For Betty White, it's still all happening at the zoo

NEW YORK – Betty White says she once had a friend named Gita. An Asian elephant who, like many elephants, "liked to have her tongue slapped," says the actress, 89. "And I was happy to oblige her."

By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY

She's just ducky: Betty White with a Mandarin duck at the Central Park Zoo.

By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY

She's just ducky: Betty White with a Mandarin duck at the Central Park Zoo.

White's here at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan to be interviewed about her new, illustrated book, Betty & Friends: My Life at the Zoo (Putnam, $26.95).

But after a few questions about the book, White has one of her own: "Can I see the animals?"

The zookeepers are happy to oblige. White is a longtime trustee, benefactor and volunteer at the Los Angeles Zoo & Botanical Gardens. In New York, she gets to feed fish to sea ducks and cradle an African pygmy hedgehog and a Mandarin duck. She addresses them as "darling" and "baby."

Zookeeper Josh Sisk asks White not about her 64-year-long TV career but about the L.A. Zoo's new Sumatran tiger cubs born in captivity in August.

"We lost one," White says, as if announcing a death in the family. "But the other two are doing fine."

On an hour-long visit to the zoo, White shows few signs of her age. She asks for an arm to lean on going up and down stairs, but on a day that begins with TV appearances, she looks unstoppable.

Despite her life-long fascination with animals, White has never been on a safari in Africa or Asia.

"Who has the time?" she asks. "I've got too much work to do." Besides her latest role as a judgmental Polish caretaker on the TV Land sitcom Hot in Cleveland (its third season starts Wednesday), there are plans for an NBC reality show, Betty White'sOff Their Rockers, with elderly pranksters, and a TV special marking her 90th birthday Jan 17.

Retire? "I don't know that word," she says. "I'm having too much fun working."

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Agatha Christie remains at the top of the mystery heap

Agatha Christie, Britain's queen of mystery, may have celebrated her 120th birthday last year, but HarperCollins, the famed mystery writer's global publisher, isn't blowing out all the birthday candles just yet. The old gal is partying on, right along with her creations, Miss Marple and Detective Poirot.

ITB for Masterpiece

British actress Julia McKenzie stars as the beloved spinster sleuth Miss Marple in three new episodes of the popular Agatha Christie?s Miss Marple series.

ITB for Masterpiece

British actress Julia McKenzie stars as the beloved spinster sleuth Miss Marple in three new episodes of the popular Agatha Christie?s Miss Marple series.

And why not? More than 4 billion of her comfy mystery novels have been sold. And counting. She's only outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare. Not bad company.

The Christie celebrations continue this month:

•John Curran's Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making ($25.99), on sale Tuesday. It's the follow-up to the Christie historian's 2010 Secret Notebooks. It includes even more unpublished works, letters and archival papers, including a look at the master's final unfinished novel.

•A new edition of Agatha Christie: An Autobiography ($29.99), also out Tuesday. The book, first published in 1976 shortly after her death, has been out of print several years. The new edition comes with a CD featuring commentary from Christie herself.

• More than 80 of Christie's novels will have been reissued and repackaged in paperback ($12.99) by fall of 2012. Half have already been released.

So why does Christie, who began her career in mystery writing with 1920's The Mysterious Affair at Styles (a Hercule Poirot story), still resonate today? No mystery at all, really.

"Readers still like the world she created, one with recognizable characters in a recognizable setting, one that is momentarily invaded by murder but has order restored by the intervention of The Great Detective," says Curran.

Christie remains popular on the TV screen, too, with Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot returning to PBS' Masterpiece in 2013.

"It's very possible that Agatha Christie might account for more hours from a single writer on Masterpiece than any other," says Masterpiece executive producer Rebecca Eaton. "And they're all winners … the stories do well generation after generation."

Curran, who is writing his doctoral thesis on Christie at Trinity College, Dublin, says Christie's success is due to the fact that not only was she "accessible" but prolific.

"You can read a different title every month for seven years."

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'Ed King’ reimagines ‘Oedipus Rex’

It sounds like an ambitious — or arrogant — gimmick: Re-envision the quintessential tragedy, Oedipus Rex, as a contemporary novel.

But in Ed King, David Guterson succeeds in recasting one of literature's most haunted and vaunted tales as a plausible page-turner — no small feat considering that any high school English student knows how the story ends, and that on its surface, the patricide-incest plot reads like something more worthy of daytime TV than a library shelf.

Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars) shifts the setting from Thebes and Corinth to Seattle and Portland. The Pacific Northwest may have never been ruled by a monarchy, but it's arguably under the thumb of something far more powerful: technology. So what does Guterson turn his titular protagonist into? An Internet billionaire.

Like his ancient predecessor, Ed King was born to a man of dubious morals, Walter Cousins. The product of statutory rape, baby Ed is dropped off on a doorstep by his biological mother, Diane, and soon adopted by the relatively upright King family. He acts out in adolescence — engaging in a doomed drag race involving not chariots but a BMW and a GTO that results in the death of you-know-who — but channels his competitive smarts toward a career in computing, emerging as the "King of Search."

(Indeed, where King falters is Ed's all-too-swift skip from high school dope fiend to Stanford math star to master of the virtual universe.)

A compelling metaphor is at play: As Ed uses the very engine he created to search and search for answers about his past, he finds that there is no algorithm to predict the path of fate. His pet program Cybil proves as limited, and ultimately dangerous, as pop culture's most infamous computer, HAL.

Through a taut 300 pages, Guterson deftly weaves the trajectories of mother and son toward their inexorable collision but — gratefully — doesn't linger on too many gratuitous gory details. He also upends the ending slightly, invoking another flawed figure, Icarus, perhaps a bit obviously.

But what's more interesting than the Greek stories Guterson draws from is the composite portrait he sketches of America's modern mythical demigods, the tech-titans. (Even Ed's company, Pythia, sounds mythical.) There are shades of Steve Jobs and his adoptive beginnings and untimely end, Bill Gates and his fully wired fortress — and most remarkably, the ruthlessness shared by both.

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TV spots hint at what's to come in new 'Girl' film

By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY

Have you noticed the TV spots that have started airing for the upcoming film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? You would have seen one last night during The Walking Dead.

Sony Pictures has released three TV spots as it actively promotes its film version of the Stieg Larsson novel starring computer hacker Lisbeth Salander and disgraced investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

The 2009 Swedish film, starring Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist, did very well in its American release and around the world. Sony's film, starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig, has fans of Larsson's Millennium Trilogy wondering how the American version will fare in comparison. The film opens Dec. 21.

The novel continues to sell well. It's currently No. 25 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list. It's spent 132 weeks on the list since 2008.

For a look at the TV spots, here's a link to movieweb.com

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War, fashion in ‘Time in Between’

Sira Quiroga is a young Spanish dressmaker engaged to a solid suitor when a suave typewriter salesman upends her life.

Spain is being upended by a civil war and the new regime's growing alliances with Nazi Germany. But The Time in Between will appeal more to fans of romance novels than the serious spy reader. Think John LeCarre-lite.

First-time novelist Maria Duenas has drawn a memorable character in Sira. Smart, gutsy and resourceful with a Scarlett O'Hara-like ability to whip up designer duds on a moment's notice, Sira has spunk. Over the 600 pages of her saga, Sira gains and loses a small fortune, is dumped by her cad of a lover in Morocco, runs guns to get the cash to start her life anew and becomes couturier to the Nazi wives stationed in Madrid. Urged on by her friend, the real-life British spy Rosalinda Fox, Sira, too, aids the British cause.

An international best-seller, The Time in Between — not the most memorable title — provides a lush travelogue of early-20th-century Madrid, Tetouan, Morocco and Lisbon. From a terrific opening line to the final page, chapters zip by at a pulsing pace. Time is aimed at female readers or the rare metrosexual who won't be put off by lines such as "my impeccable makeup didn't allow her to see the distress that her words were causing."

Looking for a breezy read about the Spanish Civil War and the early days of World War II? This could be your book. But after 600 pages, the reader is left with the feeling this novel is more girlish and glib than gripping.

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Michael Cannell shows why drivers took racing to ‘The Limit’

Most books about auto racing are lucky to find a lonely place in the garage propping up a worn piston. But The Limit deserves a spot in the library, if not — soon enough — on the DVD rack.

Subtitled Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit, Michael Cannell's narrative rides in the shadows of Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken in the way it introduces a fascinating cast while reviving a time and place in which death danced with glory.

Such scope surely contributed to The Limit selling pre-publication to Sony Pictures and Tobey Maguire. He has plans to produce and star as The Limit's protagonist Phil Hill, a cerebral talent from Los Angeles who, for a brief shining moment in 1961, reigned as the world's top race-car driver.

In often jaw-dropping detail, Cannell explores both Hill's triumph as well as the grizzly world that was auto racing in an age before safety concerns. (Italy's fabled Mille Miglia race was shut down in 1957 only after a driver was cut in half by his loosened hood as his car obliterated nine spectators.)

Were yesteryear's drivers brave knights on metal steeds, or just plain nuts?

Cannell makes the argument for the former, describing British ace Stirling Moss as "flinty-eyed and muscled, with almost superhuman discipline," someone with eyesight "so acute that he could … scan the crowd for pretty girls while entering a curve at 85 mph."

Given that bravado — not to mention a lack of seat belts — it's little surprise a key character in The Limit is the Grim Reaper.

Between 1957 and 1961, 14 drivers were killed. (In the modern Formula One era, no driver has died since 1994.) Everyone from newspaper editors to the pope lambasted motor racing. But what Cannell makes clear is that for a generation of young men for whom the decimation of World War II remained vivid childhood memories, racing's risks built character in a nuclear age with no dragons to slay.

Or, in the words of Hill's fair-haired, high-born rival, the impossibly named and ill-fated Count Wolfgang von Trips, "Danger and fear have become anonymous and invisible — radioactive clouds floating around us. That doesn't change the fact that there are people who thirst for action … who are born to fight."

With characters like that, Cannell could have skipped the book and himself gone straight to a screenplay. Fortunately for the literary-minded, he has sketched out a dizzyingly macho world in which humans and machines were savagely pushed to their limits. Too bad the title Mad Men was already taken.

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Joan Didion on the death of her only child

Didion follows “The Year of Magical Thinking” by writing about her late daughter .

In 2005, Joan Didion published a remarkable, unflinching portrait of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, about the death two years earlier of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne.

At 71, he had a heart attack shortly after the couple visited their daughter, hospitalized in a coma. Later, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael improved, but shortly after Didion finished her book, Quintana died of complications from pancreatitis. She was 39.

"That would take a whole other book to do," Didion said at the time. "It's not a book I'm ready to write." Nor was she sure "what form it will take."

At 76, Didion has written that book, Blue Nights. Despite writing that is lovely and wrenching, it is disappointing.

In Magical Thinking, Didion, a novelist, screenwriter, essayist and reporter, put all her talents to use exploring what she called "the shallowness of sanity" after her husband's death and her only child's illness.

It won the National Book Award, reached as high as No. 16 on USA TODAY's Best-selling Books list and was adapted as a one-woman Broadway play with Vanessa Redgrave.

Blue Nights is less focused. It's filled with unanswerable questions. It's less about Quintana, named after a Mexican town, than it is about Didion's growing sense of fraility.

The comparisons to Magical Thinking are inevitable but perhaps unfair. The earlier book also celebrated her husband's life, in the way that the best funerals can be celebrations.

For a parent, the death of a child, at any age, is different.

"When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children," she writes. Then she adds, "I just said that, but what does it mean?"

Which leads to other questions for parents: "Are we saying what it meant to us to have them? What is meant to let them go? Are we talking about the enigma of pledging ourselves to protect the unprotectable? About the whole puzzle of being a parent?"

Quintana was adopted, which poses more questions about the "muddled impulses of adoption."

For the child, Didion asks, "If someone 'chose' you, what does that tell you?

"Doesn't it tell you that you were available to be 'chosen?"'...Are we beginning to see how the word 'abandonment' might enter the picture?"

Didion is at her best on medicine as an "imperfect art," and how doctors retreat into jargon, but she leaves Quintana's illness as a vague mystery.

She writes about "the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children...the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them."

Blue Nights is opaque, as if Didion was never able to decide what form this book should take.

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