By Laurence Leamer
Hyperion, $15.99, 368 pages
There is one thing you need to know about Palm Beach: it’s all about money. It’s about how much a person is worth, how much the house cost, how much the widow inherited, and how much one donates to charity. In Madness Under the Royal Palms, the author, in spite [...]
By David Eastis
Aventine, $17.77, 307 pages
Humans are hardwired to find patterns in the world around us. We form theories around these patterns, we give number-based coincidences a certain level of importance in our lives. Some people even use numbers to make decisions, entrusting their futures to superstitions based on numbers.
The Magical, Amazing and Popular Number [...]
By Frank Warren
Harper Collins/William Morrow, $22.99, 276 pages
The fifth book in the PostSecret series, Confessions features over 270 new secrets from Frank Warren’s endlessly growing collection. Warren started PostSecret as a conceptual art project in 2004, and, since then, he has received almost half a million postcards scrawled, painted, collaged, and otherwise decorated with strangers’ [...]
Edited by Yoshio Sugimoto
Cambridge, $29.99, 413 pages
Professor Emeritus Yoshio Sugimoto has assembled a scholarly and in-depth examination of all things Japanese. The language in all the segments of this painstaking collection is that of dry academic statistics, anthropology, history, sociology, and linguistics. While not a casual read, It is certainly a valuable reference work.
The Japanese [...]
Edited by Michael Taeckens
Plume, $16.00, 297 pages
Our lives are full of good relationships and a few bad, Love is a Four Letter Word is a compilation of the latter. Twenty-two authors contributed their short stories of personal breakups and broken hearts. In general, the majority of the tales are mind-numbing and adolescent, though I contribute [...]
By Karen E. Dill
Oxford University Press, $27.95, 306 pages
If you’re ignorant, how do you know it? That’s what I kept asking myself while reading this book. Wouldn’t your ignorance be something you were ignorant about? By ignorant here, I simply mean, unaware. As Dill states, her book is about “…media influence-its power and our propensity [...]
By Dennis Baron
Oxford University Press, $24.95, 272 pages
If you want to know the timeline of writing technologies from the use of clay up until the era of typewriters and just before the dawn of the computer age, Dennis Baron’s A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers and the Digital Revolution offers a sweeping, all-inclusive look at how [...]
By Steve Maich and Lianne George
Key Porter, $27.95, 245 pages
Guess what? I’m special! No, really. I’m completely unique and special, and I deserve my world to be personalized to me. So says The Ego Boom, which delves into the inherent customizability of our current culture. From our Facebook to our cell phones to our constant [...]
By Bonnie Tsui
Free Press, $25.00, 288 pages
A book about visiting five American Chinatowns sounds like a fascinating idea; however, the writing in Bonnie Tsui’s book does not seem to have met its potential. Tsui visits the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York City and Honolulu (Sacramento is not included). She does [...]
By Nick Belardes
Viva Editions, $16.95, 224 pages
While there are more books of weird facts, quirky stories, and mind-bending figures than there are dimples on a golf ball, Nick Belardes’ Random Obsessions leaves the rest of the trivia book genre looking puny and sophomoric by comparison. Divided into eight chapters covering such themes as weird scientific [...]
By Joshua Blu Buhs
University of Chicago Press, $29.00, 279 pages
In his folklorist history of Bigfoot, Joshua Blu Buhs tracks Bigfoot from the mists of native mythology to the backwoods of America and beyond. He explains how the wild-man, a figure common in oral tradition and storytelling, evolved into a North American monster against which white [...]
By Tom Julian with foreword by Pete Nordstrom
Chronicle Books, $19.95, 526 pages
The idea that packaging and presentation is everything may seem to be a bit of an exaggeration to you, but there’s no discounting the fact that substance, while really the most important, is practically nothing without it. Nowadays, we generally accept this notion to [...]
By Mark Bauerlein
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, $15.95, 253 pages
Do you Twitter? And if not, do you feel an overwhelming pressure to start? Rein in that impulse, says Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future-Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30.
When Baeuerlein’s book debuted [...]
By Mark Arax
Public Affairs, $26.95, 347 pages
Decades ago, the late singer Marty Robbins recorded an album entitled “Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.” This would be an appropriate sub-title for this book of essays by Fresno-based writer Mark Arax. In Arax’s world, California is still the wild, wild, west inhabited by gunslingers, drifters, grafters, and others [...]
By Paula E. Morton
University Press of Florida, $24.95, 224 pages
In Tabloid Valley, Paula E. Morton, a freelance journalist based in St. Augustine, Florida, has prepared a brilliant ethnographic study which seeks to examine every aspect of modern yellow journalism – namely, what headlines sell and why, how the journalists gather the news, the recent and [...]
By Doug Palladini
Abrams, $24.95, 208 pages
Flowing with that quintessential “style with ease” that the Vans company both embodies in the way it handles itself and sells to millions of people who also live it and aspire to live it, Vans: Off the Wall: Stories of Sole from Vans Originals by Doug Palladini is without a [...]
