Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • L6

6L unda ul 21 20 13 ampa ay imes Despite variations, King believes in a common denominator Earthly creatures are constantly surrounded by the dying an the dead. Whether grief ensues depends on whether the living loved the deceased. hus her def inition: can be said to occ ur when a sur vivor animal acts in a ys that are visibly distressed or altered from the usual routine, in the aftermath of a death of a companion animal who had mat tered emotionally to him or her ow you receive ow Animals rieve also depends on whether you already believed her hypothesis. Skeptics may stay that wa y. The field of animal grief ontinues lack much controlled research.

Still, King reviews intriguing findings: elephants a tt rac ted more to elephant skulls and ivor than other objects; monkeys ha ving elevated stress hormones after a death; apes engaging in odd corpse-carr ying beha vior Ma ybe it won chang many minds but, by the end, he anecdotes begin to verge on data. onathan Rottenberg is an associate professo of psychology at the niver sity of South Florida and author of the forthcoming he Depths: The Origins of the Depression Epidemic. Book-to-movie news: Angelina olie is directing aura Hillenbrand Un broken hile director Guillermo del oro and riter harlie aufman team on Ku rt onnegut Slaughterhouse-Five literatur After I ain anks The Quarry a popular cot tish author of literar and science iction, ied in Ju the I nternationa Astronomical Un ion renamed A teroid 5099 ainbanks. The Po try Column One of the most distinctive sounds in small-town America is the chiming of horseshoe pitching. A friend always carries a pair in the trunk of his car.

stop at a park i some little town and start pitching, and soon, he says, others will hear at ringing and suddenly appear as if out of thin air. In this poem, X.J. Kennedy captures the fellowship of horseshoe pitchers. Te Kooser U.S. poet laureate 2004-0 6 Old Men Pitching Horseshoes Back in a yard where ringers groove a ditch, These our in shirtsleeves congregate to pitch Dirt-burnished iron.

With appraising eye, One sizes up a peg, hoists and lets fly A clang resounds as though a smith had struck Fire from a orge. His first blow, out of luck, Rattles in circles. Hitching up his face, He swings, and weight once more inhabits space, Tu bles as gently as a new-laid egg. Extended iron arms surround their peg Like one come home to greet a long-lost brother. Shouts from one outpost.

Mutters from the other. Now changing sides, each withered pitcher move As his considered dignity behooves Down the worn path of earth where August flies And sheaves of a ir in warm distortions rise, To stand ground, fling, kick dust with all the orce Of shoes still hammered to a living horse. American ife in oetry is made possible by the oetry Fo ndation (www.poetryfoundation rg publisher of Po try magazine. oem copyright by X. J.

ennedy. Po em eprinted from a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: Ne and Selected oems, ohns opkins niver sity Press, 2007 nsolicited manuscripts a re not accepted Book alk Bestselling ampa author Tim Dorsey The ip Tide ltraglide will discuss and sign his latest comic Florida novel at 6 p.m. Thursday at Book Swap of Carrollwood, 13144 Dale Mabry Highway, ampa. John iller Citrus hite Gold will discuss how he researched and published his alternative history novel at 12:15 p.m. Friday in Room 300, Northwest Education Complex, University of South Florida, 4202 Fowler Ta mpa.

Register by ednesday at conted.usf.edu/schedules. Author and vendor applications or the 21st annual ampa Bay Times Fe tiv al of Reading which will be held ct. 26 at the University of South Florida St. Pe ersburg, are available at festivalofreading.com. place an item in Book alk, send name, book title, appearance time, date, venue name and address, admission cost (if any) and a contact phone number to cbancrof (with alk in subject line) or Colette Bancrof ampa Bay Times, P.

O. ox 1121, St. Pe ter sburg, FL 337 31. Deadline is 14 days before publication THIS RI NG TR UE Romance and marriage get a thorough examination in a sparkling novel with a touch of history REVIEW BY JONA THAN RO TENBERG Special to the Times statistics professor at Stanford was fond of saying he plural of anecdote is not data. Ho you receive Barbara J.

King Ho Animals rieve pends on whether you agree. ven if you do, you ll warm to her tring of well-chosen anecdotes that show the reactions of dogs, cats, ducks, elephants, chimps and dolphins (among others) to death. ou will likely find the stories beautiful and the details surprising ou ll read of animals being listless at the death of a compatriot, not eating not exploring and showing body language that appears to indicate sadness or depression Wr it ten by an anthropologist sensitive to the permutations in human grief over place, ulture and time burial is only about 100,000 years old), the book also meditates about how humans grieve. Ju like humans, who var from person to person in grief, King argues the same is true of animals: shouldn require tha all dogs grieve to believe that some dogs do. Dif erences mat ter Goa grief is not chicken grief or chimpanzee grief or human grief.

Those mournful eyes eally mourn The author of How Animals Griev sho ws a pat tern of animals reacting to loss Ho Animals Griev By Barbara J. King University of Chicago Press, 208 pages, $25 REVIEW BY JAMES NOR TO ashington ost hen enr Da vid Thoreau published Wa den i 1854, he fueled a centuries- long ebate about the relationship between man and nature and the shackles that we wear when we participate in urban civilization. Th romantic image of Thoreau in his cabin is central to alden on Wheels a remarkable memoir that manages to stay light on its feet while saying a grea deal about the state of odern American society When Wa den on Wheels begins, Ken Ilgunas is in a bad place: working at a om Depot, deeply in debt for a useless undergraduate education and unable to ind meaningful work. What begins as a confrontation with his $32,000 college loan becomes a much larger conversation involving the author his parents and his ven ore indebted friend osh. The real heart of alden on Wheels is the ser vitude that most Americans willingly enter to uy houses, wardrobes, vacations, educations and cars that do lit tle more than keep them competitive with the oneses.

Ilgunas do cu ments his tra vels to Coldfoot, Alaska, where he earns oney doing anual labor under sometimes brutal conditions. also hitchhikes back to New ork, helps with the post- Katrina cleanup on the Gulf Coast, and sleeps in a van while at tending graduate school at Duke ni- versit y. All the while, he lives by his wits, learns from his numerous and candidly doc umented mistakes, and catalogs the costs and benefits of opting out of a conventional consumer xistence. In less skilled hands, this could become a journe into thinly iled martyrdom, but Ilgunas has an ac ute sense of humor that eeps the tone earnes and self-deprecating is use of xpense and income amounts (like those horeau shared in alden grounds his more abstract tor of truggling to escape from the grasp of modern onsumer society Ilgunas is a are and wonderful tra vel companion. Along the way he describes natural phenomena so skillfully that you might be compelled to flee your desk and head for the hills, walking tick in hand.

alden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Fr eedom By Ken Ilgunas New Harvest, 296 pages, $15.95 A modern-da itiner ant Thor eau iStockphoto.com Sabrina Rocco can be eached at or (7 27) 893 -8862 I was reading The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan, I emembered a time when I wore a $15 ubic zirco- nia ring to the mall. As I ordered my coffee at Starbucks, the baris ta taking my debit card almost passed out when she caught a glimpse of the bauble: My Gosh. ook at tha ring He must really love I felt guilt y. I was nowhere near engaged, so I jus laughed and brushed it of f.

Whether we like it or not, diamonds can define a woman social status. he bigger the rock ou ha ve, the more glamorous you are some would sa the more your husband loves you. Sullivan, the bestselling author behind Commencement and Ma i ne, akes this clear in her new novel. She pens the tories of ive ordinar people whose lives, tretched over dif ferent time periods, are ventually inter woven by the importance of diamonds. Sullivan novel includes a bit of histor y.

I tarts in 194 7 with Fr ances Garety who was a copywriter for ad giant A yer and Son (in real life, too). Fr ances is in charge of writing the ads for De Beers, which monopolizes most of the world diamonds. er assignment: rite an ad tha would the tradition of the diamond engagement ring to make it a psychological necessit y. She came up with Diamond Is orever which would become her legacy and is till the signature line De Beers uses toda y. hen The Engagements shifts back and forth among the lives of Fr ances and four other people.

velyn is happily married to her wealthy husband but faces an i ter- nal conflict when her son lea ves his wife and kids. ames faces the guilt of let ting his wife down all through their marriage. Delphine is a sophisticated ari- sian who risks losing ver ything to run aw ay America with a much younger man. And Kate is forced to put on a smile for her cousin wedding despite her sheer hatred for the whole institution of marriage. On the surface, The Engagements seems lik the ultimate chick lit book, but it far from that.

he novel describes relatable life problems lik those of Delphine, who feels complacent in her ar- riage and longs for a passionate romance. And as a paramedic in the late 1980 ames truggles for mone y. He can barely put food on the table but wants to buy his wife a bet ter engagement ring for hristmas. heir thoughts are dark, devastating real. All of the characters are compelling ex cept for Kate, who is inherently unlikable and xhausting She scarred by her divorce, so anything involving weddings, ven other people wedding photos, aggra vates her In 2012 Kate cousin, a gay man, is inally legally able to ge married, but the only thing she can think of is her own miser y.

And boy she makes it known. Delphine is ulturally critical during her time in A mer- ica. She operates with a certain elitism that she has acquired as a arisian, which is quite funn y. She can tand how water is ser ved with ice, how sugar is ser ved as grains and not ubes. er ant about Starbucks addiction hits home: he women in yoga pants ordering their lat tes in the morning without a it of makeup on their faces, their hair up in haphazard buns, as if he had been a wakened from a deep sleep and forced to go outside at gunpoint.

one of that in aris. The Engagements is an honest interpretation of the American marriage along with the true stor of how the diamond ring has become so deeply integrated into society It not chick lit. It anthropolog y. And it may change your mind about wanting a diamond ring after all. REVIEW BY SABRIN A ROCC Times Staf Writer A The Engagements By J.

Courtney Sullivan Alfred A. Knopf, 400 pages, $26.95 iStockphoto.com.