Marilyn Powell's ICE CREAM: THE DELICIOUS HISTORY Now Available in Paperback

New in paperback and just in time for those hot summer days is Marilyn Powell's Ice Cream: The Delicious History. In this informative and entertaining volume, we are taken on an exotic journey from the old world to the new, from ice harvesting in ancient China to birthday celebrations in the age of Louis XIV to ice cream cones painted by Andy Warhol in the twentieth century. It’s a story filled with history, adventure, myth, and intriguing facts about ice cream. Containing illustrations, anecdotes, and famous recipes, Ice Cream will delight ice cream lovers around the world.

Joe Bennett's Astonishing WHERE UNDERPANTS COME FROM in Bookstores Everywhere

Joe Bennett's new travelogue, Where Underpants Come From: From Checkout to Cotton Field: Travels Through the New China and Into the New Global Economy, is reviewed by Nicolette Westfall in Feminist Review: "It's absolutely astonishing to realize how much junk people in North America consume only to throw away. Most of it is from China. When I started to read Where Underpants Come From, I picked up various objects in my office--from the mechanical pencil I write with to my iPod--and I discovered that yes, everything had been made in China. Author Joe Bennett, who is based in New Zealand, does a fantastic job of describing his experience of traveling to that far off land to discover the process of how his cheap underpants were manufactured. The idea is absurd, but he runs with it anyway. China is the cheapest bidder on manufacturing most of the convenient items we consume at an exhausting rate. It comes as no surprise that the giant nation is, as a result, driving its peasant labor force for meager wages and polluting the air, land, and water at an even faster rate. Statistics aren't necessary; just take a look at the dirty grey-brown clouds of smog that hover over Chinese cities. Bennett does more than observe the grainy air; he physically visits various places in China to see for himself what the industrial giant has created in order to keep the Western materialist appetite satisfied. It isn't pretty, but his encounters are often humorous. As other journalists (such as Anderson Cooper, in the Planet in Peril series) have pointed out, China's bid to create the cheapest industrial production of everything from underpants to machinery is creating environmental destruction on an astronomical level. Chinese citizens are also just as disposable. When I was a little girl (in Canada) during Mao's time, I became interested in not only American Vietnam War veterans, but in the Vietnamese and Chinese soldiers who--as the National Geographic displayed them--were left rotting in dilapidated vet hospitals. Bennett's descriptions of countless health and safety hazards and substandard machinery show that while Mao may have died in 1976, the view that Chinese workers are easily replaceable has not. Bennett's account gets past the stats and much-repeated talk of China as an economic giant. He offers readers glimpses into people's lives. He goes where the Chinese won't--places like Urumqi south, where Muslim populations exist--and tries to communicate with the locals. His angle lends compassion and a sincere urge to understand all sides. He admits to his own prejudices against China and its peoples before he actually arrives and notes that people are people everywhere. As I sit here and type my review on my 'Made In China' laptop, the darkness is lit by my 'Made In China' lamp, and I drink Chrysanthemum tea (grown and harvested in China) from my 'Made in China' glass, I hope that people will take the time to read Bennett's work. Despite the pollution and slack labor laws and high rate of labor deaths, Bennett finds the people he encounters to be generally happy. Yes, they are driven, but they take time to live for the sake of living and family takes care of family. We Westerners monetarily benefit from the fruits of their hard work, but materialism has only left us miserably wealthy, fat, and insecure."

R.J. Ellory, author of A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS, at The Mysterious Bookshop in New York

Otto Penzler and The Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan opened its doors on Friday night to an enthusiastic group of authors and Thrillerfest attendees. Attending the festivities was Overlook's R.J. Ellory, who signed advance reading copies of A Quiet Belief in Angels. Ellory is in town for Thrillerfest, the annual conference hosted by the International Thriller Writers Association. Visit the The Ellory Journal for the author's impressions of his first trip to The Big Apple.

R.J. Ellory, author of A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS, at ThrillerFest 2009 in New York

R.J. Ellory, author of the forthcoming A Quiet Belief in Angels (September 2009) will appear at ThrillerFest in New York on Friday, July 10. Sponsored by the International Thriller Writers organization, Thrillerfest is an annual celebration of the thriller world, and a meeting place for authors, readers, budding writers, and publishing industry professionals. Click here for registration details.

Ellory will appear on the Friday morning panel "What's So Great About Thrillers?" moderated by Richard Doetsch. Panel participants include Steve Martini, Carla Neggers, Shane Briant, Andrew Gulli, and H. Terrell Griffin. He'll also sign advance reading copies of A Quiet Belief in Angels from 11:50am - 12:20pm. Don't miss this rare opportunity to meet the author and get a signed copy of his new book!

Michael Greenburg's PEACHES & DADDY in The New York Times

Sam Roberts of The New York Times takes a look at one of the great stories of Jazz Age New York: the sensational love affair between real estate tycoon Edward West Browning and a young teenager Frances "Peaches" Heenan.

On the evening of March 5, 1926, well-known, fifty-one-year-old Manhattan millionaire, Edward "Daddy" Browning, waltzed through the doors of the legendary Hotel McAlpin, and into the life of a fifteen-year-old high school girl named Frances Belle "Peaches" Heenan. Thirty-seven days later, amid blaring newspaper headlines announcing the event and with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in close pursuit, they were married. Within ten months they would begin a courtroom drama that would blow their impassioned saga into a national scandal. Their 1920s romance sent riptides across the moral landscape of America for years to come. Peaches and Daddy, by author Michael Greenburg, vividly recounts the amazing and improbable romance, marriage, and ultimate legal battle for separation of this publicity-craving Manhattan couple in America's "Era of Wonderful Nonsense." Their story is one of dysfunction and remarkable excess, yet at the time, the lurid details of their brief courtship and marriage captured the imagination of the American public like no other story of its day. Their affair propelled them into the headlines and the bylines of the nation's tabloid press for a magical moment in time; their legacy is one of an enduring contribution to the sometimes almost mad history of the country.

"If you can’t get enough of the story of Peaches, Michael M. Greenburg’s Peaches and Daddy: A Story of the Roaring 20s, the Birth of Tabloid Media and the Courtship That Captured the Heart and Imagination of the American Public (The Overlook Press, $26 ) is peppered with titillating court transcripts and even more profound conclusions."

FREDDY THE PIG Makes the List of "The Best Kids' Book Ever"

Nick Kristoff, Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, offers his opinion on The Best Kids’ Books Ever:

So how will your kids spend this summer? Building sand castles at the beach? Swimming at summer camp? Shedding I.Q. points?

In educating myself this spring about education, I was aghast to learn that American children drop in I.Q. each summer vacation — because they aren’t in school or exercising their brains.
This is less true of middle-class students whose parents drag them off to summer classes or make them read books. But poor kids fall two months behind in reading level each summer break, and that accounts for much of the difference in learning trajectory between rich and poor students.

A mountain of research points to a central lesson: Pry your kids away from the keyboard and the television this summer, and get them reading. Let me help by offering my list of the Best Children’s Books — Ever!

So here they are, in ascending order of difficulty, and I can vouch that these are also great to read aloud.

1. “Charlotte’s Web.” The story of the spider who saves her friend, the pig, is the kindest representation of an arthropod in literary history.

2. The Hardy Boys series. Yes, I hear the snickers. But I devoured them myself and have known so many kids for whom these were the books that got them excited about reading. The first in the series is weak, but “House on the Cliff” is a good opener. (As for Nancy Drew, I yawned over her, but she seems to turn girls into Supreme Court justices. Among her fans as kids were Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.)

3. “Wind in the Willows.” My mother read this 101-year-old English classic to me, and I’m still in love with the characters. Most memorable of all is Toad — rich, vain, childish and prone to wrecking cars.

4. The Freddy the Pig series. Published between 1927 and 1958, these 26 books are funny, beautifully written gems. They concern a talking pig, Freddy, who is lazy, messy and sometimes fearful, yet a loyal friend, a first-rate detective and an impressive poet. These were my very favorite books when I was in elementary school. A good one to start with is “Freddy the Detective” or “Freddy Plays Football.” (Avoid the first and weakest, “Freddy Goes to Florida.”)

5. The Alex Rider series. These are modern British spy thrillers in which things keep exploding in a very satisfying way. Alex amounts to a teenage James Bond for the 21st century.

Charles Freeman's A.D. 381 and "A Turning Point that Time Forgot"

A nice recommendation from Library Thing for Charles Freeman's A.D. 381: ""In AD 381, Theodosius, emperor of the eastern Roman empire, issued a decree in which all his subjects were required to subscribe to a belief in the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This edict defined Christian orthodoxy and brought to an end a lively and wide-ranging debate about the nature of God; all other interpretations were now declared heretical. It was the first time in a thousand years of Greco-Roman civilization free thought was unambiguously suppressed. Yet surprisingly, the popular histories claim that the Christian Church reached a consensus on the Trinity at the Council of Constantinople in AD 381. Why has Theodosius's revolution been airbrushed from the historical record? In this groundbreaking new book, acclaimed historian Charles Freeman shows that the council was in fact a sham, only taking place after Theodosius's decree had become law. The Church was acquiescing in the overwhelming power of the emperor. Freeman argues that Theodosius's edict and the subsequent suppression of paganism not only brought an end to the diversity of religious and philosophical beliefs throughout the empire, but created numerous theological problems for the Church, which have remained unsolved. The year AD 381, as Freeman puts it, was "a turning point which time forgot."