Reprinted excerpt The Miami Herald by By Connie Ogle -05/03/13
At first, Augusten Burroughs wasn’t quite sure he wanted to write his latest book. The bestselling author of Running With Scissors, Dry and A Wolf at the Table was dubious about venturing into the world of self-help: “It was not a genre I was dying to get into,” he says wryly. “It kind of grosses me out.”
But when you write about your past, your crazy family and your personal problems in several memoirs and such personal essay collections as You Better Not Cry, Possible Side Effects and Magical Thinking, readers tend to open up to you about their own issues whether you like it or not. Fortunately, Burroughs likes it, and since he’d always gotten such positive responses from his fans, he figured he’d write a book “for people who were psychologically ambitious, who wanted to do their best to fix themselves and move on.”
This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can’t (Picador, $15 in paper) — which Burroughs will discuss Saturday and Monday in South Florida — is the result. But don’t expect a touchy feely guide to gazing in the mirror and repeating affirmations to make yourself feel better about feeling low. Burroughs has a healthy skepticism about affirmations.
“Telling yourself you feel terrific and wearing a brave smile and refusing to give in to ‘negative thinking’ is not only inaccurate — dishonest — but it can make you feel worse,” he writes. “[I]f you want to feel better, you need to pause and ask yourself, better than what? Better than how you feel at this moment, perhaps.”
That practical approach to self-improvement is the cornerstone of This is How’s philosophy.
“It’s just about learning to be brutally honest with yourself,” says Burroughs, who has written about his battles with depression, family issues and alcoholism. “You may think you’re being honest, but sometimes what you believe or are told are not true. That was something I experienced so frequently as a child, when the rug was pulled out from under me so often I became accustomed to never taking stability for granted. That turned out to be an advantage.”
From that perspective, Burroughs, 47, may be the ideal author to write a self-help book, says Jennifer Enderlin, associate publisher and executive editor at St. Martin’s Press, of which Picador is an imprint.
Don’t be misled by the title: “The Flower Recipe Book,” by Alethea Harampolis and Jill Rizzo (Artisan, $24.95), is not a guide for making hibiscus enchiladas or scented-geranium sorbet. Rather, it’s a beautifully illustrated and practical guide to the ephemeral art of fresh-flower arranging.
Well, it seems that three books critical of the NPS have recently been published. They are The Soul of Yosemite, by Barbara Moritsch, The Case of the Indian Trader, by Paul Berkowitz, and Worth Fighting For, by Rob Danno. It also seems that none of the three books are being sold in NPS bookstores. We are left to wonder why. Was there some form of “Bureaucratic Negligence’ involved? (One hesitates to use the “C” word)
“I Would Die 4 U” is not a biography, but three essays about Prince as icon, a term that Touré deploys in a particular way. “Stars entertain us,” he writes. “Icons do something much more. They embody us. They tell us something about who we are and who we want to be.” Icons have access to “truths about the soul of a generation,” and Prince, though born in 1958, played this role for the mass of Americans born between the mid-1960s and early ’80s who are known as Generation X.
Joseph carves out a niche as an expert on composer Arnold Schönberg, the Austrian exile who originated atonal music.
“Kaffe Fassett is to color what Julia Child was to French cooking,” proclaimed Knitters Review.
at a boarding school run by the disciples of an Indian guru; his brief study of painting at Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; his migration to England in the Swinging ’60s; and his dealings with famous clients, such as Lauren Bacall and Barbra Streisand.
