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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; (DM) = Drew
McNaughton, and soon enough there will be other abbreviations
to deal with. Links go to Amazon.com.
Last updated: July 14, 2005
The Stock Ticker and the SuperJumbo: How
the Democrats Can Once Again Become America’s Dominant Political
Party – Rick Perlstein (Prickly Paradigm Press, 114 pp.)
I expect that there are enough progressive people worried about
the current political and cultural climate that a spate of advice
books such as this one will soon be hit the shelves—I just
noticed that Garrison Keillor has published Homegrown Democrat:
A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America—“I
live in Minnesota for the plain and simple reason that I am
not so different from these people and also because the social
compact is still intact here despite Republicans trying to pound
it out of us.” Putting aside for a moment the question of
whether it is an attractive option to see the other political party
return to its glory days, I can at least view the end of Republican
dominion as a worthy end. But no matter, the great service that
this nonpareil Prickly Press pamphlet (and others published by PPP)
provides is this assemblage of thoughtful and fierce commentary
by the Village Voice’s Perstein as well as Stanley
Aronowitz, Robert Reich, and others. Here’s Perstein’s
big thought: “This argument is for the objective necessity
of political risk for irreversible commitments. And irreversible
commitments are not anything to smile glibly at If risk is not frightening,
it is nothing at all. Republicans began their march to any irreversible
commitment to the full conservative program in 1964. It lead that
year to an atrocious defeat. I am not saying the Democrats need
to embrace an economic liberalism superjumbo and then lose in order
to win. I’m saying they must stick with it even if they lose,
in order to win big. Dream again or die.” Interesting argument,
no? (RB)
Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War
on Terror – Mark Danner (New York Review Books, 580 pp.)
Mark Danner occupies a special place in my so-called library. He
has three books: El Mozote, which was, I believe, the noblest thing
Tina Brown ever did (devoting a whole issue of the New Yorker
to the story of the massacre in El Salvador by government troops
and of course denied by the U.S. government), subsequently published
as a book; The
Road to Illegitimacy: the story of the 2000 presidential election
debacle in Florida; and now this brave book which contains 70 pages
of Danner’s commentary (taken from articles he did for the
New York Review of Books) and over five hundred pages of
documents (memos and other original sources.) As I have taken to
eccentric categorization of the textual rubble that poses as my
library, Danner’s books are to found in the “Tilting
at Windmills” section. It doesn’t yet occupy a lot shelf
space but it may be growing. (RB)
Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life – Michael
Lewis (W. W. Norton, 91 pp.)
I take a back seat to no one in my admiration for Mike
Lewis as a reporter and as a person. Additionally, I have great
appreciation for his publisher, Norton, the last of the independents.
However I feel that I must provide this preface to assuage my guilt
for the consumer advisory I am about to disclose. The story of Coach
is pretty much what appeared in a New York Times Magazine
cover story last year, albeit in a handsome little package not particularly
expensively priced. In any case, it’s a wonderful story, and
as usual Lewis tells it well. (RB)
The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature
– edited by Ilan Stavans (Schocken, 439 pp.)
Editor, teacher, translator, and writer Ilan Stavans, whose bibliography
is rife with attention to literary matters of Latin America and
the Jewish tradition, has assembled this anthology of fiction, memoir,
poetry, and essays by twenty-eight of the other Jewish writers whose
modernity stems from post-Enlightenment mid-nineteenth-century era,
including: Grace
Aguilar, Emma Lazarus, Yehuda Burla, Albert Cohen, Veza Canetti,
Yehuda Haim Aaron ha Cohen Pehahia, Schlomo Reuven, Elias Canetti,
Nathalia Guinsberg, Victor Perera, Danilo Kis, Andre Aciman, AB
Yehoshua, and Gina Alhadiff, with an excerpt from Salman Rushdie’s
The Moor’s Last Sigh. Here from Stavan’s introduction,
“The Sephardic cultural sensibility is in a perpetual state
of fluidity, continually redefining itself. Its purview spans the
world. Nothing is foreign to it: as one door closes another door
opens . . . in the end though it is obvious that what matters is
the journey itself, the quest not its ultimate destination. Sephardic
authors explore that quest through words in a Babel of tongues.
Their watch words are to be found in Psalms 106:35: ‘They
mingled among the nations and learned their ways.’”
(RB)
Black Clock #2 ed. by Steve Erickson (California
Institute of Arts, 151 pp.)
Our Ecstatic Days – Steve Erickson (Simon & Schuster,
317 pp.)
The disaffected ululations of various literary apparatchiks that
there is too much crap being published probably stems from ignorance
of writers like Steve Erickson, who have published six well-regarded
novels (by those aware of them). He has been noticed by such eminent
literary publications such as the Wall Street Journal as
well as the New Yorker, the Toronto Globe, the
San Francisco Chronicle, and The Believer. So
if have I shamed you for living in ignorance of Erickson, it’s
not too late. His latest work opens in Los Angeles in 2004 and spans
most of the twenty-first century, described in the novel as the
Age of Chaos, populated by a grab bag of, er, strange characters.
Erickson is also editor of BlackClock, a literary magazine
out of the California Institute of Arts, where he teaches. The second
issue of this semi-annual (well designed by Gail Swanlund) features
a buffet of works on musical themes by Jonathan Lethem (on Otis
Redding), Mike Ventura (on the lost Jimi Hendrix/Miles Davis sessions),
Heidi Julavits on the music of musicians who died in plane crashes,
and Erickson’s own oddity, “Paul is Dead.” And
much more. (RB)
Collected Prose – Paul Auster (Picador,
528 pp.)
My antipathy towards soft cover editions is somewhat mitigated
by the circumstance of a nonexistent cloth version and the care
the publisher takes with trade paperback. Picador, now an exclusively
paperback imprint, has published this original volume of Auster’s
Autobiographical writings, True Stories, Critical Essays. Prefaces,
and Collaborations with Artists. This book has folded flaps
on the cover, which give a faux cloth cover impression. This must
be a sign of his devoted following—else why expose this melange
of various typewritings by a barely middle-aged writer? Of course,
it’s hard not to find something(s) to like. The collaboration
with artist Sam Messer on “My Typewriter” (though I
would have been preferred it be printed in color) and Auster’s
“Appeal to The Governor of Pennsylvania” (his plea for
mercy on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal to then governor Tom Ridge) come
to mind. And in over five hundred pages there is more. (RB)
War Movies: Journeys to Viet Nam – Wayne
Karlin (Curbstone Press, 224 pp.)
The Vietnam War, like the War Between the States, is destined to
remain an unresolved matter for at least the foreseeable future.
One has only to look at the last election with its Swift Boat liars
and the matter of George Bush’s Air National Guard record
to see the truth of this. Novelist Wayne Karlin, who served in Vietnam
as a helicopter pilot and has edited some esteemed anthologies of
original Vietnamese writing as well as scripting an award winning
film, Song
of the Stork. In this memoir Karlin returns to Vietnam to work
on the film and finds himself living the worlds of postwar Vietnam
and the film—he plumbs the rich reservoir of ironies that
flow from connecting the past to the present. Kirkus Reviews
observes, “The writing here is trance-like, still and thoughtful,
groping toward memory and meaning . . . The writer is edgy, but
he has returned to Vietnam many times before and is mindful that
he must be patient if he wants to hear the stories of the Vietnamese
he’s working with on the film, a number of whom were on the
receiving end of his fire, as he was of theirs.” (RB)
In the House of My Fear – Joel Agee (Shoemaker &
Hoard, 496 pp.)
Joel Agee first came to my attention with his recently published
translation of Hans Erich Nossack’s The End (an author
lauded, by the way, by W. G. Sebald). Agee’s memoir is summarized
thus: In the spring of 1964, not quite at home in his native New
York (having spent much of his boyhood and youth behind the Iron
Curtain), he accidentally ingests a sizeable dose of LSD. All at
once he is thrown from the precincts of bohemian normalcy. His brilliant,
mentally ill younger brother is descending into a psychic netherworld
without chemical inducement, and the culture at large, not to be
outdone for surreal extremity, is undergoing a mutation of its own.
Together with his wife and their infant daughter, he emigrates in
search of kindred souls—a picaresque journey that takes him
through Spain, England, Italy, Switzerland, France, and England
again. On the way, a fantastic project takes root in his imagination:
to exorcize his brother’s madness by transforming his own
consciousness, first with “acid,” then in a quest for
enlightenment under the tutelage of spiritual teachers. Thirty years
later Joel Agee sets himself the task of recounting his adventures.
He begins again as a memoirist, but the truth he is seeking is not
just that of memory. Somewhere, he knows, the ghosts of past terrors—his
own and his brother’s, who died by his own hand at the age
of twenty-seven—are still trapped and crying for release.
To find them, to save them, he must write his way into the house
of his fear. I especially like Jamaica Kincaid’s praise, “This
voluptuously rendered account of a life lived with an almost unbounded
curiosity as if everything in the world mattered and so must be
examined and eventually loved is among the most wonderful I have
ever read.” And let me add Jamaica is no log roller. Take
this one to the bank. No doubt. (RB)
A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World
– Morris Dickstein (Princeton University Press, 280 pp.)
I can count on my thumbs the number of books on literature and
literary criticism I have read this millenium—which is to
say I don’t much care or have interest in reading about theory
and analysis. There is of course James Wood and the bad boy some
see has his evil spawn, Dale Peck—and then who? Other than
Daniel Mendelsohn, who has not, sadly, collected his work in a book,
and John Updike, who I have guiltlessly read nothing by, this is
not an age of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and
Alfred Kazan. Thus Morris Dickstein, who’s book title comes
from Stendahlian description of a novel (from The Red and the
Black) piqued my interest with his 1996 piece on Chicago writers
for the Washington Post (included here) and simply because
I found his writing (read thinking) congenial: “Critics write
about literature for the same reasons writers write about anything:
for the pleasure of forming graceful sentences that sort out their
own reactions to books or simply to be part of a conversation about
the human dilemma that goes back to the beginnings of culture.”
This anthology of Dickstein’s writings include thinking on
a wide range of contemporary authors including, bless him, writers
from outside the United States such as Samuel Beckett, Gunter Grass,
S. Y. Agnon, Garcia Marques, as well as Americans—the likes
of Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, and William Kennedy. Morris Dickstein
opines, “Novels can show us that the real world far from being
simple and always available, can also be elusive and problematic.
They create identifications that channel the quicksilver flow of
our inner experience and redirect our social sympathies. They can
be powerful tools of indoctrination. They can excite us sexually
or inflame us politically They are not simply mirrors that reflect
the world but prisms that refract it, break it down . . .”
(RB)
Irving Penn – The Platinum Prints –
Sara Greenough (Yale University Press 200 pp.)
This beautiful and useful volume serves as an accompaniment to
an Irving
Penn exhibition currently at the National Gallery of Art (through
October, 2005, which includes a large number of prints that Penn
gifted to the museum. The 120 images are well presented (something
at which Yale Press continues to excel) and curator Greenough’s
explanatory essay points out that photographer Penn’s work
with platinum and palladium prints was his reaction to the finding
much of his work being magazine based—“Penn experimented
extensively with this process in order to make prints with remarkably
subtle rich tonal ranges and luxurious textures prints that are
in fact the exact opposite of the more neutral reproductions of
his photographs that appeared in [Vogue and other Conde
Nast magazines] the popular press.” Included are portraits
of Pablo Picasso, David Smity, Saul Steinerg, Marcel Duchamp, Sir
Cecil Beaton, Alberto Giacommetti, Marc Chagall, George Jean Nathan,
and H. L. Mencken and some of his indigenous people’s studies.
(RB)
The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion – Will Eisner with an introduction by
Umberto Eco (W.W. Norton 148 pp.)
Since Art Spiegelman’s historic and groundbreaking graphic
novel(s) Maus, that form has still been left to the periphery of
literature except for appreciation by a small gaggle of cogniscenti.
Needless to say, Speigelman was not the first (not to take anything
away from him) or the last person to extend the reach of the graphic
novel. Will Eisner, who may rightly be viewed as the father of the
graphic novel (with the publication of A Contract with God
in 1978), if he did nothing else should be lionized for this tome.
In his introduction, Umberto Eco economically and clearly traces
the history of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and astutely concludes, “It is not the Protocols
that produce anti-Semitism, it is people’s need to single
out an enemy that leads them to believe in the Protocols—in
spite of this courageous, not comic but tragic book by
Will Eisner—the story is hardly over. Yet it is a story very
much worth telling, for one must fight the Big Lie and the hatred
it spawns.” And Eisner asserts—“For me, The Plot
represents a departure from pure graphic story telling. It marks
an effort to employ this powerful medium to address a matter of
immense personal concern . . . I have spent my career in the application
of sequential art as a form of narrative language with the widespread
acceptance of the graphic narrative as a vehicle of popular literature,
there is now an opportunity to deal head on with this propaganda
in a more accessible language. It is my hope that, perhaps, this
work will drive yet another nail into the coffin of this terrifying
vampire-like fraud.” Amen. (RB)
The Outlaw Bible of American Literature, edited
by Alan Kaufman, Neil Ortenberg, and Barney Rosset (Thunder’s
Mouth Press, 662 P.P )
There is some wishful thinking going on here in viewing this anthology
as a compendium of renegade writings and pronouncements, but then
we are adrift in a time that sees no ironies in Bob Dylan and Charles
Mingus songs and such being adapted to television hucksterism, selling
cars and other consumer goods. To be sure, many of the writers included
here were no doubt proud to be seen as outlaws. Maybe all that one
can draw from this list is that the movement from the social periphery
to acceptance is that one man’s outlaw is another woman’s
legislator. At any rate, there are some interesting selections included
here: Andy Warhol stabber Valerie Solanas’s “SCUM Manifesto,”
Hell’s Angel Sonny Barger’s memoiristic momento, Mumia
Abu Jamal’s Live from Death Row, everyone’s
favorite junkie, William Burroughs, beat icon Lenny Bruce, Malcolm
X, the vastly underappreciated Paul Krassner, Mailer protégé
and twice-convicted murderer Jack Abbott Henry, poet and playwright
Miguel Pinero—and Hunter Thompson, of course. The book’s
epigram by one of my favorite writers, Nelson Algren, does go a
long way to letting the air out of any of this volume’s pretensions
or perceptions there of: “For every man was secretly against
the law in his heart . . . and it was the heart that mattered.”
(RB)
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