Book Reviews

"The Magic Half" Annie Barrows Miri travels back in time by looking into glasses that she finds taped to the wall in her bedroom.  When she travels back in time, she becomes friends with Molly, who lives in 1935.  Miri tells Molly all about World War II.   I recommend this book because I think it is interesting that a girl travels back in time.  I learned about World War II. Germany and Japan fought.  My best friend recommended this book to me, and I recommend it to you. Reviewed by Sophia, 7 Overland Elementary Los Angeles "Old Yeller" Fred Gipson With Papa gone and no one to take care of Mama and Arlis, Travis takes Papa's place.

"The Magic Half" Annie Barrows Miri travels back in time by looking into glasses that she finds taped to the wall in her bedroom.  When she travels back in time, she becomes friends with Molly, who lives in 1935.  Miri tells Molly all about World War II.   I recommend this book because I think it is interesting that a girl travels back in time.  I learned about World War II. Germany and Japan fought.  My best friend recommended this book to me, and I recommend it to you. Reviewed by Sophia, 7 Overland Elementary Los Angeles "Old Yeller" Fred Gipson With Papa gone and no one to take care of Mama and Arlis, Travis takes Papa's place.

The Poetry Lesson Andrei Codrescu Princeton University Press: 128 pp., $19.95 This book, with its punishing, dread-inspiring title and pleading skeleton on the cover, is actually one of the funniest, most irreverent you'll read this year. Part memoir, part novel, part poem, part essay ("I sometimes feel that it's unfair to have so much experience, so I distribute it among characters"), "The Poetry Lesson" requires the willing suspension of credulity and a reader's refusal to get offended, hard as Andrei Codrescu may try. He's not quite Borat in emeritus robes, but almost.

Finally, a commemoration I can get behind: On Feb. 5, at Town Hall in Manhattan, t he New York Review of Books will celebrate its 50th anniversary with an event featuring, among other contributors, Joan Didion , Michael Chabon and Daniel Mendelsohn . The magazine was founded in February 1963, during a printers' strike that shuttered New York's newspapers, although its roots go back to the late 1950s and the dismay of its founding editors,...

A best-selling British author has been caught red-handed slamming others' books on Amazon while praising his own under a number of pseudonyms. It was the assiduous work of Jeremy Duns, another writer, that laid out a case demonstrating that prize-winning mystery writer R.J. Ellory had been writing the "sock puppet" reviews on Amazon. Ellory has admitted to using the sock puppetry -- pseudonymous handles to post positive Amazon reviews of his own books and one-star reviews of others'.

Free Will Sam Harris Free Press: 85 pp., $9.99 paper Religion for Atheists Alain de Botton Pantheon: 320 pp., $26.95 Once upon a time I took a degree in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. One of my tutors was Don Cupitt, a philosopher and radical theologian who challenged the doctrine that Jesus was God incarnate; Cupitt, though a priest himself, questioned the entire theistic notion of God. If God isn't God, one might think, then what's the point of him?

In Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "Brothers," a teacher, during the annual school play, watches a student, Henry, watch his younger brother, John, up on the stage. John, an "imp" and "brass-bold," is quite without stage fright: He had no work to hold His heart up at the strain; Nay, roguish ran the vein. Younger brothers are like that, sometimes. And sometimes it is the serious older brother, watching from the shadows, who dies a thousand deaths.

What better way to celebrate World Book Day on Thursday than to try out some new books that others have found wonderful? With thousands of books in print and new ones coming every day, a well-written book review can give you a small taste of a story without spoiling your appetite for the rest of the plot. So feed your mind and satisfy your hunger for new books to read by checking out the suggested books on the Times Launch Point Web site: http://www.latimes.

The Cerebral Symphony: Seashore Reflections on the Structure of Consciousness by William H. Calvin (Bantam Books: $19.95; 401 pages) One of the ongoing delights of this book-reviewing gig is that I get to meet such interesting people: the scientist-authors of books on topics from anthropology to zoology. (I don't actually meet them, of course, but I read their books, which in some ways is even better.

The Assignation: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates (The Ecco Press; $16.95; 192 pages) When there are 41 separate "stories" in 192 pages, words like vignette, fragment and note leap unbidden to the mind, but what publisher would risk one of those on a dust jacket? The public for apercus is smaller than the public for haggis, and not nearly as keen.

There were trainer Richard Mandella, veteran owner and mogul B. Wayne Hughes … and KISS frontman Gene Simmons in the winner's circle after the $300,000 Malibu Stakes on Wednesday at Santa Anita Park. Posing, pictures and polite chatter. What did Mandella and Simmons have to talk about after Hughes' stubborn chestnut colt named Jimmy Creed won the Grade I race for 3-year-olds at seven furlongs? "I wanted to sing a little bit and see if he might pick me up for the band," joked Mandella, Jimmy Creed's trainer.

Who Am I A Memoir Pete Townshend Harper: 544 pp., $32.50 Pete Townshend has always been rock 'n' roll's reluctant warrior. The driving force behind the legendary band the Who, Townshend revolutionized rock with his guitar and pen. He wrote numerous anthems, including "My Generation," "See Me, Feel Me," "Baba O' Reilly" and "Won't Get Fooled Again," and, when he wasn't smashing guitars, embraced his role as the thinking man's...

The Twelve Justin Cronin Ballantine Books: 592 pp., $28 No one expected Justin Cronin to sink his teeth into a post-apocalyptic vampire novel. He was an award-winning author of quiet literary fiction when he drafted a story so compelling and frightening that he landed a $3.75-million, three-book deal. The trilogy began in 2010 with "The Passage," a 784-page runaway bestseller, one of the few books that could boast of billboards on Sunset Boulevard. "The Twelve" is second in the series, but even the most devoted fans may notice a bit of a sophomore slump.

"Marvel Comics: The Untold Story" performs an act of what superhero comics fans might term "retcon" - or retroactive continuity - by returning to the beginning of the superhero industry and telling the tale again with a number of previously invisible heroes suddenly added to the story: the men and women who created superhero comics. Superhero comics has always been a bit of an oddball, a niche genre with a small but fiercely devoted fan base and a penchant for stories about flawed, outcast heroes who struggle not only to save the world but find their place in it. Sean Howe's book traces the byzantine histories of the colorful characters on the comics pages and in the Marvel offices, from the inception of the superhero in the 1930s through the modern era, and finds the real and the fictional equally laced with epic triumphs, tragic reversals of fortune, backstabbing and melodrama.

We Sinners A Novel Hanna Pylväinen Henry Holt, 189 pp., $23.00 Hanna Pylväinen's debut novel, "We Sinners," is remarkably funny for a book about a deeply religious family grappling with loss of faith. Pylväinen tells the story - in alternating chapters from the point of view of the parents and several of the nine children - of the Midwestern Rovaniemi family, members of a Finnish sect of Lutheranism called Laestadianism. They live in a house too small to fit them all and get around in a vehicle so "mortifying to drive" that it is known as the "character-building van. " They are supposed to renounce television, popular music and, of course, dating outside the church.

Panorama City A Novel Antoine Wilson Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 292 pp., $24 In fiction, when country naifs ship off to the big city to reinvent themselves, they go to New York or Paris. On the off chance they end up in Los Angeles, they usually skulk around muggy corners in Hollywood hawking scripts. They do not often go to the outer San Fernando Valley, unless they are perhaps looking for employment in the field of cinematic sexual stamina. That's where Oppen Porter, the 28-year-old narrator of Antoine Wilson's second novel, "Panorama City," winds up on a quest to become a "man of the world.

Irwin R. Blacker--author, professor emeritus at the USC School of Cinema and Television and a book reviewer for The Times--died early Saturday at Sherman Oaks Community Hospital after a heart attack at his home in Sherman Oaks. He was 65. A graduate of Ohio University who received his doctorate in English at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Blacker taught at Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind., before joining the USC faculty in 1964.

J.K. Rowling wrote "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" as a single mum on the dole. Seven books, 4,100 pages and a blockbuster film series later, she's one of the wealthiest authors on the planet - worth more than $900 million. That's about as close as any author ever gets to a sure thing. Yet Rowling has walked away from Harry Potter into uncharted territory. On Thursday, her novel "The Casual Vacancy" hits shelves and e-bookstores. Little is known about it beyond the basics: It's a contemporary, realistic novel written for adults.

If there's a more beautiful museum exhibition catalog than LACMA's "Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective," I haven't seen it. Exquisitely designed by Lorraine Wild and featuring knockout new photographs by Fredrik Nilson of every work in the show, the book sets a standard of excellence that matches Price's extraordinary art. FOR THE RECORD: "Ken Price Sculpture": A review in the Sept. 12 Calendar section of the LACMA exhibition catalog "Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective" misspelled the last name of photographer Fredrik Nilsen as Nilson.