Hand-Me-Down Book Reviews, Part II

My coworker who is a voracious reader has started bringing me her New York Times Book Review section each Monday, so I'm adding a new label for this here blog. I'm going to start keeping lists of titles that sound interesting each week. Here's two for today:

Fiction
The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barberry, "A young girl and a widowed concierge, both closet intellectuals, become friends"

Non-Fiction
Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives - Guy Fieri with Ann Volkwein, "A road trip with recipes from the Food Network star"

I recognized the feminist author of the book below from my Turner Classic Movies' Leading Ladies and Leading Men books (see my 12/8/08 post):

"Frankly, My Dear (2/23/09) praises Gone With the Wind for illuminating still-conflicting romantic ideas. This comes at a time when film culture has fragmented into fan-boy/chick-flick dichotomies and populist-versus-elitist criticism. (Author Molly) Haskell's endeavor, different from high-art appreciation yet not far from it, brings together audience taste and intellectual specification. Since adolescence, her admiration for the film has developed into "a more grown-up affection informed by a film lover's appreciation of the small miracle by which a mere 'woman's film' with a heroine who never quite outgrows adolescence was transfigured into something much larger, something profoundly American, a canvas that contains, if not Walt Whitman's multitudes, at least multiple perspectives." (Armond White, chief film critic for New York Press and chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle; his book, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Movies, will be published this spring)