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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.
June 27, 2003
Safe in Heaven Dead
-Samuel Ligon (245 PP, Harper Collins)
The plot line of Ligon's first novel that begins in the flyover
country of Oakland County, Michigan and inexorably moves to New
York, Chicago, Kansas City and Denver is a salad of child abuse,
family disintegration, political corruption, hookers and identity
masquerade— in the name of finding consolation. This sketch
got my attention. (RB)
Deep Purple
-Mayra Montero translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (182
PP, Ecco)
Mayra Montero (In the Palm of Darkness), who was born
in Cuba and now lives in Puerto Rico, has published her fifth novel,
Deep Purple. The protagonist, Agustin Caban, a music critic
on the eve of his forced retirement, begins a memoir that reviews
his dalliances with many of the world's most revered classical musicians.
This, of course, is an excellent vehicle for Montero's exploration
of the connection of sexual desire and music. By the way, the inimitable
Edith Grossman is slated to publish her new translation of Don
Quixote later this year. (RB)
Fear Itself
-Walter Mosley (316 PP, Little Brown)
A couple of years ago Walter Mosley (Six Easy Pieces)
published an offshoot of his Easy Rawlins, series, Fearless
Jones, and Fear Itself continues the exploits of used
book store owner Paris Minton and his pal Fearless Jones. Mosley's
latest is another one of his patented jaunts through 1950's Los
Angeles. Comparisons to Raymond Chandler are deserved. Mosley, like
Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos and Thomas Perry,
manages to deliver a new book every year. Which is always something
to look forward to. (RB)
Stillness And Other Stories
– Courtney Angela Brkic (206 PP, Farrar Giroux and Straus)
Former United Nations War Crimes Tribunal worker Courtney Angela
Brkic's sixteen stories return attention to the so-called former
Yugo slavia after world headlines have moved on the other horrific
depredations. Brkic's fictional debut makes use of her on the ground
experience as a forensic archaeologist to fashion narratives on
the aftermath for holocaust survivors. Stuart Dybek's dust jacket
blurb makes a solid point, "…witness in and of itself
can not achieve the authentic leap of empathetic imagination that
informs—that haunts—every sentence in this original
and memorable…collection."
(RB)
The Bielski Brothers
–Peter Duffy (298 PP, Harper Collins)
One of the subtleties of history is its incompleteness. The ongoing
construction of a history of the Holocaust constantly provides new
and amazing stories and The Bielski Brothers: The true story
of Three men who defied the Nazis, Saved 1200 Jews and Built a Village
in the Forest is one of those. Tuvia, Asael and Zus Bielski,
brothers in what is now known as Belarus escaped the Nazis and fled
to the nearby Naliboki forest. From there they organized resistance
to the Nazi occupation and in so doing saved 1200 hundred of their
fellow Jews and substantially hampered German operations. One wonders
if there is a Steven Speilberg movie here. (RB)
As of this Writing: The Essential Writings, 1968-2002
-Clive James (619 PP, Norton)
Australian-born and London-residing critic Clive James most certainly
understands something fundamental about his craft, "Some subjects
have no market value. They only have value. Literary journalism
is one of them. The demand for it will never increase. No one who
practices it will get rich. Literary journalism is a branch of humanism,
and humanism is not utilitarian: it must be pursued for its own
sake." James is one of a handful of arbiters who are widely
respected and his commentary embodied in these forty-nine essays,
here divided into "Poetry," "Fiction and Literature,"
"Culture and Criticism" and "Visual Images"
may serve as a cultural primer on the late 20th century. James work
has appeared in The New Yorker, The (London) Times Literary
Supplement and The New York Review of Books. (RB)
The Clearing
-Tim Gautreaux (305 PP, Knopf)
I remained unabashed in my inexplicable taste for stories set in
the backwaters of Louisiana. Oyster (set in coastal Louisiana)
by John Biguenet was a favorite last year and John Dufrense and
James Lee Bourke have also used this region as a backdrop. Writer
Louisiana-born and raised Tim Gautreaux's (The Next Step in
the Dance) second novel finds Byron Aldridge, the scion of
Pennsylvania timber fortune, in a remote mill town just after his
return from the First World War. The family buys property in this
backwater and puts Byron's younger brother in charge. If sibling
rivalry is not sufficient to drive this story for you there are
also the Sicilians who control, the booze, gambling and the babes.
This a gumbo of a story, don't you think? (RB)
The King's Evil
-Will Heinrich (195 PP, Scribner)
Joseph Malderoyce is a reserved man who has been a lawyer for forty
years when he inherits money at the death of his parents and moves
to a small town and adopts a pleasing routine of nature walks and
reading. He takes in an abused young boy and this relationship,
of course leads to something altogether different. This is Will
Heinrich's first published novel. I like the part where Joseph spends
much time trolling his library. (RB)
The Speckled People
-Hugo Hamilton (298 PP, Fourth Estate)
Talking to another fine Irish born writer Joseph
O'Connor (Star of the Sea) recently, he waxed enthusiastic
in his recommendation of this "memoir of a half-Irish childhood."
Hugo Hamilton is a novelist who has authored seven books. Hamilton's
mother is German and came to Ireland to escape life in Nazi Germany.
Hamilton's Irish father sees his sons as speckled children with
a richly speckled identity. But as Hugo Hamilton observes, "It
also means that we are marked. It means that we are alien and we'll
never be Irish enough, even though we speak the Irish language and
my father says we are more Irish than the Irish themselves."
Here's the
ever-thoughtful Katherine Powers: "The integument of memory
gives this story a fluid structure, and the point of view of a child
governs its style. The great dramas of domestic existence - the
killing of a rat, a burst boiler, a coal delivery, Christmas, and
instances of parental evasion - have the shape and force of primal
events. Amplified by recall, they resonate in later happenings."
(RB)
Bunker 13
-Aniruddha Bahal (345 PP, Farrar, Giroux Straus)
We all know the American interests in foreigners, foreign books,
foreign films and foreign cars (now known as imports). In case you
don't, those interests are suspicious, almost none, some and avid.
We'll try to do our part by mentioning that Mr.Bahal, an Indian
journalist who founded Tehelka.com and was party to its exposure,
via an elaborate sting, of corruption in the highest levels of the
Indian government. As James
Buchman points out in the New York Times, "The
novel of espionage appears to do best when powerful nations think
they are doing badly. Devised in the early 20th century to address
in fiction Britain's loss of influence in the world, the spy thriller
went on to enjoy its best years between the British humiliation
at Suez in 1956 and the return of national self-assertion under
Margaret Thatcher in the 1980's…. This novel…tricks
out the old British literary warhorse with some elements from American
novels and movies about the Vietnam War. Alongside the British over
elaboration of plot, the aggressive and soppy sex scenes and the
blizzard of technical factoids, there are wisecracks, profanity,
jungles and a most un-British interest in money and modernity. Add
in some Indian metropolitan touches -- consumerism, a passion for
acronyms -- and the reader has a taste of the literary brew that
is "'Bunker 13.'"
Aniruddha Bahal also founded and edits Cobrapost.com,
an Indian news Web site. He continues to be smeared and harassed
by the Indian government. That is not good news from the world's
most populous democracy. (RB)
June 15, 2003 - June
21, 2003
2182 Kilohertz
-David Masiel (304 PP, Random House Trade Paperbacks)
This book passed through a couple hands before reaching
me. One person found the title mystifying and the book jacket blurb
dull. Another thought the cover art and font looked too much like
a sci-fi book. Still, I started reading it, mostly because a quick
scan of the pages included characters named "The Buff"
and "The Chemist" and places called "Muktuk Island."
I was rewarded with a rich cast of frostbitten misfits and hardened
sea hands who work in the Alaskan Arctic, deal with a crumbling
marriage back home, cope with the ghosts of dead former crew mates,
and hijack a ship to rescue a stranded scientist even though they
don't know where he is. 2182 kHz (twenty-one eighty-two kilohertz)
is the radio frequency reserved for broadcasting emergency messages
and Henry Seine has taken to idly monitoring that band in search
of someone to rescue. The novel is crude, brutal, exhausting, macho,
tender, and funny. (JT)
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
-Walter Isaacson (589 PP, Simon & Schuster)
Ben Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson is an interesting
character on his own merits as media high sheriff Michael
Wolff pointed out in a column (Feb. 2003) devoted to Isaacson's
brilliant career. Formerly a high mucky-muck at Time Magazine
and of late CNN (and now president of the Aspen
Institute) one of his three past books is a respectful biography
of Henry Kissinger. Given the sensational success of David McCullough's
John Adams tome, the appetite for stories about 18th century Enlightenment
figures and--oh yes--Founding Fathers seems unsated. McCullough
(who is published by the same house as well) blurbs this biography:
"Walter Isaacson writes with great vitality, intelligence,
and a clear-eyed understanding of the worlds of politics, the press
and the human equations of high level diplomacy." One would
hope that perhaps there is something new to be said about the ever-fascinating
Franklin, but keep in mind that Isaacson is not a historian. It
is also an interesting sign of the times that all of Benjamin Franklin's
known writings have been compiled on a CD-ROM at Yale University.
(RB)
Asphalt Gods: An Oral History of the Rucker Tournament
–Vincent Mallozzi (255 PP, Doubleday)
The Rucker Tournament was founded in the early '50s
by a New York Parks Department employee and has flourished as a
real urban legend. The only book that I can think of that ranks
as one of the seminal sports books in the past half century is Pete
Axthelm's City Game (on basketball, though I haven't read
David
Shields' Black Planet). Journalism professor Mallozzi
writes in the introduction, "As a kid who grew up in Harlem
playing and watching the game and watching the moves of these gifted
players on and off the court, Asphalt Gods is a book I was born
to write." Well, okay. (RB)
Frankie's Place: A Love Story
–Jim Sterbe (273 PP, Grove)
Foreign correspondent Sterbe's story of his relationship with writer
Francis Fitzgerald and the summer home on Maine's Mount Desert Island
that she retreats to annually has all the earmarks of my kind of
love story. And Joan Didion liked it. (RB)
Jose Marti and American Writers
-Anne Fountain (146 PP, U of Florida Press)
That this monograph found its way into my hands is one of the curiosities
that abound in the ever-fascinating world of book publishing. But
that is another story for another time. Jose Marti is one of two
mythic Cuban figures—world chess champion José Raúl
Copablanca is the other—that for all their fascination with
Cuban mysteries, North Americans seem to have passed over. Believe
me there are at least two movies here. Anyway, Marti, who was, if
not something of a polymath, an intellectually engaged and active
writer, diplomat and journalist in the last half of the 19th century
(this year marks the 150th anniversary of his birth) spent fifteen
years in New York City in the belly of the Beast of the North—thus
his acquaintance with the work of Emerson, Longfellow, Whitman and
others. Fountain, using the 28-volume Marti complete works, puts
together Marti's own observations about these writers and life in
the United States during the Gilded Era. (RB)
After The Quake
–Haruki Murakami (181 PP, Knopf)
If you know Murakami's writing, you don't need me to tell you anything.
Not that I will shut up now. Though published in 2002, an acquaintance
at Knopf recently sent me a copy of this story collection. Chip
Kidd designed the cover and Marian Ettlinger did the author's portrait,
which makes this an A-team design/packaging effort (not that this
should stand in your way). See how many of these stories you read
before they were collected in After The Quake: "Super
Frog Saves Tokyo" was originally published in GQ,
"Thailand" in Granta, "All God's Children
Can Dance" in Harper's, "UFO in Kushiro"
and "Honeypie" in the New Yorker, and "Landscape
and Flatiron" in Ploughshares. If you've read at least
four out of six of these stories please e-mail me. We'll be happy
to glorify you in some way. (RB)
The Pawnshop Chronicles: Street Wisdom for the Business
World
–Jack Rossin (155 PP, www.pawnshopstories.com)
Okay, I know Jack Rossin. I know Howard Dinen (http://bertha.com/),
who took Jack's author portrait. I know Billy Chuck (who is the
enthusiast who created and maintains www.billy-ball.com,
a spunky daily newsletter on baseball) and who helped Jack "find
his voice." Also about Jack, he reminds me of my son's pediatrician
in manner and demeanor, which is, I think, a good thing. Jack worked
at Nate's Loan Office, otherwise known as a pawn shop, in the 1960's.
If you need wisdom in your business world, here's the book…(RB)
The
Land Grant College Review
Issue
Number 1
- (185 PP)
Dave
Koch and Josh Melrod have defied the laws of commerce and commenced
to publish a nicely designed literary quarterly. The first issue
contains writing by Aimee Bender, Ron Carlson, Stephen Dixon, Robert
Olmstead and, of course, Josh Melrod and Dave Koch and other nascent
talents. You know what to do. (RB)
The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
–Stendahl [Marie-Henri Beyle] (524 PP, Modern Library)
A new translation of this highly regarded 19th-century classic
novel is the occasion for this edition. In the introduction, Diane
Johnson astutely opines, "An American reader is most likely
to have encountered The Red and The Black at about the
age of its protagonists, Julien Sorel and Mathilde de La Mole, who
are eighteen or nineteen when we meet them...As with many novels,
to take it up again at an older age is to experience a different
book. At first reading you are caught up in Julien's precarious
career… we are generally swept along by the story and the
brilliance and candor of its understanding of human motivation.
American literature has not produced a writer like this, though
the reader may think of Twain's similar mixture of irony and romanticism."
Exactly. (RB)
The Transit of Venus
-Shirley Hazzard (337 PP, Viking)
This novel won the National Book Critics' Circle award in 1981
and was recently recommended to me by Mrs. Latte, Amanda
Hesser, and it was a stroke of good fortune that I found a copy
for a dollar (you might be amused that the original cover price
in 1980 was $11.95). Hazzard has a new novel due out this fall entitled
The Great Fire. The Transit of Venus is the story
of two Australian sisters' lives from the '50s to the 80's as they
travel from Sydney to London to New York to Stockholm. And, of course,
they have husbands and lovers to join them in their "passage
through the displacements and absurdities of modern life."
Go, you girls! (RB)
Hunting Midnight
–Richard Zimmler (499 PP, Delacorte)
Richard Zimmler's (The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon) novel
is set in 19th-century Portugal and focuses on John Sarcos Stewart,
a young boy and his relationship with Midnight, a mystic Bushman,
who is searching for a cure to smallpox. Midnight disappears and
Stewart embarks on a three-continent search for his friend. What
can I say, this is my kind of story. (RB)
June 1, 2003 - June 7,
2003
Martin Quinn
- Anthony Lee (374 PP, Harper Collins)
Ever made a mess of your life? So much of a mess that
your business associates want you dead, your best friend won't talk
to you, and you cringe nervously at the sight of police cars? Martin
Quinn has – except the Russian Mafia could have him dead,
his best friend isn't talking because he's dead, and the police
already have Quinn in custody and plan to charge Q with killing
his best friend. Does he become an informer or does he stay silent
and risk losing everything, including the fortune he made in a drug
deal, the love of his life (who's also he dead friend's widow),
and his own life? As a teenager, Anthony Lee had run errands for
the Russian mob in New York and some of those experiences surely
inform the scenes in this suspenseful novel. (JT)
The Book of Salt
- Monique Truong (261 PP, Houghton Mifflin)
While many people daydream of traveling to exotic locales, Binh
has lived inthese far-off countries, though not necessarily in splendor.
Born in Vietnam, he leaves home and lives at sea as a galley hand
and then serves for five years as the cook for Gertrude Stein and
Alice B. Toklas in Paris. But with the Americans returning to the
United States, he must decide whether to accompany them, remain
in France, or return to his homeland. Before revealing his decision,
he shares memories from his life and observations of the people
and places he encounters. (JT)
The Butcher's Boy and Metzger's Dog
– Thomas Perry (313 PP, 314 PP, Random
House Trade Paperback)
Before Thomas Perry launched
his Jane Whitehead series, he wrote these two great—as they
say in the biz—stand-alones. Perry's gifts for identifying
fascinating details and for modulating suspense, not to mention
a subtle sense of humor, are well displayed in both these so-called
thrillers brought back into print with introductions by fellow master
storytellers Carl Hiaasen and Michael Connelly. (RB)
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
– Chris Hedges (209 PP, Public Affairs)
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times foreign correspondent
Chris Hedges has credentials that would fill up much of this space
and in any case are marginally relevant to this moment. Here's a
piece from his "The
Press and the Myths of War" in the Nation (April
21, 2003):
The narrative we are fed about war by the state, the entertainment
industry and the press is a myth. And this myth is seductive. It
empowers and ennobles us. It boosts rating and sells newspapers--William
Randolph Hearst owed his fortune to it. It allows us to suspend
individual conscience, maybe even consciousness, for the cause.
And few of us are immune. Indeed, social critics who normally excoriate
the established order, and who also long for acceptance and acclaim,
are some of the most susceptible. It is what led a mind as great
as Freud's to back, at least at its inception, the folly of World
War I. The contagion of war, of the siren call of the nation, is
so strong that most cannot resist.
Hedges was recently invited to give the commencement address at
Rockford College in Illinois where, as Salon.com cleverly headlined,
he was "Dixie
Chicked in the Heartland." Radio ranter Rush Limbaugh,
as would be expected, joined the fray from his armchair. I'd wager
better-than-even money that none of Hedges' hecklers have read War
is a Force… which draws on his experience in Central
America, the Balkans and the Middle East as well as a lifetime of
scholarship to examine the hell and the exhilaration of war. (RB)
Mortals
– Norman Rush (715 PP, Knopf)
Novels with details of Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly
Delights" making up the cover are not exactly books that I
find attractive (one must be allowed such shallow moments). On the
other hand, Mortals has been a ten-year effort for National
Book Award winner Norman Rush (Mating). Africa, CIA, adultery,
duplicity, Milton scholarship and numerous digressions are the grist
of Rush's opus. To coin a phase, "We mention, you decide."
(RB)
A Palestine Affair
- Jonathan Wilson (257 PP, Pantheon)
London-born Wilson (The Hiding Room), who spent four years
in Israel before moving to the US, teaches, and chairs the English
Department at Tufts University. A Palestine Affair is set
in British-occupied Palestine in 1924 with the murder of a prominent
Orthodox Jew (as alleged by the British authorities) by an Arab
boy. I think Robert Stone said something about Jerusalem being the
center of it all, which makes this novel of interest to me. Why
not, huh? (RB)
1929: A Novel of the Jazz Age
- Fredrick Turner (416 PP, Counterpoint)
Fredrick Turner is a master literary journalist who has published
When The Boys Came Back: Baseball and 1946; A Border of Blue:
along the Gulf of Mexico from the Keys to the Yucatan; Of Chilies,
Cacti & Fighting Cocks: Notes on the American West; Spirit of
the Place: The Making of an American Literary Landscape and
three other non-fiction books. 1929 is his first novel
and its focus is on the brief, self-destructive life of legendary
Jazz Age figure Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke set against the
background of America's first modern high time. (RB)
Rumble, Young Man, Rumble
– Benjamen Cavell (190 PP, Knopf)
No doubt I have said this before, but when a well-respected editor
recommends a book to me I listen. Robin Desser put me on the young
Ben Cavell's debut story collection. "Balls, Balls, Balls"
has an audacity that makes me curious. And believe I am going to
have a chat with the former Harvard boxer and Crimson staffer.
(RB)
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