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Book Rate
A
digested book "review": cheap shots, glib commentary,
shameless advocacy of insidious ideology of social and economic
justice and idiosyncratic and totally arbitrary choices of books
that come our way via our gallant and steadfast UPS drivers and
other routes...
Maybe.
Note: (RB) = Robert
Birnbaum; (RLW) = RL
Whalen; (JT) = Janice Tsai; (AK) = Angie
Kritenbrink; (MB) equals Matt
Borondy; and soon enough there will be other abbreviations to
deal with. Links go to Amazon.com.
Last updated: November 7, 2004
Animal Rights and Pornography – J. Eric
Miller (Soft Skull Press, 100 pp)
If you dug Kati Bambrick’s recently published “Just
Like Normal Girls” and have a fetish for the work of Susannah
Breslin, then you’re sure to get a kick out of Miller’s
Animal Rights and Pornography—a compelling collection
of short (very short, actually) stories involving disturbing topics
like anal sex, animal torture, and oversized female genitalia. (MB)
Baghdad: Truth Lies Within - Bruno Stevens (Ludion,
244 pp)
Belgian Bruno Stevens' work on the effects of war and political
strife are presented here, with a forward by the New Yorker's
Jon Lee Anderson, text by El Mundo's Monica Pietro, and
an afterward by former NYT photo editor John Morris, in the service
of, to quote the book: "The story of the people in the ancient
city of Baghdad, before, during and after the war that took place
in Iraq in the spring of 2003. It tells the story of the fall of
Saddam Hussein's regime and of the chaos which accompanied the arrival
of the Americans. But more than anything else, as its title suggests,
this book is concerned with telling the truth, and rightly so, because
few wars of modern times have ever been so lied about." (RB)
Cuba: A New History – Robert Gott (Yale,
384 pp)
There is the non-pareil and definitive historical compendium,
Cuba: The Pursuit of Liberty by Hugh Thomas, but considering
its 1971 publication date (an updated edition came out in 2001),
more current histories are in order. Robert Gott is a historian
who first started reporting from Cuba and Latin America in 1963.
I'm happy to expropriate Jon
Lee Anderson's (Che Guevera: A Revolutionary Life)
dust jacket remarks: "Richard Gott's new history of Cuba is
quite simply superb. At once immensely readable, fair minded and
contemporary yet epic in its sweep…anyone wishing to understand
Cuba today need look no further than this book." Exactly. (RB)
Never the Same Again: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Gothic
– Jesse Sublett (Boaz, 280 pp)
Jesse Sublett overcomes the brutal rape and murder of his girlfriend
in this memoir of the early years of the Austin punk scene. Music
fans and Austinites will enjoy the subtleties of this book, as it
details Sublett’s experiences growing up in the Hill Country
and playing landmark venues in Austin with his band, The Skunks.
You get the sense in reading Never the Same Again that
Jesse Sublett is one of those rare people who sucks the marrow out
of life, and you can’t help but be inspired by this story.
(MB)
Old Friends – Stephen Dixon (Melville House,
220 pp)
Stephen Dixon has written the following novels: Time to Go
(1984), Fall and Rise (1985), Garbage (1988),
Love and Will (1989), Frog (1991), Interstate
(1995), Gould: A Novel in Two Novels (1997), 30: Pieces
of a Novel (1998), and Tisch (2000). His story collections
include: 14 Stories (1981), Movies: Seventeen Stories
(1985), The Play and Other Stories (1989), All Gone:
18 Short Stories (1990), Friends: More Will And Magna Stories
(1990), Long Made Short (1994), The Stories of Stephen
Dixon (1994), Man On Stage: Play Stories (1996), Sleep
(1999), and I (2002). Start with his new novel, Old
Friends, and work your way back. Call me if you're not pleased.
(RB)
Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and The
Great American Communist Hunt – Michael Ybarra (Steerforth,
864 pp)
In recent United States history (meaning from mid 20th century
on) Senator Joe McCarthy, if he is known at all, stands as (depending
on your politics) the poster boy or the bogeyman of American politics.
By alleging the existence of varying numbers of communists in various
government agencies and mostly for providing outrageous copy for
a cowed media (sound familiar?), the Eisenhower years began with
another one of our periodic plague years. But as well-pedigreed-journalist-turned-historian
Ybarra shows convincingly, it was Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada
who was the true and lethal spear carrier of Cold War anticommunism:
creating the Internal Security Act named after him, that outstrips
John Quincy Adam's Alien And Sedition act and the US Patriot Act
as shameful antidemocratic blights on America's constitutional record.
A 27-page index and 62 pages of endnotes are welcome signs of Ybarra's
serious commitment to reliable historiography. Clearly McCarran
types are rife in American history, but I do pause to wonder what
kind of sense of humor Karl Marx had when he suggested that history
first occurs as tragedy and a second time as farce. I've never found
men like John Ashcroft and his ilk funny. Read about Pat McCarran
and you will understand why. (RB)
Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime - Geoffrey
Stone (WW Norton, 730 pp)
If the above noted McCarran book piques your interest in the history
of the suppression of dissent, constitutional scholar Stone rounds
up six periods in which free speech was especially endangered. The
book title makes clear this study is a survey from Adams' Alien
& Sedition Act through the present "War on Terrorism."
But in contradistinction to Ybarra's work, Stone remains entranced
by the more histrionic Senator Joseph McCarthy. Here's Studs Terkel's
dust-jacket observation: "Citing chapter and verse, Geoffrey
Stone has provided in plain Americanese the history of acts endangering
our fundamental rights. Covering the bloodied turf from the Alien
& Sedition Acts …to the current USA Patriot Act, this
book is must reading for every citizen interested in something called
the First Amendment." (RB)
Remembered America – Dick McBride (Rue Bella,
80 pp)
Those of you who mourned the death of Allen Ginsberg several years
ago will be interested in reading this book of Beat poetry by former
City Lights Bookshop worker Dick McBride, who wrote a memoir of
Ginsberg. As Lawrence Ferlinghetti told Dick, “I’m glad
to see you’re still going strong, there’s hardly any
of us left!” Remembered America is a worthy addition
to the Beat canon. Here’s a brief sample from “Grass,”
the final poem in this collection: “As grass grows / So ceases
sorrow / Madness welcomes sanity / Anger burns out / Hearts open
again / Like roses rising in / The ashes of memory.” (MB)
Sailors on The Inward Sea - Lawrence Thornton
(Free Press, 288 pp)
I sometimes see the map of literary USA as one of those Saul Steinberg
drawings, which gives absurdly disproportionate graphic weight to
everything (in this instance) east of Philadelphia. This does explain
my view that many wonderful writers are ignored, in the best case,
as accidents of geography. Though the NYT did note Lawrence Thornton's
acclaimed Imagining Argentina, way back in 1987, not much
has been made by the literary press of his five books that have
followed. I thought I might have seen a review of this, his latest
book, in a major newspaper, but my search engine due diligence turned
up nothing. It couldn’t be that Thornton lives in California,
could it? Anyway, being non-denominational and non-Catholic I regularly
read many West Coast writers and other forgotten people. Sailors
on the Inward Sea employs the device (conceit?) of using Joseph
Conrad's close friend and inspiration for his character Marlowe,
Jack Malone, as a window on the inner and outer worlds of Conrad.
Not a new literary gambit but not quite meta fiction. (RB)
Soul City – Toure (Little, Brown, and Co.,
184 pp)
They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but in the
case of Soul City, you almost want to. The jacket illustration
by Christian Clayton is remarkable. The text itself is as mesmerizing
as the cover art, and perhaps it could best be captured by listing
some of the proper nouns created in the book: Cornbread Boulevard,
Nappy Lane, SuperNigger, Whatevaworld, John Jiggaboo, Niggatown,
Billiemobile. This intro paragraph to Chapter 17 will give you a
nice preview of the writing style: “Fulcrum Negro is one of
the three living people who knows there’s a portal into the
path to Heaven located in Soul City. It’s found inside the
Lake of Roses, which, by some geological miracle, is over twenty
times saltier than the ocean. When the sun is high the water takes
on the color of a red rose. Because of the high salt content everyone
floats in the lake, but Fulcrum alone can swim deep into it. Here
he begins his journeys to Heaven.” (MB)
Underground Codes: Race, Crime, and Related Fires
– Katheryn Russell-Brown (NYU Press, 142 pp)
Katheryn Russell-Brown, whom I refer to in emails as simply “KRB,”
is the head of the Center
for the Study of Race and Race Relations at the University of
Florida College of Law--as well as the author of the highly regarded
The Color of Crime. KRB’s second book, Underground
Codes, takes on issues like the relationship between “gangsta
rap” and crime and the treatment of Black women in the criminal
justice system. It’s a must read for thinking people who are
concerned with the critical topic of race relations. (MB)
The W Effect - Ed. Laura Flanders (Feminist Press)
If you are not depressed enough already, pick up The W Effect,
a new collection of essays, articles, and news pieces about the
devastatingly negative effect that the Bush presidency has had on
women’s issues and the lives of women. In chapters from “Winner
Takes All,” “Weddings, Wombs and Whoopee,” “Wages
and Well-Being,” and the simple but powerfully named “War,”
Flanders, et. al, illustrate what you already knew – that
while “w” does in fact stand for many women’s
issues, W, despite the distribution of huge red, white and blue
placards purporting to, most definitely does not. This thoroughly
well-researched work picks up where editor Laura Flanders’s
own Bushwomen, which discussed the anti-woman women in
high ranking Bush Administration positions, left off earlier this
year. (AK)
The Wake-Up - Robert Ferrigmo (Pantheon, 310 pp)
I read Ferrigmo's first novel, Horse Latitudes, in the
early '90s and for some reason missed his next six novels. When
The Wake Up came out, I reread his rookie effort just to
try to figure out why he slipped off my field of consciousness.
As it turns out, it will remain a mystery (perhaps as puzzling as
why Robert Ferrigmo, as he responded at Slate, is voting
for George Bush). Anyway, Ferrigmo can tell a story as he shows
taking ex-intelligence operative Frank Thorpe through a wild hoop
jumping chase. He gives us art scams, designer drugs, steroid (and
more) fueled psychopaths, an evil genius doctor, and a hint of social
conscience. Myself, I am drawn to a book whose epigram quotes Jim
Thompson, "There is only one basic plot: things aren't what
they seem." (RB)
What You've Been Missing – Janet Desaulniers
(U of Iowa Press, 125 pp)
The ten stories in this slender volume are the winner of The John
Simmons Short Fiction Award, won previously by such talents as Ryan
Harty, Thisbe Nissen, Nancy Reisman, John McNally, Elizabeth Searle
and Robert Boswell. Nine of these stories are sharp, incisive explorations
of unsettling instances that take over our ordinary lives. One,
"Everyone is Wearing a Hat," is a story of a couple who
loses their child to a hit-and-run accident. I marvel that these
kinds of stories (Stephen Dixon's Interstate, John Burnham
Schwartz's Reservation Road and Siri Hustvedt's What
We Loved) can be written. But they are. And occasionally I
stumble on them and marvel at the wide horizon of literature that
encompasses such misery. This harrowing tale, well rendered notwithstanding,
Janet Desdaulniers can write. And write narratives you can read.
So there. (RB)
Word: On Being a (Woman) Writer - Ed. Jocelyn
Burrell (Feminist Press)
Word explores how writing can be a restorative and empowering
act for women. Included are essays by such well-respected writers
as Margaret Atwood, bell hooks, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, Edwidge
Dandicat, Barbara Kingsolver, and . . . well, they are all pretty
great actually. Ritu Menon discusses how writing can be particularly
hard for women worldwide, who often have expectations and responsibilities
of home and family to tend to before being free to write, and then
have to deal with a sense of what is “appropriate” material
for women to discuss. Sandra Cisneros discusses finding her voice
as a writer and a woman in her own family when her father takes
the time to read her work, after having a lifelong habit of referring
to her, using the conventions of Spanish, as one of his seven sons.
And Meena Alexander, in a particularly poignant discussion of 9/11,
eloquently balances a discussion of being an Indian in New York
at a time when exotic-looking people with brown skin were being
harassed with her own personal struggle with writing during that
time. As her voice began to fail her, she turned to the basic human
expression that comes from writing lyrical poetry. This would be
a great addition to the library of anyone interested in writing--women’s
or otherwise. (AK)
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