Books Reviews - Page 26

Freedom
By Malika Oufkir
hardcover, $23.95

Picking up where her 2001 best-selling autobiography, Stolen Lives, left off, Freedom recounts Oufkir’s return to civilization after her dramatic escape from two decades of imprisonment in a desolate Moroccan jail, draconian punishment for her father’s role in an attempted coup. As she learns to live—and love—again at age 40 in a world of light, color and high-tech confusion, this heart-wrenching, real-life Rip Van Winkle tale reminds us just how precious are the everyday freedoms most of us take completely for granted.

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Open Wide
By Dan Hayes and Jonathan Bing
softcover, $13.95

Everyone knows that movies are big business. But most people don’t realize the intense planning, marketing madness and crushing competitiveness behind most major motion pictures. This lively look at Hollywood’s hit-making machine examines the little-seen cogs in the process of bringing three 2003 films (Terminator 3, Legally Blonde 2 and Disney’s Sinbad) to the masses. An absorbing, eye-opening peek into super-heated, high-pressure Hollywood, it’ll make you glad you only have to watch movies—and not worry about the millions of dollars, years of sweat and dozens of careers measured against the box-office “numbers” every weekend.

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Desk Reference to Nature's Medicine
By Steven Foster and Rebecca L. Johnson
hardcover $40

With 200 color photos, 150 drawings and nearly 160 maps, this 416-page encyclopedia is an engrossing, entertaining resource on the facts, fiction and folklore behind a multitude of naturally growing items in Mother Nature's medicine cabinet. You'll learn about the plant reputed to be one of Cleopatra's beauty secrets, the leaves Andean natives ate when other food was scarce and the herb used by Cherokee Indians to settle upset stomachs. Nature's Medicine won't make you swear off going to the doctor, but it certainly will give you a new perspective on pain management before 24-hour drugstores, HMO co-pays and emergency rooms.

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Engrossing, fast-paced and fact-filled, this sweeping look at the issues, people and events that sculpted our nation begins 40,000 year ago, when the first Asians crossed the Bering Strait land bridge, and marches right up to the devastation and turmoil caused by last year's Hurricane Katrina. In between are 999 other milestones that reveal how our ideals have evolved through the years and what it means to be an American.

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How many is a million? This inventive book tells you, stopping at various numeric points along the way—a queen-size bed sheet woven from some 153,000 feet of thread; 578,504 shoelaces tied together reaching from New York to Boston; 902,000 apples completely covering a basketball court three feet deep. Even better, A Million Dots literally shows you a million dots: There are about 24,000 on each page in each illustration—and looking at all of them for one second each would take you 11 and a half days! Though Dots is perfect for younger children, adults will also be awed at just how much of anything it takes to add up to a million.

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Subtitled "50 Eulogies to Lift the Spirit,” this collection of fond farewells to entertainers (Bob Hope, Gregory Peck, John Belushi), famous athletes (Mickey Mantle, Charles Atlas, Arthur Ashe) and other noteworthy 20th-century movers and shakers (Rosa Parks, Princess Diana, Martin Luther King Jr.) also includes a special section devoted to four New York City firemen who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001. These transcripts remind us that no one lives forever—but, if you're lucky, you'll have someone warm or witty to say a few wonderful words and tend the flame of your memory after you're gone.

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The Encyclopedia of Sharks
By Steve and Julie Parker
softcover $24.95

Loaded with fascinating facts, amazing details and dazzling, full-color photos, illustrations and graphs, here's an invigorating, 182-page dive into the world of one nature's most primitive, most dreaded and mostly misunderstood creatures. Among other tasty tidbits, you find out about the wide variety of sharks and how they interact, eat, mate, see, hear, move and hunt—plus why they've gotten such "bad press" for centuries, how they've been mythologized around the globe and what shark mysteries modern-day science is still trying to crack. Brisk, objective and observant, Sharks offers the closet look most of us will ever get—thank goodness!—at these much-sensationalized lords of the deep.

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Uncover a T.Rex
By Dennis Schatz
Silver Dolphin

Kids and grown-ups alike will love digging into this unique, 3-D book that takes you inside—literally—one of the most terrifying creatures of all time. Colorful illustrations and page-by-page, flip-over "layers" of detailed plastic models reveal the Tyrannosaurus rex's likely skeletal, cardiopulmonary, digestive, reproductive, nervous, muscular and dermal (skin) systems. You'll also learn how fast the king of beasts ran, what its tiny arms were for, where on Earth it lived and how scientists use limited fossil data to painstakingly create a clearer picture of a prodigious predator that will always be the stuff of our nightmares—and fascination.

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You'll probably never get the opportunity to sit inside the Mercury capsule that took astronaut John Glenn around the Earth, the X-1 in which test pilot Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier or the single-engine Ryan that carried Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic. But here's a book that brings you the next best thing—spectacular, razor-sharp, full-color, pilot's-eye-view portraits of the cockpits of 45 different aircraft, including the ones that took Glenn, Yeager and Lindbergh into aviation history. Aircraft fans will drool, certainly. But even the most casual reader will feel airborne by seeing what it looks like sitting At the Controls.

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