October's Best Books

Fiction soars and thrills, memoirs look at weight and madness and a book about cancer could just change your lifestyle by Caroline Leavitt


Holding My Breath
by Sidhura Ludwig
Shaye Areheart Books $23.00
Jewish Canadian Beth Levy yearns to escape her cramped 1950s small town life and become an astronaut, but she's tethered to the ground by family. Surrounded by two generations of strong Jewish women, she struggles against her mother Goldie, who wants her to marry a nice hometown boy; her aunt Carrie, a seamstress haunted by a love tragedy; and her older sister Sarah, who flies the coop and damages her wings. A haunting, beautifully written novel about loosening ties and finding yourself.

Hurry Down Sunshine
by Michael Greenberg
Other Press $24.95
Times Literary Supplement columnist Greenberg's daughter Sally is just 15 when she has a full-blown psychotic breakdown on a Greenwich Village street.  While Sally is confined to a psychiatric facility for 24 days, Greenberg grapples with the meaning of her suffering, his family's anguish, his splintering marriage, and the history of literary psychosis. Startling, haunting and incredibly moving, Greenberg's book traces the journey that he and his wife take to bring Sally back to some sort of normalcy, all the while reminding us about the shifting and very personal nature of reality.

Freezing Point
by Karen Dionne
Jove Press $7.99
Who owns Antarctica's ice: big business, environmentalists or Mother Nature? In this timely, terrifying thriller, green-minded Ben Maki's mission is to melt the polar ice caps to create fresh drinking water for millions of people.  Instead, he inadvertently unleashes a horrifying apocalypse as project scientists fall prey to both vicious Antarctic rats and an encroaching deadly illness that threatens all of mankind. Filled with fascinating science and thorny ethical questions, Freezing Point takes horror to a chilling new degree.

Thin is the New Happy
by Valerie Frankel
St. Martin's Press $23.95
At the tender age of 11, author Frankel went on her first diet. By 14, she was pushed her into Weight Watchers by her mother and mocked by mean kids. Frankel grew into a diet obsessed adult determined not to pass on this legacy to her daughters. Self acceptance is no piece of cake, but Frankel chronicles her weight wars through marriage, widowhood, and remarriage in a book that's as rich and moving as a great novel. Brave, funny and deeply insightful, Frankel's book is proof that being a better person has nothing to do with the scale.

Anti Cancer: A New Way of Life
by David Servan-Schreiber
Viking $25.95
When physician and neuroscientist Servan-Schreiber discovered he had a deadly brain cancer, he set out on a revolutionary 15-year journey to discover the body's natural cancer fighting capabilities and heal himself. All of us have cancer cells, says Servan-Schreiber, but what makes some of us get cancer while others escape? In his groundbreaking look at the foods which inhibit and activate certain kinds of cancer, the toxins ,environments and stresses that exacerbate cancer, and the alternative and conventional treatments that work, Servan-Schreiber opens up a whole new way of looking at and conquering this dread disease.

Shout out: Max Factor: The Man who Changed the Faces of the World, by Fred E. Basten (Arcade $24.95.) We wouldn't have pancake or waterproof makeup without Max Factor, and here Hollywood's golden age comes alive in a gossipy book that's as vibrant as a lipstick.

 

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Caroline Leavitt is reading even while she knits a deep green Fall sweater and worries about the election. Her new novel Breathe will be published by Algonquin Books and she can be reached at http://www.carolineleavitt.com.

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