Loving Lucy

Lucille Ball was the first to admit that she owed much of her fame to her writers, and The Quotable "I Love Lucy" helps make a case for the brilliance of the show's writers. Compiled and with an introduction by the We Love Lucy Fan Club president, Tom Watson, and with stills from the show throughout, this selection of the sitcom's funniest moments will delight her multitude of fans. The book is divided into categories like Love and Marriage and Planning and Scheming. "I didn't tell a soul, and they all promised to keep it a secret!" wails Lucy in her inimitable way, and readers will be glad this pithy little volume wasn't kept a secret, either. (Friedman/MetroBooks, $9.98 128p ISBN 1-58663-288-4; Jan.)

With a thoughtful foreword by Desi Arnaz Jr., The "I Love Lucy" Book of Trivia quizzes readers on the details of one of television's longest-running shows. Written by the director of the Lucy-Desi Museum, Ric B. Wyman, the book's questions cover all aspects of the show, from character trivia concerning Lucy, Ricky, Fred, Ethel and Little Ricky, to the vitameatavegamin and candy factory episodes. The questions' kitschy formats include multiple-choice, fill in the blanks, matches and crossword puzzles, and Wyman also includes an episode log with broadcast dates, an answer key and b&w photographs from a number of shows, making this a fun-filled reference. Authorized by the Lucille Ball Estate. 100 b&w illus. (Friedman/Fairfax [Sterling, dist.], $14.95 paper 144p ISBN 1-58663-145-4; Dec.)

Providing behind-the-scenes information about the show's origins, brief bios of the stars and highlights from every episode of the show (which aired from 1951 to 1957), I Love Lucy: Celebrating Fifty Years of Love and Laughter by Elisabeth Edwards (The I Love Lucy Guide to Life) pays full tribute to a television phenomenon and shares little-known trivia. Vivian Vance (Ethel) wasn't initially interested in being on the show because she suspected that this newfangled thing called TV didn't have much hope. Desiderio Arnaz fled Cuba at age 16 after his family's estate was burned down during the Batista revolt in 1933. Orson Wells graced the show for an episode and recruited Lucy to participate in his magic act. Questions about each episode (with answers at the back) will be the icing on the cake for Lucy devotees. Color and b&w photos. (Running Press, $39.95 288p ISBN 0-7624-1058-2; Nov.)

The Nearly and Dearly Departed

Doctor and hospice director Barry K. Baines guides the dying on taking charge of the emotional legacies they leave behind in Ethical Wills: Putting Your Values on Paper. Defining an ethical will as "a vehicle for clarifying and communicating the meaning in our lives to our families and communities," Baines draws on an ancient practice that he has put to use in hospice work with more than 3,000 people as they prepared for death. A benefit to the dying, their loved ones and people not facing an imminent death but wanting to clarify and communicate their experience, ethical wills can be letters, lists, confessions, requests and a host of other kinds of communication. Baines discusses their history, their significance and how to make them, with numerous examples. (Perseus, $13 paper 144p ISBN 0-7382-0611-3; Feb.)

In Hannah's Gift: Lessons from a Life Fully Lived, Maria Housden delivers a lyrical, heartbreaking and heartwarming account of her three-year-old daughter's illness and death. Among the values she learns from her extraordinary child's experience are joy, a Buddha-like stillness, candor and openness. When Hannah's seven-year-old brother asks the author questions about death, Hannah is fascinated and declares that she wants to be a butterfly when her body dies. When their church has a special service to honor and pray for Hannah, she's delighted. Housden, too, offers readers a gift, particularly those seeking to help a loved one through the process of dying and themselves through the grieving process. (Bantam, $17.95 240p ISBN 0-553-80210-0; Feb. 26)

After debunking myths about the grieving process, e.g., that it lasts only a few months, Mary M. Wong (editor, The National Directory of Bereavement Support Groups and Services) traces the stages of grief (shock, denial, despair, renewal), manifestations (e.g., regrets, depression, anger, workaholism) and effects on marriage, children, friendships and work relationships in Understanding Your Grieving Heart After a Loved One's Death. Even if we've seen others mourn a loss, says Wong, we may be taken by surprise at our responses to the death of an intimate, particularly the sense of being out of control that often accompanies bereavement. Grieving readers will appreciate this warm, wise guide by an experienced bereavement counselor and crime victims' rights advocate. (ADM [P.O. Box 917675, Longwood, Fla. 32791-7675], $12.95 paper 128p ISBN 0-9645608-4-4; Dec.)

Revenge of the Nerds

If you seek the perfect insult, a means to impress or plain old inscrutability, look no further than The Superior Person's Third Book of Well-Bred Words by series author Peter Bowler (Human Remains), illustrated by Dennis Corrigan. At once flaunting and mocking a raunchy upper-crust sensibility, Bowler offers a lexicon devoid of practical value, but replete with entertaining possibilities. Readers will learn the definitions of nearly obsolete words like peascod-belly ("A false stomach worn under the clothing by Elizabethan men") and musophobia ("The morbid dread of mice"), many of which won't be found in standard desktop dictionaries. Not for the faint of wit. (Godine, $16.95 124p ISBN 1-56792-161-2; Jan.)

In The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Ian Stewart (Does God Play Dice?) introduces and explains Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 math-geek classic. Stewart, a mathematics professor at Britain's University of Warwick, discusses Abbott's milieu and friends (including George Eliot and H.G. Wells), Victorian literary conventions (e.g., his protagonist gains understanding of the three-dimensional world in a dream), the low social status of Flatlandian women, Abbott's class and political affiliations, and a host of other entertaining and enlightening tidbits. Photos and illus. (Perseus, $30 272p ISBN 0-7382-0541-9; Dec.)

Jewish History and Biography

Erik Jan Hanussen—psychic, hypnotist, astrologer, amateur detective and publisher of tabloids—was born Herschmann-Chaim Steinschneider in 1889 in a Viennese jail cell and murdered in Berlin in 1933 on the orders of SA officers who owed him money. His remarkable life is the subject of Berkeley professor Mel Gordon's Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant, a fascinating account of Hanussen's many activities, many names and many lovers, supplemented by excerpts from Hanussen's writings and scores of illustrations (publicity posters, Hitler's astrological chart and advertisements—for Hanussen's Sex Creme, for example). Hanussen's association with Hitler, which began when he predicted the future führer would rule Germany, was very brief, but Gordon does a good job of exploring this baffling alliance. (Feral House [PGW, dist.], $24.95 296p ISBN 0-922915-68-7; Feb.)

Oral histories and "historical conversations" form the heart of A Homeland in the West: Utah Jews Remember by Salt Lake City transplant Eileen Hallet Stone (coauthor, Missing Stories: An Oral History of Ethnic and Minority Groups in Utah). In chapters like "Minyan in a Railroad Town" and "Standing Up to Bigotry," Stone profiles pioneer merchants, soldiers, hoteliers and housewives to fashion a moving account of men and women who came from afar to settle down in the West's new and unfamiliar landscape. A Yiddish glossary, recipes for traditional dishes like honey cake and latkes, and a list of Jewish-owned businesses in Utah round out this intriguing and carefully compiled volume. (Univ. of Utah, $39.95 448p ISBN 0-87480-702-6; Jan. 21)

Isaac Bashevis Singer first suggested that "for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka." Charles Patterson (Anti-Semitism: The Road to the Holocaust and Beyond) expands on that risky analogy in his latest book, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. Patterson hypothesizes a risky causal relationship, too, when he writes, "since violence begets violence, the enslavement of animals injected a higher level of domination and coercion into human history by creating oppressive hierarchical societies and unleashing large-scale warfare never seen before." Was human "enslavement" of animals the first step on the road to the Holocaust? Patterson doesn't say as much, but it's clear that he feels our inhumanity to the nonhuman is one of our greatest evils. (Lantern Books [www.lanternbooks.com], $20 paper 306p ISBN 1-930051-99-9; Jan.)

From the Middle East B.C.E. to medieval Spain through the end of WWII, Frank Heynick traces the relationship between a people and a science in Jews and Medicine: An Epic Saga. The ancient ritual of circumcision, Maimonides, the Bavarian Jacob Henle and Nobel-winner Otto Loewi make appearances in this sweeping history of literary, religious and professional links between Judaism and medical practice. Heynick, a scholar of medical history and linguistics, discusses the sale of mummified remains as a cure for disease, the ascendance of psychoanalysis and hundreds of other famous and obscure historical moments. (Ktav, $39.50 604p ISBN 0-88125-773-7; Feb. 20)

Up with Modernism

From UNESCO's Paris headquarters to the Hooper House II in Baltimore and New York's Whitney Museum, Marcel Breuer's buildings are "strongly tied to idioms of modern architecture—pure forms of geometry, interlocking flat-roofed cubes—and to the architectonic attributes of painting and sculpture of the modern movement." Isabelle Hyman (coauthor, Architecture: From Prehistory to Postmodernity, and professor of fine arts at New York University), presents Marcel Breuer, Architect: The Career and the Buildings, a defense of his alternately maligned and revered architecture. Beginning as a furniture designer at the Bauhaus, Breuer widened his sights to include architecture in the 1920s and by mid-career, while teaching at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, was lauded for his buildings. Near the end of his 50-year career and since his death in 1981, reviews have been more mixed, and critics tend to look down on his architecture while celebrating his furniture design. Hyman persuasively argues for Breuer's eminence strictly as an architect. 295 illus., 35 in full color. (Abrams, $85 396p ISBN 0-8109-4265-8; Nov.)

The architect of Yale University's clean-cut Center for British Art, the graceful Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the striking Indian Institute of Management in Ahmadabad, India, and the diamond-shaped Erdmann Hall at Bryn Mawr College receives elegant tribute in Louis Kahn by Joseph Rykwert, professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, with photographs by Roberto Schezen. (The writer and photographer also teamed up for The Villa: From Ancient to Modern.). After situating Kahn within the post-WWII modern social, artistic and critical framework associated with Lewis Mumford, Rykwert turns his attention to 15 specific projects, each of which is featured in about a dozen pages of images accompanied by brief text. Architects and scholars will rejoice in this learned, high-quality, large-format book. 185 illus., 100 in full color. (Abrams, $75 224p ISBN 0-8109-4226-7; Nov.)

American Pastorals

The Brooklyn Museum of Art presents a reprint of the catalogue to its benchmark 1986 exhibit The Machine Age in America: 1918—1941 by scholars Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim and Dickran Tashjian. Following on the culture-crit assertion that "the machine in all its many manifestations was the defining force in America during the years between the two great wars," the authors trace the era's aesthetic qualities in Buicks, Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Oskar J. Hansen's Ayn Randian sculpture Winged Figures of the Republic on the Hoover Dam, Berenice Abbott's photographs of steamships, Electrolux vacuum cleaners, Russell Wright's seminal flatware and furniture designs, Joseph Stella's vivid abstractions of the Brooklyn Bridge, and a host of other art works and utilitarian objects. Pop and material culture lovers will swoon over the 410 illustrations (55 in full color) and the erudite essays. (Abrams, $49.50 376p ISBN 0-8109-1421-2; Feb.)

In 2000, photographer Wing Young Huie displayed hundreds of photo-portraits along a six-mile stretch of Minneapolis's Lake Street, a major artery connecting neighborhoods with vastly different ethnicities, cultures, religions and tastes. In the book based on the exhibit, Lake Street USA, a Pentecostal Hmong minister appears under the same cover as a punk rocker with a black eye; a Cameroonian record shop owner; an Egyptian former teacher who now washes dishes at the Hyatt; a predominantly gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Christian congregation; and a hippie on a nature walk with his kids in the back alleys of the city. Statements from many of the photographs' subjects flesh out this portrait of urban American life. It's hard to imagine a more public art. (Ruminator [www.ruminator.com], $16 paper 236p ISBN 1-886913-47-1; Feb.)

Photographs, sculpture, film and other objets d'art provoke several artists and critics to consider the social and artistic roles of the car in Inside Cars, Volume 5, Number 2, of 2wice, a booklike arts journal edited by J. Abbott Miller and Patsy Tarr, with guest editor Judith Hoos Fox. Essayists include Giuliana Bruno, David Frankel and Lucy Flint-Gohlke, treating subjects as various as Nan Goldin's photos of people in taxis; the limo that endlessly circles Manhattan in Matthew Barney's fantastical avant-garde movie Drawing Restraint 7; Sam Peckinpah's violent film The Getaway, about fugitive lovers; Dan Devine's sculpture Inside Out Car (White with Brown Interior); and the Lego-like, multifunctional, habitable Nissan Chappo Concept Car. This high concept, high production—value volume accompanies an exhibit called Surrounding Interiors: Views Inside the Car organized by the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College. ([Princeton Architectural Press, dist.], $24.95 paper 96p ISBN 1-56898-311-5; Nov. 22)

February Publication

Adages ("Want + obstacle = conflict"), advice ("Make all of your story worth showing") and even an assortment of solitary words author Jerry Cleaver considers important ("fear," "worry," "hope") stand out in boldfaced type on the pages of Immediate Fiction: A Complete Writing Course. Cleaver, who founded the Chicago writers' workshop the Writers' Loft and has ghostwritten several books, insists that all one needs to be a successful writer is the "right tools" (while painting may require "inborn talent," writing doesn't) and in enthusiastic prose, he describes those tools one by one. With its writing exercises, time management hints and endlessly jocular encouragement, this volume will please many a would-be Welty or Wilde. (St. Martin's, $24.95 304p ISBN 0-312-28716-X)

December Publications

With the Canadian Hydrographic Service compiling decades of multination collaborative research, a team of oceanographers writing the text and Dr. Manfred Leier serving as editor, the World Atlas of the Oceans details the entire ocean floor. This giant book offers clear, informative text (rather like an encyclopedia entry in tone), but its real strength is its visual richness: the full-color relief maps, bathymetrics charts, satellite images, illustrations and underwater photographs. From the Arctic to the Mediterranean, and from Namibia's "sulfur pearls" (the world's largest bacteria) to Alaska's "black smokers" (deep-sea oases), this atlas will please anyone with an interest in oceanography, cartography, biology and geology. (Firefly, $50 264p ISBN 1-55209-585-1) "Happiness is living with cats," writes veterinarian and pet behavior specialist Stephanie Schwartz. To ensure readers will agree, she provides a wealth of information designed to facilitate feline-human cohabitation. Dr. Cookie's Guide to Living Happily Ever After with Your Cat begins with hints about interpreting a cat's tail, progresses to "hallucinatory" play (when a cat races about a room, chasing something invisible to its owners), kitten socialization, destructive behaviors, nutrition and grooming matters, and ends with mourning the loss of a beloved cat. Anecdotes illustrate Schwartz's reasonable and straightforward advice. 16 inexpert, almost creepy, drawings. (St. Martin's, $14.95 paper 256p ISBN 0-312-27330-4)