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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. Also, this is for 1) people who don't want to shell
out two hundred dollars for a subscription to Publisher's Weekly
2) Book lovers who are averse to reading reviews 3) Readers who
are not incited to mouth foaming at the mere mention of Toni Morrison,
Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo and most importantly 4) for people
who trust us.
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: April 27, 2004
Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive
School by Elizabeth Gold (Tarcher/Penguin,
328 pp)
I spilled lime-flavored Gatorade all over this book
today, which is an absolute tragedy because it's a very nice-looking
book. Luckily, the lime Gatorade is clear, but there is still a
lot of damage to the cover and many of the pages. I am tremendously
sad about this.
Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity (what
an amazing title!) is an account of Elizabeth Gold's ill-fated attempt
to teach at the School of the New Millennium in Queens. It's a very
personal book, sort of a black comedy that is not easily classified.
I was really enjoying it up until the Gatorade incident. Anyone
interested in "the only honorable profession" should check
out this memoir. Be sure to keep your copy away from citrus-flavored
thirst quenchers. (MB)
The
Little Earth Book by James Bruges (Disinformation,
187 pp)
James Bruges, an eminent-with-an-E British architect,
has compiled this pocket-sized encyclopedia of "facts the government
and mass media sweep under the rug." Printed on recycled, acid-free
paper and released to coincide with Earth Day 2004, this book contains
small but provocative chapters on world issues including global
trade, militarism, genetics, and, of course, the environment. It's
the kind of thing you'd find in Ralph Nader's bathroom. (MB)
Generation S.L.U.T. by Marty Beckerman
(MTV Books, 208 pp)
Generation S.L.U.T. (Sexually Liberated Urban
Teens) is dubbed as "A Brutal Feel-Up Session with Today's
Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace." The author, 21-year-old American
University student Marty Beckerman, mixes a fictional story with
a bunch of quotes and stats about teenage sexuality, like this gem
from 15-year-old Jake: "At our spring dance last year some
girl asked me to dance with her, then she unbuttoned her jeans on
the dance floor and put my hand down her pants. I got two fingers
in, so I guess that means she liked it."
The fiction is much better than you'd expect from
a college kid, and there's an unmistakeably MTV style to the presentation
-- which is meant to appeal to the book's intended audience: Generation
Y. As Beckerman told Salon.com in a somewhat
infamous interview, "This is not a book for parents, not
a book for religious leaders or reviewers or social critics or anyone
other than teenagers and college students."
Visit Marty
Beckerman's website to see a transcript of his recent appearance
on the O'Reilly Factor, as well as a photo of Marty with Hunter
S. Thompson. (MB)
The
Glory Cloak : A Novel of Louisa May Alcott and Clara Barton
by Patricia O'Brien
Fans of nineteenth century American women's literature may enjoy
this historical romance based on the life of Louisa May Alcott.
Then again, they may be literary snobs and snub their noses at it.
I say, it's fun summer reading that keeps you turning the page.
Bonus: it gets the facts right, even facts that would be little-known
to readers of Little Women, such as Alcott's crush on Thoreau
and her father's inability to support the family. So send your inner
snob out for a long lunch, and curl up under the covers (or on the
beach) with The Glory Cloak. It's a fun way to spend an
afternoon. (AK)
(Read full
review here)
Ramblin'
Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie
- Ed Cray (WW Norton, 488 PP)
Thankfully, The New Yorker has employed the very
excellent David
Hadju, who knows a thing or two about the musical life (Lush
Life, Positively Fourth Street), to assess the new biography
of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, who, arguably, is one of the more interesting
if not important American musicians of the 20th century. It's worth
quoting Studs Terkel from the book's introduction: "Dust bowl
songs, hobo songs, children's songs, work songs, loafing songs,
union songs, river songs, lonesome turtledove songs, songs infinite
in their variety, celebrating the wonder of man. For what is man
to Woody? ‘Just a hoping machine, a working machine. The human
race will sing this way as long as there is a human race. The human
race is a pretty old place.’ A Washington State senator said
that any of these Woody songs was worth a dozen legislative speeches
in getting things done. Getting things done. Affecting people. Touching
them where they live, moving them up a little higher. This was Woody."
(RB)
Cottonwood
– Scott Phillips (290 PP, Ballantine)
Here is another writer of whom I would have no knowledge had I
not talked with Mr. Bigshot Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard
Russo, who ended up collaborating on the filmification of Phillips'
The Ice Harvest and were I not a frequent reader of Sara
Weinman's weblog, The
Confessions of An Idiosyncratic Mind. Needless to say, it would
have been my loss (and, I think, yours). Cottonwood, while
not similar as a narrative like Percival
Everett's God's Country or Peter Dexter's Dead
Wood, James Carlos Blake's In the Rogue's Blood, or
Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, Cottonwood does
share the same space and time with the above mentioned fictions—late(r)
19th century frontier America. It also features a contrapuntal reality
adjustment to the conventional mythic view of America as seen by
The Searchers' director John Ford. Let me take the lazy
way out (especially since I am not being paid by the word) and say
that this novel is set in the fictional Cottonwood, Kansas of 1872
and that if you enjoyed any of the above mentioned books, that Cottonwood
is a book for you. (RB)
Peninsula
of Lies : A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love
– Edward Ball (Simon & Schuster, 271 PP)
National Book Award-winning author Edward Ball (Slaves in the
Family) retraces the story of Englishman Gordon Kenneth Ticehurst
(AKA Dawn Langley Simmons) who arrived in Charleston, South Carolina
in 1962 and in 1968 shocked Charleston by changing his name and
undergoing sex change treatments, marrying his (her) black lover
and allegedly becoming pregnant by him and giving birth to a mixed-race
daughter. As John Berendt, no stranger to the mysteries of Charleston,
observes, "Dawn Langley Simmons was one of the great trash-talking
eccentrics of our time." Certainly this is one of those stories
that gives credence to the cliché that truth is stranger
than fiction and fuels the viewpoint that the South is a leading
producer of gothic tales. (RB)
Prisoners of War – Steve Yarborough
(Knopf, 285 PP)
If I hadn't met novelist Patricia
Henley (In the River Sweet) or struck up an occasional
correspondence with sage editor Gary Fisketjon, I might never have
heard of Steve Yarborough, read The Oxygen Man or his newest
novel, Prisoners of War. I say this with some assurance
because the probability is high that you have not heard of or read
Yarborough—a circumstance I am pleased to remedy. His sixth
book places us in Loring, Mississippi, in 1943, where Dan Timms,
a thoughtful seventeen year old is biding his time waiting to join
the Army. His father, Jimmy Del Timms, a decorated WWI veteran,
has blown his own brains out, the year before. And his mother, Shirley,
an attractive and restless woman, is having an affair with Jimmy's
brother, Dan's uncle Alvin, who is a rogue in the best sense of
that preoccupation. There are a few more well drawn characters—L.C.,
a young black man whose keen wit and acerbic thoughts and comments
speak eloquently to the terrible state of race in the USA as it
was engaged in the so-called Good War. And there is Marty Stark,
a GI who has been transferred to duty at the POW camp which is the
engine that drives this story, who has seen combat in Sicily. And
finally, there is Captain Munson, a West Point graduate, who is
the camp commander and whose ruminations on duty and whose attempts
to navigate the menacing waters of his increasingly complex situation
are oddly admirable and illuminating. There are actually things
that happen in this novel that give it a subtle aftertaste and are
something of a bonus feature. It's the characters and their echoing
of life in mid-century America that makes this the riveting read
that I hereby proclaim it is. (RB)
On the Blue Shore of Silence : Poems of the Sea
– Pablo Neruda translated by Alastair Reid, paintings by Mary
Heebner (Rayo, 62 pp)
If you are a devotee of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, it's possible
you have the recently published compendium of Neruda poems. This
slender finely focused and artfully designed tome;
Let us look for secret things
somewhere in the world,
on the blue shore of silence
or where the storm has passed,
rampaging like a train.
There the faint signs are left,
coins of time and water,
debris, celestial ash
and the irreplaceable rapture
of sharing in the labor
of solitude and the sand
Antonio Skarmeta's afterword sums up, "Neruda that enlightened
man with droopy eyelids and a slow nasal voice, was born one hundred
years ago in Chile. He was a verbal buccaneer to all of the planet's
oceans and filled his legendary home with gigantic sea shells, nets,
navigational instruments, globes, bells and even figureheads which
just like the miraculous and ingenious images of saints shed real
tears of absence." (RB)
The
Second Death of Unica Aveyano - Ernesto
Mestre-Reed (Vintage, 259 PP)
The Lazarus Rhumba, Mestre-Reed's much heralded first
novel (“his symphonic imagination proves mesmerizing”)
is still languishing on my debauched shelves, somewhere near Vikrim
Seth's inestimable A Suitable Boy, probably not to be read
for the foreseeable future (4-6 months). This digression is something
of a test. If you prefer your information inelegantly direct, as
in my simply parenthesizing Mestre-Reed's debut effort — 'Gay,
Brooklynian, Cuban novelist Ernesto Mestre-Reed, author of The
Lazarus Rhumba, has published…' you may not find a novel
about an old Cuban woman's final days anything of interest to you.
But consider that the knowledgeable Ann Louise Bardach opines that
"Mestre-Reed is among the most gifted and accomplished storytellers
from the Cuban Diaspora…[his new novel]…makes clear
to all his soaring artistry." And then there is fellow Brooklynite
novelist Francisco Goldman's take: "He is a masterful observer,
the creator of dazzling word portraits." So it is possible
that Mestre Reed will join the ranks of Cuban-American writers like
Oscar Hijuelos and Christina Garcia and cross over into mainstream
awareness. This book should help. (RB)
Dancing with Cuba : A Memoir of the Revolution
- Alma Guiillermoprieto (Pantheon, 290 PP)
Alma Guiillermoprieto, a MacArthur Fellow in 1995, is a regular
contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review
of Books and has written Samba and Looking at
History: The Heart that Bleeds. This book chronicles her year
in Cuba, 1970, where and when she taught dance at a national arts
school and found herself transformed. Thirty-five years later, one
might give credit to the Cuban Revolution for contributing to the
formation of a compassionate and attentively watchful journalist
and thinker. (RB)
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