*CELEBRITY DETOX* by Rosie O'Donnell

When Rosie O'Donnell's mother, Rosanne, came down with cancer in 1972, ten-year-old Rosie came up with a way to cure her: She would become famous. With dogged determination, she tried to become a performer, in hope of earning money for Rosanne's treatment. It didn't work; her mother died, just days before Rosie's 11th birthday. What did survive was the need for fame. Rosie went from stand-up to Star Search to her own highly acclaimed television show. Then, like a recovering alcoholic, she quit her own quest for celebrity. This cleansing memoir explains how she did it and why. Intensely honest; wickedly funny.

I would give this a 3 out of 5. While expecting more of her opinion of her time on "The View", I was disappointed that most of the book was about her love and praise for Barbra Streisand.

*INTO THE WILD* by Jon Kraukour

In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. He had given $25,000 in savings to a charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet and invented a life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. Jon Krakauer brings Chris McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows and illuminates it with meaning in this mesmerizing and heartbreaking tour de force.


* I would give this book a 2.5 out of 5. I realize that this young man wanted to find himself and assert his identity by going off into the wild, I just feel that he should have been a little more aware of the ruggedness and unforgiveness of the Alaskan territory. It was truly suicidal what he did.

*THE DIANA CHRONICLES* by Tina Brown

people's princess," who electrified the world with her beauty and humanitarian missions? Or was she a manipulative, media-savvy neurotic who nearly brought down the monarchy?Only Tina Brown, former editor-in-chief of Tatler, England's glossiest gossip magazine, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker could possibly give us the truth. Tina knew Diana personally and has far-reaching insight into the royals and the queen herself.In The Diana Chronicles, you will meet a formidable female cast and understand as never before the society that shaped them: Diana's sexually charged mother, her scheming grandmother, the stepmother she hated but finally came to terms with, and bad-girl Fergie, her sister-in-law, who concealed wounds of her own. Most formidable of them all was her mother-in-law, the queen, whose admiration Diana sought till the day she died. Add Camilla Parker-Bowles, the ultimate "other woman" into this combustible mix, and it's no wonder that Diana broke out of her royal cage into celebrity culture, where she found her own power and used it to devastating effect.


Very well done, a 5 out of 5. I have read many books about Diana, but this one is the most thoroughly researched, the most non-judgemental, the best as far as I am concerned.

*THE TENDER BAR* by J.R. Moehringer

In a place that inspired Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, young J. R. Moehringer lives with his single mother and mercurial grandfather in a cramped home with a rather-too-colorful cast of strident aunts, down-on-their-luck uncles, and their various offspring. It is 1970s Manhasset, Long Island, and J.R. is lonely and adrift. Desperate to escape, J.R.'s mother takes him on long drives, where his dreams are fueled by the sight of the deep, plush lawns and dazzling, gated mansions that served as Fitzgerald's East Egg. But it is J.R.'s introduction to the local pub and its vibrant constellation of characters that would have the greatest effect on him. A panoply of discordant human notes, by turns raucous, witty, vulgar, and wise, these men -- who never quite grew up themselves -- became, for the forlorn young J.R., a veritable symphony of human succor and safety. As J.R. becomes a man, however, he realizes that the bar doesn't grant wishes as much as fill needs in a place where accepting the inevitability of failure is a defense against future disappointment.A keenly heartfelt memoir by a writer who has been deemed "the best memoirist of his kind since Mary Karr," The Tender Bar is filled with insight into the most fundamental human longings. Before J.R. can grasp such insight though, he is forced to face the truth -- about others and, most important, about himself


Totally unexpected great read! A 4 out of 5. Loved the characters and the author's description of his upbringing and his dysfunctional family.

*A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS* by Hosseini

After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love. Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival. A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.

If I could give this book a 6 out of 5 I would. This author has captured his characters so well that once you start the book, you will not be able to put it down.

*THE ICE QUEEN* by Alice Hoffman

Frozen in misery since age eight, when the mother she wished would disappear promptly obliged by dying in a car wreck, the thirtysomething unnamed narrator of Hoffman's hypnotic new novel has spent her life avoiding meaningful human contact. As a New Jersey reference librarian, she relentlessly pursues the details of death in all its countless causes while engaging in after-hours backseat trysting with a local cop. After settling near her brother in Florida, the narrator is struck by lightning. Now, with the color red stripped from her vision, she sees the ice that has surrounded her heart all these years. When she learns of a local legend named Lazarus Jones, dead for 40 minutes after his own strike, she feels compelled to track him down. Their affair ignites, literally, for Jones's aftereffects are so severe that touching him causes burns. Hoffman's genius allows the lovers to hang in suspended animation until the outside world intrudes, more threatening than the near-fatal electrical disruptions that have defined their lives. Less-skilled hands would have left readers awash in sticky metaphors of heat and ice. Have no such fear with the formidable Alice Hoffman.

A 5 out of 5. I would read Alice Hoffman if she published the yellow pages or even an address book. I adore her writing, her sense of fantasty and her imagination and know of no other writer that has this ability.

*SECOND NATURE* by Alice Hoffman

Beguiled by her seductive prose and her imaginative virtuosity, readers have always been willing to suspend disbelief and enjoy the touches of magic in Hoffman's novels ( Illumination Night ; Turtle Moon , etc). Here, credibility is stretched not by magical intervention but by the implausibility of a major character. When a feral young man is discovered living with wolves in a remote area of upper Michigan, he cannot speak and can barely remember his early life. Transferred to a hospital in Manhattan, he does not utter a sound and is on his way to being incarcerated in a mental institution until divorced landscape designer Robin Moore impulsively hustles him into her pickup truck and carries him to the sanctuary of her home on an island in Nassau County. There the Wolf Man reveals that his name is Stephen and that he was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed his parents when he was three-and-a-half years old; thereafter he lived with a wolf pack. Within three months Robin teaches Stephen to read; soon afterwards they begin a passionate affair. How Stephen can so easily expand the small vocabulary he had mastered at a tender age but has never used since, how suddenly he can deal with sophisticated concepts, speak in grammatical sentences and even observe the social graces, is the central flaw that undermines what is otherwise a highly engaging tale. Stephen's presence in the community causes various people to reassess their lives; then there is a tragedy involving a child, (a device that is beginning to be a pattern in Hoffman's novels, as are strange changes in climate that herald a significant event). Hoffman's keen appraisal of human nature and her graceful prose do much to keep this novel appealing; but the bedrock implausibility may deter readers from whole-hearted enjoyment

Even though I love Alice Hoffman's writing, this is not her best. I did enjoy her writing though and would rate this as a 3 out of 5.