Peace, brother. Keep the peace. Peace and quiet. Peace, baby. Peace be with you. Let there be peace on earth. There are two, count 'em, two books out now to mark the 50th anniversary of the peace symbol: Peace: 50 Years of Protest by Barry Miles (Reader's Digest, 250 pages, $29.95) and Peace: The Biography of a Symbol by Ken Kolsbun with Michael S. Sweeney (National Geographic, 176 pages, $25).
Check this out. Bikini-clad Pamela Anderson is caught on camera reading local author Anne Elizabeth Moore's book, Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity.
LONDON — The desk and chair Charles Dickens used while writing Great Expectations will go up for auction in June at the London auction house Christie’s.
The furniture is expected to sell for between $100,000 and $160,000.
The mahogany desk dates to the mid-19th century and bears a bronze plaque describing its appearance in Luke Filde’s drawing, ‘‘The Empty Chair.’’ The author’s oldest daughter, Mamie, wrote in her memoirs that Dickens used the walnut chair and desk the night before he died in 1870. The desk has been in the family ever since.
The money raised will go to the Great Ormond Street Hospital. Dickens spoke at the hospital’s first fundraising Festival Dinner 150 years ago and was a close friend of its founder, Charles West. Great Ormond Street Hospital is also linked to playwright J.M. Barrie, who donated his ‘‘Peter Pan’’ copyright to the hospital in 1929.
The desk and chair were on display for 40 years at Dickens House Museum in London.
AP
Christie's auction house worker Laura Castelbarco poses at a writing desk
once owned by Charles Dickens, who used it while writing
Great Expectations. (Lefteris Pitarakis~AP)
Today's book is Do Dead People Watch You Shower? And Other Questions You've Been All But Dying to Ask a Medium (HarperCollins, 288 pages, $13.95) by Concetta Bertoldi, whose bio lists her as a full-time medium who consults reguarly with members of Britain's royal family, American celebrities and politicians.
In answering the title question, Bertoldi writes: "Sure they do! They see us in the bathroom and they see us in the bedroom! But who cares? They're dead! Who're they gonna tell?"
Are we in America what we eat, wear, touch, listen to, watch on TV? Iconic America: A Roller-Coaster Ride Through The Eye-Popping Panorama of American Pop Culture (Universe/Rizzoli, 350 pages, $60), by fashion guru Tommy Hilfiger and ad man George Lois, gives us a modern look at Americana and its meaning in our everyday lives.
Hard to judge a book by its cover when there are two to choose from
The Reverend Guppy’s Aquarium (Gotham Books, 266 pages, $20) is a curious title for a book. The subtitle — From Joseph P. Frisbee to Roy Jacuzzi, How Everyday Items Were Named for Extraordinary People — tells us more.
Strangely my Book Room copy — sparkling new in hardcover — has a completely different cover design than the one on both amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. Here they are, side by side, my copy to the left, the other to the right:
Thinning the Herd: Tales of the Weirdly Departed (The Lyons Press, 320 pages, $13.95) by Cynthia Ceilan is one of those quirky little books you see in book stores, pick it up, page through it and say to yourself, "Who would buy this?"
The thing is, it's full of stories, true facts and observations about death. Sounds a little grim, I agree, but much of it is pretty amusing. Here's a random sampling ...
There is a certain art to being a good aunt — one that I've been trying to perfect since the day my first nephew was born 10 and a half years ago. (Understanding the importance of half-years a good tip for aspiring aunts.)
There is no mystery as to why I would have pulled off the shelf The Complete Book of Aunts (Twelve, 245 pages, $19.99) by Rupert Christiansen with Beth Brophy.
If I were inclined to make a pie, it would probably not be a rhubarb pie. And if I were inclined to sew a quilt ... actually I pretty much know that I shall never be inclined to sew a quilt. This doesn't mean, however, that I am ill-equipped to become a Prairie Girl.
In the introduction to The Prairie Girl's Guide to Life: How To Sew a Sampler Quilt & 49 Other Pioneer Projects For the Modern Girl (Taunton, 196 pages, $14.95), author Jennifer Worick makes mention of making a rhubarb pie about three times. And she reassures us by addressing the reader (you, me): "You are a prairie gal."
I had a Shakespeare professor in college who loved to point out what he referred to as the bawdy parts of whatever play we were studying at the time. Entire class periods were sometimes devoted to these discussions, as you can imagine young English majors whose high-school exposure to the Bard hardly, if ever, "went there," as it were.
Dr. Ferguson would have loved — and probably could have co-written — Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns (Penguin, 304 pages, $19.99) by Shakespeare scholar Pauline Kiernan...
In my Aug. 14 entry, "What would Winner Cooper do?" I discussed the book Math Doesn't Suck by Danica McKellar, who most of us remember from her days playing Winnie Cooper on TV's "The Wonder Years."
McKellar took time out from acting to pursue a college education, in turn excelling as a mathematician and then writing a book to help young girls grasp difficult math concepts more easily and in plain English.
Last week, USA Today ran an interview with McKellar about her book and included a sidebar on other actors ...
I have a fascination with nuns. I suppose it can be traced back to Catholic school, where they hovered over us for years, chalk and rulers in hand, teaching us about grammar and God. Our nuns were Dominicans. They wore all white with black veils. Some were sweet and grandmotherly, some were stern but fair, others mean and nasty. In short, they were human, even if we didn't know it at the time.
Today's book, Scary Nuns: Sisters at Work and at Play (HarperCollins, 128 pages, $14.95) is a small volume filled with photographs of what nuns are doing ...
