Books

The Obama administration's new plan to stimulate refinancings of FHA mortgages is likely to help large numbers of homeowners — even those who are deeply underwater — cut their monthly costs by switching to a loan with a rate below 4%. Here's a quick overview of the "streamline refi" program and what it will take for you to qualify. First, the baseline criteria: Your current home loan must be FHA-insured and must have been put on the Federal Housing Administration's books no later than May 31, 2009.

A change is in store for the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens’ main display of its rare books, manuscripts, drawings, photography and other literary and historical  holdings -- including a Gutenberg Bible from the 1450s, a 1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays and a gigantic first edition copy of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America.

The wait for tables is getting longer at Buck's, a popular breakfast spot for the tech elite and a weather vane for the Silicon Valley economy. Here, like everywhere else, Facebook is the talk of the town. "Charles Schwab was in the restaurant the other day, and I asked him to hook me up with some Facebook shares," said Jamis MacNiven, owner of Buck's, in the wealthy suburban enclave of Woodside. "He told me even he can't get Facebook shares. " The new tech boom officially gets underway Friday when Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg rings Nasdaq's opening bell remotely from the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, launching the largest initial public offering of stock in Silicon Valley history.

Tickets for "The Book of Mormon" at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood will go on sale to the general public starting June 10, the show's producers announced Wednesday. A daily lottery for discount tickets will also be held during the show's L.A. run. Producers of "Mormon" said that tickets for the L.A. engagement will go on sale at 7 a.m. on June 10 at the Pantages box office.

When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

First of three parts Tiffany Lee wanted a car. She was weary of the two-hour bus ride to her job at a UCLA Health System clinic. She hated having to ask friends to drive her 7-year-old son to his asthma treatments. But as a single mother with three children, bad credit and a $27,000-a-year salary, she couldn't find a bank or dealership willing to give her a loan. Then a friend steered her to Repossess Auto Sales in Hawthorne. Another buyer might have balked at the deal she was offered.

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

Comedian Greg Behrendt calls it "that dumb thing I said." He's referring to the phrase "He's just not that into you."

Hard-core Harry Potter fans who devoured the books, camped out for the movies and trekked through the theme park now have a new way to relive the boy wizard's adventures. PHOTOS: Making of Harry Potter studio tour Debuting Saturday, the Making of Harry Potter behind-the-scenes tour at theWarner Bros.studios in England will let wizards, mudbloods and muggles pull back the curtain on the movie-making secrets of the most successful film series of all time. Located 20 miles outside of London, the three-hour self-guided tour will take visitors past sets, props, costumes, models and special effects exhibits from the eight "Harry Potter" movies.

The street date of Scotty Bowers' "Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars," written with Lionel Friedberg, is Valentine's Day, but the eagerly anticipated memoir has been generating buzz for several weeks, and will most likely encounter a firestorm of criticism from some segments of the Hollywood set. It offers the former Marine paratrooper, pump jockey and bartender's accounts of three decades of having...

I remember, many years ago a mexicano working in a sweat shop on E Street by the library. I could see him through the window - a tailor by trade. Thought about asking him to make me a suit for graduation. His fingers were so thin, so dark. Usually, he labored on a sport coat. Could tell the owner had granted him privacy. He seemed happy and at ease.

"Bub Moose" Carol Wallace and Bill Wallace Bub Moose and his mom go to a valley where people live. Bub's mom tells him to stay away from people. Bub disobeys and goes to the people anyway. Will his mom find out? He also makes new friends. But when a bear is mad at his friends, can Bub stop him? Reviewed by Ryan, 11 Monterey Hills Elementary South Pasadena   "Mom's Best Friend" Sally Hobart Alexander Mom is blind. Mom's best friend is a dog. But her guide dog died and now she has to use a cane.

Gilt A Novel Katherine Longshore Penguin: 416 pp., $17.99, ages 12 and up King Henry the Eighth, to six wives he was wedded. One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded. If there's anyone in history who personifies the treacheries of marriage, it's King Henry VIII of England, who is best known for the beheadings he inflicted during a reign of nearly 38 years. What led to such a barbaric punishment for the sexual indiscretions of his betrothed is the central theme of "Gilt," which tells the fictionalized history of wife No. 5: Catherine Howard, "the forgotten daughter of the forgotten third son of the man who had once been Duke of Norfolk," writes novelist Katherine Longshore.

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama Alison Bechdel Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 290 pp., $22 First things first: If you haven't read "Fun Home," Alison Bechdel's 2006 family memoir in comic form, drop everything and get a copy right away. In its pages, Bechdel does the miraculous: tracing deftly and with nuance her complex, claustrophobic relationship with her father, an English teacher and closeted gay man who died in 1980 (in what was either accident or suicide), shortly after Bechdel came out as a lesbian.

A Disposition to Be Rich How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States Geoffrey C. Ward Alfred A. Knopf: 415 pp., $28.95. In 1863, the young Ferdinand Ward was alone with his mother in their parsonage in Geneseo, N.Y., his minister father and older brother both off to war and his older sister visiting relatives out of town. Diphtheria swept through the village, killing friends and neighbors, and each mail delivery carried the risk of disaster - would it include a notice that one of the Ward men had been killed?

Bring Up the Bodies A Novel Hilary Mantel Henry Holt: 432 pp., $28 Hilary Mantel's novel about the Tudor political puppet-master supremo Thomas Cromwell, "Wolf Hall," winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for fiction, was so richly packed with character and action that it was bound to burst its banks. Originally intended to take Cromwell through the four years that it took him to fall from the pinnacle of power (where we left him at the end of "Wolf Hall") to his own appointment with the executioner's ax, "Bring Up the Bodies" forms the middle volume of what is to be a trilogy.

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

In One Person A Novel John Irving Simon & Schuster: 426 pp., $28 Late in John Irving's 13th novel, "In One Person," the narrator, an aging writer named William Abbott, recalls visiting a high school friend dying of AIDS. It's the early 1980s, the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and Irving evokes the deathly terrors of that period, a time when people seemed, literally, to evaporate, to become, in the words of the late David Wojnarowicz, "a dark smudge in the air that dissipates without notice … glass human[s]

The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat Thomas McNamee Free Press, 339 pp., $27 Ask your average Food Network viewer or Yelp poster about Craig Claiborne and you're likely to be met with a blank look and a "Who?" How fleeting is fame in the food world. Claiborne is one of the giants of this modern age, even if today - less than 20 years after his passing - he is largely forgotten. People remember James Beard because of the foundation that keeps his name alive. Julia Child lives on in television reruns (even if some fans now believe she looked just like Meryl Streep)

Looking for a stylish read? Here are some very fashionable books out this spring. "City of Style" (Harper Collins, $21.99) is an approachable field guide to L.A. style in all its incarnations, whether Laurel Canyon bohemians or Mexican American cholas, written by former Los Angeles Times Image section staff writer Melissa Magsaysay. "L.A. style is ever-changing and moving in a direction not solely dictated by what's happening on the runway. It blends the past with current trends and a lifestyle determined by the varied landscape, golden light and sense of freedom," Magsaysay writes in the introduction.