Alvah’s Books

About a month ago, I wrote a review of Gerald Martin’s fabulous biography on ‘Gabo’ otherwise known as Gabriel Garcia Marquez for The Feminist Review. It’s finally been posted, but for a sneak preview below are the first two paragraphs:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
By Gerald Martin
Alfred P. Knopf
672 pages
$37.50

In his exhaustively researched biography of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Gerald Martin, who spent seventeen years examining every aspect of Marquez’s life and interviewing over 300 people, beautifully takes the reader through the life and times of one of Latin America’s most influential writers, a Nobel Prize winner, and one of the most popular novelist in the last fifty years.

Martin traces Márquez’s (or “Gabo” as he is affectionately referred to throughout the biography) early beginnings back to Aratacata’s early days and to the life of Colonel Nicholás R. Márquez Mejia, Gabo’s maternal grandfather, who played an influential and supportive role in the young boy’s life until he was swooped up by his nomadic parents at nine years old. It’s during that time, Martin writes, that the inspiration for One Hundred Years of Solitude was born and where Gabo learned of magic via his superstitious grandmother.

To read the rest of the review, please visit the Feminist Review’s blog.

Readers of Alvah’s Books received a very generous offer from Keith Harmeyer, author of Commercial Break. For a limited time, if  you order the book from this site – http://www.CommercialBreakTheNovel.com – and enter the following code – SQR6DBHZ – at checkout, you’ll receive 20% off the retail price.

Please note: this discount is only available at http://www.CommercialBreakTheNovel.com, not at Amazon.

World Cook’s Collection: Mediterranean Kitchen
By Jacqueline Clark and Joanna Farrow
Barnes & Noble Books
256 pages

We’ve all heard of the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet and there was a period that we ate nothing but Mediterranean-inspired recipes. Not for health reasons, but to add more variety to our meals.

Similar to the Soup Cookbook, World Cook’s Collection: Mediterranean Kitchen is beautifully photographed with step-by-step instruction. Chapters range from basic ingredients typically used in Mediterranean cuisine to recipes for shellfish and fish, poultry, meat, vegetables, grains and beans, and desserts.

My favorite part of the book is the appetizer or tapas section. I like to nosh and many of these can easily make a meal with small salad on the side. If you like garlic, shellfish, chorizo and lots of olive oil, you might want to consider these along with a nice crusty loaf of country bread to sop up the deliciously flavored olive oil:

• Sauteed Mussels with Garlic and Herbs,
• Garlic Shrimp
• Chorizo in Olive Oil

 However, if you want something more substantial to eat and you don’t mind spending more time preparing a meal, below are some of my favorites:

• Moroccan Pigeon Pie or Pastilla. This recipe consists of phyllo pastry pie filled with a mixture of squab (or chicken) eggs, spices (cinnamon, ginger, turmeric) spices and nuts. It’s a bit labor-intensive, but well worth the effort to make.
• Black Pasta with Squid Sauce. You can find tagliatelle flavored with squid ink in Italian food stores. The combined of squid, white wine, fresh tomatoes and garlic is amazing.
• Turkish Lamb Pilaf. Delicious combination of lamb, rice, spices, nuts and fruits.
• Spiced Vegetable Couscous. This is a combination of spices, and a wide variety of veggies and legumes including chick peas, zucchini, cauliflower, carrots, and tomatoes.

When it comes to dessert or sweet treats, I can never say no to these: 

• Churros. This a variation of fried dough, but the consistency is different than a Zeppole or a doughnut. Churros are deep-fried in coils. Once fried, they’re dusted with a combination of cinnamon and sugar. They’re more of a snack with thick hot chocolate or with coffee.
• Crema Catalana. This is a cross between crème brulee and crème caramel. The best part is the caramelized sugar topping.
• Coffee Granita. This is a semi-frozen sherbet, but the ice particles are larger. Ideal for the summer. You can also make these with fruits. In Spain, they make a quasi gelato/granita flavor include almond, hazelnut (my favorite) chocolate, coffee and more.

Commercial Break
By Keith Harmeyer
Hollywood2Hollywood Enterprises 2009
301 pages
$11.99

Reviewed by Randall Radic 

There’s a guy named Keith Harmeyer, who lives in New York. He used to be in advertising. Keith decided to write a book. Taking the old adage “write about what you know” to heart, Keith wrote a novel called Commercial Break. And what a novel it is!

Commercial Break is a combination of Carl Hiaasen, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joseph Heller. Which means it’s laugh-out-loud funny, replete with cynicism and verbal pyrotechnics. It’s the story of Adam Glassman, who, along with his partner, Carlo Fiore, runs a successful New York advertising agency that goes by the fitting name of Hot Posse. Adam’s marriage is on the rocks and he flamed out a long time ago. He’s sick and tired of overcompensating in his life. He feels like a fraud.

Adam’s looking for a way out of his miserable life. Utilizing the incredible virtuosity of his creative and organizational genius, he devises a plan that will provide him with enough money so he can retire forever. The plan has two tiny, little, teeny-weeny drawbacks. Mere hiccups, really: he can’t do it alone, and it means breaking the law.

The plan involves selling the same Super Bowl commercial to six of his clients. One commercial, six fees. The risk is significant, but the payoff is enormous. Adam recruits his partner, Carlo Fiore, who feels that the undertaking by definition entails a certain diminution of dignity. Rather than make a moral choice, Carlo decides to resolve his dilemma by placing it in the hands of a woman. This will relieve him of the tedium. By the way, Carlo’s luck with the fairer sex is not anything to write home about. He has a girlfriend who is the prototype of the new woman – she’s a pangynic nightmare. In short, she lacks that provocative warmth which draws man to woman.

Meanwhile, Adam has his own female problems. He gets romantically involved with a young woman – an employee – who is not only a dire and frightening female, but sucks down wine by the gallon.

One of the funniest parts of the book is the commercial that Adam is peddling to all and sundry. Composed of “six, magnificent blondes in patent leather bikinis sitting on a black iceberg,” with Bobby Darin singing ‘Mack the Knife’ in the background, the commercial is a gelatinous mass of rhodomontade and piffle, which just adds to the insane humor, because it’s so indicative of contemporary marketing and advertising.

It’s one of those things that has to be read to be believed. And Keith Harmeyer pulls it off without a hitch. This guy can write comedy. In fact, Commercial Break should be a movie. It’s got all he necessary ingredients for a blockbuster.

The reviewer refuses to spoil the book by revealing what happens along the way, as the “big idea” is implemented. Needless to say the author mixes in poetic paradoxes, bracketing oxymorons, morons, and a few tawdry magician’s tricks as he demonstrates how, in the final analysis, the masses are the final tyrants in today’s advertising world. Which means this novel can be read at a number of different levels. On one level, there’s an amusing story of white-collar crime. On another level there is a social commentary that points out how the hoi polloi seem to confuse standard of living with quality of life, and equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity. And how the scorn of the intellectual elite blinds it to the vast primitive power of mediocrity.

Commercial Break is the funniest and most entertaining book the reviewer has read in years. Readers will not be disappointed.

I have to admit it that I have serious book problem. I vow that I’m not going to request any more review copies, but then something catches my eye and bang! I’m typing an email to a publicist requesting the book.

For a couple of weeks I was good, but I admit I started missing the daily packages. Some books that I requested a while back never arrived, but then I started to receive a deluge. Sometimes three or four a day, usually one a day. As it turned out, a bunch of these had been sent via media mail while others were sent regular mail or UPS.

No matter how they long they took to arrive, I now have a huge “To Be Read” pile that it would be shameless for me to jot off another book request until I finish these.

Since I’ve been busy this month with the Alvah Bessie tribute, writing a review for a Blog Tour, and I’ve been working on my own novel (and now I am trying to revise it as quickly as possible because an agent has expressed interest to read the entire manuscript), I haven’t had a chance to post “In this Week’s Post”  for quite a while. So I thought I would list what’s come in. On another note, I am discontinuing Weekly Reads. It was fun to assign books to myself for the week, but the truth was that it was getting to be too much like work . I already have enough deadlines for my job and other projects I’m working on, why add more stress?

Now to the books:

• A Circle of Souls, by Preetham Grandhi
• Hunter, by Cambell Jeffreys
• You or Someone Like You, by Chandler Burr
• The Embers, by Hyatt Bass
• The Angel’s Game, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Stardust, by Joseph Kanon
• The Hunted, by Brian Haig
• The Rise and Fall of Communism, by Archie Brown
• From Where the Rivers Come, by Terin Tashi Miller
• Germany 1945, by Richard Bessel
• Sunnyside, by Glen David Gold
• Two to Six, by James P. Cornelio
• Beowulf on the Beach, by Jack Murnighan
• The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly

These were all the ones that came via mail. I also have three books I borrowed from the library, a half-dozen I bought at our local bookstore and library sale. And…I also have ten more that are slowly climbing up the to be read pile.  Last, but not least are the ones from my own collection that I’ve pulled out for the Spanish Civil War and Communism monthly theme.

There’s no question that I like to read, but is this becoming an addiction? I’m curious what others do to handle the backload of books. What do you do so that it doesn’t seem like work? I look forward to reading your comments and tips.

A World I Never Made
By James LePore
The Story Plant
272 pages
$24.95

In A World I Never Made, the debut novel by James LePore, readers will read about lost and newfound love, betrayal among colleagues and lovers, terror, and thrilling fast-paced action and edge-of-your-seat suspense.

The story opens with Pat Nolan in a Parisian police station, reading his daughter Megan’s suicide note. He has come from the United Stated to identify and claim her body.  However, the corpse at the morgue—that of a young woman with advanced ovarian cancer—is not his daughter.

Nolan recognizes immediately that Megan has set up this faux suicide because she is in danger, and it is up to him to find and help her. His task is complicated when he is attacked by two Middle-Eastern men, but lucky for Nolan he is saved by Catherine Laurence, a French detective who has been assigned to trail him.

Laurence and her superiors discover that the body in the morgue is not Megan’s and that she is suspected of working with a group of terrorists who bombed several locations in Casablanca. The hope is that Nolan will lead them to Megan and the terrorists and prevent a potential 9/11 scenario in France. However, it’s not all that simple when Catherine realizes that something is awry and goes on leave to help Nolan find Megan.

The story is juxtaposed with Megan’s own story that takes place almost a year earlier and how she disappeared via her fake suicide. A college drop-out, who decided to acquire her education by living in Europe and in the beds of wealthy men, Megan Nolan is a journalist who primarily writes for women magazines, but a sudden intellectual interest in terrorism develops, and she travels to Morocco to do some research. There she meets Abdel Lahani, a Saudi businessman, and becomes his mistress. A few months later and pregnant with Lahani’s child, she discovers that her lover is more than a businessman, but a terrorist with grand plans to attack European countries.

Meanwhile, Nolan’s and Catherine’s quest to find his daughter has them following Megan’s leads, which ultimately leads them to a group of Roma– an intriguing element that convincingly moves the story forward–in Paris and later to the Czech Republic. However, these are the same leads that the terrorists follow with the hope of finding Megan and killing her.

LePore keeps the fast pace of the story by switching back and forth between the search for Megan and with her life in Morocco with Lahani. Readers learn through the back stories in each of the sections of the strained relationship between father and daughter. LePore balances this estrangement by having Nolan and Catherine fall in love, but this love affair surfaces too quickly in the story and slows down the pace.

LePore’s strength lies in his descriptive detail, which mostly likely can be attributed to his skill (according to his bio) as a photographer in which he captures the image he has seen through the viewfinder and composes scenes that show the reader the actions and locales in Paris and Morocco.

However, LePore seems to lose his way when it comes to characterization. Of all the players, Megan is the only one who is fully fleshed out, and it seems the one character that the author has spent the most time developing and analyzing. LePore provides a solid foundation of Megan’s psyche and brings to life a manipulative woman who has contempt for her father and men in general.

Unfortunately, JePore fails to bring any of these strong personality traits to both Catherine and Nolan. Readers never get an adequate explanation of why Catherine hated—a strong emotion in itself–her husband so much. LePore offers a stock explanation, but the reaon isn’t sufficient and doesn’t add much to the story. Like Catherine, Nolan comes across as somewhat insipid. He is meant to be sympathetic–a strong and silent type—a man who experienced the tragedy of losing his wife in childbirth and who is left alone to take care of his daughter, but readers with an interest in the father/daughter dynamics will want to know more of the wedge that drove Megan and Nolan so wide apart.

In spite of  its few flaws, as a fast-moving suspense story with various twists and turns, A World I Never Made succeeds in keeping readers interested until its satisfying and realistic conclusion.

After reading A World I Never Made, I had the honor and great privilege to interview James LePore. Below is my interview with Mr. LePore.

About James LePore, lawyer, photographer and writer:

Rebeca Schiller: It seems that lawyers who become writers are fairly adept in writing suspense genre novels. Is this your niche and will you stick with it or have you written in other genres?

James LePore:I am drawn to the suspense genre probably for the same reason I was drawn to trial work as a lawyer. The drama inherent in both seems to stimulate my imagination in ways that other genres—and other legal specialties—do not. I think something has to be at stake for a story to be interesting; the higher the risk, the more likely it is the reader will start to root for a character. This being the case, I will likely stick with the suspense genre for a while. It seems to be in my blood.

RS: Years ago, a novice writer told me that he wanted to take up photography because he felt that composing a picture would help with his writing–to show rather than tell. Do you find that your skills in photography have given you an edge in describing scenes, characters, and action?

JL: I do. For many years I looked at the world either through an actual or an imaginary viewfinder, and asked myself, what information does this piece of the world—this potential image—convey? That was how I learned what the elements of a good photograph are, and it is that experience that has been invaluable in helping me to describe scenes and settings in my writing in a way that (I hope) put a vivid picture in the reader’s mind. I would recommend to any writer to take a basic photography class and to play with the camera. The two disciplines are not as far apart as they seem.

 About A World I Never Made:

RS: As one of the lead characters in the story, Megan Nolan is not very sympathetic. Was that your intention when you fleshed her out or did she take shape as you kept writing?

JL: Megan was always going to be a character who was difficult to like, but who would change, even act heroically, when she realized where her bad decisions had led her. When the stakes were high enough, Megan went all in. Her courage, at least, could not be doubted.

RS: The Roma play important roles in the novel, what inspired you to include them?

JL: There was a gypsy family that lived in my neighborhood when I was growing up. The boys my age were unbelievably clannish and unfriendly. One day I woke up and they were gone and they have fascinated me ever since.

When Megan needs a place to really hide, it came to me that the Roma would be a realistic answer. They have a disdain for the wider culture and a fierce privacy ethic that I felt would make them ideal for Megan’s purposes.

RS: You mention the Madrid bombings, did they spark the idea for A World I Never Made?

JL: I had been to Morocco a few years before the bombings so when they happened I was very interested. They did not spark the idea for A World I Never Made, but they are a historical fact around which I felt much of the plot and the personal story lines could revolve.

About Writing and Books:

 RS: If you read through writers’ blogs, it seems that procrastination is one of the big hurdles they encounter on a daily basis. Are you disciplined writer with a schedule or do you fall in the trap “that tomorrow is another day” and do something else?

JL: I have been lucky. When I engage with a story and a core group of characters, procrastination is not possible. I write every day, taking the occasional day off to rest or to attend to iron-clad obligations.

RS: Once you decided to write, did you join any writing groups, take classes, buy books on the craft of writing etc?

JL: I did not write well at first, but I met an editor who must have recognized some potential and who’s work with me was very informative and formative. That was my training.

RS: Who are you currently reading?

JL: I am re-reading John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. There is something about them, a sense of excitement I think, that I wanted to re-experience.

RS: Which writers do you admire and why?

JL: I love knock-out mystery and noir: Raymond Chandler, P.D. James, Patricia Highsmith, James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, Elmore Leonard, and a few others. I admire them because they have mastered all or a great deal of a very difficult craft. Who is more noir than Chandler, more eerie than Highsmith, more down than Mosley?

The Cook’s Encyclopedia of Soup
Edited by Debra Mayhew
Lorenz Books, 2001
$14.95

No Soup for You. If you’re a Seinfeld fan, you know all about the Soup Nazi and that famous line that’s uttered to George and Elaine. And there really is a Soup Nazi who has franchises in New York City and has licensed some of his recipes; you can buy them in some supermarket chains like Key Food in Park Slope.

Here on the east coast, we’ve been having some fairly wet and coolish weather. Soup and a salad seem to be the dinner of choice in our household. This week I decided to highlight a cookbook that I bought several years ago when we were going through a soup phase. In my travels to the bookstore and browsing through the cookbook section, I came this little gem, The Cook’s Encyclopedia of Soup.

It’s a lovely soft-covered book with a sedate blue/lavender color with one small picture of a vibrant orange-red bowl of Sweet Potato and Red Pepper Soup.

The book consists of six sections that include recipes for:

• Light & Refreshing Soups

• Rich & Creamy Soups

• Warming Winter Soups

• Hearty Lunch & Supper Soups

• One-Pot-Meal Soups

• Special Occasion Soups

Each recipe is broken down by ingredients and steps that are accompanied by color photographs of each phase from start to finish.

I’m partial to soups that have some kick and consistency. Some of my favorites include Jalapeno Soup made with chicken broth, chicken breast, jalapenos and an avocado. If you’re like me and like cream and butter, Jerusalem Artichoke Soup is wonderful for a chilly day.

One of my favorite is garlic and because I am half-Spanish, it’s no surprise that I’m a big fan Spanish Garlic Soup—simple to prepare and quite aromatic.

Although I’m not a fan of eating peanut butter straight from the jar or to spread on bread, I love cooking with peanuts and peanut. One of my top five soups is Spicy Peanut Soup, a hearty soup with carrots, corn, peppers, potatoes and cayenne pepper. There’s an African variation of this recipe with yams and okra.

However, I’m leaving the best for last. For me (and for Seinfeld’s Kramer) the king of soups, is the imperialistic Mulligatawny Soup. This rich soup has chockfull of ingredients from curry powder to raisins and it is the ideal lunch or dinner soup.

Unlike the Soup Nazi, I say, “Here’s some soup for you!”