|
Brief
Book Reviews
14 September 2002
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches From the Unfinished Civil War
Tony Horwitz
The Civil War may have ended over a century
ago, but in parts of the South, time stands still. Rekindling a boyhood
obsession with the conflict, Horwitz enters with world of Civil War
re-enactors, for whom the term "obsession" is too mild a word. His
account of their hardcore quest for authenticity is lively and amusing, but
he soon uncovers a more complex picture of the South and the war. The defeat
is still felt keenly, and the battle to preserve Southern culture and resist
Federal control is still being fought. The Civil War was not only about slavery,
yet it is the Confederate flag that acts as a match, igniting the powder keg
of tension between blacks and whites in the region. Horwitz travels from
battlefields to bars, from downtown Atlanta to rural Alabama, and talks to
just about everyone he encounters. He discovers some glaring historical
inaccuracies in what is considered common knowledge of Civil War history. And
all along, Horwitz is troubled by the contrast between his egalitarian values
and the appeal of the Confederate rebellion. The book contains few answers,
but it illuminates an era that has a unique hold on the American
imagination.
Shopgirl
Steve Martin
Fans of the actor and comedian won’t see in
his first novella much of the wild and crazy guy they know, but they will be
impressed with his versatility. The story Martin tells is of yet another
50-year-old man who beds a woman half his age and leaves her enriched by and
grateful for the experience, but the author’s delicate touch and intellectual
insight shed some new light on an old subject. His title character,
Mirabelle, is a shy and skittish artist, and the story has enough dark
shadows in it to keep it from being just Pretty Woman for the
literati. Martin sets part of the story in Vermont, revealing a gap in his
research: Mirabelle flies in and out of what appears to be a large,
full-service airport in Montpelier. Most of the action, however, takes place
in Martin’s beloved Los Angeles, and his fond jabs at California culture
glitter with the comedian’s clever wit.
Inconspicuous
Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, From the
Everyday to the Obscure
Paul Lukas
Ever wonder what happened to those little
red strings we used to open Band-Aids™ with? Or what those foot-measuring
devices in shoe stores are called? Or why there’s a market for sauerkraut
juice? Lukas is the man to ask. He’s out to give the things in our lives the
recognition they deserve. Marveling at a culture that produces both high
quality industrial tools and beef-flavored water marketed as a dog drink,
Lukas is someone on whom nothing is lost—quite literally. His apartment
sounds like an overcrowded museum. Whether he’s praising the elegant design
of a toothpick dispenser, weighing in on the Hydrox vs. Oreos debate, or
shopping for the perfect garlic press, his dry wit and appreciation for
ingenuity and craftsmanship can make even the most ardent anti-consumer see
the fluorescent-lit grocery store aisles in a new light.
Starting Out in the Evening
Brian Morton
Morton’s first novel, The Dylanist,
is a favorite of mine, and I’m delighted to report that his second novel surpassed
my high expectations. The story of an out-of-print novelist nearing the end
of his life, and the ambitious young woman who comes to write about him,
again turns on the basic question of how to live, this time asking,
"What happens if you’ve devoted your life to making art, but that art is
only second-rate?" Interwoven is the struggle of the novelist’s
daughter, faced at mid-life with having to give up her dream of a baby for
her dream of true love. Morton captures the painful reality of human frailty,
both physical and spiritual, and navigates the subtle dissolution of
relationships, in language that at times achieves an otherworldly
beauty.
Out of America: A Black Man
Confronts Africa
Keith B. Richburg
As Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post,
Richburg spent three years covering the most widespread corruption, violence
and human misery that he had ever witnessed. Frustrated at the lack of
popular protest against brutal African dictators, the systematic repression
of those who do speak out, and the failure of the international community to
take a hard look at what is happening in Africa, he set out to examine why
peace and democracy haven’t taken hold in Africa the way they have in Asian
countries with similar colonial histories. In an account both thoroughly
documented and deeply personal, Richburg describes the particular
difficulties of being a Black American in Africa, and how instead of finding
a spiritual home in the land of his ancestors, he only found himself grateful
not to have been born in a place where human life is so cheap. The result is
a disquieting and fascinating read.
The Inn at Lake Devine
Elinor Lipman
In 1962, the Marx family sends an inquiry
to a summer resort and receives a polite but firm response: Gentiles Only.
Twelve-year-old Natalie has found her mission. Fascinated and incensed, she
sets out to educate, and eventually infiltrate, the Vermont inn that refused
her. Her passion carries over into adulthood, when circumstances entwine her
fate with that of the family that runs the inn. With an ear for sparkling
dialogue and a taste for fine food, Lipman has accomplished the unlikely feat
of writing a charming romantic comedy about anti-Semitism.
The Climb:
Tragic Ambitions on Everest
Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt
This is the story of the fatal Mt. Everest
expedition of May 1996, told based on the recollection of Boukreev, the
Russian guide for the American Mountain Madness team. Boukreev was portrayed
in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air as highly competent but callous, and
hearing the same story from Boukreev’s perspective gives one a broader view
of a still confusing and sad event. While The Climb lacks Krakauer’s
fluid prose (actually less evident in Into Thin Air than in his
earlier work), it provides more background and details, and incorporates many
more voices of people involved in all aspects of the expedition. Boukreev,
who risked his own life to save several others, yet makes no attempt to
rationalize or moralize about the tragedy, had no romantic illusions about
his life’s work. He died in an avalanche in December of 1997.
Waltzing the Cat
Pam Houston
Despite its unfortunate title, Houston’s
second story collection fulfills the promise of her first, Cowboys Are My
Weakness. In this new collection the stories are linked, sharing the
first person voice of Lucy O’Rourke: landscape photographer, river guide, and
perennial loser in love. The linked format tightens the book, allowing it to
approach the depth of a novel as we piece together clues about Lucy’s unhappy
childhood. Houston’s form, however, is the short story; only its spareness
and restrain are right for the pictures she paints of desolate Montana
plains, wild Amazon jungles, and men as stormy and inscrutable as nature
itself.
Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families
Bill McKibben
and The Nurture Assumption: Why
Children Turn Out the Way They Do
Judith Rich Harris
Each of these books challenges cherished
beliefs about the effect of childhood experiences on human development.
McKibben’s is "a personal and environmental argument for single-child
families" written to support his own decision to have one child. He
illustrates the environmental damage wrought by overpopulation so effectively
that the reader is left in a near panic, and in need of some strong arguments
for reproducing at all. McKibben makes only a vague mention of a desire to
nurture, and adoption, which would make him a parent without increasing the
population, is never mentioned. The most original part of the book is the
debunking of the myth that only children are more spoiled, self-centered, and
lonely than those without siblings. McKibben cites several studies and uses
cross-cultural analysis, and invalidates birth order as a personality shaper
at the same time. The "Nurture Assumption" that Harris attacks is
the notion that parenting has any effect at all on a child’s development.
It’s a radical stance, and Harris backs up her theories with research and
with her own observations (like McKibben’s, her argument validates her own
choices and experiences). She cites cases of identical twins reared apart who
are strikingly similar as adults, and maintains that a child’s inborn
personality influences parenting styles, not the other way around. Harris’
emphasis on the importance of peers and community is sound, but one wonders what
her motive is in telling parents that they have no influence on their
children beyond the contribution of genes. Both of these authors seem to view
families as temporary babysitting services. Their influence on adult
personality aside, anyone with parents or siblings can testify that close
relatives remain an integral part of one’s life long after childhood
ends.
The Dangerous Husband
Jane Shapiro
The narrator’s romance begins like any
other, floating on the blissful high of discovering a soulmate. Then reality
hits: her beloved’s endearing clumsiness turns worrisome. He makes a mess of
the kitchen. Furniture collapses in his wake. The pets are afraid of him. She
soon finds herself lusting after any man who can drink a glass of wine
without spilling it. Then, attempting a good morning kiss, her adoring
husband breaks her arm. She starts to wonder: whatever happened to his first
wife, anyway? This darkly funny allegory will ring true to anyone, who,
caught between loyalty and self-preservation, has seen firsthand how
familiarity breeds equal parts love and contempt.
The Story of a Million Years
David Huddle
This book claims to be a novel, with each
"chapter" narrated by a different character. It’s really a
collection of excellent short stories that center on a woman, her husband,
and the affair that the woman had as a 15-year-old girl with a 41-year-old
married neighbor. Huddle’s writing is at its finest yet in this meditation on
marriage and secrets, and the changing viewpoints create the effect of
peering through alternating facets of a diamond.
A Return to Modesty:
Discovering the Lost Virtue
Wendy Shalit
At first blush, this call for modesty
sounds like another blame-the-victim response to the problem of women’s
mistreatment at the hands of men. But Shalit, while believing in radical
differences between the sexes, would never point to women as inferior. She
believes that a culture which advocates women’s total sexual freedom and
equality degrades their status and leaves them unhappy, and even in danger.
We no longer have the social support provided in the past by expectations of,
and codes of conduct for, both sexes. This leaves girls and women subject to
sexual harassment and stalking, to being told to get over their
"oversensitive" preference for romance over casual sex, and to
stifle their "codependent" interest in relationships. Shalit
advocates a rediscovery of the values of male honor and female virtue, not
only as guidelines for creating a more civil society, but because of the
erotic potential in mystery and restraint.
Big Trouble
Dave Barry
Widely regarded as the funniest man in
America, Barry brings to his first novel not only all the wit of his earlier
writing, but also, as he is quick to point out, an Actual Plot. Amidst the
everyday chaos and corruption that is modern Miami, a failed advertising
designer and his teenaged son become entangled with Eastern European arms
dealers, a pair of bored assassins, bumbling cops, a herd of goats and a pair
of small-time criminals who turn into international terrorists without even
knowing it. Barry sneaks in some shrewd and hilarious digs at bureaucratic
nonsense and human foibles, all while taking his readers on a roller coaster
ride that they won’t want to see end. Lucky for us, he did it again.
The Bee Season
Myla Goldberg
This beautifully written first novel is
creating a buzz among word lovers. Ten-year-old Eliza, an exceptionally
ordinary young girl, is as surprised as everyone else when she wins the class
spelling bee and moves on to the National finals. Her father, believing her
to be the next great Jewish mystic, sets out to hone her gift with an unusual
method for mastering spelling. While their studying brings him closer to her,
he doesn’t notice his wife and son becoming lost in their own spiritual
quests. Just as every word is composed of discrete letters, each with a
unique character, this modern family is made up of four individuals bumping
up against each other, each with their own compelling story.
The Gift of
Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence
Gavin de Becker
If concern about appearing rude has ever
kept you engaged in a conversation with a stranger whom you felt might be
dangerous, then you need to read this book. With clarity like a shot of
adrenaline, DeBecker reveals the techniques of violent predators and gives
advice on how not to become a victim. While needless worrying masks our
natural instincts, dismissing real fear when it does occur can be fatal.
Through stories of celebrity stalkings and workplace shooting sprees, mail
bombs and media hysteria, restraining orders that backfire and children who
kill, DeBecker shows how to identify and defuse potential threats. His
message is calmly confident: Simple intuition will protect us from harm, if
we will only let it.
Blue Angel
Francine Prose
Ted Swensen is a frustrated novelist and
tenured professor at a small fictional Vermont college. Running a creative
writing workshop that teeters close to being a group therapy session, he has
thus far managed to avoid the sexual harassment charges appearing like land
mines around campus. He adores his wife, and, for the most part, his life.
Then an exceptionally talented student shares with him a novel about a girl
who seduces her teacher, and his complicated feelings for her draw him into a
situation he doesn’t fully understand. Prose’s gift for creating complex,
believable characters allow her to craft a novel that unfolds into a classic
tragic tale as well as a wicked satire of academic life.
High-Tech Heretic:
Reflections of a Computer Contrarian
Clifford Stoll
Politicians pledge a laptop computer for
every schoolchild. Textbooks, and even teachers, are being replaced by
CD-ROMs. The national love affair with technology is changing the classroom,
and Stoll’s is one of the few voices pointing out how these changes may be
doing more harm than good. Not only is a computer program on magnets, for
example, an expensive substitute for actually holding a magnet in your hand,
it’s ineffective. Moreover, the time that kids spend learning how to point
and click comes at the cost of learning how to get along with real live human
beings, which is a skill that they are certain to need every day of their
lives. The author’s incisive and witty criticism of a culture that prizes the
latest toy over a solid education is a breath of fresh air – and a wake-up
call.
The Pleasing Hour
Lily King
Arriving in Paris as an au pair, Rosie
isn’t looking for nightlife and adventure. Her family having fallen away from
her bit by bit, she is now seeking solace in this strange country, from a
brittle host mother who keeps her at arm’s length. As Rosie makes her home on
the family’s houseboat, and as her understanding of the language grows, so
does her bond with the children she cares for, but her developing
relationship with their father threatens to undo all that she has gained.
King’s beautifully observant first novel travels into the past and back as
each character’s story unfolds, and as long-buried secret sadnesses rise to
the surface.
Bad Times in Buenos Aires: A Writer’s Adventures in Argentina
Miranda France
"An Argentine is an Italian who speaks
Spanish and wants to be English," goes a joke that reflects the
ambivalence and unease in Argentine culture. In an engrossingly personal
account, British travel writer France illuminates the capital city’s ills by
studying its recent history. The repression and murders of the Dirty War were
never publicly acknowledged, and the country lives with the awareness of
those horrors simmering beneath its surface. Psychoanalysis is a major
industry in Buenos Aires and, "urban stress" a recognized killer.
France vividly conveys the fever of the city, and its conflicted appeal
embodied in the tango, a dance born of homesickness: sad, even angry, yet
intensely passionate.
The Tipping Point:
How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Malcolm Gladwell
A tiny increase in the rate of contagion
can turn a manageable disease into an epidemic. Gladwell applies this same
principle to fashion trends and crime waves, and an intriguing portrait of
human behavior emerges. When people are viewed less as discrete individuals
with fixed personalities, and more as members of society subject to the
influence of others, the reader has a sense that a puzzle is being solved.
The intractable problem of teen smoking is suddenly explainable. The maximum
number of people in a successful group is revealed. Drawing on examples from
throughout history and across the planet, this easy-to-read little book is
sure to change the way you look at the world.
Me Talk Pretty One Day
David Sedaris
If you haven’t discovered David Sedaris,
now is the time. The sardonic, somewhat detached observations of a man whose
world seems entirely populated by lunatics include tales of being an
effeminate young boy sent to a slightly sinister speech therapist to cure his
lisp, and of working for a self-defeating Marxist furniture mover who refuses
to be hired by the wealthy. The title is a translation of some bad French
Sedaris employs when he moves to France, where, constrained by his limited
vocabulary, he comes off sounding like an "evil baby." Sedaris’
humor is edgy without being mean, making these stories of the paranoid,
criminal and cruel delightfully hilarious.
The Best American Short Stories of
the Century
edited by John Updike
With the century drawing to a close, not
even literary editors are immune to the urge to compile "best of"
lists. This collection of 100 stories includes nearly all of the contemporary
American masters of the short story, along with some lesser-known and older
writers with whom even an avid reader might not be familiar. Although the
chronological arrangement illustrates the evolution of the short story form,
some stories are surprisingly contemporary. Martha Gellhorn’s 1948 story, Miami-New
York, could have been written in 1998. This anthology is a good sampling
of a popular literary form, drawing from the country and century in which it
has flourished.
Cold New World:
Growing Up in a Harder Country
William Finnegan
Poverty in America may look like luxury to
most of the world, but poverty in late 20th century American bears
its own stamp of danger and despair. Finnegan’s thesis is that economic and
cultural shifts, including the increasingly technical job market, the growing
emphasis on profit, and the demise of job security, are leaving large numbers
of young people without viable prospects, and future generations will be
fundamentally different as a result. Even though Finnegan looks about as
white-upper-middle-class-New-Yorker-reporter as you can get, he
manages to ingratiate himself with gang members in the Yakima Valley, racist
skinheads in Los Angles, and a struggling African-American family in New
Haven. The pictures he paints are not pretty, but Finnegan manages to tell
the stories of real people and their real troubles without either judgment or
sentimentality.
The Tennis Partner
Abraham Verghese
On the courts Verghese is the student,
learning the game from former tennis pro David Smith. In the hospital he is
the teacher, supervising David’s medical residency. As Verghese’s marriage
unravels, and work and tennis become his whole life, he begins to rely on
David’s friendship as well as their twice-weekly matches. But David has a
secret life: A drug addiction supposedly overcome, now resurfacing and
threatening his relationships, his career, and eventually his life. Verghese
is at his best as a medical writer, paying loving attention to the human
body, drawing metaphor from disease but never losing sight of the patient as
a person. He turns his careful eye to tennis as well, and to the
not-so-uncommon phenomenon of doctor-as-drug addict. The story of the
author’s struggle to maintain his friendship with David, and his bewilderment
as he uncovers deeper and deeper layers of deception and self-destruction,
make this book a page-turner. See My Own
Country
Them: Adventures
with Extremists
Jon Ronson
Some books you read to be comforted, and
others to be shaken up. This is one of the latter. British journalist Jon
Ronson follows around several colorful members of society’s fringes, the ones
who see a New World Order threatening their freedom, or who spout hateful
rhetoric that civil society likes to think is long extinct. But they’re not
quite what you might expect. What to make of the amiable Grand Wizard of the
Ku Klux Klan who reminds Ronson of Woody Allen? Or of a popular lecturer who
truly believes that the world’s leaders are directly descended from
twelve-foot lizards? Or how about a right-wing talk radio host disguising
himself as a preppy software developer in order to sneak into a bizarre forest
ritual attended by some of the most powerful men in the world? It turns out
that their paranoia isn’t necessarily unjustified. As in the case of the FBI
siege on the Weavers at Ruby Ridge, the government can be a threat to its
people. This book reminds me of Julie Hecht’s hilariously deadpan account of
trailing the wacky Andy Kaufman in Was This Man a Genius?, except Them’s
funniness is discomforting, because these guys are serious, and potentially
dangerous. The remarkable thing about Ronson’s reporting is that no one comes
off looking good, not even antiracist organizers or the Anti-Defamation
League, and the reader’s ideas about "us" and "them" are
thrown into disarray. Is it scarier that, as Ronson discovers, there really is
a powerful secret society promoting globalization, or that even they aren’t
in control of the world?
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting
By In America
Barbara Ehrenreich
In her long career as an essayist,
Ehrenreich has been a vocal critic of economic injustice and a staunch supporter
of the working poor. In 1998, when she was over 50, financially comfortable
and established in her career, she chose to take an editor up on his
challenge to spend three months working at the bottom of the economic ladder,
living only off of what she earned. Ehrenreich went "undercover" in
Florida, Maine and Minnesota, working as a waitress, hotel maid, and WalMart
"associate", and found it even harder than she expected to try to
make ends meet. There are no "hidden economies" that support the
poor. Some of her coworkers were homeless, living in vans in the parking lot.
Many were dizzy from hunger, trying to make it through the day on little or
no food. Yet she found her coworkers to be generous, hardworking and
conscientious, to the point that management, with its useless drug tests and
petty rules, was often more hindrance than help. With this accessible, even
entertaining book, Ehrenreich shows her readers a world most will never
experience first hand, bringing home the reality of the widening gap between
rich and poor, and the human misery upon which our economy depends.
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and
Fishing
Melissa Bank
Don’t believe the hype! This isn’t another
Bridget Jones’ diary, bemoaning the miserable desperation of the thirty-ish
single professional woman. It’s a smart, often funny collection of stories-
mostly about looking for love, but also about those other issues in a young
woman’s life: friends, troubled siblings, aging parents, and finding one’s
way in the world of work. When Bank does get around to satirizing The
Rules, she conveys the exact undercurrent of confusion and doubt that
leads a woman to that guide in the first place, but she also puts The
Rules in their place. When our heroine repels a terrific, and smitten,
suitor by coming across as false and disinterested, it becomes clear that
ditching the rules is the only way to win.
River Thieves
Michael Crummey
Change is coming quickly to the coast of
Newfoundland in the early 19th century, as the European settlers
there encounter the Beothuk, or Red Indians, a native people rapidly
dwindling in number. In writing his novel, Crummey drew from actual accounts
of the period, turning history into literature, with lyric descriptions of a
world vanishing forever. The fear and mistrust between the Indians and the
White men weighs heavily on every member of a clan of English colonists, who
make their living trapping and fishing. Lieutenant Buchan, the Scottish Navy
officer, committed to bringing a peaceful end to the conflict, struggles at
the same time to make peace with himself. Cassie spends her life as a
housekeeper and seeks solace in literature, her self-protective distance as
one of the few women in the settlement having become an unbridgeable gulf
between her and other people. John Peyton, the respected patriarch, is
haunted by nightmares of the past, with a grudge against the Indians that he
can’t shake. And there is John Peyton Junior, his son, making his way to
manhood and struggling to do right, who on one fateful trip, captures a
Beothuk woman. Crummey tells a human story, with language as beautiful as the
wind in the trees, and images of startling violence that reveal the cost of
life in this new world.
The Dive From Clausen’s Pier
Ann Packer
As a reader of book reviews, I almost
always know something about a novel – usually a lot – before I decide to read
it. I chose this one based only on having loved the author’s collection of
short stories, Mendocino, and it was a rare treat to plunge into
something completely unknown. I won’t be giving much away by saying that in
the first few pages we meet a young woman, Carrie, engaged to her high school
sweetheart but having second thoughts. When her fiance dives into shallow
water and becomes a quadriplegic, her restlessness takes on a new shape.
Where it leads her is for you to find out. Carrie works in a library and has
a passion for sewing, and Packer shares her protagonist’s eye for color,
shape and detail. Her characters, young people figuring out what they want to
do with their lives and how they affect the people around them, are people
you’ll feel like you already know. This is a thoughtful, beautiful and sad
novel about love and responsibility, and how the choices we make are
determined by – and determine – who we are.
|
