{"id":1592,"date":"2010-06-25T03:22:13","date_gmt":"2010-06-25T07:22:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=1592"},"modified":"2020-05-07T13:33:41","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T17:33:41","slug":"authors-mei-ling-hopgood-and-monte-reel-at-book-beat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2010\/06\/25\/authors-mei-ling-hopgood-and-monte-reel-at-book-beat\/","title":{"rendered":"Authors Mei-Ling Hopgood and Monte Reel at Book Beat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1593\" style=\"margin: 9px;\" title=\"LuckyGirlCover\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/LuckyGirlCover.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"205\" height=\"320\" \/>Please join us on <strong>Thursday, July 8th at 7 PM <\/strong>for a special book-signing &amp; reading with husband and wife authors <strong>Mei-Ling Hopgood and Monte Reel.<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mei-linghopgood.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Mei-Ling Hopgood<\/a> is a Chinese-American journalist and author. Her first book &#8220;Lucky-Girl: A Memoir&#8221; published by Algonquin books in 2009 will be released into paperback this month. &#8220;Lucky Girl&#8221; is the story of Mei-Ling&#8217;s childhood and adopted family of Taylor, Michigan, the search and reunion with her birth parents in China and her quest for a Chinese American identity. Mei-Ling\u00a0 lives in Buenos Aires with her husband Monte Reel and their daughter.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/montereel.com\/Monte_Reel\/Home.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Monte Reel <\/a>is a South American correspondent for the Washington Post. He will be reading and talking about his first book &#8220;The Last of the Tribe,&#8221; a heart-pounding modern-day adventure set in one of the world\u2019s last  truly wild places. <em>The Last of the Tribe <\/em>is a riveting,  brilliantly told tale of encountering the unknown and the unfathomable,  and the value of preserving it.<\/p>\n<h2>&#8220;<em><strong>Lucky Girl<\/strong><\/em> is a refreshingly upbeat take  on  dealing with the pressures and expectations of family, while  remaining  true to oneself. Simple, to the point and uncluttered of the  everyday  minutiae, Mei-Ling Hopgood nails the concept of becoming one&#8217;s  own.&#8221; &#8212; Metro Times<\/h2>\n<h2>&#8220;Hopgood is a likable narrator whose life embodies a fascinating   Sliding Doors\u2013type what-if scenario. . . She deftly and movingly   contrasts her own childhood with doting parents in a Michigan suburb to  the very different lives of her sisters.&#8221;\u00a0 Winner of Elle Magazine&#8217;s  Reader&#8217;s Prize\u00a0 (Jill  Jacobs, Elle reader&#8217;s jury)<\/h2>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1594\" style=\"margin: 9px;\" title=\"last_of_tribe\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/last_of_tribe.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"163\" height=\"250\" \/>About &#8220;The Last of the Tribe&#8221;:<\/p>\n<p>Throughout the centuries, the Amazon has yielded many of its secrets,  but it still holds a few great mysteries. In 1996 experts got their  first glimpse of one: a lone Indian, a tribe of one, hidden in the  forests of southwestern Brazil. Previously uncontacted tribes are  extremely rare, but a one-man tribe was unprecedented. And like all of  the isolated tribes in the Amazonian frontier, he was in danger. Resentment  of Indians can run high among settlers, and the consequences can be  fatal. The discovery of the Indian prevented local ranchers from seizing  his land, and led a small group of men who believed that he was the  last of a murdered tribe to dedicate themselves to protecting him. These  men worked for the government, overseeing indigenous interests in an  odd job that was part Indiana Jones, part social worker, and were among  the most experienced adventurers in the Amazon. They were a motley crew  that included a rebel who spent more than a decade living with a tribe, a  young man who left home to work in the forest at age fourteen, and an  old-school <em>sertanista <\/em>with a collection of tall tales amassed  over five decades of jungle exploration.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Whizzing arrows, devious plots, heartbreak and  mystery           &#8212; it\u2019s amazing that amidst all this  intrigue and adventure, Monte Reel\u2019s main purpose in this remarkable  tale is to chart the science behind an event we may never witness again:  the discovery of a last survivor of a lost tribe. Reel masterfully  describes the peril and moral dilemmas that unfold when a team devoted  to protecting indigenous tribes stumbles upon a tribesman who, armed  with five-foot arrows and near-invisibility, would rather protect  himself. You won\u2019t find anthropology this enthralling without a bullwhip  and a fedora.\u201d -Christopher McDougall, <em>New York Times<\/em> bestselling author of <em>Born to Run<\/em><\/p>\n<h2>\u201cThe Last of the Tribe  is \u2018Avatar\u2019 for grown-ups, a tribe-in-peril-story with real people,  complicated motives, and every bit of subtlety and nuance left out of  James Cameron&#8217;s cliched script. Reel&#8217;s tale is expertly told: perfectly  timed, thoroughly researched and descriptively written. Back stories,  personal histories, character development and political context are  deftly woven into the narrative, and each departure from the quest feels  appropriate at the time.\u201d \u2013 The San Francisco Chronicle<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Please join us on Thursday, July 8th at 7 PM for a special book-signing &amp; reading with husband and wife authors Mei-Ling Hopgood and Monte Reel. Mei-Ling Hopgood is a Chinese-American journalist and author. Her first book &ldquo;Lucky-Girl: A Memoir&rdquo; published by Algonquin books in 2009 will be released into paperback this month. &ldquo;Lucky Girl&rdquo; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}