Blue Bicycle Books

Join us Thurs., Nov. 14, 7 pm as Deborah Burns will be here to discuss her new memoir Saturday’s Child (She Writes Press, pb., 256 pp., $16.95). The talk will be moderated by Anne Janas, a Charleston-based communications strategist and board member at the Gibbes Museum of Art.

An only child, Deborah Burns grew up in prim 1950s America in the shadow of her beautiful, unconventional, rule-breaking mother, Dorothy―a red-haired beauty who looked like Rita Hayworth and skirted norms with a style and flair that made her the darling of men and women alike. Married to the son of a renowned Italian family with ties to the underworld, Dorothy fervently eschewed motherhood and domesticity, turning Deborah over to her spinster aunts to raise while she was the star of a vibrant social life. As a child, Deborah revered her charismatic mother, but Dorothy was a woman full of secrets with a troubled past―a mistress of illusion whose love seemed just out of her daughter’s grasp.

In vivid, lyrical prose, Saturday’s Child tells the story of Deborah’s eccentric upbringing and her quest in midlife, long after her parents’ death, to uncover the truth about her mother and their complex relationship. No longer under the spell of her maternal goddess, but still caught in a wrenching cycle of love and longing, Deborah must finally confront the reality of her mother’s legacy―and finally claim her own.

Deborah Burns is a former Chief Innovation Office and brand leader for ELLEgirl, ELLE Décor, Metropolitan Home, and ELLE Global Marketing. Now a media industry consultant, she helps brands, executives, and professional women reinvent themselves through her expertise, coaching process, and website, skirtingtherules.com, which she founded. Beneath her business leader exterior, however, always beat the heart of a writer, and several years ago she began the creative journey to write Saturday’s Child and tell her mother’s story. She lives on Long Island, New York with her husband and their three children.

Join us Wed., Oct. 23, 5:30 pm as author Dr. Troy Hall will be here to to discuss his new book Cohesion Culture (Koelher Books, hb., 160 pp., $24.95).

In Cohesion Culture, Dr. Troy Hall convincingly argues that leaders who are objective, evenhanded, and humbly serve others thereby make an impact. Sixty-three percent of employees are actively searching for a new position. In today’s war for talent, the focus should be on talent retention, not just talent attraction. C-Suite Executives, Company Founders, and Sr. HR Leaders need to develop an organizational culture where employees want to belong. Dr. Troy Hall helps you create a “Best Places To Work” environment, where your employees love to work, and stay to work.

As the Chief Strategy Officer for South Carolina Federal Credit Union, Dr. Troy and his team have built a Cohesion Culture™ where employees have a sense of belonging, feel valued, and make a commitment to organizational success. Dr. Troy uses his book to showcase how and why South Carolina Federal Credit Union has been named a “Best Places To Work” by Glassdoor, the Credit Union Industry, and state of South Carolina. Dr. Troy’s mission is to advise executives on how to build a Cohesion Culture™ with the expressed intent of retaining top talent. When a culture of cohesion is in place, employees experience a sense of belonging, feel valued and align with the commitments of your organization.

Join us Sat., Oct. 12, 2 pm as author Leigh Jones Handal will be here to give us a tour of Lost Charleston (Pavilion, pb., 144 pp., $22.50).

From the dawn of the photographic era, Lost Charleston chronicles the markets, mansions, hotels, restaurants, church towers and cherished businesses that time, progress, and fashion have swept aside.

The miracle of Charleston is that despite the very worst that man and nature has thrown at it–from earthquakes to hurricanes, great fires to Civil War bombardment–so much of the city has been preserved. Lost Charleston shows what else could have been on display for tourists to visit had events been otherwise. Using classic archive images, Charleston’s greatest architectural and cultural losses are documented in chronological order from 1861 through to 2018.

Apart from the grand buildings there are also elements of Charleston life that have disappeared over time, many of which will still resonate with the local community. These include beloved local restaurants, annual festivals, the fishing fleet that DuBose Heyward wrote about in his novel Porgy, a famed local football team, trolley cars, and the Piggly Wiggly store. Plus there’s the Jenkins Orphanage Band whose dance moves gave the city its most famous export: The Charleston!

A native South Carolinian, Leigh Jones Handal has been an avid student of Low Country history since she was a Brownie Scout. She is co-editor of the City of Charleston’s official Tour Guide Training Manual and organized Historic Charleston Foundation’s annual spring house-and-garden tours for 13 years, as well as the Preservation Society of Charleston’s Fall home tours. A graduate of the College of Charleston, Leigh has been a licensed tour guide for more than 20 years.

Join us Sat., Oct. 2, 2 pm as Kathryn Smith will be here to sign her new book Gertie: The Fabulous Life of Gertrude Sanford Legendre; Heress, Explorer, Socialite, Spy.

Gertie lived a 20th century life full of fun, adventure, derring-do and drama. Read all about her Gilded Age girlhood, explorations on three continents, hijinks on the French Riviera with the Lost Generation, work for the OSS—the original American spy agency—during World War II, and her imprisonment by the Nazis. And that’s less than half the story of this remarkable South Carolinian’s life!

Kathryn Smith is a journalist and writer with a long fascination with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his circle and his times. Her abiding interest in FDR led to her decision to write The Gatekeeper, the first and only biography of Marguerite LeHand, his private secretary, confidant, advisor and friend. Kathryn frequently speaks about Missy, often in character and in period costume. Kathryn’s most recent venture is co-authorship, with Kelly Durham, of the Missy LeHand Mystery novels, beginning with Shirley Temple Is Missing. A second novel, The President’s Birthday Ball Affair, is in the works.

Just about every aspect of the eighties has come back as retro. (The 2020 Olympics will even have break dancing, which sounds like an idea from one of the zanier Electric Boogaloo characters.) But one major part of life in the Reagan era that hasn’t been rehashed much is the overhanging threat of nuclear war. 

It’s certainly the first thing that comes to mind when my fellow parents stress about their children suffering the trauma of active shooter drills. We had fallout shelters and War Games and The Day After, and “99 Red Balloons.” 

Corrie Wang’s City of Beasts is a terrific, old-school post-nuclear dystopia, the kind we used to see back in the eighties. There’s also catastrophic flooding in a nod to a more current crisis. Global warming sea-level rise has sent refugees to Buffalo NY, and then in the chaos, someone hacked the missile codes, so her story begins after a good-old-fashioned World War III. (Remember that? Back in the Cold War, that extra Roman numeral I was all it took to signify nuclear annihilation and all its radioactive aftermath.)

A few years later and the world — or Buffalo at least —  has divided into two camps, women on one side of the Niagara River and men on the other. When the teenage narrator, Glori, crosses over and encounters the men’s world for the first time, it offers up a whole host of fun possibilities and rifts on male/female relations. The women live in something of a nerdy sorority, kung fu convent, taking turns at chores and training as lethal ninjas (nun-jas?). The men live like slobs — Lord of the Flies with porn and motorcycles. 

But what’s fun about this book is that Corrie isn’t heavy-handed with this dichotomy. The women’s side is a bit boring in its rigorous asceticism, and the men have their charms. To be sure, it is a dystopian world,  twice-ruined, and both times are the fault of men. But Wang clearly has more to say than “girls rule / boys drool.” It’s clear that, for all their faults, Wang actually likes the men. She herself has spent a lot of time in a male-dominated arena — her other gig is as a restauranteur — and Food and Beverage is probably one of the best ways to see men at both their worst and their best, often in one night. 

Corrie may be a Buffalo girl who spent her formative years in Brooklyn, but Charleston is her home now, and she gives her new hometown a shout-out. Glori comes across a group of refugees from the Lowcountry in an abandoned subway. If you need another warning about climate change, how about seeing residents of your town living in subterranean squalor below Buffalo, because they can’t handle the New York / nuclear winter.

I highly recommend City of Beasts. Wang clearly loves her characters, be they ‘beasts’ or ‘fees,” and she’s written a snappy, fresh take on male-female dynamics.