|
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.
July 28, 2003
Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures,
1941-1943 edited by Maren Stange (254 PP, The New Press)
Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America,
1935-1943 edited by Michael Lesy (479 PP, Norton)
Periodically some enlightened soul under the auspices of a committed
publisher unearths (though publicly available at the Library of
Congress) some of the Farm Security Administration photos from its
famed Documentary photography project. That archives contains some
145,000 images (or 200,000, depending on who your source is) taken
between 1935 and 1943 by forty photographers that included Walker
Evans, Dorthea Lange and Ben Shahn. Late last year Michael Lesy's
book was published and ever vigilant Mark Feeney (Boston Globe,
1/23/03) took note, "Lesy weaves together its 410 images (a
fifth of which are previously unpublished) with the story of how
the FSA came to be and, more important, perhaps, how its director,
Roy Stryker, evolved in the job. His relationship to The File, as
the photographic archive was familiarly known, is the linchpin of
Long Time Coming.” ''By entering the book, you can
be transformed, in a small way, in the same way that The File transformed
Stryker,'' Lesy says, ''and in the same way that looking through
The File transformed me: epiphany to epiphany. The book is meant
to be a transformative machine….''
Maren Stange takes a small slice (a sliver, really) of the FSA's
pie to collect photos taken in what was then the "capitol of
Black America," ten square miles of Chicago that supported
a half a million people. Bronzeville was, of course, made famous
by the publication of Richard Wright's Native Son. Included
in this book are 140 photographs and two explanatory essays by Maren
Stange and Aspects of the Black Belt by Richard Wright.
If you understand that photography began before Herb Ritts and history
before Ronald Reagan these books will at least delight if not thrill
you. (RB)
The Middle of the Night
-Daniel Stolar (243 PP, Picador)
Daniel Stolar was two years into Yale medical school before he
decided he would rather be writing. These eight stories are his
debut collection. The reviews have been glowing, saying all the
right things: "expertly crafted stories"…"the
author maps the emotional and social landscape of his characters
with empathy humor and grace." (RB)
Parasites Like Us
–Adam Johnson (368 PP, Viking)
Emporium, Adam Johnson's debut story collection, was well
received last year and the keen sense of the absurd in evidence
in those stories are at play again in what his publisher calls "a
visionary epic set in a time and place that is both unsettlingly
familiar and immensely strange." I guess they are talking about
South Dakota. (RB)
The Laws of Evening
–Mary Yukari Waters (192 PP, Scribners)
Waters whose stories have been included in Best American Short
Stories 2002 and 2003 was born in Japan and these
stories in her first collection all take place there around the
time of World War II and focus on the changes wrought in the daily
lives of the characters and the loss of a way of life. If Sena Jeter
Naslund is to be believed, "Every syllable, every sentence,
every story has the grace of a ceremonial gesture…Like haiku,
each story precisely embodies a moment and evocatively transcends
it. The stories defy the finiteness of narrative: they begin almost
imperceptibly—it seems we have been spellbound our entire
lives in this magic theater: and certainly they evaporate or sublime,
but do not end." (RB)
Journal of the Dead: A Story of Friendship and Murder
in the New Mexico Desert
–Jason Kerstein (236 PP, Ecco)
Though many attempt it, there are a handful of true crime books
that scale the foothills of literature and ascend to the peak of
classic status. In Cold Blood, The Executioner's Song, Swordfish,
and Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil come to mind
as paradigms of so-called literary non fiction, and of late, Maria
Flook's Invisible Eden has such ambitions. And now journalist
(if one can call what Maxim, where he is an editor, does
as journalism) Jason Kerstein unpacks the story (the title seems
to tell it all) that hit the headlines a few years ago. Look to
ID theory for my talk with Kerstein about this story and maybe even
journalism as practiced by so-called laddie magazine, Maxim.
(RB)
Kartography
-Kamila Shamsie (320 PP, Harcourt)
Pakistani writer Shamsie (Salt and Saffron) traces the
story of two friends Raheen and Karim who are split apart when his
parents move to London from Karachi. Raheen researches a family
secret and the by-now grown-up friends are drawn together in a love
story and a mystery that illuminates the unlikely city of Karachi,
Pakistan. (RB)
July 21, 2003
Invisible Eden: A Story of Love and Murder
on Cape Cod
-Maria Flook (405 PP, Broadway Books)
Novelist Maria Flook (Family Night) takes on the
story of the murder of fashion journalist Christa Worthington
in January of 2002 in her Truro, Massachusetts home. Delving
into an unsolved crime in a small, tightly knit Outer Cape community
was bound to raise the hackles of the victim's family and the meta
story doesn't disappoint. Two stories for the price of one.
(RB)
Elsewhere in the Land of the Parrots
–Jim Paul (305 PP, Harcourt)
Okay, it's a love story. But when reclusive poet David Huntington's
father presents him with a parrot that he names Little Wittgenstein—which
gets my attention—and then sets free, we get a free wheeling
story that brings the poet to Ecuador. As Andrea Barrett blurbs,
"an engaging witty narrative, which lures us into the dreaming
of the dreams—and perhaps sharing the fate—of a flock
of parrots." In case you wondered, Jim Paul is a poet and translator
and has written Medieval in LA and Catapult. (RB)
Cut Time: An Education at The Fights
-Carlo Rotella (222 PP, Houghton Mifflin)
Writer and teacher Carl Rotella's (Good with their Hands: Boxers,
Bluesmen and Other Characters from the Rust Belt) study of
boxing joins an ennobled literature of the sweet science by covering
the short career of an college amateur as well as examining ex-heavyweight
champ Larry Holmes' need to continue sparring and a couple of stops
in between. You probably have to like boxing to get into this book,
but maybe not. (RB)
Reunion
–Alan Lightman (231 PP, Pantheon)
Alan Lightman (The Diagnosis) presents the story of Charles,
a middle-aged professor at a "leafy" college who, without
clear reason, attends his college reunion of the Class of '69. At
that event, he relives his senior year and the first serious romance
of his life. Juliana, a dancer, was his first true love and for
whom Charles' youthful poetic attentions came to represent the haunting
line "one hour of eternity." As usual, Lightman has many
smart observations to make in passing, such as this one as he watches
television, "The truth is I feel no connection to the faces
on the screen. The Hondurans are just so many electronic pixels.
I've decided that has been the great achievement of our age: to
so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image has
become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,
our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial revolution
to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense
of the word." Reunion is a markedly different than
story than The Diagnosis with its meditative focus on introspection
and memory. Alan Lightman is still the same precise and careful
storyteller who, four novels back, wrote the enchanting Einstein's
Dreams. (RB)
After
–Francine Prose (330 PP Joanna Cottler/ Harper Collins)
Highly respected and admirably talented novelist Prose (Blue
Angel) tries her hand at a novel for so-called young readers.
The subject matter is the aftermath of a Columbine-type shooting
at the local high school, which results in five dead and fourteen
wounded. Prose plumbs the adult response to this inexplicable act.
After joins a wave of new narratives using the high-school shootings
including Lionel
Shiver's We Need To Talk About Kevin, Doug Coupland's
Hey Nostradamus, Gus Van Zandt's Elephant and,
of course, Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. (RB)
The Hired Gun
-Matthew Branton (213 PP, Justin Charles Books)
and
The White Trilogy
-Ken Bruen (408 PP, Kate's Mystery Books/Justin Charles Books)
I have had both these books since March and for the usual reasons
have not gotten to them. My loss. Stephen Hull whose experience
includes an editorial stint at the now defunct Zoland Books founded
Justin, Charles &
Co. Books and among his first offerings is the so-called noir
thriller The Hired Gun. It's smart and sparse and puts
the life of a long time contact killer John Decker under the microscope.
And The White Trilogy, which includes A White Arrest, Taming
the Alien and The McDead, takes place in Southeast
London and includes the usual assortment: crack dealers, arsonists
and rapists, homicidal maniacs that Chief Inspector Roberts and
Detective Sergeant Brant, definitely a pair that beat a full house,
ride fast and hard on the very thin line between law and disorder.
The crooks are reminiscent of Carl Hiaasen and Brant and Roberts
are the somewhat amoral cops that James Ellroy makes good use of.
Bruen is funny and quick and his dark narrative charges forward
from London to New York and points west. It is worth taking the
ride with him. (RB)
July 17, 2003
Heroes Without A Country: America's Betrayal
of Jesse Owens and Joe Louis
- Donald McCrae (389 PP, Ecco)
Despite Jonathan
Yardley's lukewarm response to this book which includes his
opining that, "It would be a joke to claim that we now live
in a society free of prejudice or color-consciousness, but it is
absolutely true that the progress we have made in the past three-quarters
of a century toward ending racial discrimination and making equal
opportunity a reality rather than a slogan is breathtaking."
This book does bring into sharp focus a not-too-distant period and
the accomplishments of two very gifted athletes who were called
upon to do more than exercise their talents. (RB)
Monkey Hunting
– Christine Garcia (251 PP, Knopf)
Senora Garcia (The Aguero Sisters) will forever command
my attention based on her having written one of my favorite novels,
Dreaming In Cuban. Her latest offering begins in 1857 and
chronicles the journey of Chen Pan and his family from China to
Cuba and finally to the United States. The narrative possibilities
are endless as Garcia places Pan's descendants in Mao's Cultural
Revolution and the Vietnamese debacle. Garcia's emotional vocabulary
is powerful and well tempered. Added to her story telling skills,
her writing resonates and haunts. Oh yes. (RB)
Everyone's Burning
– Ian Spiegelman (164 PP, Villiard)
Ian's day job
is as a reporter for Page Six (whatever that is) of the New
York Post. He has apparently made a name for himself with attempted
journalistic takedowns of Dave Eggers, Rick Moody and others. Elsewhere
on Identity Theory there is a review
of Everyone's Burning which is exactly the kind of
commentary I regularly dismiss: "In twenty years, maybe, when
Mr. S has a few more novels under his belt, it will be great to
read Everyone’s Burning as the fiery juvenilia of
our hero. Right now though, Everyone’s Burning needs
to be read not because of Mr. Spiegelman’s revolutionary rhetoric
but in spite of it. Rather than the beginning of a new American
literary movement, this novel is a cover of an old favorite tune,
performed by a promising newcomer." Blah, blah, blah. To coin
a phrase, "We report, you decode." (RB)
White Kids
– Michael Wolff (316 PP, Summit Books)
Michael
Wolff, eminence grise of the New York media jungle, published
his first book a novel in 1979. The cover copy reads, "A revolution,
a crime, a honeymoon, a war— A generation revealed 1970-1979.
As my travels invariably take me to any number of bookstores that
carry so-called used books (you'd think that would make them more
valuable), I found this literary curiosity on a recent respite at
the Avenue Victor Hugo where, from all appearances, it has sat on
the shelf for many years. With this book I now have the beginnings
of a collections of oddities that include Howell Raines' novel Whiskey
Man. (RB)
The History of Japanese Photography
–edited by Anne Wilkes Tucker, Dana Friss-Hansen, Kaneko Ryuichi
and Takeba Joe (432 PP, Yale University Press)
If you live in Houston (Mar 2-April 27) or in Cleveland
(May 28- July 27 2003) you can see the nearly 400 photos offered
in this rich and rigorously researched exhibition catalogue of the
show organized by Houston's Museum of Fine Arts. If not, settling
for this comprehensive tome is not a terrible alternative. (RB)
Snakes: An Anthology of Serpent Tales edited by Willee Lewis
(306 PP, Evans)
Okay, there are multitudes of subjects that lend themselves to
anthologizing. Why not snake stories? Willee Lewis, who is the president
of the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, apparently agrees and has collected
about sixty selections of poetry and prose ranging from the Bible
and Ogden Nash to Carlos Fuentes, Tom Wolfe and Zora Neale Thurston.
This from Nash's The Python: "The python has, and I fib no
fibs/318 pairs of ribs/ In stating this I place reliance/On a séance
with one who died for science/This figure is sworn to and attested/
He counted them while being digested." (RB)
July 9, 2003
We Need to Talk About Kevin
– Lionel Shriver (400 PP, Counterpoint)
I am going to try to not get whiny or shrill about this, but reading
Shriver's seventh novel left me wondering why I had never heard
of her before. Okay, let's just say that is a rhetorical question
and move on. We Need to Talk About Kevin is the story of
a mother trying to make some kind of sense of her teenage son's
homicidal high school shooting spree. Told in the form of letters
to her absent husband, this harrowing tale reviews the birth and
early childhood of Kevin and the grim aftermath of his inscrutable
act. It is a smart novel and perhaps (given the subjectivity of
both pain and honesty) painfully honest. (RB)
Midsummer
-Marcelle Clements (291 PP, Harcourt)
This is a well-written novel that definitely falls in the New York
City book category. A group of middle-aged New Yorkers share a summerhouse,
a mansion owned by an absentee landlord (who could well be a Gore
Vidal) nestled on the Hudson River. Suzie is the charmer who pulls
her twenty-three-year-old son and her damaged friend Kay in her
wake. Then there is Elise, a neurotic, thirty-eight year old sculptor,
and Dodge, a successful, motorcycle-riding, black-clothing-wearing
artist, and Ron, the garrulous and slightly abrasive comedian. The
dialogue is urbane and rings true and the group dynamics are not
predictable. (RB)
Mirror, Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair with
Reflection
-Mark Pendergast (404 PP, Basic Books)
Mark Pendergast, who has written about Coca Cola, both the drink
and the company (For God, Country & Coca Cola),
and a history of Coffee (Uncommon Grounds) presents a (perhaps
the) history of an invention that is arguably as important
as the wheel. Needless to say this is an original work. Consider
the anonymous French proverb, "The world is full of fools,
and he would not see it should live alone and smash his mirror."
(RB)
Braving Home
-Jake Halpern (240 PP, Houghton Mifflin)
Young Jake Halpern, formerly of Buffalo, New York, Yale University
and the New Republic, finds a handful of people who despite
the dangers, imminent and otherwise, live in, uh, odd places. A
flood plain that has already wiped out the town of Princeville once,
a high rise in Whittier, Alaska, a live volcano, an extremely flammable
area of Malibu, California and a hurricane-prone island in Louisiana
are the spots Halpern visits and makes contact with some dedicated
and original people. This is a book that resonates with resourcefulness
on all sides. (RB)
Hey Nostradamus
–Douglas Coupland (244 PP, Bloomsbury)
Doug Coupland, who splashed on to the literary scene with Generation
X and a few other trendy titles, seems to have settled down
into a thoughtful and interesting writer. This book also examines
a high-school shooting spree. From the perspective of a dead victim,
her bereaved husband Jason, Jason's father and Heather, who is trying
ten years after the shootings to console and love Jason, we are
given a broad panoply of perspectives on these acts of (out) rage.
(RB)
The Company You Keep
-Neil Gordon (406 PP, Viking)
Discovering a writer's first novel and liking it pretty much assures
one of a commitment to the subsequent works. I liked Neil Gordon's
first two novels, Sacrifice of Isaac and The Gun Runner's
Daughter, very much, and so this novel about a haunted and
hunted former Weather Underground fugitive beckons both by way of
subject matter and my loyalty to this author. I took Nichoilas Delbanco's
observation to heart, "…The serious political novel is
a rare thing in America, and this book enlarges that category."
(RB)
The Big Bang: Nerve's Guide to the New Sexual Universe
-Emma Taylor and Lorelei Sharkey (258 PP, Plume)
When I received this book, I thought, "I can't review this
-- it's about sex, and I'm using my real name here!" Then again,
maybe the authors wanted to say, "Relax! Don't be so uptight
and worry about what or how you should be doing and just enjoy!"
Filled with glossy photos of young, nubile models and diagrams of
anatomy and sexual positions, this book is an entertaining romp
through the world of s-e-x. In feisty language and enough slang
to be potentially bewildering to even native English speakers, the
book covers a wide range of topics including solo performances,
safer sex, sex toys, varying combinations of genders and numbers
of partners, and role playing. The book's message seems to be, "Play.
Be careful and watch out for these things. Keep an open mind and
you too could be left speechless with delight." (JT)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime: a
novel
-Mark Haddon (226 PP, Doubleday)
The thoughts and feelings that motivate people to do what they
do are often confusing. But what if you simply could not comprehend
the range of human emotions surrounding you? Welcome to the world
of Christopher John Francis Boone, an autistic 15-year-old who has
memorized all the world's countries and their capital cities as
well as every prime number up to 7057. When a neighborhood dog is
found dead, Christopher is blamed and he undertakes the puzzle of
solving the mystery of who really killed the dog. But this brings
him into contact with Strangers and Other People who behave unpredictably.
And he tries to cling to logic and order (just like his hero Sherlock
Holmes) even as he uncovers deceit, murderous anger, and abandonment.
(JT)
The Bobby Gold Stories: a novel
-Anthony Bourdain (165pp, Bloomsbury)
I was surprised to find that Bourdain wrote and I was further surprised
to find that he had written a few novels before he wrote his best-selling
Kitchen Confidential. I picked this one up because I liked
the cover; it had a raw T-bone carved into the shape of a small
pistol. In this book, young Bobby Gold gets out of prison and immediately
returns to a life of petty thuggery. Life is good enough. Nothing
he's particularly proud of, but at least he's good at being head
of a nightclub's security and breaking a few bones when mobsters
needed it. All that changes when he meets Nikki the saute bitch
who works in the kitchen at the club and suddenly he's living life
on the lam and trying his best to keep them from getting killed.
(JT)
July 3, 2003
The Effect of Living Backwards
- Heidi Julavits (325 PP, Putnam)
Heidi Julavits’ (The Mineral Palace) second novel
finds two sisters aboard a hijacked airliner. Billed as a black
comedy, it will be just as interesting to see how Julavits' novel
is received (as, say, watching the reaction to critic James Wood's
fictional attempt) as she is the editor of The
Believer, which premiered with her warm
and fuzzy manifesto about literary criticism. (RB)
The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men
in a Race against an Epidemic
– Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury (303 PP, Norton)
Leave it to the inimitable Pat Holt (former San Francisco Chronicle
book editor) to write a book
recommendation that is as endearing as any story could be. It's
1925 and Dr. Curtis Welch, a physician in Nome, Alaska, identifies
a burgeoning/nascent diphtheria epidemic. He has no anti-toxin,
and the nearest railhead is 674 miles away. Conditions in Alaska
prevented air travel; thus the solution was a dog-sled relay. And
so for six days the best of Alaska's drivers endured 60-degrees-below-zero
temperatures and 70-mile-an-hour winds (stopping or slowing down
was clearly a death sentence) and other impossible conditions to
bring the toxins to Nome. It is quite a story and the cousins Salisbury
honor it and the men and dogs that endured it. (RB)
The Bite
-Michael Crow (288 PP, Viking)
A mystery along side of a mystery. The Bite, which is
the sophomore entry into the Luther Ewing thriller series (Red
Rain was the first), is written by a "prize winning critically
acclaimed literary novelist whose works have been translated and
published in nine languages." Black and Vietnamese Luther himself
is a handful—an undercover narcotics cop in Baltimore, a former
Special Forces soldier who with his partner Icebox deal with a sexy
DEA agent Francesca Russo and some wacky and lethal crystal meth
dealers. Luther is shot in the beginning of this story so you know
he's gong to be pissed. That is a good thing for the reader. But
not for the meth dealers. (RB)
Fabulous Small Jews
-Joseph Epstein (340 PP, Houghton Mifflin)
My mother's inquiry about where you find small Jews notwithstanding,
Joseph Epstein's (Snobbery: The American Version) stories
are much more vignettes about growing old than slices of Jewish
ethnic pie. And the surefootedness of the writing walks in places
where fiction doesn't often tread: a cranky, aging commodities trader
sends rude postcards to intellectuals he convicts of pretension,
a woman becomes the third wife of a piano maestro, a very successful
divorce lawyer surrenders to the wife he is divorcing, a professor
and former student of a literary icon is called upon to decide the
fate of some his mentor's poetry, a grandfather decides to have
bypass operation so that he attend to the grandson his son has discarded.
These are stories about quirky and funny people presented with great
compassion and clarity. (RB)
Platform
-Michael Houellenbecq (259 PP, Knopf)
I suppose there are many good reasons for picking up a book. It
could be Chip
Kidd's book jacket design using an arresting Arno Minkkinen
photograph. In Houllenbecq's (The Elementary Particles)
case it could also be that his European reputation has created an
undertow
of anticipation for his latest novel on these American shores.
Or if you know nothing at all about this bad boy of world literature
there is Julian
Barnes on the "insolent art of Michel Houllebecq."
Barnes' draws parallels with Albert Camus and concludes, "Is
Michel depressed, or is the world depressing? Camus, who began by
creating in Meursault one of the most disaffected characters in
postwar fiction, ended by writing 'The First Man,' in which ordinary
lives are depicted with the richest observation and sympathy. The
trajectory of Houellebecq’s world view will be worth following."
(RB)
Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip
-Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns (173 PP, Knopf)
I must say I am a sucker for a road story, and this is an original.
In 1903 Horatio Nelson Jackson, a thirty-one year old Vermont doctor,
bets fifty dollars that he can drive from San Francisco to New York
in a twenty horsepower Winton—at a time when there were only
one hundred and fifty miles of paved roads in the entire USA. This
book has nearly one hundred and fifty illustrations and yes, it
is the companion piece to a forthcoming PBS program. (RB)
|
