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Monday, August 27, 2012

Five questions for Molly Ringwald

Molly Ringwald, 44, original member of the Brat Pack, is best known for the iconic coming-of-age movies Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. Now she's an author and back with her second book, When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories (itbooks, $24.99, 256pp). She spoke with USA TODAY from Greece, where she was on vacation with her husband and three children, and answered five questions.

By Fergus Greer

"Right now I'm focused on the book," says Molly Ringwald. But she also is adapting the screenplay, and she has an album due in spring 2013.

By Fergus Greer

"Right now I'm focused on the book," says Molly Ringwald. But she also is adapting the screenplay, and she has an album due in spring 2013.

1. Did you marry a Greek-American so you can vacation there?
"That's right. All part of the grand plan!"

2. It says here that you write with "a deep compassion for human imperfection." Do you relate?
(Laughs) "I think it's impossible to be human and not relate to that. Absolutely. We're all pretty flawed, but that's what makes us interesting."

3. In these tales, you follow a Los Angeles family through everyday life. Could that family sometimes be yours?
"No, they're very different from mine, although I do have a daughter and a husband. But no, fortunately it's not my family!"

4. Writing is so solitary, the opposite of being on stage. What's harder, acting or writing?
Writing. I started acting as a child. It was very instinctive. In many ways children are the best actors. It just flows and it's natural. Writing is, like you say, very solitary. It's hard.

5. Do you write these stories thinking they could be turned into a movie or play?
"I didn't when I was writing it. To write a novel just to be turned into a screenplay, you're cheating the art form. However, now I am thinking about it, but I also know that it's going to have to change quite a bit."

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Unlikely hero goes on an "Unlikely Pilgrimage"

When a man learns an old friend is dying, he decides to walk 600 miles through the English countryside to see her.

The unlikely but lovable hero of Rachel Joyce's remarkable debut novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, doesn't call his walk a pilgrimage. He never even calls it a hike, which would suggest planning, a map and hiking boots, all of which Harold lacks.

It takes him 87 days to walk from one end of England to the other, 627 miles, including mistakes and diversions. And all this by a 65-year-old retired sales rep, whose wife reminds him the farthest he had ever walked was to his car.

But when a woman he had once known but not seen in 20 years writes to say she's dying of cancer, Harold takes his inadequate response to the nearest mail box. Rather than mailing it, he keeps walking, dressed in a tie and yacht shoes, although no yachts are involved.

He phones his mystified and furious wife, saying it isn't enough to just post a letter. He will walk to see his old friend, Queenie Hennessy. He phones her hospice to say, "Tell her Harold Fry is on his way…I will keep walking and she must keep living."

Pilgrimage, one of the 12 novels just long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Britain's top literary award, is a gentle adventure with an emotional wallop. It's a smart, feel-good story that doesn't feel forced.

Harold "had always been too English; by which he supposed he meant that he was ordinary. He lacked color. Other people knew interesting stories, or had things to ask. He didn't like to ask, because he didn't like to offend."

He knows he is not good with emotion. He also knows he has made a mess out of being a husband, a father and a friend. (Exactly what happened two decades earlier isn't revealed until nearly the end.)

As Harold walks, he remembers "things I didn't know I'd forgotten." He replays scenes from his life. He stops seeing distance in terms of miles. "He measured it with his remembering." His only map is the one in his head, "made up of all the people and places he had passed."

He elicits confessions and advice. A waitress tells him, "If we don't go mad once in a while, there's no hope."

Harold, who's "afraid religion is not something I ever quite got the hang of," finds believers among the strangers he meets:

"They had looked at him in his yachting shoes, and listened to what he said, and they had made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious."

His walk is not easy, especially after he mails his credit cards back to his wife. Complications ensue after an encounter with a reporter who serves up equal helpings of publicity and misunderstandings.

At home, Harold's wife, Maureen, comes to realize, "It was not a life, if lived without love." On the road, Harold sees, "You could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way."

In an author's note to readers, Joyce, a former Shakespearean actress in England, writes that her novel began as a radio play she wrote for her dad as he was dying of cancer, knowing he would never live to hear it. But she wanted to write "something life-affirming at the point when I was losing the person I most wanted to keep."

She's done that and more. I can't think of a better recommendation for summer reading. And take your time, just as Harold does.


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Book buzz: Humorist David Rakoff has died

By Lindsay Deutsch, USA TODAY

Here's a look at what's buzzing in the books world today:

--RIP David Rakoff: David Rakoff, essayist, humorist and radio personality known for his work on This American Life, has died at 47. He was being treated for cancer. He wrote three books, Don't Get Too Comfortable, Fraud and Half Empty, which won the 2011 Thurber Prize, and had delivered a novel entitled Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die; Cherish, Perish, which Doubleday plans to publish posthumously in 2013.

--Rich authors: Check out Forbes' list of the world's top-earning authors, from James Patterson to Jeff Kinney. Notably, female authors are rising on the list, led by phenoms Janet Evanovich, E.L. James, J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins.

--Agatha Christie memorial: Crime fiction lovers will soon have a place to pay homage to their queen. London will erect a statue commemorating "queen of crime fiction" Agatha Christie, The Guardian reports. USA TODAY's Craig Wilson suggests a Christie-related reading list, and look through photos of the author and her presence in culture today.

--Musical reads: Get your groove on this #FridayReads with Brainpickings' literary jukebox, connecting songs to lines from favorite books.


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Sunday, August 26, 2012

Bret Easton Ellis shows 50 shades of green?

We have a new Twitter-fueled uproar today. Why is bad-boy novelist Bret Easton Ellis claiming TV actor Matt Bomer is "too gay" to play a straight role in a movie of Fifty Shades of Grey?

There is no movie, or at least not yet. It's not yet even a glimmer in Hollywood's addled brain, let alone cast, but fans of the hot-hot-hot novels of sadomasochistic sex are busy casting the major characters anyway, especially on Twitter. Bomer, the hot-hot-hot star of USA Network's White Collar who also had a role in this year's Magic Mike, is being mentioned to play the novels' soft-porn protagonist Christian Grey.

No way, tweeted Ellis, 48, the author and screenwriter of American Psycho and other books, who may or may not be gay himself but surely is the brattiest of the literary Brat Pack. He has nothing against gays or Bomer, Ellis says, but Christian Grey has to be into women or the story won't work. Which is what he said in a Twitter rant this week.

"He's NOT right for Christian G," he tweeted Wednesday. "Okay I'll say it. Matt Bomer isn't right for Christian Grey because he is openly gay...He's not CG. Never...I am NOT discriminating Matt Bomer because of his sexuality. Fifty Shades of Grey demands an actor that is genuinely into women. Get it?!?"

Cue the ensuing flow of push-back and atta boy tweets.

And, mind you, the fact that Ellis didn't get the job to adapt the story for the big screen has nothing to do with what E!Online called "Fifty Shades of Bitter." On that point, Ellis tweeted earlier, "It's a very major disappointment to announce that I've somehow been taken off the list of possible screenwriters for Fifty Shades of Grey..."

Bomer, 32, who recently came out, plays a sexy straight guy in his TV show and so far has managed to be persuasive despite going home every night to his male partner and their children. Ellis, in another tweet, said he thinks Bomer comes off as "totally gay" in White Collar.

By the way, Ellis himself has long been coy in multiple interviews over the years about defining his own sexuality. For artistic reasons, he has said, he doesn't want to say because "if people knew that I was straight, they'd read (his books) in a different way. If they knew I was gay, Psycho would be read as a different book."


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Vaddey Ratner emerges from the 'Shadow' of her childhood

POTOMAC, Md. – Debut novelist Vaddey Ratner is a study in contrasts.

Although 'In the Shadow of the Banyan' is inspired by her childhood, Vaddey Ratner chose to write a novel rather than a memoir. Left by Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

Although 'In the Shadow of the Banyan' is inspired by her childhood, Vaddey Ratner chose to write a novel rather than a memoir.

Left by Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

Although 'In the Shadow of the Banyan' is inspired by her childhood, Vaddey Ratner chose to write a novel rather than a memoir.

Tiny and exquisite like the Cambodian princess she is, Ratner also possesses the friendliness of a Midwesterner who spent her high school years in St. Paul. A summa cum laudeIvy League graduate married to her college sweetheart, she lives with her husband and daughter, 12, in this leafy suburb of Washington, D.C., complete with her daughter's fairy-tale treehouse out back.

Ratner's own childhood, however, was very different — a nightmare spent in the killing fields of Cambodia.

What a life.

And now, what a book.

"This is the one story I had to write," says Ratner, 41. In stores this week, Ratner's first novel, In the Shadow of the Banyan (Simon & Schuster, $25), has emerged as one of this year's most anticipated books, thanks to early rave reviews.

Although In the Shadow of the Banyan is inspired by her childhood, Ratner chose to write a novel rather than a memoir. Her goal wasn't to provide journalistic evidence of Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia, where it is estimated that the Khmer Rouge killed 1 million to 2 million people between 1975 and 1979.

Rather, it was personal. "This book allows me to save my family, to immortalize them, to bring them back to life, for me to eternalize them," Ratner says.

Most of all, it brings back her adored father. At age 5, Ratner saw him led away by soldiers. When, where and how he was killed, no one knows.

Narrated by 7-year-old Raami, Banyan opens in magical luxury. Servants bustle about the Phnom Penh estate — the old gardener putting lotus flowers in iced water to stay fresh; Raami's nanny, her "milk mother," nagging her to get ready to dine with her grandmother, a high princess. (Like the author, Raami is connected to Cambodia's complicated royal bloodlines but not in line to inherit the throne.)

Meanwhile, explosions can be heard outside as the Khmer Rouge circle the doomed city.

Ratner opened her novel with a scene of peace "so you can see the beauty that is struggling to exist amid this war." Soon Raami and her family — mother, father, grandmother, aunts, uncles and baby sister — are forced at gunpoint to leave for the countryside. Because her father is a prince, he is targeted by the Communists trying to create a classless, self-sufficient, agrarian society. Raami witnesses the result: death, terror and starvation.

Writing "an imaginative narrative" allowed Ratner to change details such as the narrator's age. Asked how a 5-year-old could remember so much, Ratner explains that her memories of her father were particularly strong because of the polio she suffered as an infant.

Today, Ratner walks with a limp, but as a baby, the handicap was "devastating" in a culture that prized "physical perfection."

Instead of shunning her and her metal leg brace, her father — a royal who had married a commoner — spent an enormous amount of time with Ratner. "He was always talking to me," she says.

Ratner's ability to speak vanished for a period. She was mute when she and her mother escaped from Cambodia. (Ratner's baby sister died of malaria.) After two years in refugee camps, they came to the USA in 1981.

Speaking no English when she arrived at age 11, Ratner went on to become her high school's valedictorian. She met and married her American husband — today an environmental expert — at Carleton College and later graduated from Cornell.

Cambodia today is very different from the country Ratner fled. There is a king again — one of Ratner's relatives. Ratner lived in Cambodia from 2005 to 2009 when her husband was working for an environmental think tank.

Although she didn't complete the manuscript and find an agent until she was an adult, Ratner says that "even as a little girl, I always knew I had to tell about living through this ordeal.

"I need the world to remember."

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Saturday, August 25, 2012

'Kings of Cool' is a pulpy California tale

It's a mean, sun-dappled and pithy world that Don Winslow's outlaw characters inhabit in Kings of Cool.

Loyalties are constantly shifting. Drugs are ubiquitous, words are minimal and life is cheap. There is only one constant in Winslow's universe: the affection between the young trio at the novel's center.

Here we get the weed-whacked origin stories of close friends Ben, Chon and O, who were introduced in Winslow's 2010 best seller Savages (recently made into a movie directed by Oliver Stone and starring Blake Lively and Taylor Kitsch).

Navy SEAL Chon has a frighteningly easy way with violence. Ben studied botany in college and has a do-gooder's inclinations, but a casual callousness. Ben and Chon run a lucrative marijuana business with some ancillary help from O (for Ophelia), the twentysomething blonde they place above their own safety. And their safety is continually compromised by drug cartels, competing dope dealers, crooked law officers and even close family.

But O, Chon and Ben's bond is inviolable. Their development arrested, thanks to rotten parenting, the three cling to each other.

Set in 2005, this prequel goes back to when Ben and Chon launched their hydroponic grass enterprise. Shortly thereafter, they are asked (read ordered summarily) by a murky group called The Association to make monthly payments to a network dealing imported drugs. Afghanistan War vet Chon fights back and the trio's battles begin, ranging from Orange County to Mexico, via flashbacks to the pot peddlers of the mid-'60s and on to coked-out casualties of the following decades. We get the goods on the parents of Ben, Chon and O, subplots that are particularly chilling and often more compelling than the main story linking their children.

Winslow's brash shorthand style can be grating, but it suits the drug-hazed tale, set in California's moneyed Laguna Beach. He takes a simple declarative sentence and breaks it down to a kind of surf rap.

"Together Ben and Chon make up a collective pacifist. Ben is the paci Chon is the fist."

Winslow coins terms (some clever, some forced) and weaves in song lyrics. Action is presented in snippets and chapter-ettes (the first chapter is merely two words). Winslow's weakness is trying so hard to be royally cool. His self-consciously terse dialogue can seem more like the text of a tween than an adult novelist.

"O was made for sunshine. California gurl."

But as a former private investigator, Winslow knows his crime scene. His influences range from Tom Wolfe, Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy to the "surf noir" of Kem Nunn.

Occasionally he interjects a script format to further illuminate his amped-up prose. Not surprisingly, Kings of Cool reads more like a screenplay than a novel.

While Winslow's fractured narrative initially comes off a bit jarring, it ties up intriguingly. By the pulpy tale's dramatic conclusion involving a tense shootout with a surprise drug lord, it's tough not to be hooked.


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Friday, August 24, 2012

Gabby Douglas, from gold medal to bestseller?

By Jocelyn McClurg, USA TODAY

Here's a look at what's buzzing in the books world today:

Ringwald's new novel: USA TODAY's Craig Wilson catches up with the Brat Pack's Molly Ringwald about her new book, When It Happens to You.

A survivor's tale: Vaddey Ratner used her terrifying experiences as a child in Cambodia in tell her own story through fiction. The debut novelist talks with USA TODAY's Deirdre Donahue.

Book buzz: Readers are discovering The Light Between Oceans, a debut novel by an Australian writer that has strong bookseller support. It debuts at No. 22 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list. And while the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy continues to dominate the list, traditional romances are also a hit in the August heat. Infinity Ring: Book 1: A Mutiny in Time by James Dashner, the first in a seven-book series for kids, will be released Aug 28. Check out the cover and read an excerpt.

Solid Gold: Today.com reports that 16-year-old Olympic gymnastics darling Gabby Douglas is being pursued by numerous publishers who want her to tell her story.

'Lightning' strikes:Glee's Chris Colfer, whose debut YA novel The Land of Stories is a USA TODAY best seller, will follow up in November with another book for young readers, GalleyCat reports.

Cameron Diaz, personal trainer: HarperCollins announced today that it has acquired a book on health and wellness by Cameron Diaz. In the untitled book due in fall 2013, the actress will provide tips for young women on "fitness, nutrition and well-being," says her publisher.


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Thursday, August 23, 2012

Weekend book picks: 'How It Ends,' 'City of Women'

What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY's picks for book lovers go international, with a touching love story set in Ireland, and a compelling historical novel about World War II Berlin, a "city of women."

This Is How It Ends
By Kathleen MacMahon; Grand Central, 346 pp., $24.99; fiction

Craving a novel about family ties and romance? This summer serves up This Is How It Ends.

Irish writer Kathleen MacMahon's debut novel takes place in Ireland in 2008 in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election. It centers on Bruno Boylan, a middle-aged American who, on his first trip to his father's homeland, falls in love with Ireland and Addie Murphy. She's a bit of a loner, caring for her dad and doting on her sister's young children.

They give each other a go and though a future together seems tenuous — Bruno is waiting to go back to the U.S. if and only if Obama is elected — their love seems life-changing and then is tested by tragedy.

USA TODAY says *** out of four. "Readers mourning the loss of Irish author Maeve Binchy may find a new friend in MacMahon, who delivers a similar sort of family drama well suited to drowsy afternoons and a cup of tea with a packet of tissues nearby."

City of Women
By David R. Gillham; Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, 392 pp., $25.95; fiction

City of Women is the story of Sigrid Schröder, a (fictional) stenographer in 1943 Berlin whose husband is off on the front lines. She has a secret in her recent past, an affair with a Jewish man. When she has the opportunity to help a resistance group, we know before she does that she will take it.

USA TODAY says *** out of four. "The author's impeccable research, realism and tenderness … make fiction seem like a viable tool for reminding ourselves of history as it truly happened."

The Great Escape
By Susan Elizabeth Phillips; William Morrow, 420 pp., $25.99; fiction

Presidential first daughter turned runaway bride Lucy Jorik leaves her groom at the altar. A sullen biker and a small island in Lake Michigan help her heal.

USA TODAY says **** out of four. "Phillips' novels — funny, sweet, insightful — set the gold standard in contemporary romance."

On the Island
By Tracey Garvis Graves; Plume, $15, 328 pp., paperback original; fiction

A 30-year-old teacher and her 16-year-old student are stranded on a deserted Maldives island for 3½ years. Not as icky as it sounds.

USA TODAY says *** out of four. "From shark attacks to sex scenes, On the Island defines guilty pleasure."

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
By Rachel Joyce; Random House, 325 pp., $25; fiction

When a woman he had once known but not seen in 20 years writes to say she's dying of cancer, Harold Fry takes his inadequate response to the nearest mail box. Rather than mailing it, he keeps walking — from one end of England to the other, for 87 days and 627 miles.

USA TODAY says **** out of four. A "remarkable debut novel … a gentle adventure with an emotional wallop."

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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Summer's hot beach reads

William Morrow, $14.99, 368 pp., paperback original
The story: An up-and-coming New York designer flees to her family beach house when her husband disappears with their money, leaving her nothing.
Sizzle factor: Margaux is a “summer person,” her police chief love interest a “townie,” so it could never work, right?
Why it belongs in your beach bag: One description of quaint, fictional Crescent Cove, Con., will have you yearning for a preppy New England retreat, complete with rocky bluffs and greasy clam rolls.
2 1/2 stars
— Lindsay Deutsch


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New in paperback: Stephen King's '11/22/63' and more

Critic's pick:

Stephen King's time-traveling novel about JFK, '11/22/63,' is out in paperback.

Stephen King's time-traveling novel about JFK, '11/22/63,' is out in paperback.

Stephen King's time-traveling novel about JFK, '11/22/63,' is out in paperback.

11/22/63 by Stephen King (Gallery, $19.99, fiction, reprint, four stars out of four). Reviewer Don Oldenburg called this time-traveling novel about the JFK assassination "extraordinary Stephen King."

Also recently released:

The Passage by Justin Cronin (Ballantine, $7.99, fiction, reprint). The first volume in the apocalyptic story of Amy, an abandoned child. The sequel, The Twelve, arrives in October.

The Fatal Gift of Beauty by Nina Burleigh (Broadway, $14.99, non-fiction, reprint). Subtitle: The Trials of Amanda Knox.

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed (Vintage, $14.95, non-fiction, paperback original). Advice on love and life from the author of Wild, also known as the "Dear Sugar" columnist.

The Obamas by Jodi Kantor (Back Bay, $16, non-fiction, reprint). A New York Times staffer reports on the first couple.

Adele: The Biography by Marc Shapiro (St. Martin's Griffin, $12.99, non-fiction, paperback original). Tells the story of the immensely popular British singer.

Zone One by Colson Whitehead (Anchor, fiction, $15, reprint). A zombie novel from the author of The Intuitionist.

Ed King by David Guterson (Vintage, $15.95, fiction, reprint). Re-imagines Oedipus Rex for the modern age, starring an Internet billionaire.

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

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Monday, August 20, 2012

‘KP2’ forms bond between seal, author

By Terrie M. Williams Publisher: Penguin Press

If you're a sucker for a good animal story, or just a sweet face, for that matter, The Odyssey of KP2 might work for you.

KP2 is no ordinary Hawaiian monk seal, of course. Attacked by a male seal, possibly his father, when he was only 2 days old — an attack witnessed by group of islanders — the orphaned pup sets out on a journey told here with love by renowned wildlife biologist Terrie M. Williams.

"The little black pup who'd been abandoned on a lonely Kauai beach would beome an icon, a rogue and a threat," she writes. "The survival of an entire species would one day come to rest on his small and once discarded shoulders."

Only 1,100 such tropical seals currently swim around the Hawaiian Islands, making the seals the most endangered marine mammal in American waters. A viral epidemic that almost wiped out European harbor seals at the end of the last century, for example, would be catastrophic to the Hawaiian monks.

Williams arrives in Hawaii in 2009 to find KP2 already a local celebrity — with YouTube videos of his own and eventually a Facebook page — a wild seal who refuses to lead a seal's life, returning to the same beach over and over to entertain humans.

Do you feel a movie coming on?

Williams and the pup bond, becoming kindred spirits while she and volunteers frantically attempt to save him and his species. Will he gain weight? Will he swim? Is he blind? The questions keep coming.

"I soon had the strange feeling that this little monk seal was following me," Williams writes. She was right. The problem was the seal needed to be removed from potentially dangerous interactions with humans.

Williams eventually wins over detractors and takes him away from his natural habitat to her California lab.

"The troublemaker seal with a fondness for people was the one Hawaiian monk seal we could study in detail." And so she did, knowing that he could teach her enough to understand the seal's biology so it could be used to better its chances of survival.

What eventually happens to KP2 will be unveiled to those interested enough to wade through the almost 300 pages. Considering what could have happened, it's a happy ending.


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Julia Child is gone but still popular in her centenary year

By David Carson, For USA TODAYBy David Carson, For USA TODAY

Celebrated food visionary Julia Child in her kitchen at her home in Cambridge, Mass. in 1996.

WASHINGTON – Like a fine wine, which she was known to enjoy, Julia Child is aging well.

A toast — to the good life: Julia Child — culinary icon, cookbook author, TV show host — would have turned 100 on Aug. 15. A wide range of celebrations are planned for her centenary. By Jym Wilson,, USA TODAY

A toast — to the good life: Julia Child — culinary icon, cookbook author, TV show host — would have turned 100 on Aug. 15. A wide range of celebrations are planned for her centenary.

By Jym Wilson,, USA TODAY

A toast — to the good life: Julia Child — culinary icon, cookbook author, TV show host — would have turned 100 on Aug. 15. A wide range of celebrations are planned for her centenary.

Yes, she died two days short of 92 in August 2004, but her spirit lives on. Aug. 15 will mark what would have been her 100th birthday, and she would have liked nothing more than to celebrate with a big slice of cake made with lots and lots of butter.

Or, as she once famously said, "if you're afraid of butter, use cream."

Eight years after her death, Child remains a virtually untouchable American icon, even among foodies who are not known for playing well with others. As she did in life, she remains clear of any food fight. Like a good cream, rising to the top.

"Her presence was like that of a goofy aunt or of the really warm elder statesman grandmother," says Dana Cowen, editor in chief of Food & Wine magazine. "She was in the pre-snark world. She just floated above the fray."

Often given credit for opening the door to the fresh food revolution in America, which is still going strong today, Child's centenary is being celebrated in books, on PBS and at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History here, where the famous turquoise kitchen from her home in Cambridge, Mass., is getting a new home of its own.

Biographies and other new books celebrate
the 100th birthday of Julia Child:

Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz (Knopf, $28.95). Billed as the “definitive” biography of Julia Child, it includes excerpts from her diaries and letters.

Julia’s Cats: Julia Child’s Life in the Company of Cats by Patricia Barey and Therese Burson (Abrams $16.95). As billed, a look at Child’s love affair with cats, beginning in 1948 when a cat appears on her doorstep in Paris.

Bon Appetit: The Delicious Life of Julia Child by Jessie Hartland (Schwartz & Wade Books, $17.99). An illustrated book for all ages, and a fun look at Child’s life from soup to nuts.

Minette’s Feast: The Delicious Story of Julia Child and Her Cat by Susanna Reich (Abrams, $16.95). More cats! A children’s book that features Minette, the cat who appears at Julia’s apartment in Paris.

Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child by Noël Riley Fitch (Anchor, $18.95). Fitch’s 1997 bio, updated with a new introduction, has been reissued in paperback.

Out of public view recently because of museum renovations, the kitchen will be back on display for a limited time, Aug. 15 through Sept. 3, to celebrate the centenary. (It will reopen permanently in November, the anchor of a new exhibit hall titled Food: Transforming the American Table, 1950-2000.)

Child's kitchen has been one of the most popular exhibits for the museum's 4.6 million visitors annually, many making the pilgrimage just to visit Julia. In the eight months the exhibit has been closed, docents say visitors have continually asked about it.

"We don't like to rank our children, but … " says Smithsonian curator Rayna Green, who says visitors have been known to sit on the floor and stay for the whole 90-minute video that airs in the Child exhibit.

Visitors will find Child's famous copper pots, outlined in Magic Marker and hanging on pegboards, on a new display wall. Also returning is the yellow stripped Marimekko oilcloth that covered her kitchen table, and the paintings and cutouts of cats that adorned corners of the kitchen. Even Child's AT&T Spirit phone returns to its place on the counter, left of sink, La Capelli Hair still on speed dial.

'Happy to be alive'

Meryl Streep played Child in the 2009 hit film Julie & Julia, a movie that introduced Child to a whole new and younger generation.

She perhaps summed Child up best when promoting the film on The Charlie Rose Show. "How do you define that thing that certain people have?" she asked. "She seemed happy to be alive every day of her life."

Being a good sport helped, something she might have learned growing up as the tallest girl in class back in Pasadena, Calif. In reality, she was almost 6-foot-5, although Child always insisted she was only 6-foot-2.

Child's biographer Bob Spitz — his Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Knopf, $29.95) is out today — says she did not enjoy people making fun of her voice because she didn't think there was anything wrong with it. But she eagerly, and often, hammed it up, even imitating Dan Aykroyd's famous blood-spurting Saturday Night Live skit about boning a chicken (and "saving" the liver).

Jonathan Wenk, Columbia Pictures

Meryl Streep played Child in the 2009 hit film Julie & Julia, a movie that introduced Child to a whole new and younger generation.

Pretense was not a word Child knew. Child summed up her remarkable life quite simply during an interview with the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) in 1990: "I was the right person at the right time."

That right time was the early 1960s, when Child returned from Paris — her husband Paul was in the Foreign Service— having learned the basics of French cooking. She decided to share those basics with an American public still feasting on frozen peas, starting with Mastering the Art of French Cooking with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle in 1961.

Her motto: learn techniques, forge ahead, never apologize and never, ever look back. And use butter, but in moderation.

"Her mantra of moderation was true," says chef Ris Lacoste, owner of RIS restaurant in Washington, who was a friend and feted Child on her 90th birthday in a PBS documentary. "She would have half a sundae. She'd cook salmon poached in vermouth but always have vegetables. She ate right and enjoyed life."

She was as much a feminist as Betty Friedan, who was emerging as a social force at the same time, both telling women to take charge of their own lives. Child was a supporter of Planned Parenthood and was public about her breast cancer when she had a mastectomy in 1968.

Judith Jones, Child's editor at Knopf for more than 50 years, says she, too, was in the right place at the right time. She and Child were like two peas in a pod.

"We had a very parallel awakening to what we loved and wanted to do," says Jones, who is in her late 80s and retired in Vermont. "But you have to act on it, and that's what we did."

Julia remains with Jones every day. She cooks in a kitchen where Child-inspired pegboard walls hold her pots and pans and where most everything is on open shelves. A Julia trademark. "So you can see if you're running out of lentils," Jones says.

PBS, which Child called home for years beginning with The French Chef in 1963, is celebrating her 100th birthday online, through social media and on TV — early episodes will be aired during the celebration. Fans cooking their own versions of a Julia dish can share the experience through blogs on PBS Food and Twitter (#CookforJulia).

"We're encouraging people to get into the kitchen and cook, which is exactly what Julia would have wanted," says PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger.

There's even an app. A condensed version of Child's seminal cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Selected Recipes, is now available for download on the iPad, Nook Tablet and Nook Color by Barnes & Noble. Introductory price: $2.99. (List price is $4.99.)

Child wrote or co-wrote 18 books — with sales totaling 6 million copies — including best sellers such as The Way to Cook (1989) and Baking With Julia (1996), according to publisher Knopf. Mastering the Art of French Cooking has sold more than 2 million copies alone.

For those who have no desire to celebrate Julia by cooking, restaurants from Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., to Le Coq au Vin in Orlando are celebrating with special Julia-inspired menus during Julia Child Restaurant Week, which begins today and runs through Aug. 15. It's all part of JC100, a 100-restaurant celebration of all things Julia.

The anniversary has been a long time coming for Spitz, her biographer, who spent four years writing the newest homage to Child, rummaging through 86 boxes of her papers and writings stored at Harvard. He's participating in the celebration at the Smithsonian on Wednesday.

"I rank her as one of the great women of the 20th century, right along Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie O and Oprah," says Spitz, author of the 2006 best seller The Beatles. "This was a woman who not only changed how we eat but how we live. The food thing has evolved since her, but she lit the fuse, and the fireworks are still going off."

A culinary revolutionary

Tim Ryan, president of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., was a friend of Child's. She visited the school often, although she chided the institution for not having enough female students.

"Today there are dozens of cookbooks from notable chefs released every week. But back in '62 or so, that just wasn't the case. She was the pioneer there. It was a cookbook that had high aspirations, too," he says of Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Child was also a co-founder of the American Institute of Wine and Food 30 years ago. It now has 22 chapters with 3,000 members.

Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant and owner of Clark Wolf Consulting, was in on AIWF's ground floor with her in the early '80s.

"She was always in the forefront," Wolf says. "She was a supporter of kids eating good food in school before there were such programs. It was about how to taste an apple, for instance. For Julia, it was all about learn, eat, share."

And enjoy yourself in the process.

The last meal Wolf had with Child was two months before she died. It was at a steakhouse in Santa Barbara, and she was in a wheelchair. "She wanted to go there because the waiters were all good-looking," Wolf says. "And so we went."

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