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Why I Wrote Dangerous or Safe? (Which Could Also Have Been Titled The Danger of Thinking That Everything Is Bad For You) By Cara Natterson, M.D.

During the seven years I spent in private practice as a pediatrician-checking dozens of kids each day; taking phone calls in the middle of the night; and working weekends in the hospital and office-I also became a mother. Despite my medical degree, I found myself swirling in the eddies of parental rumor just like everyone else. I was vulnerable to the same worries and certainties about every possible thing that could harm my children, just like every other parent out there.

I felt lucky because I could do something about it: I could read the studies, understand the data, and come to rational conclusions. The problem was, I didn't have enough time in the office to pass all of this information along to my patients and their families.

The list of To Do's during a checkup visit is a mile long (Do you brush his teeth? Is he wearing a helmet when he rides a bike? Is the car seat properly installed? Have you baby proofed the house? Is he walking? Is he playing sports? How many words does he have? How much TV is he watching? Is he engaging normally with others? How are his eating habits? How are his bowel movements?) It has become a parent's responsibility to remember to ask the question of the day about lead or cell phones or DEET or antibiotics or milk or organic produce or water or vaccines. And when doctors don't have time to cover it all in the office, parents take it upon themselves to seek out answers.

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As you might guess from the very long acknowledgments section, Forking Fantastic! was hardly just the work of Tamara and me. Even so, I felt a bit of a twinge when I first saw the printed book and saw that I'd compressed my thanks for my parents into one sentence.

My parents taught me to eat well, and not in a fancy-gourmet way. My dad occasionally treated us to a dinner of nothing but rare steak and homemade french fries, with red wine. My mom made fresh bread. We had epic dinners when friends and family rolled into town. And all this happened a lot of the time on a food-stamp budget.

I grew up in what most people would call a hippie house, in the back of beyond in New Mexico--city kids often asked me, ‘Do you have running water? Do you hunt for your own food?' The answers were ‘yes' and ‘no,' respectively--but we did have a diet that most other people, it turned out, did not consider normal. Of course it felt perfectly normal to me--at first. It wasn't until I started going over to friends' houses in elementary school that I realized there was a whole other world of food beyond brown rice, green salads with homemade vinaigrette and that natural peanut butter you had to stir the oil into.

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There was an important moment when the guy standing next to me at the Washington Post for the official photo for the National Book Festival in DC turned and said, "Hey Craig, how you doin'?"  I thought he looked familiar as he told me about selling books out of the trunk of his car, but it was only as he was turning away that I got a look at his nametag and read John Grisham.

Another was when I saw an elderly gentleman at the adjacent table looking for a place to sit at the breakfast reception. I stood and took my chair over, placing it beside him. "There you go." By that time I'd gotten pretty cagey about the whole nametag thing and caught a glimpse of his, Ben Bradley--the famed editor who had seen that two cub reporters by the names of Woodward and Bernstein got a crack at a little know story back in the seventies called Watergate.

I was starting to feel a little more than out of my depth.

The night before, Judy and I had attended the opening reception at the Library of Congress Reading Room. If you haven't been there, you should go. I think it's one of the most beautiful rooms I've ever been in and if you go during business hours and show them some ID they'll give you a card so that you can request any of thirty-two million books.

I was tempted to request one of mine but it was, after all, beyond business hours.

EXCERPTS (5)

EXCERPT Rock Her World: The Sex Guide for the Modern Man Adam Glasser, aka Seymore Butts (Gotham Books)

EXCERPT World Without Ice Henry Pollack, Ph.D. (Avery)

EXCERPT Don't Follow Me: A Memoir of Hampshire College in the Twilight of the '80s Richard Rushfield (Gotham Books)

EXCERPT Design Rules: The Insider's Guide to Becoming Your Own Decorator Elaine Griffin (Gotham)

EXCERPT Man of Constant Sorrow: My Life and Times Ralph Stanley, Eddie Dean (Gotham)

FEATURES (9)

FEATURE A Touch of Dead Charlaine Harris (Ace )

FEATURE On the Edge Ilona Andrews (Ace )

FEATURE Xombies: Apocalypse Blues Walter Greatshell (Ace )

FEATURE Doubleblind Ann Aguirre (Ace )

FEATURE Latino in America Soledad O'Brien (Celebra)

FEATURE Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid Dr. Denis Leary (Plume)

FEATURE Dangerous or Safe? Dr. Cara Natterson (Hudson Street Press)

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For more than a month, the mainstream media has been yammering about an economic recovery. Chasing phantom "good number" statistics amidst an onslaught of otherwise bad economic and global credit market news, the Wall Street cheering section is desperately seeking some news that the current recession is coming to an end. They talk about "the recovery in progress"--almost a fait accompli. They have been so good at this that they have fooled some investors into putting their sidelined money back into the stock market. What a masterpiece of disingenuous grandstanding. But the sad truth is that there is no genuine recovery in progress. Perhaps there will be a minor economic boost, generated by the huge bailout spending, but the bottom line is that we are in the midst of a major recession. And unlike the recessions in the past 50 years, this one is not based on just market cycles, but rather caused by a systemic failure of the global credit market. So any attempts to re-inflate the bubble with new credit (based on artificially low interest rates and bailout "programs") are bound to be unsuccessful. This recession cum depression won't end until malinvestment is driven out of the system, and trust in a fully transparent system of credit that backs genuine, truly marked-to-market tangible assets is restored.

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Dr. Cara Natterson is our guest blogger during the week of October 13th. If you have any questions for Dr. Cara Natterson, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information on Dangerous or Safe? Which Foods, Medicines, and Chemicals Really Put Your Kids at Risk -

A leading pediatrician answers a question that's on every parent's mind: What's safe for my kids?

There is no doubt that children today are living in an increasingly toxic world. Parents are more worried then ever, and conflicting reports in the media and rumors on the playground can cause even more confusion about which products are perfectly safe and which are harmful, even deadly. Dangerous or Safe? provides desperate parents with concrete answers on what foods, chemicals, and medicines pose real danger to kids.

Combining scientific data, medical expertise, and a parent's intuition, Dr. Cara Natterson-a top pediatrician and mom herself-outlines these threats by first explaining the newest scientific research and then providing a "bottom line" for parents to follow based on the facts and her medical expertise. Making complicated medical and scientific information accessible, Dr. Natterson shows parents how to maximize their children's health and safety.

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The Help, Audible.com’s Highest Rated Audio Book Ever, Wins South Africa’s Exclusive Books’ 2009 Boeke Prize

The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Amy Einhorn Books/ G. P. Putnam’s Sons) is now the highest rated audio book ever sold by Audible.com, one of the largest distributors of downloadable audio books. The 4.89 star rating is based on 2,013 consumer ratings (a majority being 5 stars, with the overall number of reviews/ratings increasing daily) of the Penguin Audio edition of The Help, narrated by Cassandra Campbell, Jenna Lamia, Octavia Spencer and Bahni Turpin.

The Help’s ever-growing success, with nearly 740,000 copies in print and the still the longest-running New York Times bestseller currently on the hardcover fiction list, now at #5 in its 27th week, continues to extend to other parts of the world.

This week, The Help won Exclusive Books’ 2009 Boeke Prize in South Africa. The Boeke Prize is a South African book award, modeled after the UK's Man Booker Prize and sponsored by Exclusive Books, South Africa’s largest retail book chain. Although “boeke” is the plural of “book” in the Afrikaans language, the Boeke Prize has only been awarded to novels written in English. The competition was launched in 1995 and 11 of the 14 winners have been debut novels, including The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Riverhead), which was a co-winner in 2004. The books are judged by a panel of book critics based in South Arica.

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Zora O'Neill is our guest blogger during the week of October 13. If you have any questions for Zora O'Neill, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some more information about Forking Fantastic!:

The innovative hosts of a hot-ticket underground supper club invite you to crank up your oven, break out the vino, and save the dinner party from extinction

Twice a month, two veterans of the New York food world prepare a big meal in a tiny kitchen, serving heaping plates of spectacular cuisine to twenty diverse people (or more). Friends old and new at their Sunday Night Dinners supper club make spirited conversation while feasting on sumptuous cooking. Never obsessed with perfect place settings or fussy details, Zora O'Neill and Tamara Reynolds instead focus on the practical joys of down-to-earth entertaining at home. In Forking Fantastic, they showcase their very best recipes for making mouthwatering dinners-and for having the time of your life.

With a healthy dose of irreverent attitude and infectious spirit, here Tamara and Zora take the pressure off and encourage us to reclaim the lost art of cooking delectable meals for the masses. Forking Fantastic! includes:

* foolproof, party-tested, delicious menus that are easy to master, each with a "Plan of Attack" for preparing multiple recipes without panic.
* practical tips on everything from shopping and stocking a kitchen to making creative vegetarian substitutions and trussing a whole lamb for spit-roasting
* hard-won advice from the trenches and an inside look at Tamara and Zora's own cooking disasters

Food-forward but always realistic, Tamara and Zora celebrate seasonal, local ingredients while also extolling cornbread mix and the frozen pea. Quirky, funny and fresh, this book arms intimidated cooks everywhere with the courage, confidence and tools they need to have people over for the sake of food and community, not for the prize of being the best hostess on the block. A manifesto for bringing back a time-honored ritual one mind-blowing feast at a time, Forking Fantastic! makes dinner parties rock.

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The Very Hungry Caterpillar Author Eric Carle Appears on “The Today Show” to Celebrate Jumpstart’s Fourth Annual Read for the Record Campaign

Acclaimed Penguin Young Readers author Eric Carle appeared on NBC’s “Today Show” yesterday in celebration of Jumpstart’s fourth annual Read for the Record campaign. Jumpstart was aiming to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to one million children in one day. They now estimate that they far surpassed that target, and expected that the book will have been read to close to 1.6 million children during the course of yesterday.

Celebrities joined Eric Carle on “The Today Show” plaza to lend their names to this important cause. Among them were actress Mary Louise Parker, actor Vince Vaughn, Disney actresses Madison Pettis and Jennifer Stone, and celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis who made Very Hungry Caterpillar-inspired cookies on the show.

Following “The Today Show,” Mr. Carle appeared at a press conference at the New York Public Library alongside actresses Mary Louise Parker and Stephanie March ("Law and Order SVU"), New York City’s Deputy Mayor, Jumpstart officials, and Bill Barke, CEO of Pearson's Higher Education Arts & Science Group. At the conference, it was announced that Mayor Bloomberg had officially declared October 8, 2009 Read for the Record Day.

Viking has acquired Deborah Harkness's A Discovery of Witches to be published in Winter 2011. This is a tale of science and magic in which a long-lost alchemical manuscript is discovered at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, leading to romance between a 1,500 year old vampire and a witch in denial of her powers. World, audio, and first serial rights were acquired in a deal by Viking's Carole DeSanti, VP and Editor at Large, from Sam Stoloff, VP & Senior Agent, Frances Goldin Literary Agency.