The BookReport

Gwyneth Paltrow at BookHampton

Go to Photo Album (Photographs © Jeremy Nussbaum)

What a great way to wrap up Summer: Gwyneth Paltrow, one of our favorite cookbook authors — what, she's an actress, too?! — took BookHampton by storm on Friday afternoon, August 26.

We've had many great guests, but Gwyneth, whose graciousness is only hinted at in her mega-watt smile, bowled us all over. This special end-of-summer event in East Hampton introduced her great new cookbook, My Father's Daughter, and introduced the audience to The East Hampton Food Pantry. BookHampton decided to match every copy sold with a donation to the food pantry of the full purchase price.

Ready to take questions from the packed-to-the-rafters audience, Gwyneth jumped right in: She wrote the book as a way of remembering her dad, producer Bruce Paltrow. They used to cook together, and hanging out in the kitchen was always their thing. It took three years to write, because she is a perfectionist and the recipes she included had to exactly match the “taste.” A good friend saved the day by measuring out each single ingredient as Gwyneth tried and tested her way through the book.

The recipes, by anyone's measure, are really delicious. One of my personal favorites are the Veggie Burgers, and Gwyneth told us that they’re one of her daughter's favorites as well. Her own kids? Well, she said, they love pasta, so the book is filled with great pasta ideas!

My Father's Daughter, filled with delicious and easy to prepare recipes created with Master Chef Mario Batali, is a wonderful homage to Gwyneth's father and an invitation to all of us to get in the kitchen with our own kids and start cooking up a storm.

There were many, many  young fans in our audience, all of whom know Gwyneth from her recent appearance on TV's "Glee." She told them that of all her different roles, it's possible that “Glee” was her favorite. "I got to sing and dance, things that for me are usually reserved for the shower! It was really the most fun!" ("Glee" folks, are you listening?)

When the questions were over, it was time for the book signing and Gwyneth, showing the stamina that comes from healthy eating and a truly kind heart, personalized every autograph and posed for over 100 photographs with the BookHampton crowd.

Many thanks to the incomparable Gwyneth Paltrow, actress  and author, for this very special afternoon. Signed copies of My Father's Daughter are available at bookhampton.com.

— Charline Spektor

Jeremy is Reading: 1861: The Civil War Awakening

I have always loved history and in fact majored in history in college, but somehow never made a real study of the Civil War. Since this is the 150th anniversary of the start of that conflict there are ample ways to make up for this omission and I started with the remarkable book by Adam Goodheart called 1861: The Civil War Awakening (Knopf). The amount of research involved must have been simply staggering, but Goodheart is the most felicitous of writers and keeps the strands of his narrative moving at a wonderful pace.

Although of course the heros and villains (Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, etc.) receive the attention that is their due, the book is a very textured work focusing as well on individuals whose names have long been forgotten but whose  grappling with the preservation of the Union on the one hand and the stark issue of slavery on the other is presented in a vivid and appealing fashion.

On the Edge: Rufus Wainwright

Go to Photo Album (Photographs © Jeremy Nussbaum)

"Awwww" is the sound and awe is the state when a tried-n-true interviewer (that would be me) gets to talk to a cultural icon and personal hero; and so it was in Sag Harbor this past Thursday August 18th when BookHampton's guest speaker was acclaimed singer and composer Rufus Wainwright.

Rufus, whose charm is such that one has to call him by his first name, came to speak about opera as part of our ongoing On The Edge Series. His newest work is a full-length opera, Prima Donna. It was hailed by the London Times as "more than an opera, it is rather a love song  to opera. A work that recognizes the great tradition and full Romantic sound of the late-nineteeth and early-twentieth century composers."

Rufus  explained that he took the occasion of this major work, which tells the story of an opera diva and a hapless journalist, to bring to bear everything that he  loves in music. "I love opera," Rufus told the full-house audience. "I heard Verdi's Requiem when I was a little boy, maybe ten, and suddenly I just knew."  

Growing up in a house filled with music, Rufus nonetheless had to cut his own path. He was enchanted by the sound of opera, the enormity of the orchestra and the personal connection of each singer's voice. "I didn't have to understand what they were saying," he said,"I knew what they were saying."

His love of opera carried him through the Italians, and Verdi in particular, to Richard Strauss, whose Der Rosenkavalier is for him the quintessential opera experience. With Rosenkavalier in mind, he told a lovely story of being a boy and bringing a silver rose (from the jewelry store) to his beloved mom, Kate McGarrigle.

Izzeldin Abuelaish at BookHampton

On Sunday morning August 14 we hosted a very unusual event at BookHampton's East Hampton store. We were very pleased to welcome Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish. A Palestinian, born in Gaza, Dr. Abuelaish is a medical doctor now on the faculty of the University of Toronto and the author of an autobiographical book entitled I Shall Not Hate (Walker & Company).

As the book makes clear, our guest is a man of remarkable abilities who was able to raise himself from an impoverished background to earn advanced degrees in medicine and public health; more amazing still is his willingness to engage with the Israelis on a one-to-one basis — he actually practiced his profession in an Israeli hospital for many years — in the hope that they would engage with him in the same fashion. In the beginning of 2009, however, his home in Gaza was hit in an Israeli bombing raid and three of his daughters and a niece were killed (his wife had died of a medical condition a few months before). Incredibly, this nightmare did not make him abandon his quest to make peace with Israel; to the contrary it accelerated and stimulated that quest, as it made him aware of the folly and horror of each outrage (on both sides) leading to the next with no end in sight.

As he told the overflow crowd, Dr. Abuelaish insists that all people are alike, that they want the same things by way of security for themselves and their families, material sustenance and deserve to be treated on an individual basis, on their own merits and not simply as a Palestinian or an Israeli. People should, he said, be held responsible for their own actions and should be able to take responsibility for their own lives.

This was a highly inspirational talk, much different from the normal bookstore event and spoken by someone who is clearly much closer to the front line of world events — from which he experienced an almost unimaginable suffering — than most of those in the audience, but who has attempted to turn his experience into something positive. To that end he has created a Foundation called Daughters for Life that is specifically interested in promoting educational opportunities for women and girls in Palestine and throughout the Middle East, by providing scholarships and by providing circumstances in which young women and girls from a number of countries (including Israel) can be brought together to interact with each other as individuals and not just as representatives of the countries they come from. He feels strongly that empowering and educating women will create the most positive and hopeful conditions for the future, given the woman's predominant role in the maintenance and stability of family life. He said that each step is a small one but that only the succession of small steps will eventually be able to lead to significant change.

Responding to a question from the audience, Dr. Abuelaish said he saw the pattern of uprisings in so many Middle-Eastern and African countries this year as a very positive development, because so many of them were really created by young people who wanted to take responsibility for themselves and their countries and to find some dignity and self-respect; he was particularly impressed that this new spirit had recently even crossed over into Israel, where there have been street rallies and protests by young people of the working classes complaining of diminished economic opportunities in their society--here again is proof how alike all people are.

Answering another question, Dr. Abuelaish explained that he decided to move to Canada after the loss of his daughters, because he couldn't face being separated from them as much as he had been when he was commuting to Israel, all the more in view of his wife's death (it appears that there are no serious medical facilities in Gaza itself).

I was very proud to have participated in this event, which certainly transcends a normal reading or discussion based on a book or a literary topic, and believe that all of us learned a great deal from Dr. Abuelaish's quite inspirational example.

— Jeremy Nussbaum

Photographs © Jeremy Nussbaum

On the Edge: Women Sex & Art

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On the Edge is BookHampton’s newest series, and on Thursday, August 4th we really got a bit edgy.

Our two guests were psychologist Joyce McFadden and photographer Bastienne Schmidt. McFadden’s new book, Your Daughter's Bedroom: Insights for Raising Confident Women (Palgrave Macmillan), takes a look at how women talk (or don't talk) to their daughters about sex. Schmidt’s fascinating fem-centric study, Home Stills, has become a BookHampton best-seller.  

Jeremy is Reading: War and War

I owe my knowledge of the existence of War and War and of its author, László Krasznahorkai, to the often highly perceptive literary critic James Wood who described them both at some length in the July 4 issue of The New Yorker. The novel itself was first published in Hungarian in 1999 and the English translation (by George Szirtes, who deserves special mention as it cannot have been an easy job) was published by the estimable house New Directions as far back as 2006 so this is hardly a new release. In any case I'm very grateful to Wood for bringing it to my attention because it is one of the most stimulating and original books I have read in a long time.

Jeremy is Reading: Ladies and Gentlemen

When Adam Ross gave a reading from his new book Ladies and Gentlemen (Knopf) at BookHampton a couple of weeks ago I had not yet read the book, as it had only been published earlier that week. I have now read it and have to say I enjoyed it even more than I expected.

It is a collection of short stories, and although I was very impressed with hie earlier book  Mr. Peanut, I wasn't sure that Ross's talents were as well suited to the short story genre, as he had seemed to revel in the opportunities for weaving lines — not to mention puzzles and sub-plots — provided in the longer format of the novel. I needn't have worried: Ross is every bit as gifted a short story writer as he is a novelist and has obviously learned what can work best in either genre.

I was particularly taken with "Middleman" (from which he read at BookHampton), the story of a thirteen-year old boy in New York City named Jacob Rose, who was raised by his Jewish father and Methodist mother with no religion or ethnicity at all, and his two friends, one very smart and thoroughly Jewish, the other very stylish and very WASP; the latter had a gorgeous older sister and thereby hangs the tale (I don't want to spoil it by saying more). A couple of the stories have totally unexpected turns at the end (I will of course not identify them); Ross knows and uses the power of a strong ending.

Most of the stories focus on people older than Jacob, some of them college age but more who are in their thirties and are starting to discover that their lives are not turning out as they had expected, and although some of the stories may be autobiographical at least in part, others are narrated by or focused on women as the central character — the title story, for example — and show that Ross can write women as convincingly and sympathetically as can write men.

So, another very strong debut in a new genre from Adam Ross. We can only wonder what he will bring us next.

— Jeremy Nussbaum

Order books by Adam Ross at bookhampton.com.

From Avena's List: My Father's Daughter

The must-have cookbook of this summer is Gwyneth Paltrow’s My Father’s Daughter: Delicious, Easy Recipes Celebrating Family and Togetherness (Grand Central). Paltrow is a true foodie, and learned about the power of preparing food for your loved ones at her father’s elbow. Once she had children of her own, she learned to make smarter food choices for her family, and this mouth-watering collection is that fruit borne.

Filled with amazing recipes (accompanied by gorgeous photos), Paltrow's collection is so easy and user-friendly that you’ll be adding these dishes to your culinary repertoire. (Make the Seafood Paella immediately!)

Gwyneth Paltrow will be doing an event in our East Hampton store in the month of August, with the date to be determined. Check the extensive events calendar on our website, or call 324-4939 for details.

— Chris Avena