Costco Connection
Dining to Remember [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Freelance journalist, www.Powered-by-Hope.com
Who would you invite to the dinner of a lifetime — the one where you are surrounded by five of the most significant people in your life, alive or dead?
The selection for Sabrina, star of “The Dinner List,” is served up in this 273-page turner by bestselling author and hit TV writer Rebecca Serle, 33.
Readers meet Sabrina as she saunters into her 30th birthday party. Expecting only to have supper with Jessica, her best friend who encouraged her in college to create a dinner list, four others are seated around the table: Tobias, the unrequited love of her life; Robert, her estranged father; Conrad, a favorite professor — and Audrey Hepburn, just because.
“It strikes me as everyone places their order … that I didn’t really think this through. When I chose these five people to put on my list, it was entirely about me,” Serle writes in the novel. “My issues with each of them, and my mixed desires to be in their presence. I didn’t think of how they’d get along together.”
In the next four hours of that evening, Sabrina finds insight and answers to that pondering, as well as closure around her most strained relationships.
Romantics will be hooked by the end of Chapter One. And why not?
One Step at a Time [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Freelance journalist, www.Powered-by-Hope.com
Rescue thought he’d grow up to be a Seeing Eye dog — it’s the family business, after all. When he gets the news that he’s better suited to being a service dog, he’s worried he’s not up to the task. Then he meets Jessica, a girl whose life is turning out differently than she imagined. Now she needs Rescue to accomplish everyday tasks. Together, they find a way forward, one step at a time.
Such is the touching tale of “Jessica & Rescue,” the story of a resilient tween struggling to adjust to life after losing both of her legs — and the 80-pound black Labrador retriever that is always by her side who loves carrots, ear rubs, and the Red Sox.
Although readers don’t learn what happened to fictional Jessica in the 32-page picture book written for children 5-9, the lesson here is one of perseverance and inner-strength as Jessica adjusts to living with prosthetics, wheelchairs, walkers, and crutches.
“The mission of the book is the build empathy in young readers and demystifying what it means to have a disability,” insist first-time authors Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downes, whose lives changed the afternoon of April 15, 2013 when a bomb went off at the Boston Marathon injuring 264 people.
“Jess and I both lost our left legs the day of the bombing, and were among the 17 that lost limbs,” shares Downes, now 35, who was a graduate student at the time, and last year finished his doctorate in clinical psychology. “Jess also had a very bad injury to her right leg, which was amputated two years later. When we meet kids in public, you can see their eyes popping out of their heads trying to figure out what’s in front of them.”
The Nutcracker Revealed [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Freelance journalist, www.Powered-by-Hope.com
If you are among the millions whisked away to the land of the Sugar Plum Fairy each Christmas by the ballet inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann’s classic novella, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King,” prepare to hop a ride this fall to “Hiddensee” to explore the Nutcracker’s back-story.
Your guide is bestselling author Gregory Maguire, the fantasy writer who gave us a new perspective on the Wicked Witch of the West in “Wicked,” redrew Wonderland in “After Alice,” and introduced us to a distant relation of Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge in “Lost.”
In “Hiddensee,” we travel to the forest of Bavaria, circa 1808, to meet Dirk, the lad who grows up to the mysterious one-eyed toymaker, Herr Drosselmeier.
This beautifully crafted 281-pageturner will undoubtedly captivate readers. The story, rooted in 19th-century German Romanticism, teaches us how the entrancing Nutcracker came to be carved, and how it magically guided an ailing little girl named Klara through a dreamy paradise on a snowy Christmas Eve.
But “Hiddensee” is not just the reimaging of a classic fairy tale, Maguire tells the Connection from his home in Concord, Massachusetts.
Mata Hari Speaks [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Freelance journalist, www.Powered-by-Hope.com
November 15, 1917, 5am — “She drew on her black stockings, which seemed grotesque in such circumstances, and stepped into her high-heeled shoes adorned with silk laces. As she rose from the bed, she reached for a hook in the corner of her cell, where a floor-length fur coat hung, its sleeves and collar trimmed with another type of animal fur, possibly fox. She slipped it over the heavy silk kimono in which she had slept.
“Her black hair was disheveled; she brushed it carefully, securing it at the nape of her neck. On top of her head she perched a felt hat and tied it with a silk ribbon, so the wind would not blow it out of place as she stood in the clearing where she was being led. Slowly she bent down to take a pair of black gloves.
“Then, nonchalantly, she said in a calm voice, ‘I am ready.’”
So begins “The Spy,” a new book by best-selling Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, which brings to life the story of Mata Hari — the world-famous Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy during World War I.
Pucker Up: This Summer Prepare to “Kiss Carlo” [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Freelance journalist, www.Powered-by-Hope.com
If you are looking for a page-turner this summer, pick up Adriana Trigiani’s “Kiss Carlo.” It’s the latest from the New York Times bestselling author of “The Shoemaker’s Wife,” and the 2001 Big Stone Gap series — which became a motion picture in 2014, starring Ashley Judd, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jenna Elfman.
This new epic transports us to South Philadelphia, post-war 1949. Protagonists Dominic Palazzini owns the Palazzini Cab Company & Western Union Telegraph with his three sons, but a decades-long feud that began in 1933 split Dominic from his brother Mike and his family business.
“The plot sets the stage for a Shakespearean conflict, for it’s a story of love, loyalty and creativity that is filled with everything we all struggle with as humans,” believes Trigiana, who spoke to the Costco Connection from her home in New York City.
Luck Story [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Freelance journalist, www.Powered-by-Hope.com
For as long as she can remember, Georgia Hunter has been a writer. At four, in homage to her father Thomas Hunter’s 1982 sci-fi story, “Softly Walks the Beast,” she penned her first novel, coining it “Charlie Walks the Beast.”
When she was 11, she pitched an Opinion piece to her hometown newspaper; since that debut in the Attleboro Sun Chronicle, her personal essays and photos have been featured in the New York Times “Why We Travel,” travelgirl magazine, and on Equitrekking.com.
At 15, the seeds for her epic historic novel, “We Were the Lucky Ones,” were planted when a high school teacher assigned an I Search project for students to explore their ancestry. Over an afternoon spent talking with her grandmother, the Massachusetts native, who was not being raised as a Jew, learned that she came from a family of Holocaust survivors.
Breathing Lessons [Costco Connection]
Elizabeth Poliner’s novel is a journey of self-discovery for the author
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Freelance journalist, www.powered-by-hope.com
“We write to connect, and we connect through stories,” believes poet Elizabeth Poliner, author of As Close to Us As Breathing — an epic tale that reveals the heart and soul of a Jewish family that spends decades coping with the death of their youngest family member, Davy, in the summer of 1948.
Writing the book was a six-year journey of self-discovery, Poliner tells the Costco Connection from her home in Roanoke, Virginia.
“I had a certain fear of writing a novel,” admits the Hollins University creative writing teacher, who previously penned What You Know in Your Hands, a poetry collection; Sudden Fog, a poetry chapbook; and a collection of linked stories called, Mutual Life & Casualty. “I worried if I was up to the task on a technical level as a fiction writer.”
Poliner eventually let go of her fears, and readers are the better for her diligence. This tightly woven tale is a page-turner.
“Georgia” On My Mind [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Freelance writer
[Costco Connection]
I no longer love you as I once did, in the dazzling rush of those early days. Time itself was feverish then, our bodies filled with fire … the metallic scent of the dark room, smells of sweat and linseed oil, a stain of cocoa on the dining room table. It was all smashed together back then — art, sex, life — mixed into the perfect color, every shadow had a substance, shape, and tone … My hands are cool now, the past remade and packed away. Sometimes, though, late at night the air lifts and I feel it — the faint burn of your eyes on my closed lids. Still. That sense of you rushing back in.
So begins Dawn Tripp’s novel, “Georgia,” an imagined first person account of the life of the legendary American artist Georgia O’Keeffe; and the passionately complicated relationship she had with the recipient of the note above — her manager and husband, famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
This is the fourth book by the author of the Boston Globe bestseller, “Game of Secrets,” who is also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for fiction for “The Season of Open Water.”
The Harvard grad tells the Costco Connection from her home in Massachusetts that “Georgia” has been the toughest topic she has tackled — not only because Georgia O’Keeffe was so complex, but because it took nearly a year for her to find the voice of the character.
Dr. Seuss Does It Again With: “What Pet Should I Get?” [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Freelance writer
Although Theodore Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, died in 1991, nearly 25 years later he’s able to give us a remarkable gift—the new book What Pet Should I Get?
Cathy Goldsmith, VP and associate publishing director at Random House Books for Young Readers, was one of the first recipients of a call from Dr. Seuss’ widow, Audrey, who discovered the unpublished manuscript in the fall of 2013.
“We got the call as soon as she rediscovered the box filled with pages of text and sketches, which had originally been found shortly after Ted’s death in 1991 while remodeling their home,” Goldsmith shares from her home office in Manhattan. “But it spent all this time forgotten in a closet in his office until Audrey and Ted’s longtime secretary Claudia Prescott were cleaning house.”
Three days later Goldsmith flew to Geisel’s La Jolla, California, home to check out the treasure.
“The contents of the box were placed in neat piles on a glass-top table, and What Pet was there waiting for us,” adds Goldsmith, who estimates it was written between 1958 and 1962 because the starring brother and sister team are the same characters featured in his 1960 bestseller, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.
Holy bagumba! Kate DiCamillo's "Flora & Ulysses" takes readers on an incandescent adventure [Costco Connection]
Holy Bagumba!
Kate DiCamillo’s “Flora & Ulysses” takes readers on an incandescent summer adventure
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Flora Belle Buckman is 10 and hates romance. She prides herself on being a natural-born cynic, and while she wants to believe in superheroes—she just can’t make herself buy into the premise.
At least, that’s how she feels during the summer after 5th grade when she’s reading, “The Illuminated Adventures of the Amazing Incandesto!”
With the whoosh of a vacuum cleaner, all that changes. Flora’s neighbor Mrs. Tickham was using her new Ulysses Super-Suction, Multi-Terrain 2000X—on the lawn—when she sucks up an unassuming squirrel — an incident that magically gives him superpowers. From then on, the squirrel is known as (what else?) Ulysses.
“Holy bagumba,” shouts Flora, witnessing the scene from her bedroom window.
Holy bagumba, indeed.
The Art of Faking It ‘Till You Make It [Costco Connection]
“The Art Forger” turned Author B.A. Shapiro into an overnight success—more than two decades after she started writing books.
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Reporter
The Costco Connection
“I’m a cowardly writer,” admits Barbara Shapiro, author of the critically acclaimed bestseller, “The Art Forger,” a twisty tale of the largest unsolved art theft in history of paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990.
“Some writers sit down and begin a novel without knowing where it will end, trusting the process to bring their story to a satisfying conclusion,” explains the writer of nine books, including five published suspense novels. “But not me. I need an outline that allows me to believe my idea might be transformed into a successful novel. I need a working plot. Which is why it takes me so damn long to get from the first glimmer of an idea to a complete manuscript.”
The good news for readers is that Shapiro fell in love with Isabella Stewart Gardner back in 1983. True, the heiress died in 1924, but when two men dressed as police officers bound broke into her museum and stole 13 pieces of art that today is worth more than $500 million—Shapiro knew she had plenty of juicy details to work with.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh's "Language of Flowers" is Blooming Brilliant [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Publisher
Be Inkandescent magazine
Acadia means secret love, aloe means grief, basil indicates hate, and mistletoe says: I surmount all obstacles. Give a lover a planter of lavender and you are saying that you don’t trust them. However, a bouquet of jasmine says it is attachment you desire.
That’s but a pinch of what you’ll learn about the meaning of flowers in Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s breakout novel, “The Language of Flowers,” the tragic coming-of-age tale of orphan Victoria Jones, a child whose emotional scars are exacerbated by the foster care system that can’t find a way to help her.
From page 1 of the first section, “Common Thistle,” it’s easy to see why Victoria’s saga has inspired romantics, enchanted book clubs, and galvanized a legion of people who are determined to help teens newly emancipated from foster care at 18.
“Like Victoria, who ended up living in the woods after she left the system, these teens often have few resources, little support, and limited prospects for a happy future,” explains Diffenbaugh, who was 23 when she got a taste of the troubles plaguing foster kids.
Adriana Trigiani's Dance With Fate [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
The Costco Connection
September 2012
Bestselling author Adriana Trigiani unfurls the epic tale of her grandparents’ love story in her latest book, “The Shoemakers Wife.”
“I don’t know how Adriana Trigiani goes into her family’s attic and emerges with these amazing stories, I’m just happy she does,” says bestselling author Kathryn Stockett of Trigiani’s newest release, “The Shoemaker’s Wife.” “If you are meeting her for the first time, get ready for a lifelong love affair.”
That endorsement from the author of “The Help” is typical of the buzz around Trigiani’s epic tale of Ciro Lazzari and Enza Ravanelli—the fictional characters who depict the real lives of her grandparents and their sweeping, international love affair.
Charles Best: Teacher Supplies on Demand [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Costco Conntection
August 2012
Photos by DonorsChoose.org
Educator Charles Best came up with a very big idea one day back in 1999 while eating lunch with his fellow high-school teachers in the Bronx.
“My colleagues and I were talking about books that we wanted the students to read, field trips we wanted to take them on, and art supplies that we needed—but we all knew these ideas wouldn’t go beyond the teacher lunchroom because of funding issues,” explains the founder of www.DonorsChoose.org, one of the nation’s first peer-to-peer philanthropic websites, which he created in the year that followed.
Best spent $2,000 to get the beta site up and running—and several platters of his mom’s famous roasted pears with orange-rind dessert to bribe his colleagues to post those projects they had only dreamed of.
A Haunting Divinity [Costco Connection, April 2012]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Costco Connection
April 2012
“In the beginning, the boy thought he saw his father everywhere. Outside the latrines. Underneath the showers. Leaning against barrack doorways. It was 1942. Utah. Late summer. The wind was hot and dry and the rain rarely fell and wherever the boy looked he saw him: Daddy, Papa, Father, Oto-san.”
And so begins the third and title chapter of Julie Otsuka’s incandescent novel, “When the Emperor Was Divine,” a bittersweet glimpse into the internment of a Japanese-American family durinag World War II.
The boy, Otsuka says, is her favorite character.
Who's a Dork? [Costco Connection, November 2011]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
Costco Connection
November 2011
Sometimes kids just know whom they are going to be when you grow up. Take Rachel Renee Russell, author of the New York Times Bestselling Series, the “Dork Diaries,” who has been writing young adult books since she was in the 6th grade.
That’s the year she wrote “The Donny and Ronny Book,” for her younger twin brothers.
“They loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Sesame Street, and I told the story of their lives with markers and construction paper,” explains the native of Saint Joseph, Michigan who from that point on dreamt of becoming a professional writer. At Northwestern University, though, her literary dreams were dashed.
Practical Magic: A glimpse inside author Alice Hoffman's enchanting career [Costco Connection, September 2011]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
The Costco Connection
September 2011
Love. Loss. Survivorship. These are the themes that are at the heart of the 18 novels, eight young adult books and three books of short fiction that the prolific Alice Hoffman has crafted since the beginning of her career in 1973.
Her novel, Here on Earth, was an Oprah Book Club choice in 1998. That same year, her book, Practical Magic, was made into a Warner Brothers film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman. Her young adult novel, Aquamarine, made it to the silver screen in 2006, starring teen queens Joanna “JoJo” Levesque, Emma Roberts and Sara Paxton.
Hoffman says that while it’s thrilling to watch her books make a splash in theaters, her goal is to understand life’s biggest questions. Her novel, At Risk, for instance, concerns a family dealing with AIDS, and can be found on the reading lists of many universities, colleges and secondary schools.
Picture Perfect [Costco Connection, January 2011]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
The Costco Connection
January 2011
From a fatal car crash and the death of a parent, to the drama of comforting a sick child and coping with infidelity, life’s greatest emotional challenges play out in the pages of Caroline Leavitt’s “Pictures of You.”
Here’s the scenario: Two slightly desperate women get into their cars late on a September afternoon in an attempt to run away from their marriages. But on a windy, foggy highway they collide. The survivor of the fatal accident is left to pick up the pieces, and not only of her own life. Within months she becomes intimately involved in the lives of the other woman’s devastated husband and fragile son, who suffers from chronic asthma. Can they build a new life together?
Beverly Cleary's World [The Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
The Costco Connection
April 2010
“RAMONA QUIMBY WAS nine years old. She had brown hair, brown eyes, and no
cavities,” writes beloved children’s book author Beverly Cleary in the first chapter of her bestseller, Ramona’s World. It chronicles the day our heroine meets her new baby sister, Roberta.
This is one of more than three dozen books penned by Cleary in the more than five
decades (her first book, Henry Huggins, was published in 1950; her last was Ramona’s World in 1999) that she has been drawing kids into the adventures of her characters. Klickitat Street, where several of them live, is based on her own childhood neighborhood.
Motion Pictures: Scanimation inventor creates a literary movement [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
January 2010
The Costco Connection, page 71
“I’m mostly interested in finding ways to make magic,” says Rufus Butler Seder, a filmmaker, inventor, toymaker, and author of several moving picture books published by Workman Publishing including Gallop! (2007), Swing! (2008), and his 2009 newest release, Waddle!
What is scanimation?
“It is a technique that combines the eye’s ability to use parallax perception with moiré-style multiple-line patterns, and a sheet of acetate,” Seder explains. “Ultimately, the brain thinks that the images on the page are actually moving. But really the only thing that is happening is what is going on between your ears. It’s a wonderful, patented, optical illusion.”
Riding shotgun with Velva Jean [Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
The Costco Connection / Book Beat
August 2009
“Daddy says I’m going to hell,” writes Jennifer Niven in the first chapter of her first work of fiction, Velva Jean Learns to Drive, a coming-of-age tale of a spunky young woman growing up in Appalachia in the years before World War II.
“You, my baby, are not going to hell,” comforts her mother. “You’re a good child, true and pure, and the Lord will call you when it’s time. You can’t bloom the flowers before they’re ready.”
After reading those few paragraphs it’s nearly impossible to keep from being drawn into Niven’s melodic prose as she unfurls the bittersweet drama of Velva Jean’s life. Readers are quickly catapulted into the pivotal period from July 22, 1933, the day her father insists she be baptized, to the tragic moment her beloved mother dies a few weeks later.
Before Velva Jean’s mama passes, she urges her only daughter to “live out there” in the great wide world. “That’s where you belong.”
G is for Green [Costco Connection]
Article by Hope Katz Gibbs
The Costco Connection
April 2009
From organic peas to natural wooden toys, more parents and grandparents are determined to expose their little ones only to the safest, environmentally correct products. Execs at the UK-based publishing company Priddy Books have taken the cue from these savvy customers, and recently launched the Organic Baby book series, which is printed on recycled paper with soy ink.
The Gooseberry Patch is Cooking [Costco Connection magazine]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
The Costco Connection
November 2008
Things are cooking at Gooseberry Patch, a multimillion-dollar company with a country flair that publishes catalogs, comfort-food-friendly cookbooks, calendars and organizers.
Last year, the company published its 100th cookbook and shipped out more than 350,000 packages from its catalog of more than 500 items less than $20-which includes a selection of wall and pocket-size calendars, night lights, Mason jars, bowls, kitchen accessories, food items and kits, Christmas ornaments and soap pumps.
The company’s 100 employees are like family, say founders Vickie Hutchins and Jo Ann Martin-two entrepreneurs who didn’t expect to build an empire back in 1984. They were both stay-at-home moms looking for something to do after the kids went off to school. One morning the neighbors were chatting over their shared backyard fence in picturesque Delaware, Ohio, and decided to start a catalog company.
An Answer to Cancer? [The Costco Connection]
By Hope Katz Gibbs
September 2008
Dr. David Servan-Schreiber believes we have the power to fight cancer
BEFORE HE WAS diagnosed with brain cancer at age 31, Dr. David Servan-Schreiber could be found scarfing down a bowl of chili con carne on the elevator at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in between teaching classes and seeing patients.
“I’d sometimes add a bagel to the mix, and wash it all down with a can of Coke,” admits Servan-Schreiber, the author of Anticancer: A New Way of Life, which hits bookstores in September. “It’s a pretty scary mix to me now.”
However, it took another bout with cancer seven years later, when he was 38, before the neuropsychiatrist could bring himself to slow down or change his habits.
Dr. Ben Carson's "Take the Risk" [Costco Connection]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
Costco Connection / Author Spotlight
February 2008
How risky is it to separate conjoined twins? Dr. Ben Carson, director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, says he doesn’t think about his work in those terms. “You don’t go into a field that requires cracking people’s heads open or operating on something as delicate as the spinal cord unless you are comfortable with taking risks,” explains Carson in his latest book, “Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose, and Live with Acceptable Risk” (Zondervan, 2008).
Publisher Mascot Books is a start-up all-star [Costco Connection]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
Costco Connection magazine, November 2007
Book Beat, page 41
BACK IN 2002, AIMEE ARYAL was a mom on a mission. She and her husband, Naren, had just taken their 2-year-old daughter, Anna, to watch their college alma mater, Virginia Tech, play a football game. On the way out of the stadium the toddler made a request: “Mommy, I want a book about the Hokie Bird.” The Hokie Bird, of course, is Virginia Tech’s mascot. And the idea of taking home a souvenir sounded like a fine idea to Aimee, who graduated from the university with an accounting degree in 1993 (Naren graduated in 1992). But once inside the campus bookstore, she realized there was no such book to be found. So on the way from Blacksburg back to their house in northern Virginia, Aimee wrote one.
What a difference a faux makes [Costco Connection magazine]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
The Costco Connection, March 2007
Member Connection profile, page 64
WHEN ADRIENNE VAN DOOREN, a Costco member in Alexandria, Virginia, went to check out a model home a few years a she noticed some extraordinary faux painting throughout the house. But when she asked the designer who had done the work, the woman wouldn’t tell.
“It made me angry because I’m a faux painter, and it didn’t seem fair that she would not give the artist any credit,” explains van Dooren, who decided the only way to liberate faux artists was to showcase them. She also wanted to prove that, for only a little money, the average person could use faux techniques (such as crackling and aging or sponging paint) to transform a home.
On Crews Control [Costco Connection magazine]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
The Costco Connection, January 2007
Member Profile, page 23
MICHAEL H. NEEDED HELP. The producer / director had to schedule four video shoots for a documentary he was filming in India, and he didn’t know where to start. So he contacted Crews Control, a Silver Spring, Maryland, company that represents independent film crews from Alaska to Zimbabwe. The firm connected him with Dushyant Mehta of India Pictures, someone they had worked with for years. The shoot went off without a hitch.
Secrets of the South [Costco Connection magazine]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
Costco Connection magazine, December 2004
Book Club, page 29
THE CHARACTERS STARTED COMING TO Edward Jones sometime in 1991. “I’d be standing on the comer waiting for a bus, or picking out some broccoli in the supermarket, and there they’d be,” says Jones. So by the time he banged out the novel a decade later, he was thrilled—and a bit relieved—to get the characters out of his head. The next goal for the author was to find a publisher.
Picture This: Childrens books may fetch top dollars [Costco Connection magazine]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
Costco Connection magazine, September 2006
Book Beat, page 33
THOSE PICTURE BOOKS ON YOUR child’s bookshelf may be worth a small fortune, say Salt Lake City Costco members Linda and Stan Zielinski. In their newly self-published book, The Children’s Picturebook Price Guide: Finding, Assessing, & Collecting Contemporary Illustrated Books, they estimate just how much.
Lessons in Leadership: Jonathan Alter captures essence of FDR [Costco Connection magazine]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
Costco Connection magazine, May 2006
Book Beat, page 53
WHAT TURNS A PERSON into a leader? What is the relationship between being a great personality and a great president? What enables one person to lead when others—perhaps more intelligent or experienced—to rise to the occasion?
Those are some of the questions Newsweek Senior Editor Jonathan Alter answers in his thought-provoking, highly readable new book, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.
Bite me! The Historian brings Dracula to life [Costco Connection magazine]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
Costco Connection magazine, June 2005
Book Beat, page 39
YOU MAY WANT TO TUCK a few bulbs of garlic into your pockets when you read Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel, The Historian. This novel about the life-and afterlife-of Vlad III of Wallachia (1431-1476-?) is wonderfully creepyespecially when read late at night. Even before its release, The Historian was predicted to be as popular as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. And that is what the book’s publisher, Time Elizabeth Warner’s Little, Brown, is banking on. After a heated auction last summer, Little, Brown paid Kostova $2 million to publish her 656-page book.
A Paper Cut Above: Another masterpiece from Robert Sabuda [Costco Connection magazine]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
Costco Connection magazine, November 2004
Book Beat, page 51
IT WAS THE POP-UP ADVENTURES of Super Pickle that did it.
Illustrator Robert Sabuda, then 7, was refusing to cooperate for the dentist and, in an attempt to keep him from escaping from the office, Sabuda’s mom reached into a bin of children’s books. Into his hands she placed the first pop-up book the young man from a tiny town in rural Michigan had ever seen.
Not only did Sabuda relax enough to keep from biting the doc, but pop-up art is the style of illustration he came to master.
Odd Girl’ Speaks Out [Costco Connection magazine]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
Costco Connection magazine, February 2004
Book Club, page 47
IT HAPPENED ON THE PLAYGROUND. A nasty girl in Rachel Simmons’ third-grade class went around to the other kids and encouraged them not to play with the 8-year-old.
“I was mortified,” say the native of suburban Maryland, who admits the experience stuck with her. Fortunately, it also empowered her to write two books on the topic of female aggression.
A Recipe for Success: Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook [Costco Connection magazine]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
Costco Connection magazine, June 2003
Book Beat, page 65
WHEN PHYLLIS PELLMAN GOOD AND DAWN RANCK sat down to assemble the Fix-It and Forget-It Cookbook, they had no idea it would hit the New York Times bestseller list. And the Publishers Weekly bestseller list. And the USA Today bestseller list. Ditto for the Book Sense bestseller list, which tracks sales from 350 independent bookstores across the country.
It was the only book that sold more than I million copies last year, outselling the popular Lord of the Rings movie tie-ins by two to one.
For the Birds: Sibley Guide [Costco Connection magazine]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
The Costco Connection, November 2001
Book Beat, page 61
SINCE HE WAS 7, illustrator David Allen Sibley has been wild about birds. He spent years trekking into the wilderness to study birds with his dad, well-known Yale University ornithologist Fred Sibley. Then, in 1980, after a year of studying biology at Cornell University, he realized he wasn’t going to learn all he wanted to know about the biology of birds inside a college lab. So he traded in his textbooks for a dark blue Ford Chateau van and began traveling from woods to marsh to swamp to beach throughout the United States, studying and sketching his feathered friends in their native habitats. It was a trip that would last eight years.
An Ounce of Prevention [Costco Connection magazine]
by Hope Katz Gibbs
The Costco Connection, May / June 1999
Summer Recreation, page 29
YOUR CAREFULLY PLANNED TRIP OVERSEAS could be ruined by a mosquito. Yellow fever is just one of the nasty souvenirs the tiny insect could give you to remember it by, not to mention the serious infections you could pick up from food, water, surfaces, animals and people you meet. Before you pack your suitcase and update your passport for a trip to a developing country on business or pleasure, schedule a visit to your local travel clinic for required international immunizations. They may be your only defense against the most common international diseases, such as yellow fever, DTP, hepatitis A and B, typhoid fever, rabies and meningitis. Without proper vaccines, experts say, travelers will likely be quarantined and forced to get the shots at the border. More often than not, border guards administer vaccines themselves, frequently not using disposable syringes. Improper sanitation dramatically raises the risk of contracting AIDS, hepatitis B, and other blood-borne diseases. The smart thing to do is to get your shots before you leave the country.