Asbury Park Press from Asbury Park, New Jersey • Page 74

ASBURY PARK PRESS SUNDAY, SEPT. 27, 2009 page E4 www.app.com BOOKS .1 'Cheerful Money' delights with WASP angst I DDEfe? BUG A Comedy will out in Rudnick's latest By SARAH SKIDMORE THE ASSOCIATED PRESS In today's dire economic times, a tale about the WASP culture of privilege seems like an unlikely pleasure. But in "Cheerful Money: -Me, My Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor," author Tad Friend is able to paint a picture of the now-faded cultural elite of America with the delight and disgust that only an insider can. Part MONMOUTH COUNTY LIBRARY DISCUSSION: 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct Headquarters, 125 Symmes Drive, Manalapan; "Saath Saha Gaya Dukh" by Narendra Kohli; free; 732431-7220.

OCEAN COUNTY LIBRARY AUTHOR TALK: 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. Toms River Branch, 101 Washington "Michelle Obama: First Lady of Fashion and Style" by Susan Swimmer; 732-349-6200. DISCUSSION: 10 a.m. Thursday, Oct.

Brick Branch, 301 Chambers Bridge Road; "Friday Night Knitting Club" by Kate Jacobs; 732-477-4513. DISCUSSION: 2 p.m. Friday, Oct. Brick Branch, 301 Chambers Bridge Road; "Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver; 732-477-4513. MISCELLANY HOME TOUR AND DISCUSSION: 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.

Wednesday, Sept. 30; Parking Lot 2, Ocean County College, College Drive, Toms River. Discover the legacy of Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman to receive the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes for literature. Buck lived a multicultural life.

She was raised in China, then moved to the United States, where she became an author and a mother. See Buck's 68-acre Bucks County estate, with beautiful gardens, greenhouses, a cottage, a milk house, and an 1827 renovated barn. The day will include a private tour of the home, time to stroll through the gardens and visit the International Gift Shop, a Chinese lunch, and a book discussion of "The Good $109; 732-255-0469. Submit listings at www.app.com events or write Calendar Editor, A PP 3601 Route 66, Neptune, NJ 07754-1551; calendarapp.com. A4 Other Reictifw to Hit, beeth, n4 Jertty X- iV fevii.

CHEERFUL MONEY: ME, MY FAMILY, AND THE LAST DAYS OF WASP SPLENDOR ByTidFriond (Little, Brown, $24.99) By PAUL C. GRZELLA STAFF WRITER LaDonna Racyk was a sexy, "sort of white," teenaged Tina Turner who was a classmate of writer Paul Rudnick at Piscataway High School several decades ago. While violent, she wasn't unreachable, Rudnick writes in his new book of essays, "I Shudder and Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey." "During homeroom, she once threatened my friend Jean Anne with a knife, but Jean Anne just sighed and said, 'Oh, LaDonna, put that knife and LaDonna did. One morning LaDonna appeared, uncharacteristically, in a short, filmy flowered dress. When I asked her why she'd chosen this outfit, she said, 'Because this afternoon I have to (expletive) get It's exactly this type of acerbic, sweet-sour memory that make Rudnick's new book such a laugh-out-loud pleasure to read.

For nearly 30 years, the very-out Rudnick has made his living as a screenwriter "In and Out," "Addams Family Values" and "The Stepford Wives" and playwright "I Hate Hamlet," "Jeffrey" and "The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told." Rudnick, 51, spent his formative years in Piscataway "I'm a garden variety lapsed suburban New Jersey Jew" and captures the spirit of the Garden State. He writes with great affection for his hometown and its various characters and couldn't wait to get the hell out of here. After college, he landed in pre-gentrified New York City, and he writes with glee and unjudgmen-tal warmth about the bohemian people and places of late 1970s and '80s. His chapter on the AIDS epidemic as it began to ravage the city's gay community is immediate and detailed. But Rudnick never loses his sense of humor: On the 1993 March on Washington, he writes, "As we marched, or ambled, William and I ran into people we knew, from New York or elsewhere, and we all compared our rainbow trinkets, which are the Beanie Babies of gay pride." Entertainment aficionados will enjoy the chapters that gently dish the dirt on the process of making movies and creating plays.

The stories include such celebrities as Whoopie Goldberg, Bette Midler, movie producer Allan Carr, Kevin Kline, Joan Cusack, Celeste Holm, Tony Award-winning designer William Ivey Long and the very talented and sad stage actor Nicol Williamson. "Pul Hudfitck 1 a chrrrpwn of truth (and iowimd jrsjsrl wickad huisor)ihom wt ifcon memoir and part analysis, Friend shares the funny and heartbreaking stories of his life, family and friends just as the money is running out and prestige is waning. WASP, by definition, is a white Protestant. But by those terms, Friend points out, Elvis Presley and BUI Clinton are part of the i class I SHUDDER AND OTHER REACTIONS TO LIFE, DEATH, AND NEW JERSEY By Paul Rudnick (HarperCollins, $23.99) A self-proclaimed WASP, Friend says he can give a handsome wedding toast but shies away from manual labor, and he dwells heavily on his childhood and tense relationship with his mother. Fans of Rudnick's reviews written as Libby Gel-man-Waxer in the defunct Premiere magazine also will enjoy Rudnick's new persona, Elyot Vionnet.

In five "I chapters interspersed among the essays, the New York born-and-bred Elyot shares his own twisted history and personal tastes as a 63-year-old man. In these chapters, Rudnick lets his satiric pen run wild, skewering all types of stereotypes, liberal and conservative a cannibalistic, Christmas-happy Midwest family is particularly "i 'tli 1 All in all, it was a very pleasant way to spend a few hours. Zuilter's 'Level 26' is gripping By CAROLYN LESSARD THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Serial killers are categorized by levels 1 to 25. In Anthony E. Zuiker's thriller series debut, "Level 26: Dark Origins," there is one so vicious, the FBI has given him his own category.

No one knows the identity of the murderer known as Sqweegel, or how many people he has killed. He comes up with innovative ways to administer death, and has an endless supply of resources to spy on anyone who tries to capture him. FBI agent Steve Dark comes close to apprehending Sqweegel, who retaliates by killing Dark's entire family. Dark abandons his search for Sqweegel and leaves law enforcement. But after a particularly grisly murder, a former colleague is 'Lost Symbol' is a roaring ride By DOLORES BARCLAY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS lif i'i Ot.i.-A TH i i AS with some of America's most prominent family names.

Instead, Friend writes, WASPiness is an "overlay on human character, like the porcelain veneer that protects the biting surface of a damaged tooth. Worse, the adjective is pejorative." He catalogs servants, summer homes and Shetland sweaters that define the culture. But more intriguing, he deftly captures the delightful torture of being raised in a culture of restraint. As a staff writer at The New Yorker, Friend is talented at capturing other worlds most notably the one of celebrity as he writes the magazine's "Letter From California" column. But in this book (perhaps a benefit of having spent his portion of family money on years of therapy), Friend brings the added authority of first-person experience.

A self-proclaimed WASP, Friend says he can give a handsome wedding toast but shies away from manual labor, and he dwells heavily on his childhood and tense relationship with his mother. Ultimately the book reflects on more than birthright, with his take on the influence of family, tradition and loss that shapes one's life. rolling for more than 400 pages. What might unnerve some readers is that he's able to get past Homeland Security with only a little makeup to cover his tattoos. The sought-after secret is cloaked in the mysteries of the Masons: Langdon must hunt for a Masonic pyramid that holds the code to an ancient power.

His search takes him on a D.C. tour, to the Capitol, the Washington National Cathedral, the Botanic Garden, the Washington Monument and the Library of Congress. Brown was clever in choosing the Masonic Order to center his book. It's a fraternal society steeped in history, mystery and ritual, one that has claimed as members some of histo Could 1514 A.D. be just an important date in the age of Leonardo, Machiavelli and Copernicus? Is Eight Franklin Square just the address of another nondescript building in northwest Washington, D.C.? Neither are what they seem in Dan Brown's new thriller, "The Lost Symbol" (Doubleday, a roaring ride filled with the hairpin plot turns and twisty roads that made "The Da Vinci Code" one of the most popular adult-fiction books of all time.

As with "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels Demons," don't expect pages of inspired prose or even an unpredictable ending. Instead, just ride it out and have fun with a caper filled with puzzles, grids, symbols, pyramids and a secret that can bestow dispatched by the secretary of defense to persuade Dark to resume his LEVEL 26: DARK ORIGINS By Anthony E. Zulkw with Dium Swierc-zynskl (Dutton, $26.95) duties. Zuiker, creator of the TV drama "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," provides a worthy debut, the first in a trilogy featuring Dark. His portrayal of Sqweegel is both comprehensive and impressive.

Sqweegel seems preternatural, with his latex suit, contortionist maneuvers and ability to remain undetected. It turns out that Sqweegel has been watching Dark, who has started a new life, and his pregnant wife, Sibby. He provides a rhyme meant to taunt Dark and provide vague clues about his intentions. But the events that correlate to the crimes are a bit convoluted. Zuiker offers an interactive supplement called "cyber-bridges," where the reader can log onto a Web site to view brief footage of 20 scenes meant to bridge chapters of the book.

The story stands on its own without these clips, and viewing them may interfere with the reader's interpretation of "Level 26." ry's most influential men, among them Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Mozart and Teddy Roosevelt. Solomon comes from a family of Masons. His sister, Katherine, is a scientist whose lab is housed in a massive pod in a huge warehouse outside Washington that stores the bulk of the Smithsonian's holdings. Her work in noetics sciences that explore the mind and how it relates to the physical world will likely cause a surge in the study of this arcane area. "Human thought can literally transform the physical world," Brown writes.

Katherine, of course, teams up with Langdon to save Peter and solve the puzzle. She provides Langdon with a female foil and intellectual sparring partner. Brown charges to the end of the tale at a breathless pace that only crawls when he feeds us too much Masonic history or tries to seduce us to the mysteries of noetics. The ending does not startle: It's almost predictable. But the journey is very cool.

"unfathomable power." Robert Langdon Brown's alter ego and the Harvard professor of symbology in "Angels" and "Da Vinci," is invited at the last minute by his friend Peter Solomon (secretary of the Smithsonian) to speak at the National Statuary Hall. But it's a ruse. Vhen he arrives, the hall is empty. He talks by phone to the ruse-meister a bald, tattooed massive baddie named Mal'akh, who has kidnapped Solomon and left his severed right hand (decorated with tiny tats and a Masonic ring) on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda. "Langdon tried to process this.

'What do you want from 'It's simple. You have been given access to something quite ancient. And tonight, you will share it with me. The page almost ripples with a cartoonish heh, heh, heh. Unlike the demented, almost comical albino monk in "Da Vinci," Mal'akh is a more insidious evil with a bulging ego that helps him keep the plot Kathy Griffin.

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