MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee is a woman of few words and generally avoids media interviews and public appearances. But the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird” broke her silence briefly Monday at a ceremony inducting four new members, including former home-run king Hank Aaron, into the Alabama Academy of Honor. Lee, who lives in Monroeville, is a member of the academy, which honors living Alabamians, and was in the audience for Monday’s ceremony. At the end of the ceremony, Academy of Honor chairman Tom Carruthers joked with Lee, saying he knew she had something she wanted to […]

BY MAVIS LINNEMAN BOOK CRITIC Last week, TV producer-turned-lawyer-turned-author Saira Rao published her first novel, Chambermaid. It is the story of law student Sheila Raj’s clerkship (a must-do for all law students) with a revered 3rd Circuit judge in Philadelphia. Her dream come true turns into her worst nightmare when she realizes the judge is an insufferable tyrant who can’t even get her name right and who could care less about clerks or her regular employees. Think The Devil Wears Prada in judge’s chambers. As Laura Weisberger did for fashion assistants, Rao sheds light on the exacting and often outlandish […]

BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC Michael Chabon throws down metaphors like a deejay dropping beats, skillfully teasing out the intersections of character and the circumstance that bend, break and, eventually, make them. As author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier & Clay and the critically acclaimed book-turned-movie Wonder Boys, Chabon has proven himself time and time again as a master storyteller. His new novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is no exception. Lovers of film noir will appreciate Chabon’s protagonist, Detective Meyer Landsman, for his Bogart-like qualities. Like Bogey in The Big Sleep, Landsman is at once a ruthless, […]

BY KAREN HELLER INQUIRER COLUMNIST Could there be a more brilliant title than The Dangerous Book for Boys? This handsome volume, authored by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, proffers advice on such essentials as spiders, poker, invisible ink, skinning a rabbit and making a go-cart, things every boy’s father knew as a boy. OK, let’s not kid ourselves here. Every boy’s grandfather. A phenomenon in the authors’ native England where it was published a year ago, Dangerous was named British Book of the Year, with more than half a million copies in print. Since its May debut on these shores, […]

BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC All too often reviewers say a book is “laugh-out-loud funny,” but when you finally read it, it’s about as funny as child abuse. That’s not the case with Simon Rich‘s Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations. The book’s super-short vignettes and mini-dialogues had me howling in my subway seat, much to the consternation of the other morning commuters. Only 22-years-old and freshly graduated from Harvard, Rich (son of New York Times columnist Frank Rich) will no doubt be tickling the short-attention span funny bones of Generations Y & Z for years to come. Recently he […]

BY MAVIS LINNEMANN BOOK CRITIC Eight years after the critically-acclaimed short story collection The Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander’s first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, finally hit bookstores on May 1. This harrowing novel takes place during Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-1983), during which the junta government “disappeared” somewhere between 9,000 and 30,000 suspected dissidents and subversives, mostly students and liberals. Kaddish Poznan, hijo de puta (son of a whore) and outcast in the Jewish community, makes his living by erasing the names of wanton Jewish ancestors (pimps, whores and gangsters) from their gravestones on requests from more respectable […]