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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; and soon enough there
will be other abbreviations to deal with. Links go to Amazon.com.
Last updated: August 26, 2004
The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers
Reflect on Their Mother Tongues - Wendy Lesser
(Pantheon, 241 p.p.)
Given the limitless pool of information that is accessible to the
literate and semi literate in our brave new world, curatorial efforts
will come to be seen as expressions of artistic talent—somewhat
like the early FM radio free-form disc jockeys who segued music
by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Howling Wolf, Charlie Parker and The Temptations.
In that spirit, this is a genius anthology assembled by Threepenny
Review's Wendy Lesser, who credits Joseph Conrad as "the
great ancestor, the supervisory ghost" of this effort and uses
his writing as the source of the book's title, "English for
me was neither a matter of choice nor adoption… It was I who
adopted the genius of language." Included are memoiristic essays
by Bharati Mukherjee, Joseph Skvorecky, Amy Tan, Luc Sante, Louis
Begley, Ariel Dorfman and Leonard Michaels. (RB)
History Lessons: How Textbooks From Around the World
Portray US History - Dana Lindaman & Kyle
Ward (New Press, 404 p.p.)
Given the undisputed xenophobia of Americans, one wonders if the
people who are perhaps most in need of this instructive tome will
make use of it. But then it is a matter of some argument whether
Americans read their own history books. Francis
Fitzgerald, whose America Revised: History Schoolbooks in
the Twentieth Century admirably exhibits her expertise in this
area, points out, "Reading a book composed entirely of excerpts
from textbooks may seem an unpromising activity, but history texts
reveal much about national perspectives and prejudices: They are
more expressive than government pronouncements; they get into matters
diplomats avoid; and yet, as the authors note, they are in varying
degrees state-sanctioned and thus official, or semi-official, stories
about the national past. Most reflect public attitudes; all help
to create those attitudes because they are the most widely read
histories in each country, and because kids read them during the
formative adolescent years." This book goes a good distance
in explaining the rest of the world's lack of reverence for America,
something that seems to baffle Americans. (RB)
Paris Review #170 -
Summer 2004 (206 p.p.)
Paris Review senior editor Oliver Broudy interviews Paula
Fox. Novelist John Wray (The Right Hand of God) interviews
Haruki Murakami. Stories by Nathaniel
Bellows (On This Day) and Ignacio Padilla (Shadow
Without A Name) and the usual unusual literary morsels in this
first post-George Plimpton edition. (RB)
Borges: a life – Edwin
Williamson (Viking, 571 p.p.)
Last year brought forth a slew of extensive biographies of writers:
two on George Orwell (being the centenary of his birth), Geoffrey
Wolf on John O'Hara, Blake Bailey's invaluable work on the inestimable
Richard Yates, and Garcia Marquez's first volume of a proposed memorial
trilogy. The trickle has slowed to a drip-drop this year, supplanted
with books reflecting our plague time. Oxford don Williamson who
is known as (well, by the people who know about such things) a Cervantes
scholar has brought forth his contribution to Borgesian scholarship—which
now numbers at least a dozen biographies (according to this books
bibliography). Perhaps this betrays a streak of my own latent philistinism,
but I am particularly fond of the biographical essays that James
Atlas' Penguin Lives sponsored. And in that spirit I would be thrilled
to read Elliot Weinberger on Borges—as opposed to wading through
five or six hundred pages to glean a few pages of value (to me).
(RB)
Irreparable
Harm - Renata Adler (Melville House, 61
p.p.)
The
Road to Illegitimacy
- Mark Danner (Melville House, 60 p.p.)
The
Big Chill - Dennis Loy Johnson (Melville
House, 109 p.p.)
Journalist, writer and literary enthusiast Dennis Loy Johnson,
whose worthy and useful webzine Moby
Lives (wherein he tilted at various cultural windmills and which
has been on hiatus) justifies his absence from the fray with the
pride of Hoboken, Melville
House's publication of a troika of well designed broadsides
on the great black mark of American electoral politics, the 2000
presidential election. On the heels of the lovingly published series
The Art of the Novella; Melville's Bartelby the Scrivener,
Chekov's My Life, Tolstoy's My Life, Henry James'
The Lesson of the Master and Frank O'Connor's long essay
on the short story, The Lonely Voice, we think that light
and hopes of literature are alive and well in Hoboken. (RB)
The Believer - August 2004 # 20 (88 p.p.)
Susan Choi (American Girl) chats with Francisco Goldman
(The Divine Husband), Howard Hampton looks at Jonathan
Ames' latest (Wake Up! Sir) and Ben Ehrenreich's riveting
feature "Labels Can Really Kill A Person" on so-called
Sexually Violent Predators and Ann Cummins (Red House)
reviews Karen Shepard's The Bad Boy's Wife (see below).
(RB)
Ulysses S Grant –
Josiah Bunting III (Times Books, 180 p.p.)
Reading Josiah Bunting's revisionist (in the sense that he corrects
the conventional view) take on Grant, I confess to having held the
popular views that he was both a drunkard and butcher. Earlier in
the year, reading Rachel
Cohen's A Chance Meeting, my view of US Grant was rehabilitated
by being apprised of his friendship with Mark Twain. And there is,
of course, Mark Perry's Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship
That Changed America. This slender volume serves to fill in
the blanks in my historical knowledge and lays much of the misconception
about Grant at his own reticence and taciturnity. Historian Bunting
has an amusingly florid prose style and his choice of epigraph for
this book quotes Michael Beckerman, "It is not easy to discern
the motives of any action by any person, especially since our reasons
for doing something are often hidden even to ourselves…Those
who do not explain themselves often find themselves explained by
others." This study is part of an ongoing series on American
president that has Arthur Schlesinger as its executive editor, which
isn't necessarily a bad thing—though I must admit to my own
disenchantment with the famous Camelot historian. But that's another
story for another day. (RB)
Ploughshares
Fall 2004, guest edited by Amy
Bloom (218 p.p.)
I thought to reproduce the entirety of Amy
Bloom's introduction to this edition of Ploughshares, but then
what would you do:
A friend of mine finds out from her agent (her editor never calls)
that her book, her fourth, has been dropped from her publisher’s
catalogue. The work is too difficult. A writer I know is told, “How
about putting in some dogs? People love it when you write about
dogs.” An editor I admire, at a magazine I have long admired,
says, “We’re just not doing emotionally complex work.
All I wanted to do in this issue was to find room for difficult
work, for emotionally complex work, for work that didn’t have
dogs where they didn’t belong and for work that loved the
word, as well as the story, and believed in telling a story that
mattered, in a way that stayed with me, stayed with you, and didn’t
shy from imagination or get coy about facts." Twelve stories
and an essay are the results of Bloom's personal culling. (RB)
The Bad Boy's Wife – Karen Shepard (St Martins,
253 p.p.)
Karen Shepard (An Empire of Women) deftly tells (in reverse)
the story of Hannah and Cole's 20-year marriage starting 2 years
after it falls apart. We share Andrea Barrett's take, "This
portrait of a marriage gains unusual power and poetry through its
deft inversions of the past." Especially poignant are the relationship
and the dilemma of divorce as seen through the eyes of Mattie, the
10-year-old daughter. (RB)
Coast to Coast: A Family Romance –
Nora Johnson (Simon & Schuster, 275 p.p.)
Novelist Nora Johnson's (The World of Henry Orient) pedigree
and the basis for this book is her father, the great screenwriter
and director Nunnally
Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath, The Dirty Dozen, How to Marry
A Millionaire)—whose observation, "Only a hack is
consistent," gave him an unchallenged entry into my personal
pantheon of O.H.C. (Observers of the Human Condition). Nora recounts,
"I was ridiculously in love with my father. We both knew it.
So were a lot of others—his three wives and [five] children,
his secretaries and maids and movie stars and almost everyone he
encountered—which transformed my feeling into a public commodity."
This is Johnson's account of shuttling between her divorced parents
in the 1940's and '50s and all the attendant glamour of chic New
York and glitzy Hollywood society, rife with anecdotes of the famous
and a fair measure of poignancy. (RB)
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