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Jonathan Franzen's exhilarating novel The Corrections tells a spellbinding story with sexy comic brio, and evokes a quirky family akin to Anne Tyler's, only bitter. Franzen's great at describing Christmas homecomings gone awry, cruise-ship follies, self-deluded academics, breast-obsessed screenwriters, stodgy old farts and edgy Tribeca bohemians equally at sea in their lives, and the mad, bad, dangerous worlds of the Internet boom and the fissioning post-Soviet East.

All five members of the Lambert family get their due, as everybody's lives swirl out of control. Paterfamilias Alfred is slipping into dementia, even as one of his inventions inspires a pharmaceutical giant to revolutionize treatment of his disease. His stubborn wife, Enid, specializes in denial; so do their kids, each in an idiosyncratic way. Their hepcat son, Chip, lost a college sinecure by seducing a student, and his new career as a screenwriter is in peril. Chip's sister, Denise, is a chic chef perpetually in hot water, romantically speaking; banker brother Gary wonders if his stifling marriage is driving him nuts. We inhabit these troubled minds in turn, sinking into sorrow punctuated by laughter, reveling in Franzen's satirical eye:

Gary in recent years had observed, with plate tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts.... Gary wished that all further migration [could] be banned and all Midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity.

Franzen is funny and on the money. This book puts him on the literary map. --Tim Appelo.
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From the author of The Gallery of Regrettable Food comes a horrifying-yet-hysterical book dedicated to the expert parenting advice from previous generations. Each glossy page includes vintage print ads and photos accompanied by James Lilek's mean comments. But then, what other response is possible, when faced with cough syrup advertisement with a happy child exclaiming, "A cough syrup good enough to eat with ice cream"!

General categories include "Clothing and Accessories" (including a pattern to make a headband that binds protruding ears to babies' heads), "Bowels" (featuring an ad with the text, "If he spanks me again, I'm going to run away from home"), and "The Good Old Days", which offers several detailed options for creating a home delivery center. In every chapter, Lilek's comments are the equivalent of cracks from your most sarcastic friend.

For any new parent who's tired of modern advice books, or expecting parents in need of a touch of humor amidst the stress of pregnancy, look no further. Every page has a laugh, and every page will remind the reader that sooner or later, almost all parenting advice will end up having the same worth as what's included here. Jill Lightner.
Price: $10.12 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Here is a one-stop guide that shows you how to mat, mount and frame your photos and save time and money in the process Helpful sidebars and clear illustrations make everything simple. 160 pages 8 1/2 x 11 Softbound.
Price: $11.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Aimed at professionals and dedicated amateurs, The Art of Faux is packed with gorgeous examples of faux finishes Internationally acclaimed, award-winning decorative painter and instructor Pierre Finkelstein covers every aspect of the art form in tremendous detail, beginning with extensive specifics on all tools, materials, supplies, and planning, and including preparation and cleanup considerations. Each of the other 10 chapters concentrates on a wide variety of faux finishes in different categories: marble, semiprecious stone, limestone and sandstone, wood, patinas and textures, metals and gilding, tile, organic materials (such as ivory, leather, and mother-of-pearl), stenciling, and trompe l'oeil. There are even instructions for uncommon faux finishes, such as bamboo, Delft tile, snakeskin, and damask, that are not generally taught in other books on the subject. Every finish is presented as a complete recipe, and the list of ingredients includes not only paints, glazes, and tools, but also difficulty ratings and lists of preparatory exercises for techniques that are part of the complete finish. People seriously involved in any aspect of faux finishing--particularly people considering careers in the field--should invest in the information-packed The Art of Faux. .
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Written immediately after the end of World War II, this morally complex Holocaust memoir is notable for its exact depiction of the grim details of life in Warsaw under the Nazi occupation. "Things you hardly noticed before took on enormous significance: a comfortable, solid armchair, the soothing look of a white-tiled stove," writes Wladyslaw Szpilman, a pianist for Polish radio when the Germans invaded. His mother's insistence on laying the table with clean linen for their midday meal, even as conditions for Jews worsened daily, makes palpable the Holocaust's abstract horror. Arbitrarily removed from the transport that took his family to certain death, Szpilman does not deny the "animal fear" that led him to seize this chance for escape, nor does he cheapen his emotions by belaboring them. Yet his cool prose contains plenty of biting rage, mostly buried in scathing asides (a Jewish doctor spared consignment to "the most wonderful of all gas chambers," for example). Szpilman found compassion in unlikely people, including a German officer who brought food and warm clothing to his hiding place during the war's last days. Extracts from the officer's wartime diary (added to this new edition), with their expressions of outrage at his fellow soldiers' behavior, remind us to be wary of general condemnation of any group. --Wendy Smith.
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