching, and a documentary film has been made about his annual class Shakespeare productions.
His teaching honors include the 1992 Disney National Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award, a Sigma Beta Delta Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University, Oprah Winfrey’s $100,000 "Use Your Life Award", Parents Magazine’s "As You Grow Award", and a National Medal of Arts.

Jonathan Lerner: ALEX UNDERGROUND
Wednesday 7/21 7:30pm Outwrite Bookstore
Jonathan Lerner, a founding member of the Weather Underground, draws on memory and imagination to tell an authentic story of politics and passion, idealism and deceit, love, loss and survival.

It’s 1970, the era of transgressive sex, psychedelic drugs and violent revolution.

Alex gives an impassioned speech that incites a deadly campus riot; he and Doug take off on the run. Chicago, Paris, London, Havana. Highways and hideouts, cocktail bars and cruising spots, all-night drives, secret meetings and a bank heist that goes spectacularly wrong... Meanwhile Alex comes to see that his friend can never give him what he really wants. So he uses this clandestine interlude to uncover his own hidden truth.
Pretended identities, twisted secrets – but coming out gay and whole on the other side. “That awful year,” Alex will reflect much later, “when a benign impulse to remake the world led me to do so many strange and regrettable things.” This is a gripping story of the knotted psychology beneath political action, and one man’s struggle to find his honest self.

Alison Weir: CAPTIVE QUEEN: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine7/22 7pmMargaret Mitchell House

A Tudor specialist, popular British historian Weir has ventured, with great success, into the increasingly expansive world of historical fiction with Innocent Traitor (2007) and The Lady Elizabeth (2008); now she relocates further back in English history, into the twelfth century.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was the ruler of a powerful French duchy in her own right; her marriage to King Louis VII of France was annulled when she set eyes on the handsome Henry Plantagenet, count of Anjou. Eleanor and he married, he succeeded to the English throne, and Eleanor found herself queen of England. Their tumultuous marriage is the backbone of this novel. Henry was ever lusty, and Eleanor was no shrinking violet herself. Much of the battleground between these two strong-willed individuals was their sons: Henry fought against them; Eleanor fought for them like the she-lion she was.

The history itself is inherently dramatic, augmented here by Weirs usual lush detail, which stimulates rather than detracts from the well-paced narrative.

David Bottoms: The Onion’s Dark Core7/22 Decatur Library, 7:15 pm

David Bottoms, the distinguished Poet Laureate of Georgia and one of America’s finest poets will read from his latest work. The book is The Onion’s Dark Core, and it’s mostly a collection of essays composed by the poet. Edward Hirsch calls it a book that is ”personal, keenly thoughtful” and ”that treats poetry with the seriousness it deserves, as ’the most natural vehicle of the spirit’.” Bottoms has written six other books of poetry and two novels, and he holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

“What Bottoms has to say about place in poetry, consequence in poetry, and his own role in the murky matter, not to say sound, of Southern poetry is worth the price of multiple volumes. Bottoms writes something more like meditation than criticism and his book will pleasure long and well the most discriminating as well as the amateur reader.”
— Dave Smith, author of Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems 1992-2004

“David Bottoms has always been one of the seekers and yearners among our poets. In these pages he gives us an indelible sense of why that is so. Rooted in experience, rich with a sense of place, wise and frankly honest, these essays and interviews give an encouraging vision of our poetry as it makes its uncertain way into the 21st century.”
— Mark Jarman, author of Epistles: Poems

MARY KAY ANDREWS : THE FIXER-UPPER
Tuesday 7/13 The Iberian Pig, 5pm

The delightful New York Times bestselling author returns with a hilarious novel about one woman's quest to redo an old house . . . and her life.
After her boss in a high-powered Washington public relations firm is caught in a political scandal, fledgling lobbyist Dempsey Jo Killebrew is left almost broke, unemployed, and homeless. Out of options, she reluctantly accepts her father's offer to help refurbish Birdsong, the old family place he recently inherited in Guthrie, Georgia. All it will take, he tells her, is a little paint and some TLC to turn the fading Victorian mansion into a real-estate cash cow.
But, oh, is Dempsey in for a surprise when she arrives in Guthrie. "Bird Droppings" would more aptly describe the moldering Pepto Bismol–pink dump with duct-taped windows and a driveway full of junk. There's also a murderously grumpy old lady, one of Dempsey's distant relations, who has claimed squatter's rights and isn't moving out. Ever.
Furthermore, everyone in Guthrie seems to know Dempsey's business, from a smooth-talking real-estate agent to a cute lawyer who owns the local newspaper. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the pesky FBI agents who show up on Dempsey's doorstep, hoping to pry information about her ex-boss from her.
All Dempsey can do is roll up her sleeves and get to work. And before long, what started as a job of necessity somehow becomes a labor of love and, ultimately, a journey that takes her to a place she never expected—back home again.

Jennifer Weiner: FLY AWAY HOME
7/16 6pm
Margaret Mitchell House

Jennifer Weiner is the author of bestsellers, Best Friends Forever, Certain Girls, Good in Bed, In her shoes, Little Earthquakes, and The Guy Not Taken. Her latest, FLY AWAY HOME is written with an irresistible blend of heartbreak and hilarity. Fly Away Home is an unforgettable story of a mother and two daughters who after a lifetime of distance finally learn to find refuge in one another.
When Sylvie Serfer met Richard Woodruff in law school, she had wild curls, wide hips, and lots of opinions. Decades later, Sylvie has remade herself as the ideal politician’s wife—her hair dyed and straightened, her hippie-chick wardrobe replaced by tailored knit suits. At fifty-seven, she ruefully acknowledges that her job is staying twenty pounds thinner than she was in her twenties and tending to her husband, the senator.
Lizzie, the Woodruffs’ younger daughter, is at twenty-four a recovering addict, whose mantra HALT (Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired?) helps her keep her life under control. Still, trouble always seems to find her. Her older sister, Diana, an emergency room physician, has everything Lizzie failed to achieve—a husband, a young son, the perfect home—and yet she’s trapped in a loveless marriage. With temptation waiting in one of the ER’s exam rooms, she finds herself craving more.
After Richard’s extramarital affair makes headlines, the three women are drawn into the painful glare of the national spotlight. Once the press conference is over, each is forced to reconsider her life, who she is and who she is meant to be.

Joseph Gatins: WE WERE DANCING ON A VOLCANO: Bloodlines and Fault Lines of a Star-Crossed Atlanta Family, 1849-1989
7/17 Roswell Public Library, 2pm

This compelling saga, family biography and unsentimental social history follows the adventures of more than five generations of families that made their mark on Atlanta, New York, Savannah, Paris, Bogota and Killybegs, the tiny fishing village in County Donegal, Ireland, where the clan originated. The narrative especially highlights Gatins’ French grandmother's brave work with the French Resistance in World War II and her untiring efforts to successfully help her only son escape from Nazi prisoner of war camps.

The book, richly illustrated, has been more than a dozen years in the making, fruit of detailed research in courthouses and archives on three continents and review of voluminous family correspondence, documents and photo albums. Bilingual in French and English since childhood, he is responsible for all translations contained therein.

Now retired, Joseph Gatins for many years was a reporter and special projects editor with The Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond, Virginia. He was reared in Paris and Atlanta and now lives with his artist-author wife Fran in the mountains of north Georgia, where he is learning to appreciate the wilds that surround them.

Lisa's Book from aaron hughes on Vimeo.

Stan Cox: LOSING OUR COOL: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer)
Tuesday 7/6/2010 7pm Manuel’s Tavern, A cappella Books

In America, and especially across the South, air conditioning has become a summer way of life, as ubiquitous as cookouts and baseball. And as climate change continues to push the mercury upward, the role that A/C plays during the sultry times of the year promises to rise along with it. But despite the integral place air conditioners occupy in the modern world, it's rare that they are paid much mind – unless they break or fall victim to a power outage, that is.

With the release of Stan Cox's new book, Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer), however, the myriad problems posed by the world's fast-increasing reliance on air conditioning is being revealed. The first book to tackle the weighty issue of air conditioning's effects on energy use – and thus its role in feeding the warming trend it is being used to combat – as well as on our health itself, Cox's work "offers much for consumers, environmentalists, and policy makers to consider before powering up to cool down," as its recent review in Publishers Weekly read. Losing Our Cool is a thoroughly researched, sweeping account of what lies ahead for our artificially cooled world.
A scientist and environmental writer who currently works at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, Cox spent time in Florida, Arizona and India working on the book. His research uncovered astonishing details of the ways in which air conditioning has taken hold of our lives, including the facts that the amount of energy used to power home air-conditioning systems in America, as well as the greenhouse emissions they produce, has doubled over just the last decade, and energy devoted to cooling the country's retail stores has risen by two-thirds. Six out of every seven gallons of diesel fuel imported by the U.S. into Iraq and Afghanistan goes toward running air conditioners. And amazingly, the amount of electricity Americans use for air conditioners each year is equal to what it takes to power the entire continent of Africa. In addition to those eye-popping details of air conditioning's role in energy use, Cox presents troubling accounts of the technology's effects on rates of infection, allergy, asthma and obesity.
As summer turns up the heat outdoors and inevitably leads us to turn to air conditioning to keep it down indoors, Cox's new book is sure to spark lively discussions of just where all the Freon-induced comfort is leading.

Julie Andrews: THE VERY FAIRY PRINCESS
Friday July 9, 6pm Little Shop of Stories

As any library staff member will tell you, there can never be too many princess stories. Geraldine leads a rather ordinary life, and each page highlights a part of her mundane day. However, in the grand tradition of other literary, bedazzled mini-divas, Geraldine's imagination and love for the color pink brighten the daily grind of being a scab-kneed little girl. Readers will enjoy Geraldine's princess attitude and the vibrant fantasy brought to life through Davenier's ink and colored pencil illustrations.
While her friends and family may not believe in fairies, Geraldine knows, deep down, that she is a VERY fairy princess. From morning to night, Gerry does everything that fairy princesses do: she dresses in her royal attire, practices her flying skills, and she is always on the lookout for problems to solve. But it isn't all twirls and tiaras - as every fairy princess knows, dirty fingernails and scabby knees are just the price you pay for a perfect day! This new picture book addition to the Julie Andrews Collection features the joyful illustrations of Christine Davenier, and is sure to inspire that sparkly feeling within the hearts of readers young and old.

Jon Clinch: KINGS OF THE EARTH
Monday, July 12, 2010 7pm Georgia Center for the Book

In Clinch’s multilayered, pastoral second novel (after Finn), a death among three elderly, illiterate brothers living together on an upstate New York farm raises suspicions and accusations in the surrounding community. After their beloved mother, Ruth, dies, Audie, considered mentally "fragile," is devastated, but goes on tending to the Carversville farm with his brothers Vernon and Creed. When Vernon, frail at 60 and not under a doctor’s care, dies in his bed with evidence of asphyxiation, Creed is interrogated by troopers, along with Audie, the brother closest to Vernon. Family histories and troubles are divulged in short chapters by a cacophony of characters speaking in first person. Secrets and hidden alliances are revealed: Vernon’s nephew, Tom, grew and sold marijuana, which the family used medicinally; the brothers endured painful, bloody haircuts administered by their father. Alongside the police troopers’ investigation, each player contributes his own personal perspectives and motivations, including allusions to homosexual behavior. Inspired by the Ward brothers (of the 1992 documentary My Brother’s Keeper), Clinch explores family dynamics in this quiet storm of a novel that will stun readers with its power.

Notes from Daren's talk with John Lemley on WABE's City Cafe.

Steven Raichlen: PLANET BARBECUE: 275 Recipes, 53 Countries, 6 Continents of Great Flavor
Tuesday 6/29 6pm
Sur La Table, Perimeter Mall
America’s bestselling, award-winning master griller and author of HOW TO GRILL, BBQ USA, and THE BARBECUE BIBLE traveled on the “barbecue trail” collecting 275 of the tastiest, most tantalizing, easy-to-make recipes from every corner of the globe. The cookbook is filled with full-color photographs and celebrates the combination of food and culture from Puerto Rico, Germany, South Korea, Uruguay, South Africa and many other places. Raichlen is a former host of PBS’s popular series Barbecue University and Primal Grill and his articles appear regularly in Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, and other magazines and newspapers.

Joseph Dabney: THE FOOD, FOLKLORE, AND ART OF LOWCOUNTRY COOKING: A Celebration of the Foods, History, and Romance Handed Down from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany and Scotland

Wednesday June 30, 2010 7pm
Margaret Mitchell House
From Publishers Weekly
Even a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee will feel like a local after conquering Dabney's voluminous follow-up to his James Beard-winning Appalachian cookbook, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread and Scuppernong Wine. Digging deep, Dabney explores the culinary traditions and folklore of the coastal plain that runs from South Carolina into Georgia, from colonization to today. Tracing the lineage of the iconic dishes like Frogmore Stew and She Crab Soup, Dabney combines research and first-person interviews to create a rich portrait of the land and people. Quick to laud the contributions of slaves for many of the region's favorite dishes and key ingredients (like okra and peanuts), not to mention plenty of local characters, Dabney immerses culinary carpetbaggers via guided tours of cities like Savannah and Charleston, including a helpful guide to Charleston dialect ("Minuet: You and I have dined"). Though the book's scope may intimidate some-recipes and key dishes are woven into the text rather than set apart-diners who want to eat like a Low Country local will find plenty of suggestions here for crab cakes, sweet tea, pimento cheese, oyster roasts, pig roasts, and fried chicken, along with plenty of sides and dishes such as:
Benne Seed Biscuits
Sweet Potato Pie
Frogmore Stew
She Crab Soup
Brunswick Stew
Hoppin' John
Oyster Purloo
Cooter Soup
Hags Head Cheese
Goobers
And much, much more!
Discover the secrets of one of the most mysterious, romantic regions in the South: the Lowcountry. James Beard Cookbook of the Year Award-winning author Joe Dabney produces another gem with this comprehensive celebration of Lowcountry cooking. Packed with history, authoritative folklore, photographs, and fascinating sidebars, Dabney takes readers on a tour of the Coastal Plain, including Charleston, Savannah, and Beaufort, the rice plantations, and the sea islands.

Karin Slaughter: BROKEN
Thursday, July 1, 7pm
Georgia Center for the Book

When the body of a young woman is discovered deep beneath the icy waters of Lake Grant, a note left under a rock by the shore points to suicide. But within minutes, it becomes clear that this is no suicide. It's a brutal, cold-blooded murder. All too soon former Grant County medical examiner Sara Linton - home for Thanksgiving after a long absence -- finds herself unwittingly drawn into the case. The chief suspect is desperate to see her but when she arrives at the local police station she is met with a horrifying sight -- he lies dead in his cell, the words 'Not me' scrawled across the walls. Something about his confession doesn't add up and deeply suspicious of the detective in charge, Lena Adams, Sara immediately calls the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Shortly afterwards, Special Agent Will Trent is brought in from his vacation to investigate. But he is immediately confronted with a wall of silence. Grant County is a close-knit community with loyalties and ties that run deep. And the only person who can tell the truth about what really happened is dead.

Michael Largo: GOD'S LUNATICS: Lost Souls, False Prophets, Martyred Saints, Murderous Cults, Demonic Nuns, and Other Victims of Man's Eternal Search for the Divine.
Tuesday, June 22, 6pm
SCAD-Ivy Hall
Arm yourself with God's Lunatics before your next encounter with those who have been blinded by the light. Award-winning author Michael Largo, "the Capote of kaput" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution), chronicles history's vast and colorful cast of true believers—from the hidden side of the Bible's eccentric characters to today's street-corner doomsayers, and from extraterrestrial communicators, levitating hermits, and flagellating ascetics to self-serving preachers of overindulgence who believed money, sex, and drugs were the keys to the portal to divine understanding. In addition to the firewalkers, serpent handlers, cultists, terrorists, and alleged time travelers, God's Lunatics also reveals the dubious foundations of the world's major faiths and the many religious customs and laws that continue to influence governments and society, whether you are a believer or not.

Largo, dubbed "the Capote of kaput" by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and "the curator of death" by Esquire, for his irreverent books on human mortality, takes on religious fanaticism in his new release, God’s Lunatics: Lost Souls, False Prophets, Martyred Saints, Murderous Cults, Demonic Nuns, and Other Victims of Man's Eternal Search for the Divine. His latest work examines celebrated mystics, martyrs, wizards, shamans, cult leaders, founding fathers of Utopian experiments, victims of demonic possession and the originators of New Age movements.

Largo is also the author of Genius and Heroin, The Portable Obituary and the Bram Stoker Award-winning Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die.

Jane Green: PROMISES TO KEEP
Friday, June 25^th 7:15
Decatur Library
Jane Green, the bestselling author of 11 popular novels makes her first visit to the Center for the Book with a compelling new novel just right for summer reading, Promises to Keep. It’s the story of one remarkable summer in Maine when the lives of several families intersect, and what happens when you have to be your parent’s child long after you’ve grown up. The novel focuses on enduring love, building relationships and making touch decisions, the challenges we all have to face. Green has won acclaim for her novels which include such favorites as The Beach House, Babyville, Dune Road and Second Chance.

Callie Perry has a pretty perfect life. It may not be everyone’s idea of happiness – her husband spends more time travelling for his job as a commercials director than he does at home – but it works for her. It gives her time to work – she is a successful family photographer – and be around for her two kids, and her friends. She lives in Bedford, New York, is beloved by all who know her, and wakes up every morning grateful for how happy she is.

Her younger sister, Steffi, the baby of the family, has never grown up. In her early thirties and the epitome of a free spirit, she’s never held down a job, or a boyfriend, for longer than six months. Her latest incarnation is as a vegan chef. She’s living with the latest unsuitable man, in a sixth floor walk up in Soho, and her parents have almost given up hope that she’ll ever learn what it is to be responsible.

Lila Grossman is Callie’s best friend. Single, she’s finally met the man of her dreams. Ed has a son she adores, a crazy ex-wife she doesn’t, and she finally feels ready to settle down. If, that is, their goals are the same.

And then there are Callie and Steff’s parents. Walter and Honor . Divorced for almost thirty years, they haven’t spoken for most of that time. They may share two grown-up daughters, but it is agreed by all who knew them, they share little else.

Until they all receive a shocking phone call that changes their lives forever, and brings them all together one short, snowy winter.

Promises to Keep is about the hard choices we sometimes have to make; about having to be a child, long after you’ve grown up, and mostly, about the enduring nature of love.
(Jane gets a shout out mainly because she has a book called The Love Verb. We think all titles should have "Verb" in them.)

Dorothea Benton Frank: LOWCOUNTRY SUMMER: A Plantation Novel
Foxtale Book Shoppe
Woodstock GA
Saturday, June 26^th 6pm
Starred Review. Here's one for the Southern gals as well as Yankees who appreciate Frank's signature mix of sass, sex, and gargantuan personalities. In this long-time-coming sequel to Plantation, opinionated and family-centric Caroline Wimbly Levine has just turned 47, but she's less concerned with advancing middle age than she is with son Eric shacking up with an older single mom. She's also dealing with a drunk and disorderly sister-in-law, Frances Mae; four nieces from hell; grieving brother Tripp; a pig-farmer boyfriend with a weak heart; and a serious crush on the local sheriff. Then there's Caroline's dead-but-not-forgotten mother, Miss Lavinia, whose presence both guides and troubles Caroline as she tries to keep her unruly family intact and out of jail. With a sizable cast of minor characters with major attitude, Frank lovingly mixes a brew of personalities who deliver nonstop clashes, mysteries, meltdowns, and commentaries; below the always funny theatrics, however, is a compelling saga of loss and acceptance. When Frank nails it, she really nails it, and she does so here. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

New York Times bestselling author of RETURN TO SULLIVANS ISLAND, BULLS ISLAND, THE CHRISTMAS PEARL, THE LAND OF MANGO SUNSETS and many others, has written the sequel to PLANTATION. When Caroline Wimbley Levine returned to Tall Pines Plantation, she never expected to make peace with long-buried truths about herself and her family. The Queen of Tall Pines, her late mother, was a force of nature, but now she is gone, leaving Caroline and the rest of the family uncertain of who will take her place. In the lush South Carolina countryside, old hurts, betrayals, and dark secrets will surface, and a new generation will rise along the banks of the Edisto River. In her novels, Frank, a native of the South, captures the beauty, atmosphere, characters and the eccentricities of life in this area.
(We love Dottie. She's a hoot and a half.)

Julie Andrews, has rescheduled forLittle Shop of Stories on Julie 9th, at 6pm. She cancelled back in May, and I may have said some things about her that Captain Von Trapp would not have approved of. Since she was kind enough to reschedule, I've decided to rename the entire month of July for her.
So go over to Little Shop and get in line for your tickets now--they'll be available on July 6th. You can camp out in front of the store. Guitar Red will serenade you every day, you can get all your meals at the Brick Store, which is opening early every day for World Cup, and also have a good claim on that bench for the Fireworks on the Fourth. Starbucks is right there--you can get your coffee every morning when they open. They only have two hundred tix, so you better get going. Hell, there are people lined up for their iPhone, and they had about 600,000 of those to sell. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Pam Grier:
Foxy
Wednesday, June 16, 2010,
6:30 pm at Outwrite Books

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzgw0ppe1oM(there’s 15 seconds of non-FCC complaint inducing sound at 1:35, although if you bleep one mothereffing word, it would be better to start at 1:20)

In this prickly autobiography, the iconic actress is almost as hard-nosed toward lovers as her filmic alter -ego was toward enemies. Grier recalls a flamboyant career, from B-movie starlet in Women in Cages through blaxploitation diva in Foxy Brown to Tarantino muse in Jackie Brown, all of it shaped by a rigorous Stanislavskian method. (Her self-transformation into a strung-out killer prostitute for an audition almost got her arrested by the NYPD.)

Grier nods to the feminist and black power movements that inspired her screen persona as a glamorous badass shot gunning a white and/or male power structure—Hollywood's answer to Angela Davis—while distancing herself from the myth: deep down she's a Colorado farm girl, scarred by two rapes, who loves horses. But there's a resemblance to her onscreen persona in her tough, wary attitude toward domineering boyfriends like Kareem Abdul Jabbar, who futilely tried to convert her into a submissive Muslim wife, and comedian Freddie Prinze, whose suicide garners less space and pathos than does the death of her dog. “What harm would it do to say yes and keep on watching his behavior?” she strategizes when a suitor presents an engagement ring.
 
 
Sebastian Junger:
War
June 16, 2010
7pm at Barnes & Noble Buckhead

“War is insanely exciting.... Don't underestimate the power of that revelation”, warns bestselling author and Vanity Fair contributing editor Junger (The Perfect Storm).

The war in Afghanistan contains brutal trauma but also transcendent purpose in this riveting combat narrative. Junger spent 14 months in 2007–2008 intermittently embedded with a platoon of the 173rd airborne brigade in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the bloodiest corners of the conflict. The soldiers are a scruffy, warped lot, with unkempt uniforms—they sometimes do battle in shorts and flip-flops—and a ritual of administering friendly beatings to new arrivals, but Junger finds them to be superlative soldiers. Junger experiences everything they do—nerve-racking patrols, terrifying roadside bombings and ambushes, stultifying weeks in camp when they long for a firefight to relieve the tedium. Despite the stress and the grief when buddies die, the author finds war to be something of an exalted state: soldiers experience an almost sexual thrill in the excitement of a firefight—a response Junger struggles to understand—and a profound sense of commitment to subordinating their self-interests to the good of the unit.

 Junger mixes visceral combat scenes—raptly aware of his own fear and exhaustion—with quieter reportage and insightful discussions of the physiology, social psychology, and even genetics of soldiering. The result is an unforgettable portrait of men under fire.
 
 
Bret Easton Ellis:
Imperial Bedrooms
Friday June 18th, 2010
6:30 pm at SCAD Atlanta Campus

Bret Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero, is one of the signal novels of the last thirty years, and he now follows those infamous teenagers into an even more desperate middle age.
 
Clay, a successful screenwriter, has returned from New York to Los Angeles to help cast his new movie, and he’s soon drifting through a long-familiar circle. Blair, his former girlfriend, is married to Trent, a powerful manager who’s still a bisexual philanderer, and their Beverly Hills parties attract various levels of fame and fortune. Then there’s Clay’s childhood friend Julian, a recovering addict, and their old dealer, Rip, face-lifted beyond recognition and seemingly even more sinister than in his notorious past. But Clay’s own demons emerge once he meets a gorgeous young actress determined to win a role in his movie. And when his life careens out of control, he’s forced to come to terms with the deepest recesses of his character – and with his proclivity for betrayal.
 
Christopher Hitchens:
Hitch-22: A Memoir
Friday June 18th, 2010
7 pm at Barnes & Noble Buckhead

Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide.
 
In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political.
 
This is the story of his life, lived large.
 
About the Author:
Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School. He is the author of numerous books, including works on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George Orwell, Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and his #1 New York Times bestseller and National Book Award nominee, God Is Not Great.

Walking in a little late, we tried not to disturb the audience as the hard-wood floors of the Tabernacle creaked with our every movement. “Where is David Byrne?” I whispered to my friend. We finally saw Byrne sitting amidst a panel. Celebrities always look different when you see them in person- a little shorter, sunken almost. But after a few seconds the former Talking Heads star had gripped my attention. From his pitch black suit emerged shiny white sneakers and a mop of grey hair.

Byrne was a guest speaker at the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) conference on Wednesday, the 19th of May (http://www.cnu.org/healthiercirculation). This year’s topic was Healthier Circulation: The Future of Getting Around. The panel consisted of urbanists: Ellen-Dunham Jones, professor of architecture at Georgia Tech; Charles Brewer, developer of Glenwood Park in Atlanta; and Scotty Greene, executive director of the Buckhead Community Improvement District.

What was Byrne doing there, you ask? Byrne’s new book Bicycle Diaries documents the concepts of environmentalism, community, spaces and architecture that the above mentioned urbanists study. Byrne’s journeys through the cities across the world using a bicycle as his sole means of transportation allowed him to view cities differently revealing spaces otherwise hidden.

As he came up to the podium with his rock-star confidence I knew I was in for a ride. He brought my attention to cities today and how closely they resembled the giant structures that Hugh Ferris in his vision of future cities showed: Human interaction will be significantly reduced by large structures. He showed several pictures of these other-worldy grey shadowy figures that on closer look resembled many of our cities today. A chilling thought.

Standing there in the spotlight with this painting by Hugh Ferris as a background, made Byrne look like he walked out of Star Trek. “Kill the Streets”, he exclaimed was the motto of architects like Corbusier: Our streets are being killed when interactions between people is being cut because of people’s dependency on cars and highways. Come to think of it this could be one of the reasons why Decatur is comparably very community oriented—it’s easy to walk and bicycle around.

He also mentioned how he enjoyed the close encounters with people in the narrow streets of Ferrara, Italy where almost everyone cycled and cars simply could not fit into the streets. According to Byrne we need to stop accommodating cars. Instead the urban landscape around us should encourage cycling. Inspired by examples of bike parking from cities like Berlin and Japan, he has invented his own artistic vision of bike parking that he is implementing in New York City (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brCk1-AVvRk)

Bicycle diaries is on the top of must read books list. David Byrne is definitely an example of someone who walks the talk, or in this case cycles the talk.