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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; (MB) will someday equal Matt Borondy;
and soon enough there will be other abbreviations to deal with.
May 25, 2003
The Craft Of The Cocktail: Everything You Need To Know To Be A Master
Bartender, With 500 Recipes
— Dale DeGroff (224 PP. Clarkson Potter)
Once and future alcoholics rejoice, this book is for you. DeGroff,
a man praised by both Martha Stewart and the London Tribune
as the preeminent cocktologist in the world, The Craft
Of The Cocktail is all that and a bag of ice chips, as it takes
you from Moonshine to Sex on the Beach, complete with mouth-watering
photos and peculiar historical anecdotes. But don’t be put
off by the 1950’s style title or DeGroff’s occasional
I am the God of all spirits grandiosity— this book
is fun, funny, and easy to follow. Even if you are not a drunk.
(RLW)
The Beginning of Wisdom Reading Genesis
— Leon R. Kass (700 PP. Free Press)
Talking about the Bible is rife with problems, from translation
and version questions (Which Bible? i.e. the Hebrew Bible, which
Jews see as complete; or The Holy Bible, as in two books, Old
and New: The former being the Hebrew and the latter featuring
the Life and Death of Jesus, the Christ, the messiah whom Christians
[and even a few Jews] believe fulfills a long time promise of a
God who shows up and walks around a bit). The New Testament, or,
as I sometimes jokingly refer to it, the Unnecessary Fucking Testament
(please, no hate mail!), was written in Koine, a colloquial (as
opposed to High) Greek, designed to be read by regular folk, as
well as scholars and worshippers, et al. Anyway, this is all to
say that be you scholar, fan, or curiosity seeker, Kass’s
book has something to offer—as he anticipates our fear and
trembling as we open this great and complex story of stories. Though
not exactly an easy read, The Beginning of Wisdom is deep,
baby. And we need all of that we can get. (RLW)
Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American
Black Market
-Eric Schlosser (310 PP. Houghton Mifflin)
I don’t understand why I’m not more angry about the
way we exploit the people who do the very necessary work of bringing
us the fruits of our great and abundant earth. Or why I remain complacent
in the face of the massive and egregious hypocrisy that currently
describes our treatment of the American migrant worker. Maybe that’s
the problem, the American part of the equation—as
so many (possibly as many as 60 percent) are not, constitutionally,
American citizens. But if we don’t want illegals, or can’t,
as some suggest, afford to have them here, then is it fair
to use them to pick our apples and strawberries and virtually every
other crop that needs picking and then pretend they don’t
exist? I say it ain’t. In Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser,
best known for his wildly successful and beautifully written Fast
Food Nation, shows us some hard and troubling realities of
America 2003, from the ultra-punitive sentences handed out to casual
marijuana smokers and small-time dealers to the aforementioned servitude
of the mostly invisible seasonal farm worker. (RLW)
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
-Marjane Satrapi (153 PP, Pantheon Books)
I almost passed this book up, thinking it was a children's book.
Luckily, I flipped it open and was surprised to see it was a graphic
novel. I intended to skim just the first page out of curiosity and
instead read the whole book in one insatiable sitting. She relates
her story of growing up in Tehran during three tumultuous periods
in Iran's history: the overthrow of the Shah, the Islamic revolution,
and the war with Iraq. Identifying with Satrapi, the reader struggles
with her to understand the whims of an oppressive regime, the differences
between what was said inside versus outside the home, and her relationship
with God. The only child of an intellectual and relatively well-off
family, she and her family deal with ever present adversity and
danger with dancing, courage, humor, and tears. (JT)
The True Account: A Novel of the Lewis & Clark
& Kinneson Expeditions
-Howard Frank Mosher (337 PP, Houghton Mifflin)
A rollicking novel told in true tall-tale and frontier-spirit style,
The
True Account chronicles the adventures of Private True Teague
Kinneson and his nephew, Ticonderoga, as they race across the country
to reach the Pacific before Lewis and Clark do. Along the way, the
two introduce the Western tribes to hemp, invent the game of baseball,
and meet Daniel Boone. (JT)
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
- Mary Roach (294 PP, W. W. Norton & Company)
I approached this book respectfully and matter-of-factly. "Oh
good," I thought. "I can read up on what all funeral homes
do." (HBO's Six Feet Under made that topic seem approachable
and intriguing.) Murderers may have to be more creative, but most
of us will choose between burial, cremation, organ donation, or
donating our bodies to science after our deaths. Mary Roach delves
into that and so much more about what happens to our bodies when
we are dead. Aside from gross anatomy labs in medical schools, cadavers
are pressed into service as crash test dummies, forensics research,
and accident and ballistics research. I expected to learn new facts
and to possibly squirm uncomfortably but I hadn't expected to laugh.
This wasn't just the nervous laughter of coping with the discomfiting,
it was also the laughter of seeing the humor that Roach manages
to find in the situation even while maintaining respect for the
dead. (JT)
The Quality of Life Report
- Meghan Daum (209 PP, Viking)
How many of you were questioning the worth of what you were doing
with your life as you were running out of your twenties? In this
novel, New Yorker Lucinda Trout goes to the heartland in search
of simplicity, refuge from an insufferable boss, and a romanticized
better quality of life. Daum's first novel is marked with wittiness
and an effortless style that make her wryly written characters spring
to life and at times it felt as if I were watching a play. (JT)
My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile
-Isabel Allende (199 pp, HarperCollins)
Though my interest in Isabel Allende has waned with her novel Daughter
of Fortune, from House of the Spirits, Of Love
and Shadows, Eva Luna, The Stories of Eva Luna
to Infinite Plan, I was an avid devotee of her story telling
(I was tempted to saying 'writing' but since she writes in Spanish,
I quite willing to credit the English iterations to her long-standing
translator Margaret Sayers-Peden). Though born in Peru, Sra. Allende's
newest book recounts her life in Chile, that she fled after the
assassination of her uncle, Salvadore Allende, in a CIA-supported
coup in 1973. The accompanying press release claims "the confluence
of two violent, life changing moments—the military takeover
of Chile on September 11, 1973 and the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001—triggered Allende's desire to make sense of her deeply
ingrained relationship with Chile." While skepticism about
the employment of the ubiquitous numerals 911 tempers my curiosity
about Allende's memoir, my respect for talents and sincerity place
this book on my required reading list. (RB)
Short People
-Joshua Furst (206 pp, Alfred Knopf)
What can I say, when a respected editor like Gary Fisketjon recommends
a book, I pay attention. Joshua Furst is a graduate of the Iowa
Writers' Workshop and a playwright living in New York City. For
what it is worth, he taught in the public schools there. His debut
collection features ten stories that contemplate American childhood.
Since I plan to talk to young Joshua more information will be forthcoming…(RB)
Game Time: A Baseball Companion
-Roger Angell, edited by Steve Kettman (397 pp, Harcourt)
If I need to introduce Roger Angell (The Summer Game and
Late Innings) to you, consider yourself a sadly deprived
person (I was tempted to say stop reading here, but I hold the belief
that it is never too late…). These twenty-nine pieces covering
forty years of writing about baseball are divided into Spring, Summer
and Fall and range from Fenway Park in September to ruminations
on Pete Rose, Barry Bonds, Bob Gibson and Pedro Martinez. Here is
Richard Ford in the book's introduction:
Roger Angell, entirely consonant with his affection for the
game, writes about baseball from a viewing stand that's conspicuously
in life and society, and he understands as the few great sportswriters
do, that to achieve his craft's highest expression, a writer must
bring along his loftiest values, moral and lexical, yet somehow
do it without tying his slender subject to weights and galactic
significances it can't possibly bear. To make sport more than itself
threatens to make it boring, and almost always turns the writing
bad and absurd.
Though I don't mind a few 'galactic significances', sprinkled in
anything I read Angell's judicious employment of such is mightily
appreciated. (RB)
The Language of Passion
-Mario Vargas Llosa (277 pp, Farrar Giroux Straus)
Peruvian man of letters Mario Vargas Llosa (Letters to A Young
Novelist and The Feast of the Goat), who among his
many accomplishments ran unsuccessfully for his country's presidency
against the infamous Alberto Fujimora in 1990, has been writing
a newspaper column for Spain's El Pais since 1977. The
title of his second collection (the first was Making Waves)
is taken from his tribute to Octavio Paz and covers such diverse
subjects as Miss Margaret Elizabeth Trask, Gabriel Ferrater, the
morality of cynics, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Anti-Semitism, the O.7%
Movement, Bob Marley's memorial, Hans Magnus Enzenberger, life in
a Palestinian village and a variety of subjects beyond the current
monolithic story that TV's flying monkeys are babbling about. As
you might gather from this brief list, Vargas Llosa's interests
range broad and deep. He's my kind of guy. (RB)
Cuba On The Verge: An Island in Transition
-edited by Terry McCoy (199 pp, Bulfinch Press)
Cuba. Is there a word more loaded with mystery, confusion, excitement,
passion, romance than the name of largest island in the Caribbean?
Not as far as I can tell, and the ongoing outpouring of books and
commentary and anecdotal information and febrile rhetoric about
Cuba confirms that. This book assembled by filmmaker/producer Terry
McCoy is one more validation of Cuba's enchanting powers. Thirteen
essays by John Lee Anderson, Russell Banks, Achy Obejas, Mayra Montero,
Arthur Miller, Susan Orlean, Pablo Medina and others conjoined with
seventy five black and white and color photographs by such masters
as Inge Morath, Abelardo Morell, Carrie Mae Weems, Sylvia Plachy,
Adalberto Roque and more deliver what William Kennedy opines in
his introduction:
[Cuba on the Verge] is a book of variations on desperation,
a collection of photographic images of great subtlety and power
that make time visible through ruins and flesh, and together with
the wise, often confessional insights of its writers, suggests the
saddening scope of lost life in Cuba. If the book suggest life in
a highly charged political time, it does so without the virulent
rhetoric of political warfare…[it] stands, instead as a collective
revelation to the world of the consequences of politics
to Cuba.
While we are considering Cuba, I would suggest a click over to
http://www.progressive.org/june03/gal0503.html
where Eduardo Galeano gives a distinctly non-north American view
of recent events. (RB)
Star Of The Sea
-Joseph O Connor (386 pp, Harcourt)
What is it about Ireland that makes it so fertile and abundant
in talented writers? No, do not answer that. In any case, O'Connor
(The Salesman and Desperadoes) has created a ripping
tale of murder and intrigue that takes place on a ship traveling
to New York from the British Isles in 1847. Set against the profound
despair of the Potato Famine of the same year, O'Connor's last chapter,
"The Haunted Man," is an eloquent epilogue that concisely
frames this dreadful time in Irish history. My conversation with
Joe O'Connor will be showing up on the Narrative Thread/Identitytheory
soon. To be sure, it is a good one. (RB)
Evidence of Things Unseen
–Marianne Wiggins (382 pp, Simon & Schuster)
Marianne Wiggins (Eyeless Eden and Almost Heaven)
has written a novel that takes us back to America between the (20th
century World) Wars and an America on the brink of dramatic transformation.
Set in Tennessee, all manner and type of historical details shine
their way into this narrative; The Tennessee Valley authority, The
Ku Klux Klan, the Oak Ridge Laboratory and Site X. I especially
appreciated her citation and embellishment of the great and now
dimly remembered Boston Molasses disaster:
The first story she remembered from the papers, the ones that
gave her visions in her dreams both night and day for years thereafter,
was the one Conway read to her when she was six years old. The news
was five weeks old by the time Conway read it to her at the supper
table. A molasses storage vat (he read) had collapsed in Boston
releasing a syrup wave thirty feet high onto Milk Street, killing
twenty- four people. The syrup oozing in the summer sun, left a
sickly sweet thick residue six blocks long like an enormous flypaper.
Combining with the sweet aroma (Conway read), the tragedy hung above
the scene for days, clotted with flies, like a still life deceptively
alive beneath its humming veil of sorrow.
My previous contact with Wiggins' writing skills suggest to me
that this mid 20th century narrative is in talented and agile hands.
(RB)
Previous week:
Moneyball: The Art Of Winning an Unfair Game
-Michael Lewis (288 pp, WW Norton)
Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker and The New New Thing)
tells the story of Oakland Athletics and their general manager Billy
Beane's contravention of Baseball's conventional wisdom that winning
requires big money. Sabermetrics and Bill James figure in this well-written
account of the triumph of rationalism over superstition. (RB)
Ten Little Indians
-Sherman Alexie (243 pp, Grove Press)
Native American writer/poet/filmmaker Sherman Alexie (Reservation
Blues and Indian Killer) has a new (nine) story collection
and if you are not familiar with him, judging from the extensive
book tour he is embarking on, he will probably be in your neighborhood
soon. (RB)
Erasure
-Percival Everett (University Press of New England)
This novel by the inventive and satiric Everett (Watershed
and God's Country) has been out a few years in the US and
just
published in Britain but having recently talked with PE he was
kind enough to send me a copy, and as far as I am concerned that
qualifies for this mention. Erasure's protagonist is African-American
Thelonius (Monk) Ellison, a professor and avant-garde novelist,
who writes a parody of a wildly successful best seller, We's
Lives Da Ghetto, "the exploitative debut novel of a young,
middle-class black woman who once visited some relatives in Harlem
for a couple for days." That's where the fun begins. (RB)
A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates
-Blake Bailey (688 pp, Picador)
Writer Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road and The Easter
Parade), who had also written speeches for Robert Kennedy,
died in 1992 and
was a mentor to many fine writers. This is the first full-blown
biography of the manic-depressive, alcoholic, talented Yates and
his tragic, heroic struggles. (RB)
The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love,
Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death,
Dinner, Baseball, Travels, The Art of Writing, and everything else
in the World since 1953: A compendium of Fiction, Poetry, Interviews,
Essays, Art and more
-By the Editors of The Paris Review
(751 pp, Picador)
With an introduction by George Plimpton, the book's title says
it all. But let me give you some names: Raymond Carver, Joseph Brodsky,
Vladmir Nabokov, Michael Cunningham, Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag,
Jim Crace, TC Boyle, Donald Hall, Jack Kerouac and James Balwin
and many more. (RB)
Bugaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music
-Arthur Kempton (495 pp, Pantheon)
I first became aware of Arthur Kempton as a the announcer of a
Sunday morning radio program, "For Lovers's Only," on
what was then MIT's WTBS (call letters which the university sold
to Turner Broadcasting later). It was so tasteful and well informed
that I made it a point to tune in every week. Bugaloo is
a history of Black American pop music from the gospel roots of Thomas
Dorsey and Sam Cooke to the current rap/hip hop scene. (RB)
Long for this World
-Michael Byers (432 pp, Houghton Mifflin)
Michael Byers (The Coast of Good Intentions) has the excellent
young writer credentials—a MFA from the University of Michigan
and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a critically
accepted story collection as well as inclusion in Best American
Stories and Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards. Byers'
debut novel is the story of Dr. Henry Moss and his search for a
cure for a congenital children's disease and what confronts Moss
when he finds an opportunity to cash in on his on his work. Sounds
like a story to me. (RB)
Hell at the Breech
–Tom Franklin (318 pp, William Morrow)
Tom Franklin (Poachers) who hails from Dickinson, Alabama
and now lives in Oxford, Mississippi, may be the leading contender
for this summer's great book by a Southern writer (this is good
thing) that last year was gloriously occupied by Brad Watson and
his The Heaven of Mercury. Hell at the Breech
is set in rural Alabama in 1897 and centered on the mysterious murder
of a politician and the local vendetta it unleashes. I'm going to
be talking to Franklin, so stay tuned. (RB)
Isaac Newton
–James Glueck (272 pp, Pantheon)
My dog Rosie knows and likes James Glueck (Faster and
What Just Happened). Given Glueck's skill as a writer and
this potentially interesting subject, this could appeal even to
those of us who are science phobic. Here's what Alan Lightman (who
has a new novel coming out soon) blurbs, "After reading Jim
Glueck's beautifully written and intimate portrait of Newton, I
felt as if I spent an evening by the fire with that complex and
troubled genius." If you are further interested in Isaac Newton
there is Brit Phillip Kerr's novel of Newton's later years set in
a dense political intrigue, Dark Matter. (RB)
George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to The
Eighteenth Century
-Robert Darnton (208 pp, WW Norton)
Princeton University historian Robert Darnton is fascinated with
the 18th century and more specifically, France in that period. This
slender volume includes eight essays that offer a smart and imaginative
window on history. The word 'unconventional' is the tip-off here.
(RB)
True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans
- Joe Queenan (236 pp, Henry Holt)
Joe Queenan [Imperial Caddy and Balsamic Dreams]
was a contributor to the wonder that was Spy Magazine and has gone
on to write numerous books and until a recent regime change, write
for GQ. He has authored a bittersweet and funny paean to the sports
fan. His first paragraph sold me:
Labecede is an exhaustingly beautiful village in the south
of France, founded in the early twelfth century, roughly 768 years
before the Philadelphia Phillies played their first game. The picturesque
hamlet of perhaps 375 souls is situated in the rugged Montagnes
Noires, the heart of the Lauragais district where the Albigensian
Heresy erupted in the years 1167. Not far away lies the historic
city of Besziers, where a French monk, asked by his troops for guidance
in distinguishing devout Christians from apostates blithely remarked,
"Kill them all; let God sort them out." Ninety minutes
to the south, in the shadow of the Pyrenees, stands Monstegur, the
last heretic stronghold where in 1255, 215 holdouts chose to be
burned alive rather than abjure their faith. It was the appropriate
place for a twenty-five year old baseball fan to spend the summer,
because supporting the Phillies was exactly like worshipping the
Albigensian
god: no good would come of it and before the ordeal had run its
course, immense pain would be inflicted.
Funny stuff. (RB)
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