Books

Arthur B. "Dutch" Schultz, 82, an 82d Airborne Division paratrooper portrayed in the 1962 epic about D-Day, The Longest Day, and whose battle experiences were documented in several major World War II history books, died of pulmonary disease Sunday at home in Helendale, Calif. The former Frankford and Bucks County resident was raised in Detroit, where he graduated in 1940 from St. Philip Neri High School. After two years in New Mexico with the Civilian Conservation Corps, Mr. Schultz itched for action: He enlisted in the Army in 1942 and volunteered to be a paratrooper.

Thank you, Ocean City, for a wonderful month. After years of talking about it, my husband and I decided to spend July at the Shore. We rented the top floor of a duplex. The first two weeks, we shared the apartment with my brother and sister-in-law. The second two weeks, friends joined us. We did all the things we had talked about all winter: bike rides in the morning, afternoons on the beach, day trips to Atlantic City, Cape May and Rehoboth, and walks on the boardwalk at night.

Ralph Brooks Jr., the 7-year-old South Philadelphia boy paralyzed by a suspected drug dealer's bullet in July, arrives at school in a paratransit bus yesterday to start in the second grade.

You know librarians, they're always trying to give away books (provided people agree to return them). Nothing newsworthy there . . . except that at the Free Library of Philadelphia, they've done a rather spectacular job of giving out books in the last 12 months. Library officials report that the central library and 53 neighborhood branches circulated some six million volumes during the fiscal year ending June 30. That's the highest count since 1966, the period city librarians reverentially refer to as the Free Library's "heyday," when 6.2 million tomes were borrowed.

JumpStart, A Love Story Robb Armstrong (HarperCollins / $12) A VALENTINE KISS Carla Fredd, Brenda Jackson, Felicia Mason (Pinnacle / $4.99) If you're saving your sweetie's Valentine treat for the weekend (or you just plain forgot), two new books appealing to the traditionally mushy and the playfully poetic may be just the ticket. Philly resident Robb Armstrong moves his JumpStart comic strip up to the big time with his first full-length cartoon, "JumpStart, A Love Story.

The opening of Borders Book Shop in Center City yesterday invited browsing and the sampling of coffee in a corner espresso bar. In the former Nan Duskin building at 1727 Walnut St., it is the 11th of a Michigan chain known for its large selection and hard-to-find books.

The Great American Read-Aloud gave books a voice, and it gave many shoppers something different to do at the Springfield Mall on April 24. The event was sponsored by the Delaware County Library.

Do children really read the books on those recommended reading lists? This year at E. T. Richardson Middle School in Springfield, the chances are good that they will. Tuesday, a group of 90 seventh graders compiled a Best Books list of their favorite books in four genres. "These are truly the books they have read and loved," said Gail Outlaw, an English teacher. The project was coordinated by Outlaw and librarian Jenny Pittman, who were looking for ways to nudge students into reading more.

YOU THINK WE have a pretty good beer scene now? You should've seen this town back in 1879. Every neighborhood had its own brewery, and every corner had a saloon. In the preceding 30 years, more than 250 breweries had opened — many of them closing quickly, but others becoming national powers. A census by Western Brewer magazine counted an astonishing 94 breweries up and running. The city's population was barely half of today's, and yet it had 12 times the number of breweries we boast of in 2012.

Bill Veeck Baseball's Greatest Maverick By Paul Dickson Walker & Company. 448 pp. $28   Why did it take so long for the most colorful and perhaps most influential figure in baseball history to get a definitive biography? Probably because it took more than 20 years after Bill Veeck's death (in 1986) to put all the facets of his amazing life together. With Bill Veeck: Baseball's Greatest Maverick, Paul Dickson, author of several superb baseball books, has done more than write the best baseball biography so far this decade.

Transfer By Naomi Shihab Nye BOA Editions. 119 pp. $16   Naomi Shihab Nye is one of the most spirited voices in American poetry. The author, editor, and translator of more than 30 volumes, she is best known for her poetry collections Fuel (1998) and You and Yours (2005), and her award-winning anthology of international poems for young people This Same Sky (1992), which represents 129 poets from 68 countries. In her affirming introduction for that book, she writes, "Whenever someone suggests ‘how much is lost in translation!

On a summer's day in 1943, a young scientist at Rutgers discovered an antibiotic that would change millions of lives. But Albert Schatz, who died in West Mount Airy in 2005, was denied credit. His name never appeared on the Nobel Prize given for that work.   That's the little-known story told in Peter Pringle's new book, Experiment Eleven: Dark Secrets Behind the Discovery of a Wonder Drug (Walker & Company, 269 pp., $26). And there's a widow who remembers, and a grandson conquering cerebral palsy to create a documentary film honoring his wronged grandfather's work.

In high school, he was the guy who shaved his head in solidarity with a buddy who was going through chemo, then let the hair grow back in a mohawk. She was the girl who never wore a dress. So when Tom Burrows and Meghan Connolly showed up at the 2006 Cheltenham High School prom — he in a white tux and spectator shoes, dark hair in glossy spikes; she in a black spaghetti-strap gown with white accents, fingernails tipped in ebony lacquer — they made a striking pair. They also caught the eye of photographer Mary Ellen Mark, who included a photo of Burrows and Connolly in her new book, Prom, published in April.

There's no end to movie books — star memoirs, critical career overviews, coffee table "making of" commemorations (The Art of John Carter: A Visual Journey — really?!), sex-laden, scandalous tell-alls. Heck, somebody's even written a book about movie stars on bikes. But is that a bad thing? Of course not. For the serious film addict, watching movies is never enough. We crave more information, more insight, more dirt. So here are three compelling, original, cinema-inclined new books: The Astaires: Fred & Adele, Kathleen Riley (Oxford University Press, $27.95)

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War By Stephen R. Platt Alfred A. Knopf. 478 pp. $30 One of history's least-known conflicts for Westerners is also one of its bloodiest. China's Taiping Rebellion, from 1851 to 1864, is estimated to have killed 20 million to 30 million people, making it the most sanguinary internal war in human history. Americans, of course, tend to focus their historical attention during these years on the trauma of their own Civil War. Yet, as Stephen Platt observes in his well-researched, highly readable account of the Taiping movement, there are unsuspected connections linking the two conflicts.

Rights at Risk The Limits of Liberty in Modern America By David K. Shipler Alfred A. Knopf. 400 pp. $28.95 Best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner David Shipler believes America has "lost its way" since 9/11. "Constitutional rights are routinely overwhelmed," he says in his new book, Rights at Risk, "largely out of sight in criminal courts and interrogation rooms, in offices of prosecutors and immigration bureaucrats, and in schools. " While we talk about freedom and liberty a lot, there has been little opposition as the Patriot Act empowered the federal government to ask store owners what books we buy and what videos we rent, and to compile these and our political preferences in government files.

Anatolian Days & Nights A Love Affair with Turkey By Joy E. Stocke and Angie Brenner Wild River Books. 264 pp. $16.95 Toward the end of Anatolian Days & Nights, a 12-year-old boy, tour guide for a day to the two authors, encourages them to take shards of pottery that lie amid the rubble of the ancient Turkish city of Harran. "There are so many pots to choose from and all of them so very old, ladies. So old it makes my head hurt," he says. The honest, childlike remark seems to encapsulate the modern-day view of this intensely complex, richly fabled country.

Prague Winter A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948 By Madeleine Albright Harper. 488 pp. $29.99   Reviewed by Joelle Farrell When German soldiers occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, a Czech diplomat and his wife scooped up their toddler daughter and fled to England. The child, who would one day become the United States' first female secretary of state, was forever changed by the failed diplomacy of "appeasement" that led her home country to become one of Adolf Hitler's first victims.