A Week of Entertainment: Books Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly 06 Nov 09

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the November 6th issue include:

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, by Timothy Egan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. NONFICTION/HISTORY. EW's slant: "Few writers have the Pulitzer Prize-winning Egan's gift for transforming history lessons into the stuff of riveting page-turners." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (39 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"On the afternoon of August 20, 1910, a battering ram of wind moved through the drought-stricken national forests of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, whipping the hundreds of small blazes burning across the forest floor into a roaring inferno that jumped from treetop to ridge as it raged, destroying towns and timber in the blink of an eye. Forest rangers had assembled nearly ten thousand men - college boys, day workers, immigrants from mining camps - to fight the fire. But no living person had seen anything like those flames, and neither the rangers nor anyone else knew how to subdue them. Egan narrates the struggles of the overmatched rangers against the implacable fire with unstoppable dramatic force. Equally dramatic is the larger story he tells of outsized president Teddy Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. Pioneering the notion of conservation, Roosevelt and Pinchot did nothing less than create the idea of public land as our national treasure, owned by and preserved for every citizen. ... the Big Burn saved the forests even as it destroyed them: the heroism shown by the rangers turned public opinion permanently in their favor and became the creation myth that drove the Forest Service..." - Amazon.

Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer. Little, Brown and Company. NONFICTION. EW's slant: "...compelling, earnest, overly cerebral, and endlessly debatable..." Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (19 reviews). Kindle edition $14.29. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood - facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf - his casual questioning took on an urgency. His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits - from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth - and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting..." - Amazon.
$9.99 or less alternative: Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat, by Howard F. Lyman.


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You Better Not Cry, by Augusten Burroughs. St. Martin's Press. MEMOIR. EW's slant: "...a welcome antidote to standard holiday treacle." Amazon customer rating: 3 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"You've eaten too much candy at Christmas - but have you ever eaten the face off a six-foot stuffed Santa? You've seen gingerbread houses - but have you ever made your own gingerbread tenement? You've woken up with a hangover - but have you ever woken up next to Kris Kringle himself? Augusten Burroughs has, and in this caustically funny, nostalgic, poignant, and moving collection he recounts Christmases past and present as only he could. With gimlet-eyed wit and illuminated prose, Augusten shows how the holidays bring out the worst in us and sometimes, just sometimes, the very, very best." - Amazon.

Invisible, by Paul Auster. Henry Holt and Co. NOVEL. EW's slant: "Auster handles the books-within-books and multiple narrators expertly, assembling the story's intricate moving parts with precision. ...all that virtuoso formalism leaves little room of the characters to breathe." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (6 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power..." - us.macmilan.com.