A quest to make new friends


MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend
By Rachel Bertsche
(Ballantine Books)

Making friends shouldn‘t be complicated. We’ve been doing it since we were kids, right?

But for many of us, as a new book points out, “friend-making is not the natural process it used to be.” Chicago transplant and journalist Rachel Bertsche discovers this the hard way when she finds herself without close friends to speak of, two years after moving. She comes up with a game plan to change her situation — go on one friend date a week over the next year, 52 in all.

“MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend” chronicles Bertsche‘s quest. If reading about several dozen meet-ups sounds like a drag, it can be at times. But more often than not, Bertsche’s skill as a writer and the myriad ways she finds potential dates keep things interesting. She asks current friends to set her up, approaches prospects at her yoga class and neighborhood restaurant, signs up for a speed-friending event, consults a friend matchmaker and, demonstrating she‘s willing to give anything a shot, even tries a Rent-a-Friend website.

The book is also peppered with intriguing research on topics like what makes friends click, how many friends we need and the health benefits of having friends. (“Researchers found that having low levels of connection is comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic, more harmful than not exercising and twice as harmful as obesity.”)

The audience for this kind of a book is probably limited. But Bertsche seems to have a clear idea of her target audience. She gives no explanation when referring to the likes of Regina George (the lead bully in the 2004 movie “Mean Girls”), but feels the need to include this parenthetical comment when mentioning Gallup: “You know, the company that conducts all those polls.”

For all the book’s weaknesses — the gimmicky premise, the repetitive comparisons between her old friends and new friends, the sometimes tiring accounts of dates — a reader cannot help but root for Bertsche, cheer her successes and consider trying out some of her ideas. (AP)



Mills explores greed and power

The Immortalists
By Kyle Mills
(Thomas & Mercer)

Author Kyle Mills examines the greed associated with powerful people demanding to live forever in his new novel, “The Immortalists.”

Microbiologist Richard Draman needs to find a cure for progeria, a rare genetic disorder, especially of early childhood, characterized by premature aging. His daughter has progeria, and he must find a way to save her.

The husband of another scientist approaches Draman with a horrifying tale. He claims that his wife was murdered because she was close to a discovery that might stop the aging of cells.

Draman cannot pass up the opportunity to cure his daughter and discover the key to immortality. He takes the data to review. Soon after, the other scientist dies in a car crash, and Draman is accused of industrial espionage.

The elusive cure might exist, but Draman and his family need to survive to find it.

Mills keeps the thrills coming while minimizing the medical terminology. He knows readers need just enough to become invested in the story. Great characters and vile villains mixed with a great premise — what else does a thriller need? (AP)



Black history told in images, essays

Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History 1513-2008
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.
(Knopf) 

In ‘Life Upon These Shores,’“ Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes, ”I set out to picture African-American history, to find a new way of looking at its full sweep. I imagined a book with an abundance of images of the great and small events and significant individuals who shaped the heritage of the African-American people and the history of our nation.“

The great strength of ”Life Upon These Shores“ is the ”abundance of images“ that Gates, the editor-curator, and his team of associates have woven into this book. More than 700 photos, maps, illustrations, posters and cartoons dot the book, from a 1579 illustration of Juan Garrido, a black man who was part of Hernando Cortes‘ 1519 expedition to Mexico, to the requisite photos of President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

The book‘s short essays cover both familiar topics -- the Amistad, Harriet Tubman, Dred Scott, Marcus Garvey, the Tuskegee Airmen, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X -- and lesser-known ones, including black cowboys and women activists of the 1970s. Gates and company also write about sports, literary, cultural and musical figures, including the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, boxer Jack Johnson, singer-actor Paul Robeson, baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, tennis star Arthur Ashe and radio star Tom Joyner, to name only a few.

Given the wide-ranging kind of survey book it is, anyone can find fault with it. For a book that tries to point out African-American cultural highlights, there’s not enough jazz in it for me, especially in the decades after Duke Ellington: nothing about Charlie Parker and only incidental mentions of Miles Davis and John Coltrane (whose significance as a black icon transcends his great musical accomplishments). Yet it finds room for an essay on Quincy Jones, a significant producer but hardly the equal of Parker, Coltrane or Davis, and the popular but minor singer Billy Eckstine.

Gates rightly gives President Obama‘s historic election its due, but a separate short essay on Obama as a senator is superfluous. He’s not famous for his short-lived term in the Senate.

Nonetheless, ”Life Upon These Shores“ is a good starting point for a perusal of African-American history. It would make an excellent addition to a home or school. In fact, if you‘re feeling generous this season, pick one up and donate it to the middle-school library nearest you. (MCT)